notes from underground

I checked out the art book for Disney’s Mulan from the library the other week, mainly to study Hans Bacher and Chen-Yi Chang’s concept art for the film, but the book has proved to be a fairly fun read. One section explains Disney’s “dead parent syndrome”:

[Mulan's mother] creates a two-parent family for Mulan…the heroes of past Disney animated films were often orphaned or had only one parent. The explanation for this [is that a] tight storyline eliminates everything that is unnecessary. With two parents, unless they support the hero in different ways, they essentially perform the same story function. However, assigning different story functions to each parent can suggest a disagreement between them that may detract from the story’s focus. In addition…it doesn’t make [financial] sense to have two characters who do the same thing.

When I was growing up I would distress my mom by repeatedly making up stories in which the hero (usually an analogue for me) had a dad, but no mother. I should tell her I was just exercising economy of story; it was nothing personal!

I really like In Rainbows. It’s my favorite Radiohead album since OK Computer, for sure, and that album is still one of my top five favorites of any band from all time. But In Rainbows kind of bothers me, too. It’s irritating that the focus was so focused on the album’s price… I had friends who downloaded it for free, and even a few who paid a couple bucks for it, and then didn’t listen to it for months. They participated in the media event, and then moved on, only later going back to actually listen to the music.

In a way, this is related to why I am irritated at the new videogame Spore. It’s become such a media event, overshadowing projects like Braid. I would never argue that Spore is a bad idea, or a bad game, or not worth paying attention to… I just think that Braid has a lot more to do with the future of the games industry than Spore does. I guess that’s technically the opposite of Radiohead, where In Rainbows is clearly an evolutionary step forward in terms of marketing… but in both cases, the media hoopla overshadows the real creativity and artistry.

Summer is still trying to pretend it’s not over, but here in Chicago it has begun to feel like fall already. It’s impossibly weird to realize that it’s autumn, and I’m not going back to Brown like I still feel I should… I miss it.

The days that I remember the most fondly are always the ones where I did the least. I remember sitting on the statue outside the gate, doing my reading for Chinese history in early fall of Freshman year, and I remember a pick-up game of Frisbee from Halloween afternoon that same semester, way better than I remember the more hectic, interesting days. Even in more recent semesters, I remember walking up to Pembroke and back down Thayer with a friend, killing time while putting off something I didn’t want to do, much more than I remember most of my lectures.

I miss the way it feels to look out the window and realize that dawn has come while I worked on my paper. I really miss the way the cold air hit my face when I walked to Louie’s at 6 AM.

I’m looking forward to visiting Brown next month, but it’s going to be very bittersweet to not be able to stay.

This is a test of whether I’ve got Lightbox 2 set up correctly, not a great example of image quality… these are all from my little moleskine sketchbook, but I took them with a handheld camera and spent an absolute minimum of time preparing the images, so enjoy the nice interface and check back again once I own a working scanner.

suspense!!!

Now I recognize that this is pure speculation, as I’ve never actually met any of them, but I’ve heard that “normal people” have nightmares about fairly mundane stuff—wolves, scary sheep, so on and so forth.

Why on earth do I have to have dreams about hard disk failure?!

OK, so I have a well-documented love-hate relationship with the folks over in the Modern Culture and Media department. I want to hate them, but deep down, within the icy, granite bowels of their darkest, most deliberately obfuscated souls, they have some good ideas. Case in point: this paper, on Shadow of the Colossus, immediately irritates me by first off requiring a citation for the statement that game designers are artists, as if we need their permission, their endorsement, to be so! Add to that the simple fact that they’ve taken one of the most beautiful games I’ve played and broken it down into theoretical tripe, and you have a recipe for aggravation. That said, there is a quote in the article that I somewhat appreciate:

Scott Miller, [...] co-creator of Max Payne, writes, ‘It’s time game designers grasp the power of creating games with emotional depth, [...] and really – I mean REALLY – make them care about their game’s story’

Last night I played through part of Rainbow Six: Vegas II. In one level, your team fails to prevent hundreds of innocent hostages from being slaughtered by a chemical weapon. Here’s an instance where Miller’s point could have been taken more to heart. The fact that such a scene even exists in Vegas 2 puts the game a huge step above its much more traditional, linear and uncomplicated predecessor, but at no point in that level is they player made to feel that there is any hope of saving the poor souls inside.

Now, I don’t want to start an argument about the riskiness of creating psychologically traumatic situations in videogames. All I am saying is that for any game to make an impact on the art form (particularly a game in as formulaic a pantheon as Tom Clancy’s) beyond implementing more clever mechanics and better level design, we need to take more chances. Take risks with your players’ emotions. Taunt them with cake or something. The first time you take the cake away, they may cry. They may even slip up in their grief and get incinerated in a fire pit. But it’s a game. They’ll try again, and the second time, they will have learned something.

The folks I’ve met who have participated in Teach for America emphasized one thing about their experiences above all others: if you trust somebody to rise to a challenge—a kid, a gamer, whoever—they usually will. Even if the outcome of the story is predetermined, allow the player to think, just for a moment, that they have a chance to save those men and women. Let them sweat a bit.

Just a thought.

Here’s the link to my final project on YouTube, and here’s an embedded version:

Enjoy!

I woke up at 4pm on Sunday, and turned in the beast at 9AM this morning– I think that means that of the past sixty-five hours, only six of them were spent sleeping. I can’t pretend I’ve been working 100% constantly, but I’ll be damned if it hasn’t been close. We’ve been through Hell and high water, but my “Typebot” animation project is now complete! There are tons of niggling little problems I want to go in and fix, but the project is more than presentable and I think it looks pretty awesome. A Youtube link will go up once the clip “premiers” at Thursday’s wrap party and class reel screening.

So that’s it, huh? That project was my final undergraduate work. I’ve got a critique with the professor and teaching assistants this afternoon, and then I’m done with college. Weird feeling.

But in the meantime, TO BED!

The first final renders from my animation final project are in! After a surprising turn of events last night, this project has gone from being my second-to-last project to being my final undergraduate project ever. Fairly momentous, though also somewhat daunting… all the more so because the deadline I am racing to meet is in a meager four hours, and I’m only done rendering one shot! You’d think I’d have more to show, I started weeks ago and in this final run-up to the deadline I’ve been awake and working on this for roughly 40 hours. At least the other (cooler) shots should be done in good time to present them at the screening and wrap party on Thursday.

Anyway, here’s the image:

Image links to a higher-res version… it’s a pity the depth map shadows are such low quality, but any higher and it would have been going significantly slower.