Viral (Patreon)

Posted a new lazy tutorial! Nightmare Men! I forgot how much fun making those tuts were. In most of the lazy tuts I'm trying to secretly introduce folks to some new feature of blender, but this one was just for fun (well- maybea quick into to texture painting). 

But meanwhile! Hot damn! Never had anything like this happen before.

That before/after clip has been posted sooooo many times over the past few days, it's a little wild.  20 million views on Twitter, millions on facebook, top of the front page of Reddit, innumerable uploads on instagram/9gag/whatnot. It's on gif pages, random articles- it's a little bananas. 

Really fun, very surreal, and a little... intense? Exposed? To see something you worked really hard on shared so many times devoid of context. That's a first for me, for sure. 

Like, the reason I went all out for that clip was so that it could be kind of a demo of what you can do with free open-source software and a piece of green fabric; an exciting thing where anybody could have access to to the tools for realizing the worlds in their head; your films could be more defined by your imagination than budget. Maybe that sounds pretentious, but that's the reason I let myself spend an inordinate amount of time on it, and I'm really glad I did. 

Instead it's as often as not being shared as, "How they make movies now" and everyone's like, "Sad :/", "Utterly soulless", "Film is dead", "Did you know Ian McKellen cried because of greenscreens?", "This is why I hated Aquaman". 

And I get it- the before-after does have this cinematic nihilism vibe to it. And there's a natural part of me that wishes I could talk to each of those people and explain, "This was maybe the most creatively satisfying project of my life. I put more of my passions/excitement into this than I have into most anything. This isn't "soulless"; I hand placed nearly every vertex with delight at the thought of being able to transport folks into a world I was creating."

But I can't (or- probably shouldn't. I dunno. Nobody tells you the rules for this stuff :P ), so I'm just typing up (alllllllll) my thoughts here instead. Because goshdarnit I gotta say it somewhere.

Because sure- absolutely. Creativity works best, IMO, when it's pushing against something. You can't think outside of the box if there isn't a box, and if you don't have a limitation forcing you to think laterally- if there isn't a built-in impetus to try a little harder- it's easy to exist in that comfortable space where you're not challenging yourself to do your best. I believe this 100%. That the difficulties inherent to the filmmaking process can actually be what makes your work shine in the end; you take those little broken bits and fill them up with creativity.  

And the hollywood vfx system totally exists in part as a, "Don't worry, relax, we can fix it" solution. 

And also if the ending of your film is a big CG fest, that can definitely be an indicator that you're not focusing on a character driven narrative (Marvel tends to walk this line alright, though I'm still tired of the "faceless CG army" trope. People don't invest in Big Stakes like saving the world- they care about individual characters, and how they're affected. The more you try to "globalize the drama" the more you abstract it, and make it harder to connect with). Because in the end most drama is all about context; ideally you've spend the whole movie building up to why the ending is a big deal, so audiences are on the edge of their seat to see how it plays out. Instead a lot of times lately they're trying to make every moment "edge-of-your-seat", so there's never a time for them to build context/empathy for how the ending struggle affects the character (Rocky IV vs friggin' Rise of Skywalker).

I've done a lot of work as a VFX supervisor, and a significant portion of my job is actually trying to convince folks to do stuff practically. Especially since it's usually the chaotic stuff (explosions, blood splats, dirt) that folks tend to want to do in the computer. And that's the stuff that DOES tend to help actors. Crawling around in 3 inches of mud under a rain machine probably is going to give you a different performance than rolling around in a mocap stage. Computers aren't great at messes, so if we can make the mess on set instead, I'm all for it. 

There's also a total lack of distinction between, "CG as valid art medium" and "VFX as a Filmmaking Tool". Like, I get that photorealism is often the goal, but I've never really minded when stuff wasn't (Mirror Mask is still great). And I'd never watch Miyazaki and go, "wow OK I can definitely tell these are drawings. Where's my immersion?" I think we tend to put too much focus on photorealism as an absolute end-goal of CG. I actually enjoy what the abundance of CG in films has done to our collective perception, since I think we're actually more forgiving of that "Cg look" now (that is, we're not just looking at CG being like, "Prove Yourself"), and I think that's been crucial in letting films take CG and run with it for developing whole new styles. I love the idea of an "is-it-animated-is-it-live-action-who-cares" middle ground, because it seems like such a great stew for creativity. 

I also get that people really don't think VFX artists are "doing" anything. They have no idea how the process works, so they assume The Computer does a lot of it, instead of being this crazy craft of technical know-how and artistic imagination (THE APES IN THE PLANET OF THE APES MOVIES- you have to not only understand how every layer of ape works, you have to be able to explain it to a computer, too. Absolute madness (ugh and even all of those vfx bts clips are just 50% Andy Serkis (this one's dope though))).

The truism that "Actors Hate Greenscreen" is overplayed, too. Most people have like two data points, "The prequels had too much greenscreen and so I didn't like them" and "Ian McKellen cried because of VFX on the hobbit" (oh also "Mad Max Fury Road was 100% practical and it's awesome" Freddie covers that one good, though :P)

Acting is already "Imagining". Stage actors can stand in a black box theater and perform their guts out; sometimes the experience would even be lessened if you could actually see the things they were evoking through their performance. Saying actors can't act if they have to use their imagination is a little wacky, to me; that's the whole schtick. 

Because I think the big goal for most actors is to cultivate something real inside themselves, and express it honestly- this equilibrium where they birth this self-sustaining experience, where even though something may have been scripted, in that moment everything feels absolutely real. It's even easier when you have another talented actor to play off of, your energy feeding back and forth. Especially performing "on the stage", where typically you've rehearsed the hell out of everything, and now all you have to do is flex the mental muscle, access the headspace, and exist in the moment. 

Film is harder that way. We'll just film an actor and say, "K yeah now you're watching your friend get shotACTION" and they have to go from 0 to trying to imagine their friend being shot in three seconds. And then just as they're getting into it we yell "CUT yeah great let's swap lenses and get it again."  Some directors shoot in a way that lets actors get long extended full-scene takes, but even so you almost always have to do the scene a dozen times, over and over, to get all the different angles. It's a lot more technical medium. 

So when McKellen has to simulate all the appearances of a real-life emotional conversation/experience at a tennis ball, and the tennis ball is naturally giving him nothing back, there's no equilibrium. It's less magic than just dumping emotional energy down a black hole (imagine situations when you've had to be extra nice to somebody who just grunts in response- exhausting). So ideally, the greenscreen isn't a big deal, as long as the thing you're actively playing off of can play off you, too- there's some sort of feedback. Trying to scream in terror at a tennis ball dragon is always going to be pretty demanding, and maybe a different, less rewarding 'kind' of acting than an intense discussion with an actual human actor. 

Kaitlin did an absolutely amazing job in that shot, for sure, but in this case (she agrees) it wasn't even really "acting"; it was performing a series of tasks, "walk across the stage, tap your card in the elevator, wait, walk back up steps..."- which worked great because that's what running errands is. That was 100% the right headspace; anything more than that would have been too much. I love working with Kaitlin and Sean actually, because they both know that's my wavelength (I'm usually trying a bit too hard to have everything feel "casual" and not over-acted). 

On that note- if you're acting in a thing and have lines, if you just try to say them in a regular monotone, you're probably going to sound more "real" than if you're acting your heart out and stewing on the character's backstory. A lot of acting is just trying to turn off all of those little mental processes so you can just exist honestly in the moment. Even if you try to speak monotone, you'll still probably talk like a normal person, because it turns out we have lots of experience talking.  You can usually tell when an inexperienced actor is trying to do something clever like slip in a microexpression or something, because once you have that thought, it usually reads way larger than you expect. 

Anyways!! It's been interesting seeing the clip going around. It's brought a few more eyeballs to the project (and a few more folks here (hello!!!)), which means I have a bit more money to help me do some shoots in the near future!! I think I've said it before, but secretly this whole patreon just exists to fund my indie film habit :P So thank you all for that!!!) And also hopefully it maybe inspired folks to try filming stuff in their garage. We'll see! 

I've stretched myself a little thin over the past couple weeks (these are wild times), but I've got a lot of stuff cookin' I'm excited to share! My goal for this week really is to finish that greenscreen tut (I know I've literally been saying that for months, but the reminder from YouTube about how many people are waiting for it was a good kick-in-the-pants).

Hope you're all staying safe out there!!! Talk soon! :D