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Post by ka9q on Dec 22, 2011 14:10:37 GMT -4
It wasn't just the CGI, it was the fact that acting to nothing is hard. 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' did an amazing job and there was still moments that said "they ain't looking at nothing." I thought the secret is just to have something -- a prop, a piece of equipment -- take the place of the cartoon character so the actor can focus his eyes on it. E.g., during the weasels' raid of his apartment when Eddie Valiant hides Roger in the kitchen sink, Bob Hoskins is actually holding a pipe that sprayed the water that we see coming from Roger's mouth in the finished film. Even in ordinary face-to-face conversation, actors often do their lines with stand-ins. The original Star Trek might film Kirk from Spock's point of view, and then Spock from Kirk's point of view, each delivering his lines to an assistant standing next to the camera who read the other character's lines. If the director didn't have them in the shot together there was no need for both actors at the same time.
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Post by Apollo Gnomon on Dec 22, 2011 14:20:15 GMT -4
Tsialkovsky, as it seems you won't be admitting your errors, I guess you must be slaving over your CGI workstation - that one you have been using since the 60's and 70's. So how are the example images coming along? Do you need some help? I'm actually pretty handy with photoshop, and .. well.. I suspect you might need it... Be patient. He has a lot of work ahead of him. I estimate 5000 to 10,000 cards would be required per image.
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raven
Jupiter
That ain't Earth, kiddies.
Posts: 509
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Post by raven on Dec 22, 2011 15:52:03 GMT -4
To be fair, they did have other means of storing data besides punch cards, even back then.
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Post by gillianren on Dec 22, 2011 16:47:35 GMT -4
I thought the secret is just to have something -- a prop, a piece of equipment -- take the place of the cartoon character so the actor can focus his eyes on it. E.g., during the weasels' raid of his apartment when Eddie Valiant hides Roger in the kitchen sink, Bob Hoskins is actually holding a pipe that sprayed the water that we see coming from Roger's mouth in the finished film. For most of the movie, the part of Roger Rabbit was played by a tennis ball on a stick. I don't know what they did when Eddie was literally surrounded by Toon characters, which happens several times, but that must have been the hardest part for Bob Hoskins to do.
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Post by JayUtah on Dec 22, 2011 17:39:15 GMT -4
Raster graphics didn't catch on until about 1971. Prior to that, computer graphics meant vector displays, which cannot represent photographs, texture maps, shading, or any of the things we mean today by modern CGI, or even raster-based methods such as in Adobe Photoshop. The representation of a raster scan line by discrete values (as opposed to a continuous intensity function) was largely unknown in the mid- and late-1960 period in which Apollo photos began appearing, and RGB encoding (as opposed to monochrome) was entirely unknown.
Random-access memory sizes of modern mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s were typically limited to single digit megabytes, precluding the storage of an entire frame of 70mm film in RGB at film resolution. Hence digital image manipulation had to be performed on tape-stored photos, a scan line at a time.
Lighting models were crude. Flat shading predominated early raster images until the work of Gouraud and Phong (at my university) in the early 1970s. Gouraud-shaded images still have telltales on object edges. Texture mapping did not appear until 1974, long after Apollo was over and done with.
The history of computer graphics simply does not allow CGI to be used to produce Apollo photos.
The IBM 029 card punch is reasonably inexpensive, although the chances of correctly using it to manually input a raster image without error are miniscule.
Taking off my engineer hat and putting on my film actor's hat...
A conversation is typically filmed in one of two ways. With a two-camera setup, you film both over-the-shoulder (OTS) angles and roll-edit between them. This is not used as often as the two-shot method, where you film OTS for one actor, then OTS for the other, repeating the conversation each time. Since the cadence differs between the two takes, you can't roll-edit between them. Often the rough cut will be a roll edit, which is then tightened up on the finesse editing pass, sometimes giving the audio editor fits as he tries to edit between the location audio takes.
One of the non-intuitive things about film acting in this setup is that if the featured actor looks directly at the non-featured actor, it will look like he is "spiking" the camera -- i.e., looking directly into it. The viewer's perception is especially sensitive to eye lines, but in this case is fooled by a confounding effect from lens focal length. So the featured actor has to "cheat" his eyeline outward, away from the camera slightly. Attention to eyeline is part of what makes a good film actor. Ironically some actors find it easier to cheat the eyeline if there is no physical actor there to distract them. But in general it's difficult to act convincingly if there is no interlocutor.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 22, 2011 17:41:25 GMT -4
It wasn't just the CGI, it was the fact that acting to nothing is hard. 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' did an amazing job and there was still moments that said "they ain't looking at nothing." I thought the secret is just to have something -- a prop, a piece of equipment -- take the place of the cartoon character so the actor can focus his eyes on it. E.g., during the weasels' raid of his apartment when Eddie Valiant hides Roger in the kitchen sink, Bob Hoskins is actually holding a pipe that sprayed the water that we see coming from Roger's mouth in the finished film. Even in ordinary face-to-face conversation, actors often do their lines with stand-ins. The original Star Trek might film Kirk from Spock's point of view, and then Spock from Kirk's point of view, each delivering his lines to an assistant standing next to the camera who read the other character's lines. If the director didn't have them in the shot together there was no need for both actors at the same time. One of those moments is preserved in the Star Trek blooper reels. The scene involves Kirk and Spock working on a communicator, trying to tune it to get through to the ship. "I think...I've got it," says Kirk. "Kirk to Enterprise. Enterprise, come in." "Enterprise. Lieutenant Uhura here," comes a VERY male voice (presumably a production assistant.) Beat. Then Shatner and Nimoy break up laughing. The story I heard (and it could easily be false) is that Lucas made no effort in the prequels to explain to the actors what they were seeing, or even provide eye lines. It would certainly explain why Annakin in particular is wandering around Coruscant looking bored out of his head.
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Post by gillianren on Dec 22, 2011 17:57:16 GMT -4
That would make sense. I'm also given to understand that it was the biggest challenge for actors of Cinerama--in long shot, if they looked at one another, it looked like they were looking in random directions because of the camera setup.
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Post by ka9q on Dec 22, 2011 21:30:42 GMT -4
A conversation is typically filmed in one of two ways. With a two-camera setup, you film both over-the-shoulder (OTS) angles and roll-edit between them. This is not used as often as the two-shot method, where you film OTS for one actor, then OTS for the other, repeating the conversation each time. Has digital video changed this? Because the cameras are much smaller and the recording medium is essentially free, I assume it's now far more practical than it ever was with film to cut between several digital cameras filming a single take. This would save much time on the set, but it still wouldn't work if you had to change the lighting or rearrange the set between camera angles.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 22, 2011 22:03:11 GMT -4
Raster graphics didn't catch on until about 1971. I was thinking of saying in an earlier post that if NASA had used the vector graphics of the late 60's, the LM would have looked like one of the ships from Space War. Or, as we thought of it when a heavily modified version hit the arcades, Asteroids.
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Post by gillianren on Dec 22, 2011 22:53:03 GMT -4
Has digital video changed this? Because the cameras are much smaller and the recording medium is essentially free, I assume it's now far more practical than it ever was with film to cut between several digital cameras filming a single take. This would save much time on the set, but it still wouldn't work if you had to change the lighting or rearrange the set between camera angles. You still have to be careful about the cameras' catching one another in field of view. That hasn't gone away just because the cameras are smaller--if for no other reason than that cameramen aren't.
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Post by tedward on Dec 23, 2011 2:38:08 GMT -4
How much is done onto to film nowadays? I expect the lenses are the same but wonder if the CCD is like my camera. Not as the same chip but the crop factor, that is my camera has a crop factor of 1.6 compared to a full frame CCD that should be 35mm. Makes for interesting lens buying.
Also, slightly off topic but the method of shooting two heads for an interview on the news with one camera I find cringing. They ask the questions of the guest then film the other side asking and get a bit of nodding from both to edit it all together.
Edit. Mention the single camera in the sentence missed.
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Post by Glom on Dec 23, 2011 3:41:59 GMT -4
The story I heard (and it could easily be false) is that Lucas made no effort in the prequels to explain to the actors what they were seeing, or even provide eye lines. It would certainly explain why Annakin in particular is wandering around Coruscant looking bored out of his head. The impression I got was that all the blue screen stuff was to allow Lucas to get his team to create whatever after the scene had been shot, so he probably didn't know what was going to be there. I guess, he thought he'd get the actor bit out of the way, and then get to the important bit of building the amazing Nintendo Game Cube environment around them.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 23, 2011 5:01:21 GMT -4
What was funniest to me is that for Episode 1, Jar-Jar was actually my favorite character. Probably because he was rendered after the CGI environments, he was the only character who actually seemed to look around and otherwise take an interest in where he was.
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Post by JayUtah on Dec 23, 2011 14:23:41 GMT -4
Has digital video changed this? Because the cameras are much smaller and the recording medium is essentially free, I assume it's now far more practical than it ever was with film to cut between several digital cameras filming a single take. This would save much time on the set, but it still wouldn't work if you had to change the lighting or rearrange the set between camera angles. No, digital methods haven't changed the technique much. Small single-camera productions are still small single-camera productions, and large studio productions are still large studio productions. Feature quality digital camera rentals are dramatically more expensive than film camera rentals, so the savings in photochemical film stock are simply transferred to a different budget line item. And they use the same lens grades. Lens rental is also a huge expense. Effects and editing have been done digitally for quite some time, so you save time and labor by going directly to a digital medium. But the cost difference isn't enough to dictate a marked change in cinematography technique. You'll use the two-camera technique, for example, when the location costs outweigh the equipment costs. I remember shooting in a train station where they would only let us rope off the area for half an hour. That was a two-camera shoot. We shot the dialogue close up from two angles, then again with the leads in a two-shot and the B camera up on a balcony. That led the editor have an opportunity to make some cutaways. Then the B-roll shots we did handheld with ordinary passengers let back into the area. And yes, the technique has as much to do with art as with economics. If your cinematographer is trying to achieve a certain "look" then he'll definitely want to make sure both angles are well crafted. Then there are artistic concerns that have a distinctly practical manifestation. Especially when shooting outdoors, direct sunlight poses problems. You'll shoot half the conversation with a big sunshade to soften the difference between light and shade. But you typically can't shoot the reverse angle without seeing the sunshade. When it's cut together the lighting seems consistent.
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Post by Apollo Gnomon on Dec 23, 2011 16:33:47 GMT -4
To be fair, they did have other means of storing data besides punch cards, even back then. I would think it obvious that I'm being facetious to even suggest it. jayutah said: But isn't it a wonderful mental image? Doing photoshop with manually generated punchcards is the only thing I could think up that's sillier than faking the entire Apollo record using the computer technology of the day. Rather than debunking this particular claim I prefer to mock it. Usually I post an image of the gantry at Langley and describe it as the mechanism to move the stylus for the crude wacom tablet they used to manipulate the images. Because, as we all know, pixels were a full yard wide in the early 70's.
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