Wally Cleaver to show at the Louvre

The actor (Tony Dow) who played Wally Cleaver on the 50's television show Leave it to Beaver will exhibit a sculpture at the Louvre.

Performance at UNR this Thurs & Fri

My wife Kristin has been artist-in-residence at the UNR dance department this past semester; she'll be putting on a piece she set on some UNR students, and staging a couple pieces with two of the dancers from her San Francisco-based company, Element Dance Theater, as part of the UNR Fall Dance Festival this week. It's this Thurs and Fri at 8pm, at Nightingale Concert Hall at the UNR campus -- the festival features work by UNR dance faculty and students. More info is at the link.

One of the pieces is "Drunk Trumpet," and features some of my animation projection, so I'll be up in the lighting booth, manning the projector. The still above is from a previous staging of the piece.

Art Student Scholarships

MyArtSpace is looking for entries for their art student scholarship competition. There's $16,000 up for grabs and it's open to art students worldwide. Check it out.

Jackson PollOck.org

Wow, I had no idea there were so many ways to look at Jackson Pollock. (and I knew there were a few....) Chris, I love the two images you put up.... but try the correct link for the silly website below:

www.jacksonpollock.org

I am rather famous for misspelling artists' names. Van Gough anyone?

"Saucy"

"Saucy" is the name of the very brief show (tomorrow is the last day) several students put up, reflecting their experience on the class trip to Burning Man. Here are some pics. The camera was passed around by several folks, so I'm not sure who photographed what, but that seems in keeping with the feeling of collectivity that drove the trip and the show. I'll add a bit of commentary if I'm up for it later.

Speechless

Heather River, a student, put up a photostream on flickr, with a few images she took at an Obama election watch party. I think she did a great job of capturing a mood and a moment. Go here to check it out in slideshow form.

ETEK trip, day 4

And here's what happened last Wednesday...

The first stop was Electronic Arts. We got a tour of the facility, which follows the Microsoft model of corporate life: all the amenities are provided on-site, including a cafeteria and a rec center, the latter of which looks down upon an open stretch of grass, which provides the field of play for EA's "Medieval Fight Club," an occasion where employees wallop one another with foam axes and bludgeons.


We got a peek at production art for the new title "Red Alert 3," and before we left, the students got access to the company store, where they were able to buy titles at employee prices.



While waiting for the students to emerge with their discount booty, I played one of the games in the EA lobby, Burnout Paradise, driving a car in reverse at 80mph, sideswiping buses, flipping over anything that might resemble a jump or a dropoff. I stopped when I became aware of some nervous expressions on the faces of onlooking students; I was the one driving the van today.

House of Moves:

House of Moves is a high-end motion capture studio -- they've done mocap for many games, as well as doing mocap for Beowulf, Monster House and Polar Express.

Here's Yoshi, a performer who works for HoM, all suited up, existing in both real space and virtual space.




The balls on his suit are made of reflective material, that bounces back the infrared light the Vicon mocap cameras beam out into the space, allowing the position of the markers to be spatially triangulated. When you take a picture with a flash, the reflectors flare out like christmas lights.


Here Gabor follows Yoshi with a virtual camera, which beams footage in real-time to a large screen set above the stage. When Lee followed Yoshi into a virtual tunnel, Yoshi got a little modest, thinking his butt was featured a little too prominently in the shot.



It's not necessary to use the apparatus for capturing the data; a scene can be recorded without such a POV camera, simply recording the performance in its three dimensions, the camera virtually inserted into the scene afterward, at any position the director may desire. Evidently, Robert Zemeckis doesn't refer to any real-time POV footage at all, preferring to concentrate on the actors; when James Cameron has used the system, he keeps his eyes glued on the viewscreen, focused entirely on what's in his frame.


Here's an example of the kind of tracking that was necessary for doing facial capture. In shooting Beowulf, there were issues with the actors sweating, and the markers sliding around on their faces, so that the corner of a mouth, for instance, would melt down to the bottom of the chin, or even end up on the floor. One system they used to track eye movements (since markers, obviously, couldn't be glued to the eyeball) measured the electrical current that passes through the eyeball as the optical muscles move it around; one problem with that system was that, if the actor knocked down a few drinks the night before, that would change the pH of their skin, and the baseline readings would be thrown out of whack.


Since physical props can be replaced by virtual ones in the final production, the toys the performers have at their disposal can be pretty rudimentary -- here's a video camera, made out of wood. House of Moves is so high-tech, they get to be low-tech.

We finished off the trip with a look at two sound mixing studios, Margarita Mix and 48 Windows. I'm always amazed, on these ETEK trips, how open and welcoming people tend to be, taking time out of their day to show us their process, and give some insight and advice.

We got into Reno pretty late -- our flight was delayed, and we hit the Reno tarmac at about 1am. We were so late, in fact, that we were locked in the airport -- going down to the Baggage Claim, the hall was blocked by a large metal grate. The situation was resolved quickly, though not before people were up against the grate, fingers woven nervously through the metal lattice, and Keith blurted out: "Was there a &#@%ing zombie outbreak or something!?"

ETEK trip, day 3

Way behind here, but this is what happened on Tuesday.

Rhythm & Hues:


R&H is particularly known for virtual animals -- having done work for Babe, the Golden Compass, and the Narnia Films (Aslan actually makes a cameo appearance in Night at the Zoo). Here our tourguide, Scot Byrd, is pointing out the primitive hair on the Polar Bear in the old R&H Coke commercial -- "It looks a little like toothpaste." Now the technology is sufficiently developed that animals models can have millions of individual hairs, which need to be tended by digital fur groomers.


Rhythm & Hues still deals with analog film -- they were one of the pioneers of high-resolution film scanning. You can tell Scot likes to handle the stuff. They keep a movieola in a back room, which also has this animal mugshot chart -- I'm assuming had something to do with the casting of Babe: Pig in the City.


Some 3D geometry for virtual models is scanned from actual physical models. For virtual models, only half of a physical model usually needs to be sculpted, the biological symmetry taken care of by replicating and mirroring the geometry of one side.




Their server farm is cooled by large ducts blasting enough air that the room feels a bit like a wind tunnel. You can get a small taste of the effect with Lee's (non-digitally-groomed) hair in the picture below.


There's a lot of art on the walls at R&H -- some beautiful drawings of dancers by Jules Feiffer, and a lot of animation artwork, including some "Princess Mononoke" cells and animation drawings of Bambi, Bugs Bunny, and so on.




Then, on to Sony Imageworks, where we had a demo reel screened for us, and a reconstruction of the elements used for a composite shot featuring a CG beaver from the first Narnia movie (both Sony and R&H have shots in that film).

We got to duck into an animator's cubicle (she worked her way up from an initial position as a motion tracker), and a Visual Effects supervisor stepped us through the creation of a complicated effects shot that was created with the Flame system, a quarter-million-dollar combination of hardware and software that allows you extrapolate the implied 3-D geometry of a location shot and its attendant camera motion, and composite 3D and 2D elements into that tracked space. It was a shot he'd worked on for four or five months. Sony is serious about their NDAs, so although the shot is from a film that's already been released, all I feel comfortable telling you is this: It was a crane shot of the aftermath of a _____ collision. As the camera climbed upward, various _____s of the _____ continued to pile up, spilling into the ____ and knocking over a few _________ _____ as well. Most of the _____ ____ were digitally inserted, as where the trailing vapors of steam and smoke, and a good number of the ____ on the ____ beside the _____ ______, as they receded into the distance. Trust me, it was impressive.


Jimmy Kimmel:


We had a couple hours to kill between arriving at Hollywood Boulevard and being admitted to the Jimmy Kimmel show. A lot of the shops on the strip had Halloween costumes, and it occurred to me that Halloween must be the worst time of year for the folks who dress up as Spider-man and Jack Sparrow and so on, in the hope of cadging money from tourists who want to have their pictures taken with pushy entrepeneurial simulacra. With everyone on the street in costume, every superhero is just another Clark Kent.

For roughly a half-hour before the show, there's a guy whose job it is to rev up the crowd, which he does by insulting them (or at least a few unfortunates among them). He's actually very funny, and at some point he noticed the row of our students, three of them wearing hats (and not just baseball hats -- we've long noted, this semester, our unusually high fedora-to-student ratio). I braced myself for a round of haberdashery-related abuse, but he moved on to other pastures.

The highlight of the show itself was Kimmel's interview with Cloris Leachman, who'd just been booted from "Dancing with the Stars." I haven't been following the show, but judging from the clips they showed by way of intro, Leachman was treating her stint as a profanity-laden piece of performance art, crawling, bouncing and siezuring her way through her routines. She kept up the vibe by starting off her interview with a complaint that her chair was too high, and proceeded to align herself and re-align herself across the seat in increasingly precarious positions, in postures that suggested something between a sexual proposition and preparation for a suicide leap. She finally threw the cushion behind the chair, and eventually deliquesced to the floor, where Kimmel, in gentlemanly fashion, joined her. They ended the interview in a sort of tender tangle, beneath the overhang of Kimmel's desk, holding hands.

I don't think the camera caught any of us in the crowd, but Gabor claims his hat made it into a shot.

Message for James Nagle

James,
See Richard Heller Gallery (link on image). Daniel Clowes,
Edward del Rosario, etc.

j.

Exhibit coming up in L.A.

I am going to have an object in an exhibition in this space, in Los Angeles, coming up here in a few weeks. More crazy artists' space I suspect.