Delicatessen

A French indie from 1991 I remember having seen almost ten years ago. I watched it together with Esther and Martina from my class in the cute little Lichtblick Kino in Prenzlauer Berg after an extended chat and update on everything in the Café St. Oberholz.

The theater is so small and lovely that I feel like describing it a little. The first thing you notice after entering the “Foyer” is its smallness. There’s a counter on the left, a table on the right and a bank covered with a blanked in front of you — who knows what’s underneath the blanket. Left of that is also a little door to the narrow screening room and an even narrower stairwell to the cellar, guarded by a street sign saying “Ende”.

Once we had persuaded the man behind the counter that all of us indeed were students (despite our expired student IDs) we got our tickets and I felt like buying a pack of TUC crackers for as little as 1 €. Then we went in.

After the blue door you walk past the den with the projector, past a black curtain on strings and descend into the theater, a lengthy room with about ten rows with four seats each. I found out that the second row from the front is the best, in the last row you should watch the movie on your cell phone because of its comparatively big screen. The walls are in a light blue with square-shaped lights in different colors scattered randomly along them. Right before the screen waits an old dusty upright piano to be played on along to a silent movie. Further, as Esther told us, you can hear the phone ringing in the apartment above the theater, or if somebody goes into the kitchen for a snack; still I didn’t experience any such nuisances when I was there. So all in all it is a charming little cinema with a lot of character and patina.

Then the movie starts. No commercials, no trailers, no nothing — just the film. That’s how it should be!

Rant

Delicatessen is a great piece of very entertaining art until the third act. The setting is placed well and all the characters are set up with so much love and detail, have their motivations and are entwined masterfully until the third act. Then, little by little everything loses substance and motivation and everything falls apart. You can’t tell who’s on whose side and the end is as random as the authors may have felt. My guess is that the three (!) of them (two of them directed the film as well) made a bet who would be the first one to finish the script within one night. I bet that any of you who only watches the first two thirds of the movie will produce a better ending than the filmmakers.

WALL·E

I went to see the film on Tuesday afternoon at 2:40pm so I didn’t expect many people and in total we were five in a big theater, the three children with their dad sitting right behind me, as usual — *sigh*. In fact in any show of the small indie Lichtblick Kino there were more people in the audience…

The first ad was for a xbox 360, the children cheering in my back. That was when I realized that it was going to be a tough time sitting through the children’s ad-reel but it wasn’t as bad as anticipated¹. It is shocking how receptive the little buggers are to commercials! There was a Ben & Jerry’s 60 second ad for cookie dough and the three children aged about 6 to 12 instantly asked their sorry dad if they could have ice cream after the show. He mumbled something about “it’s not the weather for ice cream today”, hoping the kids would forget about it in 90 minutes.

Another odd thing was the children’s proficiency with upcoming movies. After about three seconds of a new trailer they shouted in unison “Madagascar 2!“, “Ice Age 3!” or “Inkheart!” and were always right. They giggled along at the intended moments of blunt and uninspired slapstick and non-funny jokes. Hmm. It looks like I am getting too old for this. Or I am just a connoisseur when it comes to quality. And boy, alone from watching the trailer I can tell that I hate Madagascar 2 already for its lack of quality and intelligence. But I was waiting in the dark for a Pixar film to start after all and I wouldn’t be disappointed. Still, there are some very questionable movies coming up.

The tradition of the funny Pixar shorts lives on with Presto, that transported the atmosphere of 40’s and 50’s Warner Bros cartoons very well in the digital medium. I already felt my money well spent after this one.

If you want to know some background behind WALL·E, see my report from the fmx/08 where I talked to some folks from Pixar.

There were great little in-joke moments in WALL·E where only I laughed — I wish I had brought somebody along for sharing laughs about the sound WALL·E makes when being fully charged on solar power (listen below), when he reaches 2000 points at Pong! and at some point later in the movie you see a new-generation version of the same game for a second. And listen to the sound of the little cleaning robot: It’s an electric shaver. Or compare the stage where the BnL-CEO talks in the video message with this one. Creepy. And I bet there is way more to discover — can’t wait for the Blu-Ray!

WALL·E fully charged.
[See post to listen to audio]

Rant

The movie was quite good but as somebody with close ties to film-making I have some points to resolve: When you are in the audience then turn your fucking cellphone off for Christ’s sake, even when you’re nearly alone. Because “nearly” does not mean “completely”. The dad behind me received three calls during the film and when he was having the third I advised him to turn off the phone or I would do it. That helped.

Further you should stay during the credits because there usually are a lot of people involved in making a movie and walking out on them is as rude as it is ignorant. Plus you miss some very good illustrative animation at the end of Pixar films. And with WALL·E also some funny pixel animations. So stay until the end. On the other hand it’s your money you throw out of the window…

Burn After Reading

My second film on that Tuesday, again for moderate 4.50 € so I threw in some more cash for some nachos with salsa. One word of advice: If anybody asks you about an extra helping of peperoni just say no otherwise your stomach is screaming “No! Nooo!” all the time.

I was prepared for another shitload of commercials and trailers, but I was not prepared to sitting next to two chatterboxes of middle-aged ladies who were gossiping like crazy during the commercials. Fortunately they turned their voices to a whisper when the movie started.

Funny: Again the ad-reel started of with the xbox 360 commercial and one of the ladies asked the other “So — what is it good for?”, the other replied “It’s for downloading movies”. I lol’d hard on the inside when I heard it and I wonder how the guys and gals who plotted the marketing campaign would react to that.

Another couple of trailers rolled along featuring Till Schweiger’s medieval satire twice, probably in the hope of stirring public interest for a mediocre movie by a not-so-good-actor/director.

Then, finally after 25 minutes of trailers, commercials and chinking bottles in the audience the movie started. And it was a good movie and in English it would’ve been even better. The opening scene is a home run for John Malkovich; Francis McDormand as Linda Litzke has the naïve charm of Marge Gunderson, her role in Fargo, Brad Pitt as dumb fitness trainer is as hilarious as George Clooney’s slightly paranoid role. All in all it is a very Coen movie with protagonists you pity for their lack of luck, a twisted story that doesn’t unravel completely (still satisfactory enough) with probably one of the funniest closing dialogues and a catchy tune for the credits. Stay seated. And if you like movies with people in cars stalking after other people in cars then this is your movie!

Rant

Nothing much to rant about this movie. But I just came home from it. Maybe I’ll develop some deep rooted hatred in the next couple of days, who knows?

Taxi Driver

It was Monday and it was close to 10pm as I realized that I own the DVD for a couple of years but have never seen this famous Scorsese movie. And when I have the chance to watch it on a big screen² I wouldn’t miss it for the world. So I abandoned my evening in the Café St. Oberholz and took the M1 to the theater. I bought another pack of TUC crackers and seated myself in the second row, right behind a pierced and very indie girl that sat right in front of me and coughed a little throughout the movie. But it was bearable.
During the movie I always caught myself in trying to analyze it like “This was the exposition, cleverly done!” or “So the water stands for Travis’ intentions to ‘wash away the grime’?”. It’s a good movie and it’s a very atmospheric movie. The New York of the 1970’s remembered me a little of today’s Berlin with its charming dirt and worn down sidewalks. But, I have to admit, I didn’t quite understand the movie and I don’t think watching it over and over again will be of any help. Maybe some of you can explain it to me very slow in very easy terms.

Rant

Like Delicatessen it was a subtitled movie which is always better than a dubbed version, still it becomes a little annoying when there are errors in the translation. For example they translated “Libra” as “Leo” which is not a typo but totally wrong.

Are you talking to me?

My conclusion is that one like me should avoid multiplex theaters because it only gives me stuff to rant about, they sell their snacks for prices that couldn’t be higher after a nuclear war and the massive amount of commercials they try to stuff into your head. On the plus side you can order the tickets online and choose your seat in advance (apart from any seat that’s exactly in the middle. They just won’t allow it. Bastards!) and have a very big screen with very good sound.

The small theater has a big bonus in flair and prices. They usually show only subtitled movies so you can listen to the live recordings which I always prefer to dubbed versions. That was also the reason why I welcomed the DVD so much back in the good old 1990’s. The audience is usually just as drunk as in the big theater but remains silent throughout the movie and most of them stay also for the credits. On the downside… well, it’s small and the sound is good but also a little low in volume. And if you miss a film once, you miss it for good.

A downside on both movie theaters is the low temperature that creeps up your trouser legs and into your sweater after half an hour. But in Berlin you have it like this any place you go — for me that’s terrible! The only place warm enough is the bathtub or inside the furnace. When I am back in Austria in two weeks I’ll heat up my apartment until it feels like Honolulu — muhahah!

1. I am very imaginative so there was a lot I anticipated such as children vomiting in my collar and so on.
2. at least a little bigger than my 24″ screen

EDIT: See below for some new insights about the critical start-up bug. Why me?!

But what the hell? Every time I try to start the game it wants me to insert the original DVD first. It is the original DVD, damnit! Some smarty pants on the forums across the web suggested reinstalling the copy protection but I don’t know how to do that or even what the copy protection is.

The ironic twist of this is the fact that I am forced to use a no DVD crack in order to play my totally legal purchase. It is my strong belief that all this copy-protection hassle only made everything harder for the average gamers and that there are no less pirate copies as if there were no protection at all - period!

I was busy on some forums and those are the weirdest ways people keep telling me on how to run the game:

1- Put disk in drive.
2- Dont click anything - wait for the windows message - run or open folders msg.
3- Close the message - what means dont choose any of the options, just click the “x”.
4- Wait some seconds and double click the game’s desktop shortcut to run CS.

I made this happen by Starting the game up well over 10 times in a row, so on the processes list there were loads of instances of the xrengine.exe running.
i then had to wait, in turn to click “Ok” on EVERY SINGLE one of their “please insert the original DVD” error windows.

This took a very very very long time, and at the end of it the final instance of the xrengine.exe started the game up.

I did some research myself and that’s what I have found out about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky’s start-up bug:

• The European version uses the queer french Tagés copy-protection, the Russian version StarForce.
• This bug seems to happen often on Laptops with HD-DVD drives. My computer has a Toshiba HD-DVD drives, but with the lastest firmware.
• The Developers give a shit about the complaining community
• On GameCopyWorld are some No-DVD-cracks, however not for the latest patch, which seems to be critical because…
• …the game is said to be as buggy as a fresh copy of Windows ME

I’ll keep you up to date.

Looks like I am transforming to a grumpy nerd, because I have to be so angry and pissed all the time about a variety of topics. If you don’t like it: I hate you one and all — damn your eyes!

EDIT: Thanks to some Russian Malscript the rest of this post has gone into nirvana. And there was so much more ranting going on…

I guess they will become what Electronic Arts is in games: Every year a new update of the same old shit with not more than one new feature but for the same price as the previous version. Not to mention cash-cowing with add-ons. So watch out for Avid 2009, 3dsmax 2010, Combustion: Tournament and the Maya Add-On Maya: Masters of Mayhem.

EDIT: Of course I couldn’t finish this lengthy post in one lunch break so I posted it the next morning.

As some of you already know I am working as an intern at rise visual effects here in Berlin and spend my days working with Nuke, Combustion as well as Avid, the latter two being a major pain in my brains. Rise is currently doing the VFX for quite a number of international projects, putting me in the position to participate on some of them with minor shots. I keyed and comped² for the German TV movie Die Patin some dull green screen shots, helped out with a replacement of an Oslo tram sign for the Norwegian movie Appelsinpiken as well as designed a fake UI for a screen replacement in the same movie. And after messing around with Avid on the company’s demo reel for two and a half weeks I was assigned to one shot for the upcoming Warner Bros movie Ninja Assassin.

The shot is equivalent to the movie’s title: Two fighters, one ninja and the protagonist (probably Rain, but it is hard to tell because of all the action going on) stand on wet asphalt in the middle of a street, their blades crossed. A car sends both of them flying into the air, Rain lands in front of the camera on a dark stunt patch whose fabric matches the tarmac not really perfect. And both stunt men are rigged with fat wires for their stunt, the camera panning along.

This shot from scene 98 is 136 frames long and one hell of a wire removal. Everything is moving and shifting, the overall lightness changes all the time depending on the headlights of the other cars and the wires move wildly behind and in front of the flying men. Seen from the compositor’s point of view: Hell. At least close to it.

On Friday I really started out with Combustion and felt quite lost at first. My co-worker Sascha introduced me to the Painting tool and I started painting like crazy and was certain to have that shot finished by Wednesday. On Monday I looked at it again and it just was awful. Jittering, double images, offsets and all the things you don’t want to see when you expect to see the background instead of the wire.

I couldn’t find a quick tutorial or at least a guideline on the web on how to start out with that kind of shots so I learned by trial and error. For any of you interested in a short guideline on how to pull of wire removals here’s what I suggest, thanks to Florian, Sascha and Jonathan for helping me find my way through to this. Hence I am not allowed to post any stills from the shot I will deal here only with basic concepts.

How to remove the wires

The Topmost Layer – Foreground

Take out your scissors, it’s roto time! The first step is nearly always to rotoscope the wires tightly but not too tight, you want to add about 3 or 5 pixels surplus on each side, in case you need to feather your mask later on. And probably you will. Pay special attention to the parts where the wire disappears behind the actors and make this really perfect that you won’t have to deal with partial removals in that areas later on.

The Bottommost Layer – Solids

If your shot is like mine and provides you with a couple of frames where the wires are shot against a (more or less) uniform solid (such as the sky) you can put a layer with the original footage below the layer with the cut out wires and. Now nudge the original so that the solid color will look through where the holes of your wires are. It is advisable to do this for each wire separately so you don’t have to make any compromises. Also don’t compromise with the areas where you have background features because we will make a clean plate of those parts.

In the Middle – Clean Plates

For any background that has features you will need to draw a clean plate from your original material now. That means to use the clone stamp (or it’s equivalent, depending on your tool of choice) and to paint out any of the actors and wires for one frame. Attention: This is no photograph where it doesn’t matter what portion of the background you use to paint out a wire! Hence it is an animation you have to paint exactly the obscured background. You do this by setting your clone source to a frame later or earlier in your sequence when the part you want to paint over is not covered by any foreground elements. If the actors are moving quite a lot it should be done in no time, but usually you have to use half a dozen or more source frames to clone one. If the actors are very static and there is no way to get a clean view on the background behind them you have to fabricate some background yourself. Make sure it is always your background that’s showing then, otherwise the features will flicker.

Place this clean background under your rotoed layer and on top of your sky-nudge-layers after you cut out the sky from your clear plate as well.

If the camera is moving too (like in my case) then track your background clean plate to the camera movement. The combustion tracker works really well but is not perfect. So you might want to nudge your plate in position yourself.

And here’s the tedious task: You need a clear plate of the background whenever it has changed. In my case the camera was moving wildly and it still was the same background after 100 frames, but from a slight different angle and very different lighting conditions.

The Colors Change!

I was not very lucky with my shot and the brightness and color values kept changing all the time so even my clean plate and nudged background did not always match the foreground. The only way I saw fit was to have an animated color correction in every layer but the original one. So I raised and lowered gamma values somewhere far beyond the decimal place frame by frame until it looked right.

That’s it?

In fact: No. Until now I was only writing about the background. But what about wires in front of your actors? In my case one of them has wrapped the wire even around his torso so he could be lifted even higher in the shot.

If your actors aren’t moving much but the wire is, you should be fine by painting it out frame by frame but be very careful and alert about any changes of lighting and motion and do it like the folks at Disney: After every paint stroke view it in motion with the frames before and after. In fact it is possible to pull it off in Photoshop (you will love CS3 Extended for importing image sequences and being able to use the healing brush in case you can’t use or don’t want to use one of Combustion’s greatest features: tracking paint strokes over time to certain features).

If there’s a lot of action going on any most of it will be lost in motion blur it becomes a little easier for you, the same way it becomes harder when there’s not much motion in the picture and a constant wire removal in the same place to do. The only way to pull this off I see is to make a small clean plate of the area in question and employ a four-corner pin or warping or that kind of stuff on top of it. It will be a lot of nudging and fine-tuning but in the end it will be much smoother than fidgety paint strokes.

Quality Assurance

Just as you think you’re done, it gets ugly: To ensure the quality of your work crank up brightness and contrast of your viewer and view our work whether it really matches the background and prepare yourself mentally to be busy for another couple of hours. Some masks won’t fit all too well, some colors are a little off and some things you expected to be in the blacks aren’t that black at all.

Phew, that was more than I expected…!

But you said something about a….

Yes, I mentioned learning about “an inconvenient truth” in the beginning, right?
As of one hour ago I was positive to be finished by Friday with the whole shot, already having done a great deal of the work. Only some minor painting and corner pinning would’ve been necessary. Shortly before taking my lunch break Florian, my supervisor asked me to look into the scene’s references folder. “There are only five frames in it” I replied puzzled. “That’s right! Those are the frames that will be in the current edit. So render what you got with additional four frames before and after and you’re done on this!”.

Five frames. The five frames of the car hitting the two guys. That’s a little more than a fifth of a second! I was hoping to be done with the shot by Friday, still I don’t feel satisfied with the shot anymore.

1. translates to The Rebellion of the Cinnamon Star
2. I will keep this kind of short form of “composited” from now on, so better get used to it

And I am pondering an idea for a weird short story all the time now so eventually I’ll drop that one onto you as well…

Greetings from Berlin!

Finally I had some time this weekend playing the new Alone in the Dark, with the same name as the original from 1992, which was done by Infogrames (now Atari) and taught me how three polygons scare the bejesus out of a nine-year old. Good times… But this new game left me with mixed feelings and an uncomfortable nausea.

one shouldn’t write a review of a game when he hasn’t even finished with the first chapter of a total of eight, but what the hell.

Installing game that’s just shy of occupying 8 gigs on your hard disk took so long that I had enough time to write my one page of this week’s report for the university. When I finally started it, everything looked very promising and the look was great, the atmosphere dense and the voice acting quite good.

The first odd thing was having a key to blink your digital eyes which was necessary because your view kept blurring. And it happened, just as in real life, that when something interesting was about to happen you were busy blinking your eyes, including half a second of refocusing again. Tedious!

The Product Features on Alone in the Dark at Amazon.com read: In-Game movement has been designed to allow players to do almost anything that is physically possible in the real world. A big *LOL* here because in the real world I don’t have any troubles going through a door, facing into the right direction. Don’t get fooled by this buzzline, I wish it was more like Half-Life² mated with F.E.A.R. and spawned this game with a spring-solver for ropes and cloth.

On the plus side the game tries to teach you its interface while you play it, which I always like better than a never ending table with keyboard commands or a useless tutorial-mission. On the down side the game doesn’t discern between first person and third person view when prompting messages like “to spray [Button 0]“. I was using “Button 0″, which turned out to be the left mouse button, over and over again but Edward, the avatar, only kept attacking an invisible enemy with the fire extinguisher before stepping into the fire. Yes, Ed advances a step when he’s swinging furniture. it wasn’t the first time that I fell off a ledge. So to extinguish a fire in Alone in the Dark with “Button 0″ means switching to first person mode and pressing the left mouse button.

That switch between first person and third person is an interesting idea but it acts more as a tool for showing you stuff to interact with by a third person camera on Edward and his surroundings. The camera and the controls react oddly in third person but it is nearly impossible to play only in first person, because the game switches back and forth, swivels the camera around until I feel really nauseous in front of my 24″ HD-screen. Anytime you want to know what you are doing, you switch to 1st person, only to get switched back to very cinematic and very uncontrollable 3rd person.

In once instance you have to fight your first “real” zombie which was so terrible that I quit the game angrily at that point at first: She attacks you while you walk around as if going for a walk, looking for something, anything, to whack her. Until you finally pick up a chair and start to strike back, your almost dead. But if you really succeed at punching the zombie to the ground she’ll get up again after a while! Like fuckin’ Silent Hill 4¹! I hate that! The only way to kill her for good, the game tells you, is to drag her numb corpse into some fire. But when you haven’t played that scene over and over again, you don’t know where there’s fire. She comes at you again and so on and so on.

As one reviewer on Amazon.com pointed out: This isn’t a run-and-gun-game, it’s more like a walk-walk-walk-and-then-search-in-a-panic-through-your-inventory-while-fire-is-all-around-you-and-monsters-are-coming-game.

Oh, and the inventory or the way to treat wounds: Atari says its an innovative new system, in practice it’s a bitch in the middle of a fight: Hitting I, selecting your weapon via mouse and then closing the inventory by hitting, get a grip, β, that’s an I with a brow (haha!). The only way of producing an Î is by hitting the circumflex ^ first and then the letter I — in the middle of a fight! Gah! Just as bad as letting go of a rope, hitting Alt Gr, the German right Alt key. And if you are wondering: Yes, it means letting go of the mouse for a second — that’s a sin in most modern games (no, text adventures aren’t modern games)!

The graphic is up to today’s standards, sometimes it looks really good, sometimes there’s just a little too much bump-mapping, but I can understand the artists: Once it finally works you want everybody to show how well it does. And occasionally there’s heavy clipping, collision misdetection or some other atmosphere killers.
The in-game cinematics are executed quite well, defocusing, different angles, nice cinematography, but the characters seem so unnatural despite all the efforts taken by the designers with bump-mapping and blend-shaping. They could at least have made their mouth-cavities darker! And don’t get me started on buggy cloth-solvers that kill the atmosphere at an instant.

I haven’t played far yet to tell enough about the story but I don’t like it, when all the time people you just met keep dying in various ways. So far in the story only one or two survived. Out of seven characters!

I would really love to love this game, but after all Half-Life² still is god to me and I haven’t played a game with such a good balance of an interesting story, fun gameplay, intuitive controls and pacing since four years. Maybe a patch will save it all. Or maybe I’ll become so brainwashed while trying to beat that sucker that I really enjoy it. That reminds me: I have to finish F.E.A.R. Fahrenheit and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. too…

1. …which hast much better controls, though!
2. I guess I have to say thanks to my German keyboard layout

Marlboro, Magic and many ‘Mercials

It was my first night out watching a flick here in Berlin. I ordered the ticket online and once there I got myself all buzzing on salty popcorn, sugar and caffeine - thanks to the liter of coke which troubled me a little in the final act of the movie: I was ready for a nice evening with a good film.

Before getting into the movie itself I have to rant a little about today’s movie theaters and their way with advertisements. When paying for something today, you’re not really paying so much for the movie but for keeping the ads out of it. Interestingly this is not so much the case with films: If you download them for free (illegally, fair enough) there are no ads, but when you pay to see them in the theater you get half an hour of commercials. That’s right, half a frickin hour!.

I haven’t been in a bigger theater watching a movie quite a while so the first images that popped up on the big screen where breathtaking to me: A very strong score, beautiful helicopter shots of wild horses running in the prairie, the Death Valley, cowboys, more horses, more cowboys, more helicopter shots — and after a minute: “Marlboro” followed by a short “Smoking can kill you” plate. I don’t smoke, neither did anyone in the ad. But I discovered my love for the big screen again. Then there was a stupid German beer commercial and some more really shitty ones I luckily forgot about. But Marlboro was one of the most cinematic ads I’ve ever seen. My recommendation!

In between the ads there was a call for watching movies in the theater rather than one a tiny screen at home or, god forbid, on your iPhone. Yes, this clip really tried to convince us, the people already sitting in front of the silver screen, paying money for it and fed up with watching shitty commercials, to visit the cinema more often: “Don’t watch movies on your tiny screen at home while ironing!”. This ad was a waste of money and time. Especially mine. And the next ad was for a mail-order video rental service: “Watch all of your favorite movies at home while ironing!”.

After the commercials the lights went on again. The audience shared some puzzled “wtf?!” remarks with each other until the lights faded out again after a minute and the trailers-reel was shown. And one of the first ones was for Far Cry, another ratfucking of computergame-based films by German director Uwe Boll. But when I saw the trailer suddenly it was magic to me. Ooooh! — I can hear your “wtf?!” remarks now but it meant something different to me than watching Till Schweiger in a Hawaii shirt: Once at work I opened accidentally a project of an effects-shot from another movie rise had been working on, Far Cry. And I think there even was a five frame long sequence of that shot in the trailer. Seeing on the big screen what I only knew from the small computer screen, even for a tiny amount of time, made me realize that some of this immensely tedious work I do on the computer will eventually become unleashed. “One day”, I thought, “one day some of my works could end up on a big screen in a big theater with a big score as well…” That thought brought back the magic into my work-life at an instant. “One day…”

When the Italians next to me already shared a loud conversation about when the movie would “fucking roll already!” it finally did so. And what did I hear? A clipping in the front right speaker, it was getting old and you could hear it, which was quite a nuisance once you kept thinking about it. At least it wasn’t as worse as the Ursty screening in Salzburg!

But you did see the movie, right?

Yes! And first of all hats off to Heath Ledger, who played the Joker so frightingly crazy yet so real that I was really scared of his presence. The Joker was his best movie role and it’s a tragedy that such a tremendous actor is no more. He was among a very talented and well directed ensemble of strong character actors: The first half minute I saw Cristian Bale as Batman in action it was like “That’s what Batman should be like!”, any memories of the feeble and pathetic 60’s Batman were gone, as well as Robin’s character in the movie. A very good decision. Maggie Gyllenhaal just keeps getting better and better with every movie and is like a strong colored flower in the dark and gloomy world of Gotham City. Actors Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhard appear along the movie veterans Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, and everything fits so well together, that The Dark Knight would’ve been no less recommendable if there were no action sequences in it, which wouldn’t bother me much personally. Director/writer Christopher Nolan did another great job and can be considered not only a superb director but also a tremendous writer. In the 152 minutes (plus a random ten-minute break after the first hour) there hasn’t been a single time when I felt the urge to check the time or think of something different. And I easily get bored or distracted by thoughts like “If he really fell from a height like this and would catch his fall by hanging on to a ledge like that, then there would be one million pascal pressure on his fingertips…”

Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister kept the camera as free as a bat, flying over Gotham City, sometimes nearly jumping from high buildings with the actors, circling around the actors in some scenes. Gotham City is not as stylized as I would have liked to see it, still the city is always present and becomes an actor of its own. Nearly all the apartments, offices and other locations display the city through long and mostly seamless windows. Everybody is part of that city.

Sometimes I couldn’t help from watching the actors’ edges against a computer generated background closely for some glitches or problems that might occur with thin hairs comparable to my work at rise at the time. But, of course, Double Negative, Framestore CFC and BUF Compangie don’t make any mistakes. And you wouldn’t see them in a scaled down negative of the IMAX version. Although I couldn’t pay much attention to that because the story sucked me in, although it sometimes got a little puzzling.

So I should watch it, right?

Absolutely! The Dark Knight is a great movie even if you’re like me and not into all that super hero movies that flood the theaters with the same story arc of injustice, vigilante justice and oh-so-predictable ending. No, The Dark Knight offers some interesting twists, a real plot with interestingly developing characters and a dense atmosphere. The high rating (currently 9.1 out of 10) on IMdB is justified in my opinion. It is an stereotypical hero-story masterfully enhanced and populated with multidimensional characters and the mandatory action sequences. I recommend to go and see it at least once — on a big screen!

What I have learned today:

• That I don’t have to stand in line when retrieving a pre-paid ticket.
• That I hate hate HATE commercials that keep you waiting for the main feature more than five minutes.
• That one liter coke and a movie longer than two hours don’t go well together.
• That when strong lights are blurred by a defocused lens, the flare’s rays are still sharp.
• How much evolution within an genre like this is possible.
• That I still feel the magic when watching a movie in the theater.

In my solitude I was pondering on that topic for quite a while and realized that I am quit immune to homesickness. Even when I was away from home for the first time when I was ten I remember being glad to be back again, but staying for another week with my class in upper Styria wouldn’t have done harm to me.

When I started at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg and got my room there on campus I wasn’t eager for my home in Graz any minute while some people in my class had had some emotional troubles to overcome if I remember correctly.

But why am I feeling so well and at home here in Berlin? Is it the apartment? Yes, perhaps because it isn’t mine. This may sound paradox but it doesn’t feel like actually “living” here, more than an extended stay to water the plants and to have an eye on everything here my landlady left for me to discover. Right now I am sitting in one of the most comfortable beds amidst some very interesting books and a large CD shelf. Both these assets tell me more about her than she could tell me in an afternoon. So am I nothing more than a watchdog to overlook this flock of books, this herd of personal belongings?

But here’s the catch: I feel at home where my computer is. And I am not talking about Desdemona, my notebook, but about my nameless computing-monster that is downloading Call of Duty - Modern Warfare in the other room¹. My computer is more than just some overpriced piece of electronics for viewing websites and watching films. In my case my computer is a big part of my life and creativity and I feel constrained and blocked when I don’t have access to my beloved Photoshop, Lightroom, Maya, Nuke, and all the others.

Sherry Turkle once wrote in her great book Life on the screen that computers allow us to outsource parts of our personality and characteristics into it, shape it and use it as mirrors for ourselves. In the highly customizable world we’re living in everything that was made or chosen on purpose by a person tells something about him or her, with every t-shirt imprint, every time our cellphone rings with a distinctive (or emphasized generic) ringtone, every time we change the wallpaper on our desktop.

And in my case there’s helluva lot of my personality in my computer. My mp3 collection in highest bitrates with high-res scanned covers and lyrics in every file, my digital photos tagged in Lightroom with keywords, GPS coordinated and developing data or my personal archives of jobs well done, terabytes mirrored on two disks, a thousand kilometers apart. Yes, this is me, in every folder icon I can see a fraction of my self, with every mouse click I transport my creative intentions into digital reality which is nothing more but the same: Electic energy transformed, submitted and captured, in my brain like in my quadcore.

So working on my computer, spending many hours a day with it, working, watching, playing, browsing means nothing more than looking into a reflection of thine own self? I’m ashamed to admit it but yes, I’m looking into a digital image of myself, and my machine-self looks back at me. For now it’s a symbiosis, and I want to keep it that way, even if it may seem like an one-sided addiction to an outsider. The machine helps me to structure my self.

1. And that’s not even illegal, because I bought the game for 55 Euros but forgot it at home and am eager to play it. Along with my newly awaken affinity for Diablo II. But that’s another story.

Monday was my first day of many other to come at rise visual effects Berlin as an intern. Strangely it’s exactly as I imagined it, maybe even a little boring — but hey: It’s my first week and they won’t hand me critical or very creative stuff right away because the team is a little stressed keeping a deadline for a feature film project due in 2009. I hope that I’ll be involved in stuff for the big screen myself sooner or later…

Monday started off more or less as expected: I was up way too early and had terrible dreams about some ranting video game nerd, thanks to the fact that I had been watching quite a number of episodes of that Angry Videogame Nerd. After some strong coffee I packed my Sony α 100; looked for my paper at the threshold which wasn’t there - not a good sign - and went with my flipping and flopping shoes to the subway station, as swift as the wind because I needed to catch my train, but not without buying some salmon bagel along the way. And I didn’t feel too girlish already not to listen to Good Morning by Ikimono Gakari.

Ikimono Gakari - Good Morning. Life Album (ライフアルバム) (2008)
[See post to listen to audio]

I was too soon. So I munched away on my bagel, alienating the people who watched me, not many though. rise starts at 10am in the morning when most of the commuters are already at work so I always get a nice seat on the city trains. It took me about fifteen minutes to my station, Treptower Park where I got off and headed for my bus station, thanks to Google Earth I knew exactly where to look. I got on the bus with the correct number and after the first turn it felt wrong somehow. And after the first stop I knew I was on the wrong bus. I got out after traveling six hundred meters into the opposite direction.

The street I got out was a one-way so I couldn’t just take a bus back. I had to walk. Back at the station where I boarded the wrong bus I realized that none of the departing vehicles was going near my workplace. And I was already late.

And so I passed the Federal Criminal Police Office, and was looking for that “big road” I had seen on Google Earth. To cut it short: I was walking in a wrong direction again — I blame Google Earth! When you keep zooming in and out all the time, there is the tendency that distances look longer than they are in real life. Well… some do. After I found out I called rise to tell them about my late arrival. It was okay, still I don’t like it to show up late on the first day of work.

Finally I was walking towards the radio tower and closing in on my workplace, sweaty back and aching calves, after all I walked 3.5 kilometers in 30 minutes — my personal best so far.

At work

My workplace,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I entered the building and, oh please god no!, stairs. Just as I was wondering whether I was wrong again a black sign with the rise logo told me to Keep Rising! and after some more steps I was at a large door. As I opened it I could hear somewhere the first few notes from the Super Mario Bros NES game but nobody was sitting in the lengthy lobby. To the right were some white stairs descending into a much darker area, muffled voices coming up from there. So I walked down.

The first thing I saw was a very hyper Jack Russell terrier chewing a small ball running up to me.

I shook hands with the couple of guys hanging about, first of all Florian, my supervisor. He introduced me to the others whose names I instantly forgot although I prepared myself to memorize any names people would tell me. Before I could think much about it I was shown where the toilets were, where the render farm was located (in the coolest room in the office), the HD-screening room and the kitchen with the espresso machine. Continuing his tour de force I was shown how the intranet works, where to hand my render jobs to, how to preview and check log¹ image sequences and where to put the garbage. My first job: Study the inhouse wiki.

Nuke that compo,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

So after about five minutes of drinking coffee and getting somewhat acquainted with my coworkers, one being a graduate of the FH Salzburg, I was sitting at my workstation browsing the house rules, the naming conventions and what inhouse tools they use, most notably Dawn, which makes it possible to load film-stock LUTs into the graphics card’s display of log footage.

Shortly after that I got introduced to another intern and I was handed my first job: For the cheesy TV thriller Die Patin III, (”The Godmother III”) there were 120 effect shots to compose, obviously the director got crazy about VFX. Oddly about 95% of the shots are just green screen shots of scenes with people driving in cars and talking to each other — boooring! I got handed the shots 016-01, 016-02, and 016-05 which tells you nothing but I just like numbers.

Veronica’s hair,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I was sitting in front of two big CRT displays, in front of a quick and dirty keying setup in Nuke 4.8 by one of the other interns and for the first time I felt a little overwhelmed and didn’t know exactly how to pull a good matte from the footage. It was terribly low exposed (because the shots are meant to take place in the night), grainy and Veronica Ferres hair is just hell to key. Plus I started seeing chromatic aberration on my screen. But I can’t tell whether it’s my eyes or the old CRT.

After a short break at noon that’s what I kept doing the whole day: Pulling a good matte from rather tricky footage. In fact, that’s what I was doing on Tuesday too. I suppose the fun starts, when applying these setups to the following shots and they work!

What I have learned:

• That eating a salmon bagel while waiting for your train is a hell of a mess as it is disturbing to other people.
• Where my bus is not leaving.
• What the Federal Criminal Police Office looks like from the outside.
• Many things about file handling, LUTs and house rules.
• That employees at rise are offered free massages now and then.
• That working hours end at 7pm but nobody seems to care.
• That Veronica Ferres is getting old.
• Where to get a pizza for 2.50 € and yummy ice cream for 90 cents.
• The difference between big VFX production houses and students (I’ll get into that some other time).

1. log, as short for “logarithmic” means here that every pixel in an image or image-sequence has its RGB-values assigned logarithmically as opposed to linear which results in an image that lacks saturation and contrast. If this image is exposed back onto film stock, however, it will look just right. And to simulate how a log image will look on the big screen there are look-up tables (LUTs) for different film types and/or gamma settings.