Ed's Newsletter - January 2009

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL . . . AHHHHHHH!
As I write this, Chicago is in the middle of an ice storm, so it is with particular nostalgia that I remember the WARM reception I received in Spain and Portugal last month <g>. Animated thanks to Jon Hodge and the super-talented folks at Grin Games in Barcelona for being such terrific hosts for me and Acting for Animators. Thanks also to Jose Fonseca, the faculty and students at Escola clas Artes Universidade Catolica in beautiful Porto, Portugal. I had a wonderful time and am looking forward to staying in touch!

ED HOOKS'S UPCOMING SCHEDULE
Jan 19-21, Montreal, Canada, National Animation and Design Centre
Feb 2-6, Teesside, England – Animex International Fest
May 5-8, Stuttgart, Germany – FMX International Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Digital Media
May 14-17, Kalamazoo, Michigan – Kalamazoo Animation Festival International  

The creation of empathy is a major challenge for first-person perspective games, be they shooter games or otherwise. The reason is that one cannot empathize with oneself. A necessary element of empathy is distance. If a player can control the behavior of an on-screen character, then he won’t be able to empathize with him. This is the reason we see so many “buddy” characters in games now. The buddy characters often have a mind of their own, and the player cannot completely control them, thereby allowing for empathy. This is also the reason why cut-scenes work like they do: The player stops playing and becomes an audience to on-screen action, permitting empathy. But cut-scenes have their own challenges, not least of which is that players find them increasingly annoying after the first game play.

The first feature length live-action movie to experiment with first-person subjective P.O.V. was “Lady in the Lake”, released by MGM in 1946. It is worth screening as an educational exercise even though the movie itself is an artistic failure. Robert Montgomery directed and starred in this flick, based on the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title. MGM promoted it as a “special event”, specifically because of the first-person perspective. "YOU accept an invitation to a blonde's apartment. YOU get socked in the jaw by a murder suspect!", exclaims the announcer in the movie trailer.

Here is what I took away from a screening:

1) Though advertised as “subjective” or first person perspective, it really is not. We still sit in the movie theatre and watch the action unfold on screen. And, while we do indeed see the action from the camera’s perspective, we have no control over it. Theoretically, therefore, we should be able to empathize with the main character. But the P.O.V. is so limiting and distracting that it calls attention to itself, killing any possibility of empathy.

2) The director did not trust the audience to “get it”. Therefore, he inserted several mirror-sequence scenes in which the narrator (Mr. Montgomery) can actually be seen. He also inserted a prologue in which he (Montgomery) sits at a desk and talks directly to the camera, explaining what is happening on screen.

3) Really, the movie shifts back and forth between first-person, second person and third-person perspectives. If you are a student of such things, watching this film is like studying an artifact discovered in a pyramid. It is something you have never seen before, and you wind up trying to get into the head of its creator to figure out what he was up to.

4) There is a scene in which the hot blond woman comes in for a kiss, planting her lips on the camera lens. It made me laugh, and I’m sure that was not the intent. Same thing happened when the camera took a punch in a fight. The screen faded to fuzzy black, indicating a loss of consciousness. I chuckled rather than gasped. <g>

All of the supporting actors speak directly into the camera lens, and you can tell they are uncomfortable doing it because nobody blinks. They also tend to stare continually into the lens. In life, a person who is talking to another looks into his or her face 40 percent of the time, casting his gaze away in conjunction with his thoughts and then looking back at the listener to see if the information has been grasped. The listener, in contrast, looks into the face of the person who is talking 80 percent of the time. (This is why talking to a blind person feels different from talking to a sighted person.) Robert Montgomery was quoted in the book, The Detective in Hollywood, "We had to do a lot of rehearsing. Actors are trained not to look at the camera. I had to overcome all that training. I had a basket installed under the camera and sat there so that, at least, the actors could respond to me, even if they couldn't look directly at me." That was the right idea, I suppose, but Montgomery had not taken human communication apart and studied it the way today’s animators are doing.

We have to applaud the creative effort behind “Lady in the Lake”, even as we diss the end result. MGM put its money where its mouth was and, in the process, made a movie that deserves study, particularly by game developers. Pop some corn and put your feet up. The movie is only 82 minutes long, and you can fit it into a workday. Available in Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 3, released by Warner Bros.

Until next month...be safe!