My father would describe their actions and policies to me, and for three of them, he would do so with caveats. “The President issued a great statement to Gorbachev today,” he would explain, “but remember that the Republican Party is wrong about these four points.” Or, “Mrs. Thatcher is fighting for what is right, but her strategies should be modified this way.” And he communicated how deeply he appreciated the Pope’s fearless stance on Communism before clarifying why our family was not Roman Catholic.

My father has always been very quick to point out the best qualities of imperfect men, but is careful not to condone their flaws. The only one of my four heroes whose praise he didn’t have to qualify was Howard Phillips – the moral backbone of America’s conservative movement. While he never achieved the fame of a President, Prime Minister, or Pope, he cast a large shadow in the world, and leaves us a legacy that will last for generations.

Dad first met Howard Phillips in 1981, the year I was born, and he became one of the few people to see and experience both sides of this great statesman’s life. Most of Howard’s colleagues in Washington saw him as a powerful political player; the confidant of presidents, the founder of many conservative organizations (and the driving force behind dozens more), the ultimate policy analyst, the second-best public speaker in DC (after Reagan), the leader’s leader, and always the dominant mind wherever he went.

But what most politicians missed out on was Howard’s personal walk with the Lord, and his life at home as a father. After all, every politician claims Christ and family values, but a very few make total obedience to God’s Word their ultimate goal in life. A personal friend and student of R.J. Rushdoony, Howard Phillips was a man with a powerful, child-like faith, and was a loving and nurturing father. At his funeral on Monday, his friends and family gave testimony more to his love, compassion, and faith than his vast record of political achievements.

Various obituaries have marveled at his ability, or even his attempt, to master these two separate spheres; internal faith and external work, the emotional and intellectual, or family and career. Howard would just laugh at the foolish idea that these spheres should or could be separate. It was his faith and love that drove his political pursuits, and his hard political experiences that added to his faith and drove him back to scripture.

It was his family that motivated his defense of freedom, and his participation in brutal ideological battles that motivated the education he gave his children. His youngest son Sam, educated at home, had an excellent explanation of what made his father such an exceptional man. “Dad’s commitment to principle was always inspiring to me growing up,” wrote Sam. “I appreciated that Dad always took his beliefs seriously, but never himself.”

I believe that this is what enabled him to be supremely confident and supremely humble at the same time. This enabled him to be ferociously adamant about right and wrong even when he was the only one doing so. It enabled him to shrug off the vilest personal attacks even when they were printed in the most widely-read newspapers. More impressively, it enabled him to resist the temptation to compromise, even when conceding ground would have bought him power and fame at the highest levels of government.

During his vast career, Howard Phillips made many powerful enemies, each of whom demonstrated that Howard couldn’t be intimidated or conquered, even in defeat. His amazing intellectual abilities and personal discipline brought him many opportunities that demonstrated that he couldn’t be bought or corrupted, even in success. And despite experiencing a number of amazing and often unparalleled successes in many areas of life, he never acted out of pride or ego.

Even when lauded for his principles and sincerity of belief, Howard would sidestep the compliment and point to the source of those beliefs, and to the responsibility of all men to live in obedience to God’s Word. In all my personal conversations with this exceptional man, he described himself as simply a normal and unexceptional person who owed everything to the blessings of God.

Most of the obituaries written over the last week highlight his truly remarkable career, and the incredible influence he has had in the conservative movement. Even many of his opponents have honored his personal consistency, his unswerving commitment to principle, and the honorable way he opposed them. Many of his allies have lamented the future of conservatism, now that Howard Phillips is no longer around to be their “true north,” and the example of political faithfulness.

What people should realize, however, is that Howard’s greatest legacy, and greatest example, was as a father and a Christian who applied God’s Word to his life. That is a legacy that will last even longer than the fortifications and craters he left on our political landscape. My father taught me many lessons about those battles in Washington, but how he taught me was shaped partly by Howard’s example of fatherhood.

This legacy is another aspect of the exceptionalism of Howard Phillips. Unlike most political players, he has left behind several loving children and grandchildren, and, even more rarely seen, thousands of grateful spiritual children and grandchildren. It must seem strange to the world that one of the most embattled, most slandered, most betrayed and most hated men in recent American history would also be the most admired, most appreciated, most emulated, and most loved… but this is not surprising to anyone who knew him.

This year at NAB, they announced their second and third cameras. First, they unveiled an upgraded version of the BCC which shoots 4k video on a Super35 sensor through a global shutter. Like its predecessor, it comes with a free copy of daVinci Resolve (normally $945), and is still only $4000. As astounding a camera as this is, I found the announcement of the Pocket Cinema Camera even more interesting.

This camera is a mirrorless point & shoot, with a Super16 sensor shooting native 1920×1080 HD footage. Currently, the prototypes record 10-bit ProRes to SD card, with a slightly compressed 12-bit DNG RAW codec coming soon. The sensor promises extreme dynamic range, and by shooting at a native res, there will be no problems with aliasing or moiré, and it will have larger photosites that should give it very impressive low light capability.

In addition to standard SD cards, it takes standard Nikon batteries, and has a standard active Micro Four Thirds lens mount. This gives it a pretty wide selection of Panasonic and Olympus lenses, and adapters are in the works to support a number of classic 16mm lens mounts. It’s pretty capable video camera for $995… especially when you consider that this is roughly the current price for a used Canon 7D.

Of course, a video-enabled DLSR like the 7D is a dual purpose device, primarily a serious still camera. The Pocket Cinema Camera, despite looking like your average point & shoot, will not have even have the capability to take cellphone-resolution pictures. Its tiny size and cute design aside, this is meant to be a pro camera, with a pro sensor recording to pro codecs. I’m pretty sure that the ungraded RAW footage won’t even look that flashy.

That’s not a downside, though. What might be, however, is the somewhat limited control scheme. It uses the same menu system as the original BCC, which is a very full-featured touchscreen-based setup. The PCC, on the other hand, doesn’t have a touchscreen. In a way, that’s good; since a tiny camera like this will probably need a finger-blocking viewfinder eyepiece, it’s nice to have buttons off to the side.

The problem is that using directional buttons to navigate an interface designed for a touchscreen can be slow. For a cinema camera on a controlled film set shooting planned shots, speed is not essential… but the price and size of this camera make it perfect for run-and-gun documentary shooting, and in that environment speed is much more important. If I’m moving fast, I might need to adjust iris, ISO, shutter, white balance, and audio levels in between shots, and that’s five different settings with only one set of buttons.

To make matters worse, a number of MFT lenses don’t have physical focus rings, so that’s a sixth set of parameters to adjust using five tiny chicklet buttons. I wish the camera had a control wheel in addition to the directional pad, since it will be very hard to rapidly press the clicky buttons on a camera this small and light without jiggling it. Not a great way to do follow focus, so clearly physical focus rings are a must. At the moment, there’s no telling if this camera will have auto-focus or auto-exposure; the original BCC is purely manual control, with only a very basic one-time auto-iris.

Nevertheless, it is nice to see a no-frills camera designed purely for video quality, especially when it has been priced lower than DSLRs that have squeezed video in as an afterthought. The more professional features like focus peaking and the headphone jack (I never thought I’d consider a headphone jack a “professional video feature”) make it easy to overlook a few rough spots, and there’s a lot of room for firmware updates between now and the late July shipping estimate.

I am seriously considering pre-ordering one of these. The native lenses are pretty cheap, older S16 lenses are abundant, and if the dynamic range and low light capabilities of the sensor are similar to the original BCC, it will shoot an amazing image. To some extent though, despite being cheap and tiny, it is more camera than most of us actually need. Canon’s compressed MPEG4 video is sufficient for most video productions, and the full frame sensor of the 5D is still very hard to beat.

I believe that the 4k Cinema Production Camera will do very, very well. It brings all of the RED Scarlet’s capability to the table for a fraction of the cost. It can’t compete quite as well with the Epic or the Sony F65, but the people who buy or rent cameras in that rarified price range tend to be able to decide what they need and could pick it up. In comparison, the Pocket Camera is practically an impulse buy, but it is a more complicated product to predict.

Ultimately, the success of this camera will depend on how many shooters are serious videographers who want to get better at their craft, and how many wannabe filmmakers just want a fancier camera because they think that their tools (or toys) define them. The PCC is capable of shooting a vastly superior image to existing DLSRs, but it will take a lot more work to get that better image. The codec open up a whole new range of grading options, but it also requires a whole new level of grading.

Casual shooters will probably be frustrated by this challenge, and serious pro shooters should probably be considering the more expensive 4k version. A pocket-sized RAW HD camera feels custom-made for guys in between those two groups – like me – but I’m just not sure how big that demographic is. Right now, the original 2.5k BCC is highly sought after, and even after the 4k version hits the market I expect that used bodies will be scarce and expensive.

So the only reason that I’m holding back on the pre-order is that I’m not sure how many used Pocket Cameras will be for sale by the end of the year. Any thoughts?

This year, Bill Westenhofer accepted the Oscar for Best Visual Effects while his employer, Rhythm & Hues, was filing for bankruptcy. To add insult to injury, the Academy organizers cut his mic when he tried to mention that his team of award-winning effects artists were now unemployed. This was a painful snub, since on most of today’s films, visual effects artists put in the majority of the man-hours, represent the largest chunk of the crew, and often create the vast majority of what the audience actually sees on screen.

For example, 2012′s Disney’s Marvel’s Joss Whedon’s Avengers’ climactic battle took place in an entirely digital New York City, was fought against entirely digital alien invaders, and usually involved digital stuntmen protecting digital extras from digital explosions. For Life of Pi, most of Claudio Miranda’s Oscar-winning cinematography was actually shots of flat blue walls that were replaced with completely original renders from the Rhythm & Hues team.

So, if more and more of today’s blockbuster filmmaking is done in post, why are post’s mightiest unsung heroes closing their doors? The two biggest reasons are that Hollywood studios aren’t sharing their profits, and that foreign animators are willing to work cheaper. Every year, more effects work is being outsourced to Canada, eastern Europe, and Asia.

This situation is kind of personal for me, since I’ve worn most of the hats in the effects and animation business, and over the years I’ve gotten to meet Bill Kroyer and other members of the Rhythm & Hues team. I’ve also worked for a New Zealand animation studio that picked up a lot of outsourced work from American and Canadian productions, some of which we further outsourced to Malaysia.

Outsourcing is an inevitable part of free market economics. If high-quality workmanship can be purchased cheaper overseas, the buyers of that workmanship will go there. In 2008, James Cameron employed Weta Digital to create the effects for Avatar, rather than Digital Domain, the effects company he co-founded in 1993. Last year, Digital Domain filed for bankruptcy, and is now owned by Chinese and Canadian investment companies.

The problem is that the basic economics of outsourcing are confused by the complicated tax subsidies that various nations have set up to attract international productions. Yes, Digital Domain and Rhythm & Hues did lose valuable movie contracts to foreign effects houses, but they were also financially weak after building their own foreign branches in an attempt to get those subsidies themselves.

Today, protesting animators are blaming studios, bankers, and foreign and domestic governments. It’s not a very coherent message, since some are demanding an end to foreign film subsidies while others insist that California and the U.S. must fully incentivize their businesses and their art. To be fair, most of us effects artists are pretty inexperienced when it comes to politics and business, but this situation is nothing new.

Several years ago I watched as a number of Australian effects studio startups dove deep into debt while preparing for the giant Hollywood films they presumed would come to Sydney after the Star Wars and Matrix trilogies. These big-budget co-productions never came, and most of those companies disappeared in a cloud of liquidated computer hardware.

Ultimately, the “free money” that other counties are handing out to buy movie productions is costing them a lot, and it’s unwise to bank on incentives that could change at any time. Besides, a government forcing taxpayers to support art only gets you bad art, and a state-patronized industry is never industrious for long.

The other solution that’s been bandied about is an effects artists union, designed to compete with all the other guilds and unions that have a stranglehold on Hollywood. A union, after all, would enable American animators to demand bigger contracts and make it harder for them to compete with each other. On the other hand, those bigger contracts would make it impossible for them to compete with the cheaper international companies that are already undercutting them… and now they’d have to pay union dues.

Besides, the absence of a rigid, innovation-stifling union is part of why the VFX industry has developed so fast in the first place. The whole reason that the early ILM wizards were able to be such creative problem-solvers was a freedom from big Hollywood studio compartmentalization. Optical printer techs could invent new cameras. Makeup guys could build hydraulic rigs. Matte painters could create Photoshop. Any person could wear any hat and do any job.

I realize that an effects artists’ guild might not be as restrictive as, say, the Teamsters union, but now is a time when the industry desperately needs flexibility. Entertainment markets are changing in almost every conceivable way, and we have technical breakthroughs turning our workflows upside-down every few years. Perhaps a simpler guild or trade organization could help standardize processes and streamline adaptation without the rigidity of a typical Hollywood-style union.

And if it turns out that big-box effects and animation companies can’t be competitive in the 21st century, let’s not feel compelled to try and build a bunch of artificial walls to prop them up. Those walls will only get in the way if we actually need to be smaller and more agile. If it takes fewer artists to do specific jobs, then we need to accept that now, rather than overextend ourselves to maintain yesterday’s system, and be unprepared for tomorrow.

When ink and paint departments started to be replaced by Xerox machines and computers, some people complained about the jobs that would be lost. And eventually, hundreds of diligent painters who had spent thousands of hours putting tons of paint on millions of cels did lose their jobs. But in traditional 2D animation today, we no longer think of those countless menial hours of mind-numbing drudgery that we don’t have to do as time lost, but as time saved.

The big Hollywood studios should definitely demonstrate more respect toward to the men and women who are creating 80% of their motion pictures, and the directors who are honored for those animation-dependent films could show a little more gratitude to their animators. The effects companies themselves, however, will need to share part of the blame for financial failure.

If we have underbid on too many projects or signed bad contracts, that’s really our problem. In the same way that we can’t blame it on other governments or the big studios, we’re also not going to solve the problem by making it the responsibility of our own government or some union officials.

The effects and animation industry, as a whole, is famous for being flexible and innovative, and for being able to solve problems and create solutions for any movie challenge. Now is the time for individual artists to be responsible and creative – and to use that creativity off the screen as well as they do on it.

Images sourced from BeforeVFX

Different printers can print different types of resin, plastic, ceramic, and even metal. Some printers have an ink nozzle right next to the media nozzle, so it can paint objects in full color while printing. Other dual-head printers can print a rigid plastic and soft rubber at the same time, or ABS and wax. This is useful for objects with a lot of non-touching moving parts, like gears. The gears and axles can be printed in hard plastic, supported by the printed wax until the object is done and the wax can be melted or crumbled out.

There are even experiments in printing blood vessels and human organs, cell by cell, custom designed for transplant surgeries. As the printers get more sophisticated, they can do more things. Researchers are building machines than can print optics and electronic sensors directly into objects during printing. One of the great advantages of this system is that the cost is the same to print one object as it is to print a thousand. Mass production of injection molded plastic still might be cheaper in the long run, but there’s no setup cost to print a single custom product.

Despite a number of homebuilt printers and successful Kickstarter campaigns to develop cheaper models, it’s still a fairly expensive field to get into. That’s where Shapeways comes in. The entrepreneurs at the company have invested in several different types of printers, and allow users like me to upload our models and pay for the materials and machine time to have them printed.

I was making jewelry. I made several different pendant designs, since the price was the same if I was printing ten individual models or ten copies of one model. Shapeways prints a variety of materials, even food grade ceramic, but I wanted to try out the metal options. The cheapest material is a nylon polymer. It’s fairly strong, flexible, and reasonably detailed. It’s a great substance for prototyping, but because it can be polished and dyed, it can also serve an a finished product.

The metal printing is similar to the plastic, with one extra step. The print head lays down a steel powder, which is held together with a glue. Once the object is finished, it is placed in an oven, and sand is packed around it. The oven melts the glue out, but the sand holds the steel dust together until it fuses to itself, and a bronze material in the sand is drawn into the tiny gaps left by the glue. Here’s how it compares to the nylon print.

The final result isn’t particularly strong, since it’s a steel/bronze alloy that has been essentially cast at low temperatures. It also loses a little detail on the edges during the firing, so it’s not going to work for machine parts, but it was fine for my purposes. Shapeways technicians can also plate this object with bronze or gold.

I built the objects in Lightwave 3D, and uploaded .DAE files to Shapeways site. It actually took a few tries to get an object that was actually printable; their automated software would let me know if a model’s points were too sharp, walls too thin, or details too fine to physically duplicate, and at first all of my models had errors. As you have seen, the steel pendant’s edges are a little blurred by the limited resolution of the printer.

Another printing option is Sterling silver, which requires yet another step (and is understandably more expensive than steel). The silver process starts with a wax print that comes off of an extremely precise printer. A plaster mold is built around the wax print, and when it sets, the wax is melted out, and molten silver is poured in. When the silver cools, the plaster is broken off, and the finished cast is cleaned and polished.

This is basically the ancient “lost wax” method of casting, but today the wax model is handmade by robots. Because the wax printer is capable of building models at a much higher resolution than the metal printers, the silver objects have much greater detail. All in all, I printed nine objects, and I’m pretty happy with all of them. Some handled detail better than others, and now I have a better idea of what type of geometry works with the different materials.

By the way, Shapeways is more than just a service bureau. Every object uploaded can be added to the Shapeways store, which is packed with tools, jewelry, coffee mugs, phone cases, camera mounts, insanely complicated Rubik’s cubes, detailed models of obscure dinosaurs, and more. A lot of the objects can be customized, and most are available in a variety of materials. This means that the store contains a possible 6 billion different products. It’s a great example of a disruptive company, even if the technology is still in its infancy.

As various companies are working to bring to cost down so we can all have 3D printers in our homes, other companies are bringing the technology up, so we can print machine-ready replacement parts for our cars, or complex electronics. It will be fun if this becomes a second industrial revolution, and high-end manufacturing goes back home as the giant factories close. I don’t know what’s more interesting; a return to the cottage industry model for production, or the ability for basement inventors to make literally anything they can design.

But in all seriousness, I’ve found it very interesting to follow the progress of the discussion, both here and abroad. The American presidential election is the largest, most popular, and most globally scrutinized political contest on earth, and watching world opinion can be very revealing.

When I lived in New Zealand I had just come from working in American media, and I was amazed at well international television reports from the BBC and Deutch Welle covered some things and how inaccurately they portrayed others. Being away from home provided perspective our own news, and made it easier to compare cultural ideas.

Even after moving back, I’ve tended to follow international coverage of our elections, and there were a lot of international opinions that arose on a recent Quora.com question: “If the current US presidential election candidates (Obama Vs. Romney) were running in your country who would you vote for and who do you think would win?”

Of course, some statistics actually exist, and a recent Globescan poll of 21 countries resulted in a final tally of 50% voting for Obama, 9% for Romney, 31% various don’t knows and don’t cares, and an insightful 10% who didn’t believe that there was any difference between the two.

As an Australian pointed out, “I’ve been following the election and I still can’t work out what it is Romney actually stands for. I know he really wants to be president but I can’t understand what he will do if he gets in.”

As much as I would love to blame the Australian Broadcasting Corporations’s news coverage for his ignorance or take this obvious opportunity to pick on Seven and Nine’s hilariously unresearched sensationalism, I can’t say that this is a media fault. I’ve been reading statements directly from Romney’s own office for over a year, and I don’t know either.

Is that why Obama’s international polling is so high? Quora members chimed in to try to explain the breakdown, and their comments ranged from the tactless “I would be shocked if Romney wins and I would be sorry for the stupidity of Americans” to the harsh but difficult to argue with: “Republicans have proven incapable of producing viable candidates for leadership of still the most important country in the world.”

For the most part, however, they described why their nations would almost unanimously vote Obama. One Indian gentleman broke down his response to a number of platform issues, like Social Security: “Obama wants to protect and strengthen SS. Which means free stuff! Indians love free stuff! Romney wants to encourage people to create individual accounts. Who will get the government’s money then? Something is fishy here!”

Apart from not really understanding the definition of “free” or knowing where “the government’s money” actually comes from, this was a very accurate description of the board’s general feelings. Nearly all contributors praised Obamacare, slammed the free market economic system, and were oblivious to the fact that Romney’s introduced socialized medicine to Massachusetts. A Canadian described the overall tone of the discussion: “Canadians trust our government programs more than we trust the market.”

This gentleman went on to discuss gun control: “How ridiculous is it to let just about anyone own a gun. As if there wasn’t enough crime already. Clincher for Obama. Deal breaker for Romney.”

It should be pointed out that neither candidate has dared to say much about guns. In this case, Romney has been saddled with a bunch of subjective Republican stereotypes, rather than personal promises. International viewers, like American Christians, see Romney as an unshakably pro-gun, pro-life, pro-private-business, religious firebrand, rather than the pragmatic fence-sitter that his record shows him to be.

And Obama isn’t the CEO-smashing, gun-grabbing, war-stopping Malcolm X-cum-Ghandi that the secular left has been praying for, either. Ironically, he has probably driven the sale of more firearms to more private individuals than any single person in the entire history of gunpowder. And in a recession, too.

Despite the global economic crunch, few commenters mentioned the candidates’ positions on debt, budgets, or trade, and nobody ever asked for more jobs. Apart from a desire to tax the rich, there was no suggestion of making money even while demanding more Federal financial aid. A Ukrainian dogmatically underscored this: “A country is not a business and should never be lead by an ex CEO. Any business mentality is to make money… This mentality is not appropriate for running a country.”

Despite Turkey’s 34-9 Obama win in the Globescan poll, a Turkish voter disagreed: “I am not supporting Romney’ s perspectives for Foreign issues and the things like education, health, resources etc… but, till to be a super power country on the world, I would vote for nationalist people.”

The term “superpower” came up a lot, but was inconsistently used. Sometimes it meant the obvious and acceptable goal of any nation, and sometimes it was an unfair advantage that should be destroyed. A lone Obama critic piped up: “Of course the rest of the world prefers Obama because he is on the path of making the US like the rest of the world.”

And the rest of the world is more to the left than the United States. Most other nations clearly govern less conservatively than the America has, and even the labels “liberal” and “conservative” have shifted. “I’m from China and I’m now living in Canada,” wrote an Obama supporter. “I used to think myself as a conservative, albeit a moderate one. Having followed the US election for sometime, I now think I would probably be labelled as a communist in the US. Our Canadian conservative party seems to be more liberal than the Democrats in the US.”

A Brit explained: “I think for most of Western Europe ( and say nations like Canada and Australia, it would be impossible for a Republican party to ever attract more than around 10% of the vote, there are so many Republican views that are simply impossible for any remotely balanced person to ever become comfortable with.”

The “unbalanced” views he then described were things like any opposition to socialized medicine, abortion, or gay marriage. A Canadian added, “running against gay marriage in Canada is a good way to get yourself labelled an extremist and to make yourself unelectable in all but bible belt ridings.”

There were comments deriding the “religious fringe,” someone claimed Romney was bringing the “Christian variety of a Sha’ria ruled state,” and all the other tired old tropes were brought out. One Obama supporter from India described his position: “I find it disquieting to think of someone in a position of power whose decisions might be influenced by religion.”

This is an idea that I’ve heard over and over again, usually from whiny Westerners who owe almost everything they have to the Christian character of their ancestors. It is a much more understandable sentiment from someone whose country is teetering between the lunacy of Hinduism and the brutality of Islam, but it is still impossible.

All leaders, voters, and internet commenters will be influenced by religion. All ideological belief systems are equally religious and equally influential, whether they point to a god, a man, a system of government, or even just a collection of widely-adopted cultural principles.

The belief that government must not be run like a business is a moral and religious idea. The convictions that gun ownership is wrong, that self defense is right, that the State can deem what is fair, or that man should be free – these are all equally religious ideas. They are moral frameworks will direct the thinking of anyone who holds them. Everyone on earth has a cultural bias, an ideological system, a religion.

This is why moral relativism doesn’t work, and why a transcendent standard is needed. Without standards, labels like “liberal” and “conservative” can move so far that they stop meaning anything. By moving away from standards, countries and cultures will keep moving and not even realize it.

“I am from India and I say with all my heart that the day India finds its Obama we will be the fastest growing economy and well on our way to being the superpower.”

Also, there’s no shortage of fantastic new HD cameras, like the Blackmagic Cinema camera, which gets you uncompressed 2.5k video for less than $3,000, or Sony’s just-announced NEX-VG900, which is a full-featured camcorder with full-frame 35mm sensor, and next week Panasonic is going to unveil the Lumix GH3. Everything is getting better, smaller, and cheaper.

With pro audio, however, not so much. Sample technology for composition is advancing by leaps and bounds, but mics, mixers, and recorders haven’t changed much since the digital revolution over a decade ago. Stu Maschwitz has a great post up asking for a new revolution in audio support for newbies, or in other words, video guys.

Being the mastermind behind Magic Bullet, Stu has had some great ideas on how to give not-quite-professional users very professional results with fast and powerful color grading tools. Now he has some great ideas about how better software could get us better audio using the tools we already have. I’m completely behind his suggestions, but I’ve got some specific requests for the industry. I want new hardware.

Case in point, the wonderful and bulletproof Sennheiser EW 100 series. I’ve owned four sets of this wireless kit from different eras, and they’ve never let me down. They, more than the Zoom recorders, are my go-to audio tools; rugged, simple, they run on AA batteries, and they never fail. I can’t say enough good things about them. That said, they’re big, heavy, and really expensive. As far as I know, their cost hasn’t come down, ever. It used to be that a set of these was 5-10% of the cost of a camera. Now, however, they’re about 100-120% of the price of a brand new 60D.

Realistically, though, I’m not expecting the price to change; in fact, I’m just impressed that Sennheiser has kept the price steady during inflation while adding features like IR frequency sync and better displays. But it’s still old tech. It’s the same analog UHF radio system that we’ve used since the very first wireless lavs were invented. I think we can do better.

Just for illustration, check out the Sansa Clip MP3 player. It plays almost any audio codec, has an FM radio, voice recorder, microSD slot, OLED display, great battery life, and weighs less than five grams. It packs a processor beefy enough for variable speed audio, full EQ, compressor/limiter, and, with a little tweaking, it can play games, like chess or Doom. When it’s not on sale, it retails for $30.

It has the raw ability to be a serious pro audio recorder – sampling rate up to 96khz, WAV, MP3, or lossless compression, prebuffering, manual gain, hot-swappable external storage, etc – but it’s limited by a terribly tiny built-in microphone and a consumer-based menu system. How hard would it be for Sandisk to put a bigger and better mic on board, add a few features to the menus, and sell us a recorder small enough to be a lavalier mic all by itself? Just clip it inside a collar, pocket, or lapel and start shooting!

And why couldn’t we have a wireless lav that size? Bluetooth headsets these days are tiny. Now, it should be pointed out that regular, old, original Bluetooth 1.0 is terrible for video. The quality is low, it cuts in and out because the range is incredibly limited, and worst of all, it has variable latency that slides all over the place and makes it impossible to get good lip sync. But Bluetooth has come a long way.

Enter Bluetooth 4.0, the latest standard. It uses the higher bandwidth of Bluetooth 3.0, plus some new low-power features. In short, it means higher quality audio, up to 300ft range, less power consumption, and much less latency, somewhere between 3ms and 6ms (for reference, 41ms throws you off by a single frame). Being a standard, plenty of manufacturers are making radios for it, and it’s globally usable (UHF and VHF radios might be illegal to operate in certain countries, depending on the band you have).

So let’s take the brain of an upcoming Bluetooth 4.0 headset, ignore any of the telephony protocols and the speaker, give it a really nice omnidirectional mic, and power it off of an easily replacable AAA battery. It would be a little over two inches long (since the largest part of the system is the battery), but that’s still very small. Documentary filmmakers would love it. Affordable to buy, easy to carry, and easy to use. No more running long, thin mic cables under shirts, and then spending hundreds of dollars replacing them when they get kinked and snagged.

For the receiver, let’s have two radios, two high-gain antennas, run it all on two AAA batteries, make the output hot enough that you can bypass consumer grade preamps, and give it the duotone OLED screen from the Sansa Clip (stuff is cheaper if it already exists). Now you can connect to two Bluetooth lavs at once, and send both channels out to your camera’s stereo input jack. Stick it on your camera’s hotshoe, or clip it to the strap; it’s that small.

Now, there are a number of companies that make products for digital wireless audio streaming and a lot of them use proprietary codecs and chips, for good reason. Any one of them could build the gadgets that I’ve just mocked up using their own tech, but I think there’s some merit in sticking with Bluetooth. The more devices that use it, the more flexibility the filmmaker has. Shooting a TV show in a really loud environment? Use a Jawbone headset’s incredible noise-cancelling ability to get clean audio anyway.

And hey, can your smartphone connect to multiple Bluetooth devices? Boom, it just became your software-based audio mixer. Record individual tracks on it and send a mixdown feed to your camera at the same time. Does your phone not connect to enough devices? Some enterprising electronics company can just build an add-on case containing multiple Bluetooth radios and you’ve got the equivalent of a full flyaway case of rack-mounted audio gear in your pocket or attached to your camera rig. It would sure beat carrying all the analog equipment.

As an aside, I’ve discovered that Sennheiser receivers fit perfectly into M4 mag pouches, so if you attach four of those to a Molle vest and wire them into a four-channel mixer in a dump pouch on your chest, you can run its headphone jack out to your camera, and its line out to a Zoom H2 in a radio pouch, and you can add an H1 in a pistol mag pouch for backup. It works great, but it’s not exactly low-key. It’s also simpler and cheaper to have everything Bluetoothed into a single receiver.

And we might even be able to ditch the receiver. Lots of cameras these days have GPS and Wifi radios… why not Bluetooth radios too? A lot of off-the-shelf wireless chipsets have all three anyway. Just stick the audio levels for these lavs in the camera’s audio menu, which is usually a touchscreen anyway, and simplify everything. Nikon and Samsung have both released point-and-shoot cameras running Android, and Samsung’s Galaxy camera actually is a working cellular device – with 3G and everything. Eventually, this is coming to camcorders and dSLRs.

Of course, using Bluetooth for wireless audio connectivity is only one idea. It could just as easily be work over Wifi, or a proprietary system. But the point is that some consumer gear has more raw power now than the dedicated professional tools. My $30 Sansa Clip has a higher sampling rate, better battery life, and cheaper storage than ten-year-old $1000 DAT tape decks. Stu’s idea of using GPS clock data to line up audio and video files is probably more accurate than jam synced smart slates, and costs nothing. Digital audio streaming can use less power, less bandwidth, handle interference better, and operate using cheaper parts than analog wireless audio radios.

And being able to easily use multiple, cheap, wireless lavalier mics on set is the fastest and most idiot-proof way to improve audio quality. Tiny capsule mics on collars will never sound as good as an expensive shotgun operated by a pro, but they’ll never sound as bad as cheap shotguns run by amateurs. There’s a lot of money in semi-pro audio gear for pro video production, and a lot of money to be saved in making these tools using existing digital technologies.

I was extremely pressed for time, so I had to come up with a solution that would work without global illumination or volumetric rendering. The real trick for aerial shots like this is simulating the effect of looking though several miles of atmosphere. Dust, humidity, and even the air itself will diffuse and absorb light in complicated ways, but I decided to cheat this haziness and distortion with a combination of Lightwave’s fog and some depth-mapped gradients in After Effects.

The geometry for these renders was sort of pre-existing, but needed substantial cleanup and reconstruction. There’s a lot of GIS data that’s available for a lot of US cities, but nearly all of it will require that you jump through a lot of hoops to get it into your 3D package of choice. For example, extruding 2D building outlines into simple shapes is easy and surprisingly effective; but getting them to sit at the proper ground level and extrude to the proper height is tough. Plugins and scripts for these repetitive tasks are a must.

I knew that I’d be texturing the ground and roofs of the buildings with satellite imagery, but I needed some pictures for the building sides. There are a lot of places to get images that can be easily un-shaded and un-distorted to make texture maps. I also made specular maps for each image so that the windows would be properly reflected.

DC has a lot of trees lining its streets, so I built six different tree shapes, each using about 80 polygons, and used UV and procedural clip maps to make leaves. Then I used Lightwave 11′s new instancing feature to turn those six trees into 600,000. A greyscale image map controlled where the trees were placed, and a gradient randomized their colors. I made them quite a bit larger than Washington’s actual trees for stylistic reasons, and they added a lot of depth to the image without adding a lot of render time.

At this point, I was using most of my 8gb of RAM just loading textures. My main color map was 20,000 pixels wide, but I saved a lot of memory by making sure that most images were only 8-bit files. There are only a few objects in the scene, and most of them are contiguous, so the reflectivity of the windows, the dull shine of the concrete, and the surface of ponds and rivers all had to driven by texture maps. I created several layers using different filters and color selections to build the images I needed.

The project didn’t require that I cross the Potomac, but my Lightwave scripts and Photoshop actions had automatically created detail in Virginia. Just for fun, I’ve flown the camera out to the Pentagon, and apart from a few misplaced trees and weird bridges, it looks pretty good.

So, as amazing and powerful as dedicated environment renderers can be, this was a simple solution that rendered quickly and didn’t take too long to put together.

Brave vs. Tangled
Story-wise, Brave is much more similar to Disney’s 2011 film Tangled, since the prevailing conflict of each film is a strong-willed princess daughter rebelling against a mean ol’ (step)mother’s rules while being personally conflicted about their relationship. Axe-wielding ruffians, magic, and big hair are tangentially involved in both films.

There are some major differences, though. In Tangled, Rapunzel’s mother figure is a kidnapper, which means that the audience can overlook any disobedience. It’s a clever trick of the writers, but Rapunzel doesn’t know this, so she’s being genuinely defiant to someone who she thinks is loving and trustworthy. When she runs away from home a happy adventure ensues, wonderful things happen to her, and everybody’s life gets better (except for her stepmother’s life, which gets shorter). It’s kind of a problematic message for kids, when you think about it.

However, a lot of Christian reviewers disagreed. The colors and music and story and cuteness were so appealing that it was easy to make excuses for the problems of story… and worse, the moral problems of the characters. There was a lot of arguing between the various pundits who identified with Rapunzel’s character or situation and those who found the plot and theme disturbing.

Ultimately, of course, everyone would agree that rebellion per se is bad, but the complicated situational ethics of the movie confused people who should have known better. Don’t believe me? A lot of the same reviewers who had nothing but glowing praise for the messages of Tangled are deeply uncomfortable with the exact same messages that they see in Brave.

For example, the same reviewer that praised the “sacramental quality” of the magic in Tangled warned of the “strong occult content” in Brave. The magic is sparkly and gold in one, and smoky and blue in the other, but they should be equally antithetical to a Christian observer. I think the real difference is that one magical tool is sunny and flowery, and the other requires the stereotypical newt-and-frog cauldron process.

To be honest, I too walked out of Tangled liking it, and it was only on reflection that I started to realize that I was excusing serious problems because of all the fluffy fun of it. Brave was different in that it made me uncomfortable right away, and it’s easy to see why. A lot of reviewers fell for the aggressively saccharine treatment of Rapunzel’s story, and her manic pixie dream girl perkiness, and the charming love-at-first sight lantern-lit romanticality. It never makes us feel bad because the characters that we like don’t suffer any consequences for anything. Who doesn’t want to live in that world?

Brave’s characters have to deal with consequences. Big ones. There aren’t any loopholes for Merida’s attitude, nothing that will let her off the hook that her actions have hung her on. She is selfish child who wants to shirk her responsibilities as a future queen, and ride and shoot all day. She fights and snarls at her mother, who honestly loves and cares for her. She sullenly buys a cursed pastry from a witch and slyly tricks her mother into eating it. The next thing she knows, her grief-stricken father is hunting down her panicking bear-mother, and Merida can no longer pretend that this disaster isn’t her fault.

Smoky blue magic aside, Merida’s world is far more realistic than Rapunzel’s. Brave makes Tangled look like a Barbie doll commercial. Because of these seemingly harsh realities, most reviewers, especially Christians, seem uncomfortable recommending it for kids, but I think that children should learn that actions have consequences, that selfishness can hurt people, and that your parents will try to protect you.

When all seems lost, Merida repents of her bad attitude, confesses what she has done, and, with only seconds left to say goodbye, tries to tell her mother how much she really loves her. Isn’t this a better role model for young girls than the self-justified and always right Rapunzel, whose most heroic moment in her film is telling the stepmother how much she despises her?

You parents reading this, would you prefer to explain the Biblical concept of magic to your kids while watching a movie where spells and incantations do only good, helpful things, or a film where every enchantment is strange and destructive, associated with creepy blue fire and pagan stone circles? Yes, one of these movies is scarier than the other, but it will result in much more thoughtful family conversations.

Tangled takes place in a magical Victorian/Medieval/Renaissance/Candyland, where even the greediest jewel thieves are handsome and charming hunks. Will you be able to warn your daughters that he’s not a good matrimonial prospect? Disney spent millions of dollars and lots of Glen Keane’s unparalleled artistic ability to convince your daughter otherwise by making him seem noble, nice, and like Rapunzel’s obvious destiny. Besides, when Rapunzel’s parent warned her about him, she was being mean and evil and wrong. Can you compete with that level of emotional manipulation?

The ultimate question we need to ask about these movie is not which has less evil in it, but which movie calls evil good, and which movie calls evil evil. Brave easily wins this contest, but unfortunately, it leaves a lot of evil completely unaddressed, and introduces some serious confusion.

Brave vs. Brenda Chapman
When Brave was announced, it was pitched as Pixar’s first film with a female protagonist, and also their first film with a female director. This generated a lot of press about Brenda Chapman breaking into the Pixar boy’s club, and bringing feminism to the screen, and various speculations about how everything was going to change. Then, when Pixar fired her from the project, articles appeared all over the web about how the glass ceiling had fallen on her, and how the chauvinistic male execs at Pixar had chickened out on their edgy, ground-breaking girl movie.

Chapman was replaced by Mark Andrews in late 2010, at roughly the halfway point in actual production, citing the usual “creative differences.” When Brad Bird replaced Jan Pinkava on Ratatouille, we knew enough about his signature style to at least guess at what he might have brought to the table. In this case, Chapman was one of three directors on Prince of Egypt, and in the story department on a number of Disney films, and Andrews has been in the story departments of a number animated films from different studios, so it’s very hard to tell which story concepts came from which director.

We do know that Chapman did want to really push the strong-willed-princess angle, though. In a recent interview she explains her motivation: “Because of marketing, little girls gravitate toward princess products, so my goal was to offer up a different kind of princess — a stronger princess that both mothers and daughters could relate to, so mothers wouldn’t be pulling their hair out when their little girls were trying to dress or act like this princess. Instead they’d be like, ‘Yeah, you go girl!’”

I don’t know how many mothers actually want their daughters to relate to a princess whose only real strengths are defying and nearly killing her mother (and tearing through dresses). In fact, I’d think that most 21st century moms would be very relieved to see their daughters emulating traditional manners and respect for parents, but nevermind.

Reviews jumped on the progressive feminist film angle, but they can’t really agree on what it means. “Holds True to its Feminist Slant,” says the Urban Daily. “A Feminist Triumph!” trumpets Hypable. “A heroine who does not need saving any more than she needs/wants a man!” gushes Ms. Magazine. Indiewire went so far to say that Merida is Pixar’s first lesbian character, and Entertainment Weekly agreed that she was, at the very least, built to appeal to the gay market.

Hardcore feminists, though, are not so sure. Most of them like elements of the film, but don’t feel that the message goes far enough. Time Magazine published an editorial entitled “Why Pixar’s Brave Is a Failure of Female Empowerment.” Jezebel’s reviewer was equally disappointed, asking “maybe they just thought having a female lead was enough?” It’s not surprising that there’s so much confusion on this issue; the film itself is confused. A number of modern gender-equality clichés are trotted out in a world where they don’t even apply.

“A Scottish redhead fights the patriarchy!” Salon’s review cheered, but there is no sign of patriarchy in Brave. King Fergus is every bit as subjugated and submissive to his wife’s will as the castle servants. He doesn’t have a single speech, thought, or fight that isn’t prompted, interrupted, or finished by his wife. This isn’t as painfully obvious as it sounds, because in every case his wife is right, and he, like every man in this movie, is an idiotic, drunken, immature brawler.

There is no male domination in this movie, and no male conventions to break. The only thing that Merida is kicking against is Queen Elinor’s rules. Yes, there’s talk about ancient traditions, but when push comes to shove, it turns out that nobody believes the old legends but Elinor and Merida, and the clan leaders are only too happy to break traditions, as long as they can break some crockery while they’re at it.

The inciting incident happens when Merida is being forced into a marriage to prevent war. She bristles at this, partly because the three suitors are the most imbecilic characters in the film, but mostly because a girl kicking against forced marriage is cinematic shorthand for spirited, ahead-of-her-time girl power. The movie’s themes don’t have anything to do with marriage or betrothal, it was just a convenient thing for mother and daughter to fight over, and something that modern audiences would immediately be indignant about.

Kind of like the old corset lacing scene. If you want to show your main character as a spunky free-thinker being constricted by traditional values, just have her complain about how uncomfortable corsets are. This is a literary cliché that predates film, but Hollywood still uses it a lot, like in Mulan, Pirates of the Caribbean, Pocahontas 2, and the new Alice in Wonderland, just to name the recent Disney films. It’s worth noting that Brave takes place hundreds of years before corsets were invented, but Merida (and only Merida) gets squeezed into one just the same.

It’s also worth noting that, as threatened, the war does actually break out, in the very dining hall of the castle. Elinor is outraged, and she puts a stop to it by dragging her husband, and the other clan leaders, out of the fray by their ears. They get a sound scolding in front of their soldiers, and that’s that. The peace lasts until she leaves the room. Statecraft in this particular Scotland is even more like ordering four-year-olds around than modern international diplomacy.

Unlike the Vikings in Dragon these Scots aren’t fighting for survival or domination or justice or anything. They’re just a childish parcel o’ rogues who love quaffing and quarrelling for fun, and Queen Elinor doesn’t, not for moral reasons, but because it’s hard on the peace and its hard on the furniture. And she’s the boss, which means the movie is about feminism after all.

Elinor is a strong, intelligent, calm and unflappable queen, superior to all the men in her domain. She makes the rules, cracks down on displays of silly masculinity, and her word is law. Feminists like all of this. But then, Merida is a spunky tomboy who wants to follow her heart and be her own woman. She questions authority, eschews traditional femininity, and won’t bow to any rules. Feminists like all this, too.

It’s no wonder that these two characters end up fighting, or that feministic reviewers are fighting over this film. Nobody can agree on what this film means, because its main messages conflict with each other, and there is no over-arching theme to unify things.

Brave vs. Brave
There are two over-arching themes. No, I guess there are three. Ok, four. The film open with a voice over from Princess Merida talking about fate, explaining that “It’s the one thing we search for, or fight to change. Some never find it. But there are some who are led.” The little blue spirits do lead her to her destiny, but is fate predestination? If so, how can you fail to find it? Can you actually change it, or just fight vainly against it?

This is just mythic-sounding gobbledygook. It doesn’t actually set up the story or tell us the rules of this world. How to Train Your Dragon begins with the main character introducing the world in a dry, on-the-nose, even monotone voiceover. It’s not as solemn and vague as Brave’s, but when it ends, you know the names of all the characters, where they live, how the dragons work, and the main theme of the film.

Brave’s theme isn’t even about fate, at all, so making the introduction revolve around it is weak. Merida mentions fate once more, in Act II, when she asks for the witch to use magic to change her fate. Again, we don’t know if “fate” means circumstance, environment, other people, opportunity, destiny, or anything. It doesn’t come up again until the closing voice over: “Some say fate is beyond our command, but I know better. Our destiny is within us. You just have to be brave enough to see it.”

This last line is really, really important, because it’s the only connection that the film has to its title. The film isn’t about cowardice or courage, the moral tests aren’t about bravery, and the only verbal mentions of fear or fearlessness are in relation to the three stooge suitors. The Bear and the Bow is a much more apt title, so I think “Brave” was chosen to be subtly reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s Scottish Oscar-winning blockbuster smash.

So, if the theme isn’t in its title, and it isn’t in the introductory comments, is it the feminism angle? Well, not really. The film is certainly set in a feministic world, where men have ceded control to feminists, but the groundbreaking girl power theme is more present in the marketing than the movie itself. In every interview the creators are focused on this, even when they say they aren’t.

“Because she’s adventurous and athletic and outdoorsy, her gender is not the most important thing about her.” explained producer Katherine Sarafian, but cinema is filled with adventurous, athletic, outdoorsy characters. In order for Merida to be as gutsy and new a character as we’re told, she has to be a girl, and we have buy into the presupposition that girls have never been adventurous, athletic, outdoorsy characters.

We’ve been seeing adventurous female characters since the silent era, and the movie’s themes are equally long in the tooth. This is not a bad thing; there are as few good themes as there are good story elements – and one of the themes is very good. “A true queen will always sacrifice her desires for her people,” Elinor teaches her daughter. The other theme is not so good: “Always be true to yourself and follow your heart,” as taught by Merida. These themes do not go together. They are in total opposition to each other, like many of this film’s elements.

This is why the opinions on this film are so varied. Depending on your interpretation, this movie teaches almost anything. The genre is even variable, since the audience can decide whether they want to be moved by Elinor’s horror at becoming a bear or laugh as she struggles with the embarrassment of suddenly being huge, hairy, and slobbery. The movie plays alternate scenes for pathos and comedy, and it only says “this is good” or “this is bad” about a few, simple, safe things. Nobody is offended when you disapprove of forced marriage, but no comment is made on the witch.

And by not passing judgment on the events of the film, the directors missed out on a lot of opportunity. Opportunities for teaching good lessons and bad. Ideas of feminism, bravery, destiny, witchcraft, family relations could all have been either condemned or upheld by the film. Instead, the story just meanders, and the values system of the movie’s universe changes from scene to scene. Worse, the emotional power of the film is undercut when elements are contradictory.

Now, my readers who believe that films don’t communicate messages, or shouldn’t, might be thinking this is a good thing. What’s wrong with a non-judgmental film that lets the audience decide what lessons they want to leave with? It’s weak. From a story perspective, it’s weak. We never know who or what to root for, what the stakes are, or even what the rules are. Other Pixar films make clear moral judgments (even if it’s just on small things like taking care of your toys), so there’s no confusion, and we can be totally on board with the theme, and the characters, and the world.

I’m hoping that Pixar’s next film will be brave enough to have some consistent principles. It’s the only way for them to get good story back on track.

Check out my sisters’ review: “Can we have a braver princess, please?“.

In short, the story is pretty simple. The tomboyish daughter of a boorish king is constantly fighting with her prim and proper mother, ruling queen of the realm. As she kicks against this overbearing child-training from her admittedly loving parents, she destroys the trust that they have placed in her. Then she tries to solve this rift with a hastily-purchased witch’s spell, but this backfires when her mother is magicked into a bear. Her distraught father attempts to kill this bear, which he thinks killed his wife, and so mother and daughter flee into the woods. While hiding out together, they bond, and eventually everyone sees everyone else’s side, the spell is lifted, and everything goes back to normal.

Brave vs. How to Train Your Dragon
There are a lot of obvious similarities to the 2010 Dreamworks film How to Train Your Dragon, and if Brave hadn’t experienced so many delays during its seven(!) years of production development, they might even have gone head to head at the box office. It reminds me of the old days when Pixar and Dreamworks would compete with similarly themed films (Antz vs. Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo vs. Shark Tale, Monsters, Inc. vs. Monsters vs. Aliens, etc.), and the pop-culture, gag-based, teen-centered Dreamworks movies never could match the methodical, story-driven, family-centered craftsmanship of Pixar.

Things are different now, though. The Dreamworks Animation team have vastly improved their story departments and art direction, and while the tired Shrek and Madagascar franchises still rely on celebrity voices and raunchy jokes, How to Train Your Dragon featured an ex-Disney director (more on that later), great structure, good art, and lots of fun. Meanwhile, Pixar’s recent films have been slipping in many ways… so how do these two movies compare?

Dragon’s Scottish Vikings and Brave’s Scottish Scots share a lot of production design and musical inspiration and even a few voice actors. However, the Dreamworks characters are simpler, squarer, and have limited movement, not just individually, but collectively; all Dragon adults are wider than they are tall, and speak with heavy Scottish brogues, and differ only in their accessories. They are like Lego men. The kids are smaller, have whiny American teen voices, but also totally different face shapes, almost as if they are a different species. Since Dragon’s primary conflict becomes old vs. young, this distinction is subtle but powerful.

Brave’s Scots are all Scottish, with a huge variety of body types and face shapes, regardless of age. A lot more work has gone into making the different characters in the different clans distinctive, even if the story ends up not needing them all. Furthermore, the Pixar characters are very fluid and expressive. Stoic’s face is built to communicate stoicism and anger and determination, and it does these things well. Fergus’s face is built to communicate anything, and it is rigged for far greater subtly of motion and far more extreme emotion than any of the Dragon leads. At a glance, the simple shapes of the Dreamworks characters are more fun to look at, but over a ninety minute film, the Pixar characters are more engaging to watch.

The environments are also similar; big stretches of rugged north European wilderness, with dramatic snow-capped mountains, jagged cliffs, and dark forests. Dragon pushes this to the limit, with tiny Viking huts perched vertically on crazily tilted islands and natural rock arches rising out of a wild sea. Brave focuses on more realistic inland detail, with huge forests shrouded in mist and buried in moss and lichens (and a very cool new non-linear motion blur). Each film capitalizes on firelit halls of rustic hewn wood and heavily carved stone, but each has a different goal.

Dragon sets up these locations for sheer fun and adventure, and then takes the audiences on thrilling dragon rides through these sets at breakneck speeds. The sets are a backdrop for fiery aerial battles between Vikings and dragons, but the Brave locations surround the story and audience. They are more immersive and more evocative, but not as exciting. Princess Merida galloping up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen on her Clydesdale doesn’t have the same visual pizzaz of explosive dragon dogfights, but it does communicate more gravity.

In the same way, the Dragon score uses huge choirs and orchestral arrangements in addition to traditional Celtic instruments, and is not only more fun to listen to, but makes the movie feel bigger and more important than it really was. In Brave, Paddy Doyle’s Gaelic music is very accurate and very fitting (and very good), but slower and quieter, so it ends up feeling much smaller than the sound and mood that John Powell created for Dragon, and then is further undercut by some Disneyfied pop ballad montages that make the film seem much smaller and much less important.

Brave vs. Disney
So, is this Pixar’s first princess film, or Disney’s eleventh princess film? In my opinion, it’s just Disney’s thirteenth Pixar film, one of the last that began development before the Walt Disney corporation acquired Pixar in 2006. Since then, Pixar’s top men have been splitting their time between the two studios. Ed Catmull is now president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and John Lasseter is the CCO of both companies as well as Principal Creative Adviser at all the theme parks. Andrew Stanton, who served as the executive producer of Brave spent many of its development years directing the live-action Disney film John Carter of Mars.

Brave is the first of their films not to have any of the original Pixar alumni in a major creative leadership role, but it does have a lot of great Pixar artists involved, which is why some aspects of the film feel like pure Pixar, and others feel like generic modern Disney. Visually, it is stunning. The art direction is not only more internally consistent than Dragon, and more beautiful than Tangled, but it’s fresh and unique and interesting.

The story, on the other hand, is surprisingly old hat. Merida may be the first Disney heroine to be raised by two living parents, but her father is the same dopey dad we’ve seen in countless animated films. Her mom is a much more rounded character, but there’s still a lot of standard-issue evil-stepmother in her. Merida’s teen rebellion copies Little Mermaid, her outdoorsy nature-girl montages are cribbed from Pocahontas, her tomboyish hobbies echo Mulan, the inciting incident comes from Aladdin, and the twist is the plot of Brother Bear.

Director Mark Andrews tries to explain that this film is gutsy and groundbreaking: “We didn’t want to make a character that was questing for ‘happily ever after.’ That’s why at the beginning of the film we have all of those rules about ‘a princess is this and a princess is that’ and Merida breaks all of those rules. We’re saying to the audience, we’re breaking the rules. We are not Disney.”

Of course, there are only so many story elements that exist, so it’s inevitable that some comparisons to Beauty and the Beast or Tangled be made… but it feels like Pixar’s story department was trying harder to fit into the existing Disney® Princess™ Franchise© canon than create something new. It sure didn’t feel like they broke any rules. The only actually new thing about this princess is that she has no prince and no happy ending. Everything else has been done before.

Which is a real shame, since visually speaking, Merida does break the Disney princess mold, and her curly hair is a technical and artistic triumph for Pixar’s color and code artists, and she’s voiced by a real Scot instead of a valley girl starlet. In other ways though, she is shockingly unoriginal. Part of the problem is that she’s been pitched as a brand new feminist hero, Pixar’s first female lead, their first princess, something never before seen on screen, and above all, defined as brave. It’s a lot of hype to live up to.

For someone who is supposed to be a defined by fearlessly fighting against tradition, it’s awkward that she is the tired cliché in a fresh and interesting world. We’re supposed be believe that she’s being oppressed for cultivating masculine combat skills, but everyone in the kingdom is fine with this, except her mom. Audiences can’t possibly be surprised by such daring; the warrior princess has been the new norm for a while. Both of this year’s Snow White reboots and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland turned older Disney princesses into sword-swinging combatants like Mulan.

Unlike Merida, however, Mulan builds her actual fighting skills for the purpose of national defense .The stupidity of that movie’s plot and supporting characters aside, this is a practical, selfless thing. Merida shoots arrows, climbs rocks, and rides her horse purely for fun. She never demonstrates any useful application of these skills at all. She doesn’t hunt, gather food, or serve the needs of anyone (until she’s actually on the lam in the woods). These activities are just hobbies for her. Personal self-expression at best.

It’s no wonder that her mother thinks her time would be better spent preparing to be the ruling queen of the realm, and it’s really hard to disagree. Also, it is impossible for me to have any sympathy for a character who screams “It just isn’t fair” when presented with an opportunity to be a leader or save a kingdom. That’s not heroic or interesting.

But Merida is the main character, and rather than strengthen her integrity and arc to increase her importance, the writers have taken the easy way out and simply decreased the importance of the other characters and elements. She doesn’t even have a “save the cat” moment, but Merida becomes everything in this movie. She supplies all the conflict, the inciting incident, the B plot, the obstacles, and most of the resolution.

Because of this, we have secondary characters who contribute very little, and because of that we don’t know them very well. This means there are tons of unanswered question about this movie. Does the Dad want his daughter to get married or not? Who is the witch, and is she good or bad or crazy? What does Queen Elinor really want for the kingdom? It is very difficult to root for Merida’s specific tasks, because she dives into them before we (or she) can understand the consequences, and suddenly the rules change.

It is also hard to get behind her main goal, because we don’t know what she’s fighting against. Her desire line is so weak that we really need a clear antithesis to choose sides. It’s hard to wholeheartedly support someone who is fighting solely for herself. Sometimes, fighting for personal freedom is noble, but it has to be real freedom against real tyranny. There’s a lot of moral courage in saying “I will do what’s right, no matter what.” There isn’t any in saying “I will do whatever I want, no matter what.” When Merida stands up to her mother, she isn’t fighting for truth, or justice, or other people. She is fighting for her hobbies.

Brave vs. Pixar
There are still a lot of differences between this movie and a Disney movie. For example, Rapunzel’s dress was designed to be easily reproduced as a Halloween costume, and stays perfectly intact through the entire film; people in Brave have clothes that get torn and dirty, and they look like real silk and real wool. Tangled looks like a golden pink sugar high, where even the moonlight sparkles; Merida has to trudge through mist and gloom and thunderstorms, but there’s a lot more natural beauty on display.

In the same way that Ratatouille felt like a fairly generic follow-your-heart dish smothered in delicious Pixar sauce, this movie has some great Pixar trimmings on the stale premise. With every film, however, it seems like more Disney ingredients dilute the Pixar formula. For example, recent Disney films have all played with adult humor and worldliness that Pixar movies tend to avoid. In Tangled, the characters visit a leather bar and find that the hairy guys inside are all sensitive Broadway-singin’ pianists, interior decorators, and porcelain collectors.

It’s extremely disturbing how crude some of the jokes in Brave are, and even though none of the male Scots end up as lipstick-wearing mimes, there’s a level of coarseness and even nudity in this film that doesn’t line up with the tone of earlier films. Slashfilm published an interesting article called 15 Reasons ‘Brave’ Doesn’t Feel Like a Pixar Film, and they’re hard to argue with.

Some of Brave’s weaknesses, like Ratatouille’s, are probably caused by changing directors halfway through production. When John Lasseter fired Chris Sanders from American Dog, the project was completely rebuilt to become Bolt (and Sanders went on to direct How to Train Your Dragon). When Brenda Chapman was fired from Brave, Mark Andrews stepped in to finish it. There were significant changes, but it wasn’t rebuilt from scratch to accommodate the new direction.

This explains a number of setups that never pay off, and probably a number of payoffs that never get set up. For example, when Merida and her mother Elinor start their big shouting match in the beginning of Act 2, Elinor angrily throws Merida’s beloved bow into the fire. This bow is her most important possession, which she and her mother have already fought over in the film. Merida runs sobbing from the room, and Elinor, shocked, quickly pulls the bow out of the fire. Is it damaged? Is it ruined?

We spend a lot of time watching Elinor rescuing the bow and tearfully kneeling over it as she asks herself what she has done. It feels like a really important moment, and it would have been a great setup for Merida finding it later and beginning to change her attitude towards her mother, but no. This bow is never mentioned again. Merida has a bow later, and when she goes back to that room in Act 3 the bow is gone, but nothing is ever said about it. I guarantee that some point in Brave’s seven year history, this was addressed on someone’s storyboards, and it could have been a powerful scene.

But the deeper story issues can’t be blamed on a change of direction. They were obviously there from the start, and production clearly began before the script was really ready. To me, this feels like Pixar’s shortest and slowest film, and if you stack it up against their own 22 Rules of Storytelling, it doesn’t hold up well.

There are some neat story concepts that come up in references to the characters’ recent history; evil tyrants splitting the kingdom, invasions of Viking longboats and Roman legions, and epic battles that united the clans. Any of these events would have been a great addition to the plot, or even a superior replacement to the family feud between the brat and the bear, and it’s the first time that in the middle of a Pixar movie I found myself wishing the film had taken a different direction.

But in addition to the technical weaknesses in story, the there are some very strange inconstancies in the messages that the film teaches (and there a number of strange messages, as well). How does its worldview compare with recent Disney films, and what is Brave’s over-arching theme?

Check out Part II of this review here.

Unfortunately, all the films of the last century contain too much data to try to see at one time, but programmer Vijay Pandurangan has come up with the next best thing: a way to chart the dominant colors of movie posters. After downloading 35,000 posters and sorting them by year, he crunched to numbers to produce this image, which shows the color trends over time. The most obvious change we can see is an overall increase in blue over orange during the last 98 years of movie marketing, which vastly accelerates in the early 1980s.

Of course, there are a lot of factors outside of changing color theory that would affect this color shift. Newer printing technology has increased the color gamut over time, older posters are more likely to be faded or yellowed, skin tones tend to be much warmer when painted than when photographed, etc. Nevertheless, it’s pretty neat to see the ways things do change, and interesting outlier years, like 1920, 1977 and the extra-purple 1989.

In addition to how marketers thought about appealing color design, this chart probably also shows changing trends in genre. As we all know, animal-based documentaries and films always have blue covers, and certain other genres have staked out claims to specific palettes, so I’m hoping that Vijay will break his poster database into genre and rating categories as well. I’m sure that would reveal some interesting trends.

His current codebase lets you drill down the data in other ways, though. Each year has a page that shows the films that have been analyzed and a pie chart showing how predominant certain colors are. Here’s the full chart: