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Ed's
Newsletter - September 2004
ANIMATED THANKS
TO SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT OF AMERICA! Jason
Parks organized a terrific workshop on Sony's San Diego campus.
Animators came from up and down the Pacific Coast, joining
the San Diego artists for a two-day workshop that was accompanied
by the roar of Navy jets overheard. I think I learned as much
as I taught on this one, and I send a grateful cyber high-five
to all the talented mocap artists that took time to compare
notes with me. The more I understand about what you do, the
better able I am to bring to bear what I know.
BACK HOME IN
CHICAGO, I HAD A GREAT TIME WITH THE TEAM AT HIGH VOLTAGE
SOFTWARE (Leisure Suit Larry, Heh.). Eric Nofsinger
and Nat Corso in particular deserve kudos for making the class
happen. Being as how we are in the same town, guys, I am definitely
looking forward to staying in touch with you!
WANT TO PURCHASE
YOUR VERY OWN PERSONAL COPY OF "ACTING FOR ANIMATORS"?
TRY THIS LINK:
http://www.actingforanimators.com/Resources/booksbyhooks.html#AFA
ED HOOKS'S UPCOMING SCHEDULE
2004
Sept. 21-22 Walt Disney Feature Animation -- Burbank
Sept.
24-26 Cineme 2004
Chicago, Illinois
Oct
9-10 Ringling School of Art and Design
Sarasota, Florida
Oct 13-16 Dundee, Scotland, Projector
2004 Animation Festival
Oct
30-31 College of Creative Studies
Detroit, Michigan
Nov
4 Montreal Game Summit
Montreal, Canada
Nov
22-27 SAND '04, Swansea Animation Days
Swansea, South Wales
Nov
29 National Film & Television School
Beaconsfield, UK
2005
Jan
22-23 College of Creative Studies
Detroit, Michigan
Jan
31-Feb 4 Animex '05
Teesside England
April
20-23 Louisiana State University Animation Festival
April
28 - May 1, FMX Animation Festival
Stuttgart Germany
May
2-3 Filmakademie Baden-Wurtemberg
Ludwigsberg, Germany
June
6-11 Annecy, France
CRAFT NOTES
GAMES ARE NOT MOVIES
According to August
12th Daily Variety, Warner Brothers is buying Monolith Productions,
which puts the big studio up to its corporate navel in the
videogame business. At the same time and across town, Sumner
Redstone is picking up publisher Midway Games for Viacom.
It won't be long before all of the big Hollywood telecommunications
conglomerates have in-house game companies. We are heading
toward a time in the industry when there will be an on-the-shelf
echo videogame title for every demographically relevant TV
show and movie. This might be an opportune moment to consider
the impact of all this on the future of games.
From an artistic standpoint, games
are not movies, and no amount of tinkering with them is going
to make them movies. The game playing experience is fundamentally
different from the movie watching experience. Unless developers
want to forget interactivity altogether and simply produce
humongous cut scenes, that's the way it is going to be.
Recently, I took a look at a hot new trade book in which a
Hollywood author essentially spends several hundred pages
browbeating the game industry for not being as clever as the
movie industry. His big idea is that, if the game artists
would simply pay attention to what the movie artists do, and
then do the same thing, presto-change-o, we'd have triple
the game grosses. The only hurdle holding back games, he seems
to suggest, is that they are not movies. Yeah, well, thanks
for the swell advice and pass the catsup.
The game industry is developmentally
still an infant while the film industry is mature. A corporate
drift toward joining the two at the hip is not going to help
things. Oh sure, we already know that even a weak game will
generate money if the box carries a photograph of a movie
or TV star. My concern is with what this is doing artistically.
Game developers must have room
to breathe. What the industry needs is more independent game
development, not less, which corporate consolidation portends.
Creators and producers must be willing to take risks, think
outside the box and still have some hope for distribution.
In the game industry - unlike the movie industry - artists
are still working on issues of basic aesthetics. They are
still trying to figure out how to get the player to empathize
with an NPC. Games are artistically at the modern-day equivalent
point of D.W. Griffith's invention of the close-up. I worry
about major game talents being highjacked by big telecommunications
companies into producing games with titles such as "Nip/Tuck,
The Game".
Consider the mess that the entertainment
industry has become since passage of the 1996 Telecommunications
Act: We have something like five men running the entire show
now, tying in movies with the TV show spin-offs with the books
on which they are based. And soon we'll have the game. More
product, less quality, a race for the lowest common denominator.
Commerce over art.
No two game industry
artists I meet seem to agree on what the future holds for
the industry, yet nobody seems happy with the status quo..
There is too much talk about the limitations on creativity
and not enough dreaming. There is too much leverage being
applied to create more graphically exciting versions of whatever
was a hit game last year. I'll tell you true, if D.W. Griffith
had thought like this, we still wouldn't have editing rooms.
Here is an excerpt from
on on-line biography of D.W. Griffith. Instead of movies,
imagine games See you next month.
"But Griffith was not happy.
In his Biograph years he had perfected all the elements of
so-called film grammar -- cross-cutting, tracking shots, the
running insert, flashbacks, and more. He wanted to make longer
films, but Biograph fought him all the way.
"Biograph was a
member of the Motion Picture Patents Company, a trust organized
by Thomas Edison and his associates to restrict production
of motion pictures to ten companies, to eliminate further
competition. Theaters paid a two-dollar weekly fee and could
only exhibit Trust-produced films. Independents who tried
to produce their own films were often met with violence.
"The Trust had
a policy when it came to filmmaking -- keep it simple and
keep it profitable. One-reel films were profitable and there
was no reason to make them longer or more expensive. Griffith
did manage to make a number of two-reelers, but it was always
under protest from the company.
"By 1913, the grip
of the Trust was weakening, but not their resistance to change.
Griffith decided to leave Biograph and, when he did, he took
his stock company of actors with him. Biograph's decline began
the moment Griffith walked out the door. In five years, it
was gone.
"Griffith, on the
other hand, continued to prosper and in 1915 he put forth
his most ambitious effort, the twelve-reel destined to be
classic Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon's southern
tilted Civil War era drama. Although highly controversial
for its content both then and now....(the climax of the movie
is a highly dramatic gathering and riding of the Ku Klux Klan)....the
film was an instant sensation. Griffith was hailed as a genius."
See complete article
at http://www.2020site.org/griffith/bio.html
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