Recouperation Random-ness
So I’m still behind on my web development contract. The week and a half of sheer insanity followed by three straight days of grueling horror as we premiered Star Wars did not help matters any, and I’m presently trying to retain a grip on sanity, which means my ability to write code that does anything but print “AMC is a demon-spawn” is rather limited. I also, despite all indications otherwise after the premiere, still have a job at AMC, though I do need to cull my hours in order to catch up on web development. I say this because after the premiere (which did not go off without a hitch, despite our best efforts), the three of us who ran the midnight showing were fairly certain we’d get written up for the problems, even though we couldn’t have done anything more to prevent them. Had we been written up, the three of us would have walked, and by all reports, about 4 more people would have followed us off the job. (Un?)fortunately, this was not the case, and everyone is still gainfully employed, but still looking for a reason to leave.
I’m pondering the intelligence of my bank, as they reported that a check I deposited was in my account balance according to the online account access site when in fact $860 of the $960 was still lacking in a magical property known as “funds availablility”, which means my efforts to pay off the Cinema Display have resulted in my account going under the zero limit. Poopy. Fortunately, a recent re-check has indicated that I am no longer overdrawn and that the Apple payment went through without taking me below zero since my check deposit also apparently finished going through today. Yay. I’m thinking about driving to the Apple Store tomorrow after work and dragging a dual 2.3GHz G5 out the door with me, w00t.
I am apparently in a limbo state that RAWA and I have co-deemed “in the running” as far as my application at Cyan is concerned… they’re not quite actually really actively hiring at the moment, but apparently someone was impressed because they do actually send you an email if you suck and they want you to go away, and I’ve yet to get a “go away” email. Woohoo.
After watching the special edition DVDs of A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back (ah for the days when “Episode X” did not connotate instant recognition of what the smeg you were talking about), I have concluded that digital effects are a lot more expensive, in terms of man-hours, than traditional effects. The original New Hope and Empire credits have about a 30 to 40 person crew listed under optical effects, miniatures, and muppetry. The Special Edition add-on credits have a list of about 100 extra people on Lead TD (a term I still need to find the definition of and actually memorize this time) and Animation, plus rotoscoping and matchmoving. That’s a hell of a lot of people. I admit it was probably harder than it should have been since the original trilogy wasn’t shot with ILM’s target thingies all over the set for matchmoving purposes and whatnot, but still… 100 people doing the job that 30 people did fantastically well almost 30 years ago. Go figure.
I’ve been asked if I have any intentions of going into film given how much I tend to talk about it, but really, I talk about it because that’s what I deal with about 35 hours a week, and I see a lot of good and an extraordinary amount of bad movies roll through our doors at AMC Newport. When I talk about film, or storytelling, or digital effects, I’m largely basing my reactions and opinions on what I’ve seen and discussed at work and in school. I really have no burning desire to go into digital film effects at ILM, Weta, Cinesite, or Sony Pictures Imageworks. They do absolutely mind-blowing stuff (usually… I’ve seen bad [and I mean truly visually bad, not just a slip in a matchmove every few dozen scenes] from everybody but Weta, but I’ve only seen LotR from them), but they are largely involved in simply bringing an artistic vision to the screen as best as they can manage. It’s a fairly one-way pipeline in film, and I want to do something that has more two-way-ness in it, which is why I want to make video games. More than that, though, I want to tell stories. Not just telling stories to people, though, but with people. That’s the real fun, I think, which is why I’m eyeing Cyan rather seriously, becase I get the feeling, based on what Rand has said in interviews, that he wants to advance the role of storytelling and interaction in games. This intrigues me, and I’d like to be on-board while he does whatever he’s doing.
Tangentally, I’ve decided that the next time I play Myst, I need to make a mini-game out of it entitled “find the construction errors”, which basically involves pouring over each still and trying to see where things were built or textured badly. As a sort of component, the goal is to try and determine how each object was built just by analysing it visually in the final render. This was brought on by a recent test of my Cinema Display’s visual quality at very low resolutions (namely 640×480), wherein I noticed several oddities on Myst Island, such as the uber-reflective Planetarium rock texture (you can see the dock reflected off the side when you’re standing right beside it) and the mis-aligned Tree Elevator (the tree is three parts: a bottom, the elevator box, and the top [plus the leaf cone], and the elevator part doesn’t line up with the top and bottom). This is largely aimed at learning from other people’s mistakes, not pointing them out simply to make fun of them. The rest of it is just good-natured fun seeing how far CG has come since 1993 in terms of accuracy and what you can do with it if you do it properly. Myst is an inspiration to all us late-blooming “three guys and a garage an internet” CG artists who want to do something fun :).