If you haven’t read my article on Three-Act Structure yet, you should. This post will make more sense if you do, and so will the three books on screenwriting that I recommend.

I’m a big fan of Syd Field and his gamechanging book Screenplay, which was published in 1979. Prior to that, there wasn’t that much material on how to write movies, and what there was hadn’t been too specific on details. Field is the one who really nailed down the concept of plot points being part of a three act storyline.

Other authors quickly jumped on this concept of structured plot and pacing, but it also had plenty of detractors. Field’s paradigm has been rephrased and tweaked by every solid story specialist in Hollywood, but the best of them have stuck close to his formula. The most notable of these successors is probably Bob McKee, who after years of teaching screenwriting published the 1997 book Story.

Then, in 2005, the late, great Blake Snyder published his advice in the extremely practical Save The Cat. The book is subtitled “The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need,” and I think that’s actually a fair claim, especially if you’ve previously read anything by Syd Field or Bob McKee. Save the Cat fills in a lot of the blanks that those authors may have left, emphasizes their main points, and is a get-your-hands-dirty approach to the nitty gritty aspects of writing movies.

For example, Blake Snyder was the first writer I’ve come across who really described how to make the proper use of The Board, even though it’s a tool that virtually every screenwriter depends on. For example, here’s The Board for one of my projects:

It’s a giant piece of paper, divided into four horizontal sections. The top is Act I, the next two are the two halves of Act II, and the bottom is Act III. Written on the paper in the appropriate spots are the immovable Things That Must Happen* in any movie, and pinned in top are my story beats - all the main events, scenes, and ideas that tell the story.

It’s an easy matter to add, subtract, and rearrange these story points to get the beats of the story really hammered into shape, and it’s a great way to visualize where the story drags or is too rushed. This Board is in an early stage; it hasn’t been color-coded and there are no arcs on it, but soon a single glance will explain where specific events occur in space, in time, and in relation to all the other points in the film.

The only downside to this system is that it’s difficult to share with long-distance collaborators, and it’s not very portable. Of course, The Board can be altered and shrunk. I’ve seen rolled-up posters plastered with post-it notes, and folding whiteboards, and those are pretty good solutions, but I still tried my hand at making a digital one.

Oh sure, there are plenty of online corkboard programs, professional screenwriting packages like Final Draft offer some neat index card tools, and Blake Snyder’s site even offers a nifty iPhone app for creating beat sheets, but my option is very basic.

It’s just a simple Microsoft Word document, with four vertical pages representing the horizontal strips of The Board. I’ve also added the 40 beats that Snyder recommends writers limit themselves to, and I’ve labeled the immovably* required ones as per the suggestions of the three authors listed above. It’s cramped and not as tactile as a physical Board, but it has a few advantages.

Color-coding is faster, it’s easier to save revisions, you can track changes, and the entire board can be emailed back and forth easily. It’s also very portable; on a 15” or 17” widescreen laptop, all four pages are simultaneously viewable. Besides, once you have a bunch of beats written in Word, it’s easy to print them out, cut them up, and pin them to a real corkboard anyway. So what are you waiting for? Try it out!

 TheBoard.doc  

In addition to the first four pages, there are a few other things that you might find useful, like dialogue and cast lists. If anyone has any suggestions on improvements to the file, send them in. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to get Word to print the pages side by side on a single sheet automatically, but if you cut your regular 8.5×11 printer paper in half before printing, it works great.

*I’ve been referring to certain beats as immovable, but this isn’t strictly true. You can always slide them around a bit, but not that much, and the order really can’t change. The hero’s debate always follows the inciting incident, for example, and he can’t break into Act III until after his lowest point, etc.

Unfortunately, Cameron then populated these precisely replicated sets with 1990s characters speaking lines from his 1990s worldview. True stories of romance and heroism were ignored so that a fictional tale of forbidden love in a fabricated class war could be told. Needing more villains for his melodramatic conclusion, Cameron rewrote the historic words and actions of real White Star crew members seemingly at random, erasing or misrepresenting their legacies.

Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, Titanic went on become a global phenomenon, which teenage girls would buy tickets to see again and again. The tremendous scale of Cameron’s artistic vision overshadowed his flat characters and cheesy dialog to create an overwhelming spectacle. These same strengths and weaknesses are also apparent in Avatar, but with more of a videogame feel.

Fortunately, the futuristic storyline doesn’t tarnish any historic events, but it still has a kind of ham-handed revisionist feel to it. Apparently, in the year 2154, intergalactic space marines will still remind each other that they “aren’t in Kansas anymore.” More anachronistically, their caricatured commanders will quote George W. Bush in strategic briefings, refer to any conflict as being a war on terror, and attempt to “shock and awe” any insurgents they run across.

Yes, James Cameron has many political axes to grind in this very beautiful film, and no matter how awe-inspiring the scenery and action gets, there’s always an obtrusively highlighted moralistic footnote to distract the viewer. That said, the visuals are undeniably amazing. From the opening scenes on board spaceship to when the crippled marine named Jake first takes control of his genetically engineered avatar body, the sets and gadgets are incredible.

And once Jake actually leaves civilization for the glowing, fog-shrouded rainforest of Pandora, things get even more eye-popping. Six-legged monster jaguars prowl through bioluminescent foliage and scare up orange helicopter lizards, while blue-crested pterodactyls weave over and under floating mountains dotted with inexplicable waterfalls. Jake experiences all of this by Tarzaning around in the hyper-athletic body of a twelve-foot-tall blue alien, and as soon as he abandons his pasty-white paralyzed human husk for such physical perfection, it’s clear that he’s never going back.

A lot of people have pointed out that Avatar is the same storyline as Dances with Wolves (including the director), but it also borrows heavily from FernGully, Dinotopia, and Pocahontas. Not the actual true story of Pocahontas, of course, but Disney’s animated New Age eco-romance. This post-modern version of a gone-native John Smith and the wise warrior woman who guides him in primitive tribalism seems to be Cameron’s main source for Avatar.

In fact, the similarities are painfully obvious: Our expressionless hero tags along on an expedition that leaves him lost in the incredible jungle and found by the chief’s daughter. Taken back to camp, her father, played by Cherokee actor Wes Studi (Pocahontas’s uncle in the live-action Terrence Malick revision of the story), condemns him to death, and just as the peaceful and tolerant forest folk are about to gut him like a fish for being a slimy paleface, our extra-terrestrial Pocahontas steps in.

It seems that the wise tree-based spirit of their ancestors has spoken, and this outlander should be made part of the tribe. The chief’s daughter then is chosen to lead the hero on his path to manhood (strangely enough), the penultimate step of which is to hunt and kill an emu-headed buffalo. As it lies dying she directs him in the traditional American Indian thanks-for-giving-me-your-life-energy prayer, but then they don’t actually seem to use any parts of the buffalo. After all, these double-fanged alien hunters are so in touch with nature that they must be vegetarian.

Cameron is very inconsistent with his portrayal of the Nav’i people. They are bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, and way more beautiful than any human being – but they freeze like panicked spider monkeys when in the path of, say, a falling tree. They enjoy an idyllic tribal culture led by female shamans in completely peaceful coexistence with all creatures, but they are also presented as a fearless warrior people who end up needing a human marine to lead them in a fight.

And fight they must, because evil corporations and military contractors are hell-bent on strip-mining Pandora, especially if it means a chance to violently displace some naked native peoples! Fortunately, Jake has a few allies among the despicable humans – some plucky ethnic minorities are willing to betray their whiter buddies, and the enlightened scientists of the expedition are eager to adopt the planet-worshiping spirituality of the noble blueskins.

This is one of the only films I’ve seen where science and religion are supposed to be on the same side, and James Cameron takes considerable pains to explain how all living things on Pandora are psychically connected by The Force™, creating a singular planet-wide intelligence that the matriarchal Nav’i priestesses call the “All-Mother.” This touchy-feely goddess is never actually a source of moral right or transcendent law, but since every tree is part of her ethereal being, obviously no deforestation can go unpunished.

And so, with the tribe’s poisoned arrows bouncing harmlessly off of the windshields of advancing death machines, Jake kneels in desperation before the holiest altar tree and begs for help in the impending battle. First his new girlfriend scolds him for asking Gaia to take sides, and then, pointless relativism once again established for the audience, they saddle up to lead a suicidal Last Samurai-style cavalry charge, pitting mounted pterodactyls against 22nd-century choppers in a gargantuan action sequence that is Apocalypse Now meets Return of the Jedi.

Of course, the living planet does hear Jake’s prayers and it sends wave after wave of forest critters to overwhelm humanity’s footsoldiers and clog the jet intakes of capitalism’s air force. Inexplicably, the wooden arrows suddenly begin to puncture the mercenary armor, but the tribe’s new chief still abandons his native weapons for an M-60 and grenades to more effectively slaughter his former compatriots and fellow men.

The film ends happily, with humankind limping back to a dying Earth, and the tree goddess permanently implanting Jake’s psyche into his avatar so that he will never again have to be a treacherous white man. James Horner’s least-inspired ethnic soundtrack transitions into a pop ballad as the credits roll, and the audience is left to consider all the lessons that they have been smugly beaten over the head with for two and a half hours. I had other questions.

If the humans have the technology to grow functional alien clones in vats and then project their consciences into these synthetic bodies from unlimited distances, why do they still strip-mine planets with giant yellow Tonka-truck bulldozers? And if the alien clans are so advanced that they can mentally connect with all living organisms on the planet and even the old tribal leaders have picked up fluent English, why do they still vainly shoot feathered arrows at those yellow bulldozers? And where do you even get feathers on a birdless planet?

The entire film is a no-holds-barred series of sermons on James Cameron’s favorite issues rather than a carefully considered story, and no expense was spared in the production of an entirely new world unintelligently-designed to fit a very old worldview. The marketing of the film has likewise pulled out all the stops. Giant print, radio, and television ad campaigns have been bolstered by appearances by the cast and crew at major comic and sci-fi conventions, exclusive trailer showings at sports events, and even extensive plot tie-ins on prime time network tv shows.

Reviews of the films are largely positive, but even the writers most impressed with the 3D effects of the film generally point out the very two-dimensional characters and storyline. Other reviewers have complained that for all the film’s apparent multiculturalism, it’s still the white guy that saves the ignorant savages. Many internet commentators have suggested that anyone who hasn’t seen film in 3D isn’t allowed to complain about it, since it’s about spectacle and eye-candy.

To some extent, I agree. The film’s only redeeming aspects are in the art and sound design, and the 2D version of the film is in many ways very different from the 3D experience. For starters, the movie was designed for 3D. All the shot composition has been worked out to take advantage of z-space. When I watched the climax in 2D, I actually found it very difficult to keep track of where everything was spatially organized.

When the viewer can see depth, it’s very easy to figure exact distances between the antagonist, hero, and objective as they drive each other back and forth. In two-dimensions, there aren’t enough establishing shots to maintain a clear picture of that. Furthermore, the scale of different objects and characters could have been more dramatically emphasized if the storyboards were drawn with 2D in mind. Without clear action lines and points of focus in 2D, shots lacked impact.

Also, the graphics seemed far less revolutionary on a flat screen. In 3D space, all the CGI elements had quantifiable depth, solidity, and mass. It was hard to pick out lighting inconsistencies, poor shaders, or texturing flaws when my brain was presented with fully 3D objects interacting in 3D space. Presented with only one perspective, I was less overwhelmed with the rendering. It was still immensely impressive work from all the studios involved, but without the extra dimension dazzling me, I did notice shading errors, distracting reflections, matte lines, and flesh and skin that just wasn’t quite convincing.

I don’t really see the film as breaking any new ground. In fact, the structure of the script, character arcs, and dialog are a major step backwards for James Cameron, even taking Titanic into consideration. The protagonist drifts, waffles, and is tossed back and forth by the plot, initiating nothing. The antagonist is confident, honorable, and consistently makes things happen. Everyone else is a stereotype, looking for a personality and telling the audience point-blank what to feel. There is a lot of technical excellence in this film, but the advances are minor or inevitable improvements to existing techniques.

With Avatar’s budget, Cameron has dwarfed the cost of Titanic, and with a new line of toys, games, and books for all ages, has an reasonable chance of attaining similar returns. It seems that Cameron’s sanctimonious hatred of corporate development and capitalism is as inconsistently applied as the existential pantheism of Pandora. This film cannot be recommended for humans.

A common idea in modern journalism is that for a documentary to be “fair,” its creator must have no biases about the subject in question. Even if this were remotely possible from an ideological standpoint, the filmmaker would still have to know nothing and care nothing about the subject or message of his film until its completion. It is a ridiculous concept.

As many readers know, the Botkin family is extremely pro-home-education, and has been since the early ‘80s, and so when we began work on Homeschool Dropouts in August, we were already familiar with the history and current state of home-education movement.

Pre-Production
We had already discussed many of the issues that we wanted to focus on in the film with several homeschool graduates and homeschool leaders, so choosing our interviews was very straightforward. Since we were also familiar with the positions that our interviewees would be representing, we had a pretty clear outline for the script before we began shooting.

Act one makes the case that a problem exists within the home education community - the second generation is not fully supporting their parents’ vision - and provides historical context for this development. The second act describes this problem and its causes in more depth, and the third act explains how and why the problem must be solved. Simple, obvious, and hopefully a clear and concise way to present the material.

After shooting all of our interviews, we transcribed the strongest segments (Adobe Premiere CS4’s new auto transcription feature almost worked, but not quite), and began to organize the clips. Despite already having a clear direction for the film, the material we got from the interviews suggested and provided many new points, and so the script was reordered and adjusted.

Documentary filmmaking blurs the lines between production and pre-production, since lots of the rewriting can occur during and after most of the shooting. Once we had selected the best material from the almost seven hours of interview footage, we began writing interstitial segments to tie everything together, and filmed all the Botkin children delivering his or her lines. In future, we may try to have fewer hosts.

Post-Production
Since the film was basically edited at the script level, it was a simple matter to just drop the appropriately trimmed files into the Premiere timeline. The only complicating factor was maintaining sync between the A and B cameras and the externally recorded audio of the interviews. The standups, shot on a single camera with onboard audio, was easier to manage.

A lot of our outdoor shoots had background noise that we needed to remove. Rather than clean and tweak the finished audio of the final edit, we decided to process all the audio we had captured. This way, we would be editing with the final audio, and when we locked the edit, the bulk of our audio mastering would already be done.

I set up a number of scripts in Adobe Audition and we basically batch-processed everything overnight – noise reduction, normalizing, multi-band compression, and a little EQ, all customized for each setup, but not each individual file. At the beginning of a project, there’s much more time for rendering things than at the end, so even though I ended up processing several hours of audio instead of 50 minutes, it was a more efficient workflow.

We did the same with color correction. Since nearly all of the footage was beautiful right off of the camera, we went for a very minor grade, with very few adjustments which rendered quickly. I decided to render corrections to all the footage, rather than just the selected files. This meant that any last minute adjustments to the edit wouldn’t require additional grading and rendering.

That bought me time to work on the cover design and DVD menus right up until the deadline even as we continued to polish the edit. This was our first project to use Adobe CS4, and we used all the pieces; Premiere for the edit, After Effects for the graphics and color correction, Photoshop for the cover art, and Encore to build the DVD.

Even though Cineform’s real-time engine wasn’t functional in CS4 yet, the codec is so efficient that we got real-time performance anyway. Since we had color corrected anything that needed it in advance, we never needed to render anything in the timeline until final output. Also, Premiere CS4 was rock solid stable no matter how many clips were in the bin or how many sequences were in the project.

I’m already looking forward to our next project. The quality of the 5D’s image, the speed of tapeless workflow, and the stability of the whole Adobe package made this a very fast film to complete, with just over two months from shooting the first interview to mailing off the master. It never felt like we had to fight to make things work in a technical sense (although the script was a different story).

The only things that could have drastically improved the process would be the Cineform real-time engine, which comes out November 6th, and more accurate voice recognition in CS4, which is being upgraded. It really is an excellent production package for documentary filmmaking.

Above is the final image as it was rendered from After Effects. Firstly, we have repaired the exposure. This was a very early shoot, before we started using the Magic Lantern firmware, and without its live histograms and zebra bars, getting the right exposure was tricky. Even though the camera only saves an 8-bit image, there is lots of room for correction, and since it comes from a 14-bit sensor, there is a surprising amount of latitude recorded.

Next, I adjusted the color. The green cast on the top of the wall is actually sunlight bouncing off the lawn in front of the porch. Since I had over-exposed a lot, and eyeballed the white balance badly, slight color changes like that were amplified, but it’s a great testament to the color sensitivity of the camera that it picked that up so vividly.

This shot also required a little bit of denoising. Even though we were using a low ISO setting, I had enabled Highlight Tone Priority on the camera. There’s some dispute as to how useful this setting is for video, and while it does provide more latitude in the highlights, it also adds some strange shadow noise. I used it on several early shoots, but I’m a little more leery of it now. I would use it with caution.

There’s also some subtle moiré pattern on Mr. Swanson’s sleeve. This is the Achilles heel of all of Canon’s video-enabled dSLRs, and it can be tricky to spot on the viewfinder. It’s also not especially predictable; note how it appears on the invisible pattern of the oxford cloth shirt, but not at all on the very pronounced weave of my jacket.

This cannot be fixed in post, but slightly adjusting the camera’s position, zoom, and/or focus will often make obvious aliasing and moiré artifacts vanish. I overlooked this issue, like all the others in the shot, because the camera was new, the shoot was hasty, and I was on the wrong side of the lens. Still, no excuse.

But enough dwelling on the worst shot; have a look at some of the better footage that we got:

All the outdoor shots were natural light with a single reflector, and the indoor shots were using available lights in the various homes rather than a professional light kit. Outdoor shots generally used Canon’s EF 28-135mm zoom lens, and most interviews used EF 50mm 1.8 primes.

Minor grading was applied to each shot, but it was extremely limited since the raw footage was so good. Some interviews got a subtle vignette, and there was a bit of levels work here and there, but most of these shots are pretty natural. I’ve downsized all the 1080p screenshots to 720 for bandwidth reasons, but it’s still big enough to see noise, any artifacts and also the sharpness that the camera is capable of.

Update:
I forgot to mention audio, or how we actually got footage from the camera into the edit. This is an important part of posting, so here’s our process:

The Canon 5DmkII records to MPEG4 files at about 48mb/s. For reference, HDV is MPEG2 at 25mb/s. MPEG4 is a far more efficient codec, so I figure that there’s actually more than twice the image data contained in twice the bitrate, but it’s not a good editing codec, so we converted everything to Cineform as we pulled it onto the computer.

The 5D also shoots 30 frames per second, which is a problem since NTSC video actually runs at 29.97 frames per second. Fortunately, Cineform automatically fixes this, conforming to the proper framerate and stretching the audio that extra 0.03 fps during conversion. We never had any sync issues once we realized we also had to stretch our external audio as well.

The interviews were recorded with a Sennheiser 100 G2 wireless mic running into a Zoom H2 audio recorder. All of the Botkin standups were recorded with that same mic running directly into the camera. Being primarily a stills camera, the 5D has crummy audio preamps, and they are by default set way too high and on automatic gain.

Using Magic Lantern, we were able to manually set the analog and digital gain at the appropriate levels, 0db and 6db respectively. With the Sennheiser receiver cranked all the way up to -6db, the audio signal was hot enough to need no real in-camera amplification, and so we got a very clean signal.

5DmkII – released November 2008
The pioneer. Its full frame sensor provides excellent low light performance and tremendous color reproduction, and a high bitrate MPEG-4 codec preserves a lot of image detail. However, a single processor doesn’t allow full HD out and full HD recording at the same time, making monitoring the camera difficult, and the camera is limited to 30 frames per second only. However, that will change with a firmware release expected early next year which will offer 24p and 25p, and the third-party firmware Magic Lantern enables live histograms, zebras, manual audio control with VU meters, and more.

7DmkI – released September 2009
Shoots 24p, 25p, 30p, and introduces a second processor for shooting additional framerates like 50p and 60p (when in 720p mode). With double the CPU power, it also has better monitoring options, allowing full HD output during recording, but auto-only audio is still a limiting factor. It has a new APS-C sensor which, being quite a bit smaller, has a little less sensitivity than the 5D, but allows the use of cheaper EF-S lenses (and much more expensive S35 cinema lenses). And it’s almost $1000 less than a 5D.

1DmkIV – announced October 2009
Same added processing power and framerate options of the 7D, and probably no real improvements in audio and monitoring, but it does have a brand new APS-H sensor which can see in the dark (not in low light – in the dark), and vastly reduced rolling shutter artifacts. Of course, it will be expensive. And it’s not out yet. But… it can see in the dark and there’s no jello-cam!

A couple of months ago, I bought a 5D, and I love it. It has many technical limitations, but the image quality is so good that I really don’t mind working around them. Immediately after unboxing the camera, we shot a 54-minute documentary with natural light in the space of three weeks, and I never felt tempted to reach for my XL H1.

Of course, there are also a few image limitations, but they tend to be the inevitable result of putting a video camera into a still camera body, like a lack of basic live autofocus. The aliasing and moiré patterns that can result from every-other-pixel capture exist on all three cameras, and can require a little focus adjustment to avoid. Also, the electronic iris control on certain Canon lenses can flicker when zooming.

Nevertheless, Canon’s firmware and Magic Lantern have made it a very usable filmmaking tool, especially for the price. I think that the 7D probably offers the most bang for the buck, but some documentary filmmakers could certainly use the improved low-light performance of a 1D, once it arrives.

Because I do very little still photography, the full-frame sensor of the 5D is really overkill for me, as are most EF lenses. In many ways, I would really prefer a 7D with a wider (and cheaper) selection of image-stabilized EF-S lenses, but I have to admit that the look of the 5D’s giant sensor is really hard to beat.

Of course, there were many other great talks and papers presented over the week. Some of my favorites were the Pixar team explaining new feather and fur techniques for Up, more Bolt discussion on procedural animation and real-time collisions for the hamster ball, and Digital Domain’s breakdowns of shots from Benjamin Button. The paper that I found most interesting was submitted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and deals with a new approach to video stabilization.

However, I spent most of my time in the Exhibition hall. SIGGRAPH 2009 was a much smaller affair than usual, with somewhere between 16,000 and 18,000 attendees total, and there were far fewer exhibitors as well. For example, Disney, Newtek, Adobe, Weta and many others chose to represent themselves without booths. Apparently this is partly a result of the current economy, and partly a natural occurrence whenever SIGGRAPH is held anywhere but L.A. (where last year’s attendance was 28,000).

There were still a lot of great vendors, though. The busiest booth was probably Pixar’s, which was a full-sized version of the Up house, complete with Carl & Ellie mailbox and picket fence. They hosted many Renderman-based talks there, and made many new Renderman-based announcements, including a never-before-seen educational pricing scheme.

There were a number of new product announcements, such as Spheron’s new digital cinema camera. Spheron is best known for their 360° HDRI cameras which are usually used for shooting spherical light probe images, but their functional HDRV prototype shoots either 32 or 48-bit images off of a 35mm non-CMOS sensor at up to 30fps. Not much else is known at this point, since only the camera (with PL mounted Arri prime) was on display; its tethered control panel was not. Until we learn more, there’s not much else to say, but recording 20 stops of latitude in a single file is pretty amazing.

That was the only video camera. Video displays, however, were everywhere. There were more HD screens and projectors at this event than I’d seen in my entire life up until this point. The video wall above is showing 1,250 individual video files, all of which are streaming from a single solid-state hard drive made by Fusion-IO. It can handle an incredible amount of bandwidth. Spheron camera techs take note.

Other video walls demonstrated everything from GPU acceleration to data presentation. I got play with Google Earth at about 6k resolution, and mess around with Maya at 4k in full 3D. Stereographic displays were everywhere, with at least one in every other booth. In my opinion, the best was made by Planar3D. All it requires is two off-the-shelf screens and a one-way mirror, and it offers flicker-free 3D viewing for as many people as are wearing inexpensive polarized lenses.

Other options on display were lenticular screens, which showed a glasses-free image with limited depth and limited viewing angles, and a lot of 120hz LCD screens that had great 3D when paired with nVidia’s shutter glasses, which require recharging and a sync signal and cost $150 per pair.

The Hungary-developed Leonardo 3D modeling platform used shutter glasses combined with a motion-tracked stylus called a “Bird” to manipulate and sculpt objects in 3D space. It was really amazing to use. Within about 4 minutes, far less time than it took me to figure out ZBrush, I had a very recognizable hippopotamus head built from scratch.

To be honest, I have no idea how Leonardo would really work within any existing production pipeline since it only handles polygons, and it constantly re-tessellates the mesh as the object is altered… but it was just ridiculously fun to use. It was such a neat experience that I was actually grabbing passing strangers and insisting that they try sculpting with the Bird so that I could watch their faces as they picked it up. This video doesn’t do it justice, but it’s as close to communicating the experience as is possible. It shows almost exactly what the sculptor sees.

Interestingly, the Bird doesn’t use gyros or accelerometers or ultrasound to compute its position and rotation. The three sensors you see on top of the computer monitor are little IR cameras, and they track the white dots on the spines of the Bird in real time. They also track the location of the shutter glasses so you can peer around the object simply by moving your head.

There were a number of vendors with motion capture solutions on sale, and those using camera-based optical tracking have become far more affordable recently. High-speed cameras and LED illuminators have dropped in price, and even laptop computers now have the processing power to interpret spatial data from multiple cameras.

A really interesting booth was being run by Motion4U, who have a product that uses monitor-mounted cameras like Leonardo’s to put a miniature motion capture stage onto an animator’s desktop. The animator can then use handheld markers to puppeteer objects and characters around in real-time without the hassle and expense of a full-sized mo-cap stage and suited performers. It works with Maya now and will be supporting Lightwave soon.

Another technology that has come down in price lately is stereolithography. There were a number of 3D printers being demonstrated, and for a mere $15k I could have taken one of Dimension’s finest home with me to build any 3D model out of solid ABS plastic. All of the different developers had different approaches and materials, like ObJet, whose machines can actually mix different compounds in the nozzle, so hard plastics and soft rubbers can be combined in a single model.

Unfortunately, I’d don’t think I do quite enough fabrication to justify buying my own machine, so any 3D printing that I do need done I’ll probably send to Shapeways.com, who were demonstrating some of their new materials, like stainless steel. That’s right, you can have objects printed in plastics, nylon, and polished steel. I’m tempted to build a follow focus system for the 5DmkII with them. It would probably be cheaper than most existing products.

So, all in all, it was a fascinating week. Even though attendance was lower than an L.A. conference, and there were a number of companies that I thought were under-represented, there was still a lot to see and do. In some ways, it was easier to find people and I think that organizers and staff had more time to talk to me than if they’d had an additional 10,000 people there.

And most of the regulars that I talked to mentioned that they felt things were a little slow that year, both at the conference and in the industry. Obviously economic concerns played a lot into that, but almost everyone suggested that the Autodesk Monopoly was also to blame for a lack of competitive spirit. Even though this was my first SIGGRAPH, I definitely noticed a sense of borderline apathy everywhere.

Everywhere but the job fair, that is. Recruiters and studio booths were swamped by attendees, mostly recent graduates, who were desperate for employment. I actually got a few job offers myself, which surprised me because I was just walking by. Even though I have no formal education, a number of recruiters were very curious about my experience. I guess it doesn’t surprise me that experience trumps credentials, but I wasn’t there looking for work.

They main reasons I attended was to get a better feel for the state of the industry, to get caught up with tools and techniques that I really haven’t had time to study, and to bounce some ideas off of different people. To that extent, SIGGRAPH 2009 was a huge success.

As many people know, Spielberg is probably my favorite film director. Not all of his films are favorites, but he is extremely talented at managing the three main responsibilities of the director: directing the camera, directing the actors, and directing the screenwriter (although this is an area where he is weakening). Yesterday Stu Maschwitz posted a video that goes a long way towards explaining why.

This clip was shot by the American Film Institute in 1978, and it’s a principle that I strongly believe in. Obviously, good directors don’t have to be former animators, but animation is an excellent training ground because it requires considerable planning, and so it forces animators, and directors, to decide what they want before they start production. This approach will always give better results than the make-it-up-as-you-go style of improvised filmmaking used by directors with no pre-conceived vision. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Also, here’s a clip where Spielberg explains why he always draws his own storyboards. Even with a budget large enough to support staff artists, he does the initial sketches himself. This is another important principle, since the storyboard artist is the guy who directs the camera. If the director renounces this responsibility, he is no longer the director of the camera, and he probably didn’t know what he wanted in the first place.

Dual-eye renders are easy to produce from just about every animation program, but it’s tricky to tweak those images in compositing apps without destroying the illusion. See the flickery 2D-created shadows? This is why stereoscopic tools like Ocula have been created for high-end compositing apps like Nuke.

But the interesting part of that clip really isn’t that it just looks 3D. The interesting part is that it looks like a painting. This is a very simple rendering technique that I’ve been developing for a while in Lightwave. It’s not particularly new in theory, but I’ve spent some time extending it and documenting it, and now managed to get something that offers both flexibility and control.

I’ve always been eager to learn about various non-photorealistic rendering solutions, and wondered if other people might be interested in mine, so I prepared some notes and examples, and sent it off to SIGGRAPH.

To make a long story short, on the 5th of August, I will be presenting my material at the Painterly Lighting session, which should be great, because it also features talks from Adolph Lusinsky, lighting director for Bolt, Ivan Neulander of Rhythm & Hues, and Jonathan Stone of Double Fine Productions. If any of my readers will be there, I’d love to catch up afterwards.

You can read more about how this technique works and see more examples in the abstract, which I’ve posted here.

The Story of Up
Story is king. Pixar’s writers and directors are known as being masters of the story development process, and in addition to exhibiting a technical superiority in the areas of structure and plot, they are growing increasingly adept at bringing powerful themes of character to life.

The Music of Up
A powerful storytelling tool is the musical score that accompanies every film. Some directors and composers don’t use this tool to its full extent, but Pete Docter and Michael Giacchino have done a tremendous job at uniting script and score to emphasize the emotional turning points of the film.

The Art of Up
But film is also a visual medium, and animated films offer a tremendous opportunity for artists to control every aspect of the image that the audience sees. From character design to color and composition, each shot demonstrates excellence in creative discipline.

The Technology of Up
Of course, a computer animated film also leans heavily on the rendering advances that allow for a hairy dog, a squashy scout with an overloaded pack, and a cubical man in perfectly simulated jacket and slacks to go venturing through a beautifully lit jungle. Also, this is Pixar’s first film to be released in stereoscopic 3D, which is no mean feat in itself.

Most Pixar films have had one area of groundbreaking technical achievement. Monsters Inc had a lot of new hair and fur simulations. Finding Nemo debuted a lot of new fluid dynamics. With Cars it was volumetric dust, and Wall-E made some serious advances in emulating light in physical camera lenses.

I wan’t sure what Up would bring to the table, since it used tech from all the previous films. The balloons cluster needed some seriously impressive collision detection, of course. Now the ballons themselves are basically simple spheres, so that’s easy math, but remember that each balloon is on a string. That’s where the hard math comes in.

In many ways, Up’s tech is just the latest generation of previous innovations. For example, a lot of the character and cloth work from Ratatouille has been improved for this film, as has the subsurface scattering from The Incredibles. And of course, the volumetric renderer has been beefed up for some seriously impressive clouds and atmospheres.

However, as far as pioneering goes, this is Pixar’s first stereoscopic film. There’s a lot of extra work to do for films that will be shown in 3D, but the extra dimension adds some new storytelling tools. The directors have complete control over how wide the depth of a shot really is, as well as whether objects push out of the plane of the screen or recede behind it, and how far.

For Up, this control is used subtly and well. For example, the altitude of the floating house is very apparent. The scene with Russell on the porch high above the ground had a much better sense of jeopardy and vertigo to it than when I’d seen it in the 2D trailer. Large objects like Muntz’s zeppelin seem more imposing because they can be huge on the screen and obviously far away at the same time, giving the audience a real understanding of their true scale.

More importantly, though, the film develops a cinematic language for 3D early on, and the audience picks up on this. The emotional moments are fairly shallow in their stereography; taking place in small spaces. This forces viewers to focus on the dialog there, and it makes the visual depth of the sweeping vistas in other scenes more breathtaking by comparison.

Unfortunately, the technology behind 3D films isn’t perfect. The circular polarization of the new Real D glasses easily beats the linear polarization and anaglyphic lenses of yesterday, and the 144hz refresh rate of the projectors beats trying to keep two reels synced, but there are still limitations.

For starters, the image was very dim through the glasses. 3D projectors need to throw more light at the screen since the polarized lenses block so much of it. During several scenes I had to take the glasses off just to get a better idea of what colors and tones the lighting technicians were using. And of course, fast horizontal motion will cause some ghosting in the image. Besides, to some extent, modern cinematic editing techniques need to be tweaked just to be watchable in 3D.

For example, high-energy films will often cut quickly back and forth between medium, wide, and extreme close-ups of action. Editing in 3D, the director now has a choice; he can jump the action closer to the audience when the camera cuts closer, which makes sense in physical space but forces the audience to constantly “refocus” as their focal point leaps back and forth in 3D space – or he can keep the action the same relative distance from the screen regardless of what the camera does, which looks strange but is less jarring to the viewer.

So, 3D films need to take these issues into consideration, and Up does a great job of that. Every shot is long enough for audiences to take in all the spatial data, and the cross-cutting nearly always happens along similar planes so the images don’t appear to leap forwards and backwards from the screen. Even the exciting chase scenes feature long, swooping camera moves that show off the 3D effect without fast cuts or the main action jerking around in frame.

In the past, the 3D element of 3D films was always a gimmick. It was really too crude to enhance the story , but now it’s coming into its own. Directors are learning how to use it, rather than work around it. Studios love it because it’s a powerful anti-piracy measure; as long as you can’t watch 3D movies at home you must go to the theater. Even audiences seem to like 3D movies, but that may not last, since they are really no longer a novelty.

As of this writing, I think all upcoming CG animated movies are being released in 3D. All the trailers before Up were shown in 3D, and they were almost all awful. Ice Age 3 fared the best because its teaser was basically a continuous short, but the others all pushed 3D further than they should have; extremely short shots, attempts to push the depth farther than it could be maintained, and too much fast motion. Also, since most trailers recut movie scenes, there was no spatial coherence between shots, which made the recutting more obvious.

The 3D effect was far more satisfying when used by the Pixar team in small ways. For example, there’s a scene where Carl and Russell chat by a campfire. The camera is static, and the shots are long, but just seeing the stars in the deep background and the house slowly rotating in the wind gave the scene tremendous visual appeal. Also, the “chunkified” stopmotion-style props and sets were well suited to stereoscopic display; many establishing shots felt just like my old Disney View-Master discs.

In fact, it was so visually interesting that over the last few days I’ve done some of my own 3D tests in Lightwave. Keep an eye out for those next month. In the meantime, remember that in the same way that Pixar’s films are usually the best examples of the art serving the story, they also demonstrate how technology can serve the story as well. By doing so, the art and technology are far more interesting than they would be on their own.

All images copyright Disney/Pixar. This is the third in a series of articles which include the Story of Up and the Art of Up.