AI generated Star Wars as 80’s anime
Like it or not, AI generated art is here to stay. TheArtofAI used the generative image technology to imagine what Star Wars: A New Hope might have looked like as a 1980s anime.
Stanley Kubrick explains the endings of 2001 and The Shining
If you want to read some epic nut-ball theories that put the average tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to shame, you don’t need to go much further than the average Stanley Kubrick movie analyst.
There’s a lot of modern movie critics out there that believe that movies can mean whatever you want them to mean – and boy do people make some tenuous connections. While relativist interpretations are the most popular logical fallacy in our post-truth world, I would argue that approach is nonsense – and now we have a little more proof from a director most often cited by critics as supporting their nutty interpretations.
Stanley Kubrick’s movies are often multilayered and difficult to comprehend, but it turns out he absolutely did have a message for each of these movies. He does, however, say that he is reluctant to reveal his interpretation: “I tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out because when you just say the ideas, they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized, one feels it.” That part I very much get. The experience of something is far different than logically thinking about it.
So what were his intended meanings?
The meaning of the ending of 2001 – This one is NOT hard to interpret. Why? Because Arthur C Clarke wrote the book the movie was made from and very clearly lays out what is going on visually. Personally, I think a lot of the reason the movie 2001 was so confusing was due to effects limitations Kubrick struggled under. I bet we could re-do the gate transport sequence today and make it much more amazing and clear what’s going on. But anyway, here’s what Kubrick said about the ending of 2001:
“The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities — creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form, and they put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him. And his whole life passes from that point on in that room, and he has no sense of time, it just seems to happen as it does in the film.
“And they choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture, deliberately so inaccurate, because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty but weren’t quite sure, just as we aren’t quite sure what to do in zoos, with animals, to try to give them what we think is their natural environment. And anyway, when they get finished with them, as happens in so many myths, of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being sent back to Earth. You know, transformed and made into some sort of superman. And we have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is a pattern of a great deal of mythology. And that was what we’re trying to suggest.”
The ending of the Shining:
“Well, it was supposed to suggest a kind of evil reincarnation cycle where he is part of the hotel’s history. Just as in the men’s room when he’s talking to the ghost of the former caretaker who says to him, ‘You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know. I’ve always been here.’ One is merely suggesting some kind of endless cycle of evil reincarnation, and also — well, that’s it. Again, it’s the sort of thing that I think is better left unexplained, but since you asked me, I’m trying to explain.”
But you don’t have to take my word for it, we have it recorded from Kubrick’s own lips:
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AI enhanced snowball fight – from 1897
Remember old-school movies that were damaged, in black in white, and everyone ran around at 2x speed? With AI processing, they can fix many of those problems. Olden Days youtube channel has a number of great restored videos like this.
Amazing to see that when fixed, this looks just like a snowball fight one might see today – proving that we aren’t all that different from the people of our past as we’d like to think.
These restoration techniques have come a long way in just a few years.
Other links:
AI based digital re-aging
Disney published this paper about using AI to digitally age and de-age actors in a fraction of the time it usually takes for normal frame-by-frame manual aging techniques used today.
FRAN (which stands for face re-aging network) is a neural network that was trained using a large database containing pairs of randomly generated synthetic faces at varying ages, which bypasses the need to otherwise find thousands of images of real people at different (documented) ages that depict the same facial expression, pose, lighting, and background. Using synthetically generated training data is a method that’s been utilized for things like training self-driving cars to handle situations that aren’t easily reproducible.
The age changes are then added/merge onto the face. It appears this approach fixes a lot of the issues common in this kind of approach: facial identity loss, poor resolution, and unstable results across subsequent video frames. It does have some issues with greying hair and aging very young actors, but produces results better than techniques used just a few years ago (not that the bar was very hard to beat).
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Manual Cinema
Manual Cinema does shadow puppet shows in Chicago. They do some amazing shows such as Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol and many others. They use combinations of puppetry and live acting. Here’s a video on how they produce some of their effects and shows.
Here’s another video of how they create their effects:
Here’s an example of what they can produce in a short film called Eighth Blackbird
Christmas Ghost Stories
The British have an intriguing history of telling ghost stories at Christmas. The most famous one is probably Dicken’s Christmas Carol with the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future who haunt Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas eve. The immensely long running play Woman in Black starts with the protagonist Arthur Kipps being asked by his children to tell a ghost story on Christmas eve.
Here’s a collection of wonderfully 70’s era BBC productions of traditional ghost stories from the likes of MR James, Dickens, etc. They hardly classify as what we would considered horror today, but are a wonderful look back into what scared and intrigued people 100 years ago. I recommend listening to audiobook versions to give them a fair shake. They were originally designed to be told out loud compared to produced into plays (which often mess up pacing/lack description of the experienced horror of the characters).
You can find other productions like Mr. Humphrey’s and His Inheritance. Full of epic 70’s experimental theatrics and music:
Update: Here’s an even bigger collection of videos that includes everything above and more.
The End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy
I thought this a really interesting term and article: the End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy. Many young people have grown up in a world in which they have never had to pay the real costs of things. How? Venture capital has been helping Silicon Valley companies run with big losses for over a decade now. The goal was growth at any cost – and cost overruns were not a problem with basically 0% interest rates and venture capital and stock market investors pouring money into tech and growth stocks. With rising interest rates however, the last 20 years of free money seem to be slamming shut. The real cost of the Uber trips, complementary next day shipping, cloud storage, free apps, and cheap eats are starting to come out.
Venture capital companies are warning startups that the money is drying up and they need to act fast. Across the entire startup landscape, VC money is dropping by double-digit percentages and costs must be cut. Even Facebook and Google are issuing dire earnings reports that show that the party is likely over. You can read lots of articles on Inc about this rapid change and it’s causing scores of startups to rescind offers and even lay off substantial amounts of their staffs – often 20% or more at a time.
Time will tell if we ever return to the heady days of 2% interest rates. Until then, I think a lot of young people might start experiencing things that many lived through in the late 70’s and 80’s – high inflation with just as high interest rates. Much like the Ghostbusters did:
Photocrom Print Collection and online inspiratino
I think we forget the amazing collections of historical artifacts we have on the internet. The limitations of Covid has left me doing a lot of traveling and bucket list visits to famous places via Youtube and online streamers.
I started looking up filming locations for a favorite movie of mine – The Grand Budapest Hotel. Pre-soviet eastern block countries had amazing architecture. In my searching, it turns out Wes Anderson tried to capture the feel for the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel from old Photochrom prints.
The Photochrom Print Collection is available for free from the Library of Congress and has thousands of early prints of European and North American images from the 1890’s to 1910’s.
It makes me wonder what amazing artistic creations people can make using just the free resources we have at our fingertips today – plus some imagination.
Yo Ho Ho and The Fall
The 2006 movie The Fall is an under-rated movie that I really enjoyed for it’s unique story and beautiful, dream-like visuals. Set in 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman (Roy) begins to tell a fantastic story of five mythical heroes to a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality blurs as the tale advances. Roy’s true motives and desperation start coming out as his story progresses.
The making of the movie by Tarsem Singh was a real labor of love. The film was shot in 28 countries over four years. No stages or sets were used, only existing absolutely fabulous and exotic locations were used. Filming locations included the Namibian desert, Cape Town Africa, Hagia Sophia, Palace in Jaipur, Rajasthan India, Fiji, Rome, Bali, Egypt, China, Boliva, and countless others bucket list locations.
With as few people that know The Fall, even fewer know it was based on a 1981 Bulgarian movie called Yo Ho Ho (Bulgarian: Йо-хо-хо). In Yo Ho Ho, an actor crippled after a bad fall on stage befriends a 10 year old boy who is recovering from a broken arm in hospital. The actor starts telling a marvelous fairy tale, inventing stories about a good buccaneer fighting the evil ruler Alvarez that must be punished for his crimes. Little by little the real people in hospital are transformed into the imaginary heroes of the pirate stories that the Actor and the child vanquish by goodness, honesty and self-denial – all the while the actor intends to use the child to provide him with poison to end his life.
Yo Ho Ho (Йо-хо-хо) is terribly hard to find. There is a youtube video, but no subtitles. Even ebay seems to have failed me, but it appears DVDLady has a copy available.
Father Mulcahy’s Sermon
“God created us so He could be here Himself – in the lives of those He created in His image”