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So, nearly two weeks without an update, and this one is going to be about movies instead of anything really techie. Trust me, you don’t want to see my Core Audio code for 360iDev just yet; it’s going to take some time and luck in the next two weeks to get my demos lined up.

In the meantime, I took my daughter, Quinn, to How To Train Your Dragon today, and I’ve got animation on the brain again. That and the release (if not in my town) of Waking Sleeping Beauty, a documentary that tells the increasingly familiar tale of how Disney turned around its feature animation department from near-extiction to world-wide acclaim and massive financial success, largely on the merits of four classic films: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. Entertainment Weekly had a brief retrospective on how TLM initiated the turnaround, and Wikipedia has filed it under Disney Renaissance.

It’s a great narrative, stunning when you think of how the troubled studio of the mid 80′s lost Tim Burton and actually fired John Lassiter. But there are some pretty big holes that are missing in the conventional wisdom version of the story.

Not the least of which is the elephant in the room: just 10 years after The Lion King, Disney gave up on traditional animation, retraining all their artists in CG techniques so they could make debacles like Chicken Little. So what the hell happened?

Animation fan-boy that I am, I mentally split the post-Lion King movies into two groups: 1995-99 are the “formula films” (edit: previously said “unnecessary films”), and 2000-2004 are the “troubled films”. Let’s start with the first group. With the success of the four modern classics, Disney apparently had a formula, and forced all of its subsequent films to fit that mold: family-friendly musicals, with merchandisable funny sidekicks. In retrospect, some of those traits seem tacked on. Nobody remembers the songs from Hercules or Mulan, and the funny gargoyle sidekicks in The Hunchback of Notre Dame were a terrible distraction from what was otherwise a strong musical drama (Les Miz Lite, if you will). And the less said about Tarzan, the better. Interestingly, the collective opinion of Pocohontas seems to have gone up in the last few months, thanks to widespread perception that Avatar is effectively an expensive retelling of the same story (a point best made in this YouTube video)

They must have known they were in a rut, because they tried to break out. The effort is more admirable than most of the post-99 films. Aside from the icy artistic indulgence of Fantasia 2000, you have three films that feel like they were written by committee: Brother Bear, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Home on the Range, the latter two of which suffered production shutdowns, title changes, and massive retooling (to be fair, so did The Lion King, and that worked out OK).

They also made two sci-fi action films, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet. U.S. audiences have never gone for animated action or drama in a big way – the Japanese will go wild for Gundam, but Americans won’t – and these didn’t change any minds. Atlantis is a bit of a obsession for me, in that I think it may have as good an Act I as I’ve ever seen, yet falls apart faster and more completely than any movie I can recall (if you’ve seen it, how much of the plot’s energy drains away once the big submarine is destroyed?). Anime fanboys saw superficial similarities to Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, but if anything, Disney didn’t steal enough. In Nadia, the bookish hero meets mystery girl in the first episode, and they are the main characters. Atlantis keeps Kida away from Milo for half the movie, trying to distribute our interest among a crew of stock characters who just don’t carry the story (listening to the DVD commentary, the producers keep talking about “the adventurers this” and “the adventurers that”… when they should be talking about one or two genuine protagonists).

Atlantis’ failure probably kept people away from Treasure Planet, which is a shame. Despite the too-easy “in spaaaaace!” concept (smirked at by the EW story cited earlier), it’s vastly more story- and character-driven, and deserves a second look. Just skip the Martin Short annoy-o-bot if you can.

The only film that really succeeded in this era is Lilo and Stitch, a deliberate turn against Disney’s frequent technological indulgences (Tarzan’s “Deep Canvas”, Treasure Planet’s mixture of 2D and 3D animation), in favor of a cheaper, more personal film. In various accounts, notably the book Lilo & Stitch: Collected Stories From the Film’s Creators, the filmmakers cite Dumbo as a spiritual touchstone, which itself was intended as a simple, cheap, and direct film after the indulgence of Fantasia. It’s the most character-driven Disney film of the decade, and easily the most satisfying.

But it wasn’t enough. Suits decided the films were failing not because of bad stories but because audience tastes had switched to CG: just look at Pixar’s hot streak (which continues today), or the upstarts from Dreamworks. And maybe the suits were right: audiences largely passed on last year’s fine The Princess and the Frog. At any rate, in mid-decade, Disney retooled for computer animation, and turned out more troubled films, like Chicken Little and the title-changed Meet the Robinsons. If Bolt worked, it did so by cribbing shamelessly from Toy Story.

But that’s the other elephant in the room. As Disney feature animation began its decline in 1995, Pixar began its seemingly unprecedented run of 10 straight hits with the release of Toy Story. Their industry-defining success has created a new set of formulas to work from: Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon shares a lot of beats with A Bug’s Life (which I seem to like a lot more than most people), and Sony Picture’s Animation’s Surf’s Up has a plot almost identical to Cars, released just six months earlier, except that Surf’s Up manages to tell the same story in 85 minutes instead of 115.

It’s funny, though: much as I admire and enjoy every Pixar movie, I can’t say there’s any one of them that I really love, the way I love Beauty and the Beast (or Miyazaki’s The Castle of Cagliostro or My Neighbor Totoro, for that matter). I don’t fully agree with the “best picture” talk that surrounded WALL-E or Up… y’all do realize the whole film has to qualify and not just the first reel, right? That means you’re also nominating the fat pod people on the Lido Deck and the talking dogs flying biplanes too.

Yet every time I think that Pixar’s number is up, that their next film will be the Poconhantas-style disappointment that starts the decline, they dodge the bullet. Toy Story 3 seems somewhat unnecessary (and surely Cars 2 is), but there was plenty of reason to doubt a movie about a rat and another about a senior citizen, and they’ve been great. Pixar’s already made a non-suck sequel, maybe they can pitch two more.

Speaking of sequels, that’s the other thing these Disney Renaissance stories often forget: there was a movie released between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. In 1990, they released The Rescuers Down Under. I recall reading one account saying the genesis of the film was a meeting where Michael Eisner asked for a tally of recent animated features, with an eye to making a sequel to whichever one had made the most money. Kind of takes the shine off the story, doesn’t it?

I’m not terribly interested in most of the stories speculating about Steve Jobs’ health or the company’s outlook — do you really think Steve designed the Cocoa APIs or wrote the iPhone’s power management software — but I do think one valuable analogy you can make is to how Disney at first stumbled but later pressed on without its hands-on namesake founder.

Jim Hill Media contributor and long-time Disney artist Floyd Norman is in a unique position to make this comparison: he worked for Disney on The Jungle Book, and later for Jobs at Pixar. So I’m highly willing to listen to his take on how the two stories played out. Plus, his sketches of Jobs are a hoot: Steve Jobs: A Tough Act to Follow.

I’m packing for the move in a week, dealing with boxes of papers in the storage room that haven’t been opened since the last move, a pretty good hint they need to at least be considered for the dump.

Above is a betacam tape of one of my Headline News shows from 1997, looks like a day when I was producing a full live hour, with this half directed by Bruce Daniel (who still works there, and whose wife is a good friend of Kelly’s). I think I kept a couple of these tapes just in case I needed them for pursuing another producing job, though the rigid format of Headlines back in that day meant that one producer’s show really ought to look pretty much like anyone else’s, so there really wouldn’t have been much value showing anyone this tape, short of pointing to the back of my head in the control room on the show-opening Camera One zoom and saying “see, that’s me!”

One thing about the format is that different producers still had flexibility within the format to pick their packages (with the guidance of a supervising producer) and fill out their 13-minute news block however they saw fit. We had one associate producer (which is what I was) who, when he did live hours, tried to give the audience something different by using cold opens, or effecting through some VOs with a “in this half hour”, or stuff like that.

I rarely did that, but what I often tried to do was to get more new stories into the system by digging through the wires (especially state wires, features, business, and Reuters’ “odd” wire) and, if I didn’t have enough writers to take on extra work beyond the necessary updates, I’d just write it myself. There was a full-blown producer named Alicia who also did this. We thought it was good for the Headlines ecosystem as a whole, because the new stories could be duped into later shows, so there’d be more variety in the next 23.5 hours. But in retrospect, the downside of this approach is that were writing from the wires instead of writing to available video, and usually ended up only having a box right for our new read. So on the one hand, we had new content in a textual sense, but were we really creating new “television”? My older self argues against my younger self on this one: today, I think I would have used the time to look through the feeds and see if I could find some good unused video, even if the story wasn’t as good.

So, also in the boxes of vanity, I found this little embarrassment:

Yep, I tried to write a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine spec script. Not that I was alone. Trek was the only show that regularly accepted spec scripts from unagented writers. To wit:

As they point out, 99.9% of spec scripts are sent packing with a “thank you very much”, though a few writers were able to break through this way, and it’s to Paramount’s credit that they were so open to new writers, and to their fan base, in this way.

I didn’t submit this script, in fact, because I knew then that it was bad (and can’t bring myself to read it today). I had about two acts plotted out and started writing, which ended up pretty much how you’d expect: somewhere in the middle of Act IV, I was just throwing words on paper, not knowing what the fuck I was doing or where I was going. In fact, the only reason I don’t trash all remaining copies of this (for fear of my children finding it in my effects 30 or 40 years from now), is the fact that I also found some notes where I was radically re-breaking the story for a thoroughly overhauled second draft:

A rewrite might not have made it good, but it would certainly have made it better.

Before drifting into CNN, I think I ended up writing maybe four total spec scripts. Clearly not enough, and it was not something I did often enough for the process to get easier. Maybe you have to write 10 scripts before you write a good one, but if you don’t truly think the first 9 can be any good, how the heck do you turn them out?

I’ve felt this in an accelerated way with iPhone work since getting the SDK earlier this year. My first couple were tentative, confused, and sometimes appealed for Java analogies that weren’t there. Two things that helped were trying to do some ambitious work early on (my still-broken web radio client) rather than just “screwing around” with the SDK, but then getting into a groove of creating a number of projects and getting familiar with the process of creating an XCode project and being increasingly purposeful with where I wanted to take the code.

Writing an application and writing a screenplay have certain strange similarities. Aside from having to start with an empty “new document” window and needing to bring life to the void, there’s also a sensation that when things are set up right, they just run themselves. In code, those are methods, delegates, and program states. In writing, it’s character and situation (indeed, plot is sometimes defined as character plus situation… define both of them well enough and your story writes itself).

As for my spec scripts, they fell by the wayside while I worked at Headlines. I tried to write a Home Improvement spec to keep the Hollywood screenwriter dream alive, but aside from having some gags and a general premise, I could never get the feel for the straight sitcom. My two half-way decent specs are animation (a spec for Animaniacs which got a nice read from WB and a copy of a real script from the show, sort of a gentle “do it more like this”), and an off-the-wall sitcom pilot we did in grad school called Public Access, which was a finalist in a couple of competitions, but not a winner. It still has some of my favorite gags, the recurring show-within-a-shows like “Can You Fit A Hamster Through A Funnel?” and “Show Dyslexia The”.

Had I taken my chances in LA rather than playing it safe at CNN, I might have taken the next step beyond these scripts, but then again, I might also have crashed and burned and wasted even more time. Guess we’ll never know… short of finding a way to an alternate universe where things played out that way. Which, I think, is what my DS9 was about.

Over the weekend, I took the kids to see Speed Racer. We only made it through an hour — Keagan was repeatedly stage-diving into his seat and I worried we were annoying other patrons — and his fidgetiness speaks to the fact that the movie is too damn talky. I mean, we’re talking about the usual “evil corporations” plot, in this case trying to use the protagonist to fix races. It shouldn’t take that long to get across. But moreover, it’s another one of those “talk, don’t show” mistakes that you’d expect people like the Wachowskis not to make. Think back to the first act of The Matrix, how you were lured in by sequences like Neo in his cubicle getting a package, which contains a cell phone, which rings as soon as he touches it, and on the other end is Morpheus, telling Neo things about the police raid on his office as they’re happening, things that nobody on the other end of the phone call could possibly know… and with each exchange between the two, you’re thinking “what the hell is going on here?” Where the heck was that skillful story-telling in Speed Racer (or, for that matter, the second and third Matrix movies)?

That said, the visuals and the action and the sense of fun in the movie are underrated by the critics. Quinn is still saying “go Speed Racer go!” a couple times a day for no particular reason.

Roger Ebert’s review takes an unnecessary side-track into the minimal merits of the original anime series, apparently casting aspersions that it and other anime of the time were of a lower quality than other contemporary series. Having grown up at the time, I don’t buy it. I’ll take the low sheet count in the original Speed Racer for the sake of unconventional story elements, like the irony that Speed doesn’t know that his rival Racer X is actually his long-lost brother. To the Japanese, this has a bittersweet flavor that American TV in the 70′s, cartoons or otherwise, was incapable of. By comparison, I distinctly remember Batman and Robin having a chat on Super Friends… and by “chat” I mean that their lips and only their lips were moving, for two damn minutes… about why they couldn’t scale an eight-foot chain-link fence. By comparison, Speed Racer had cars frickin’ exploding in the opening credits.

Over on Anime News Network, Zac Bertschy points out what may be the most remarkable trait of the film: “it’s clear they’ve managed to perfectly emulate the unironic, impossibly sincere and simplistic storytelling of the original show.”

And that’s the element that makes it perfect for kids, and pisses off people who think too much about this kind of thing. There’s a wonderful quote I saw once — ah, thank you Google for finding it again for me — that Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. Yet after a certain point, we resist this natural desire to treat our fun seriously. A sci-fi or fantasy film cannot take itself too seriously, the critics insist. I’ve never seen this position played better than it was by Mike Wallace, in an interview with Rod Serling, on the eve of the premiere of The Twilight Zone. The video’s on YouTube, with the critical question split right between parts 1 and 2, with Wallace following up a question about self-censorship versus doing meaningful work in the half-hour format by asking Serling, with absolute seriousness, “but you’re not going to be able to are you? You’ve given up on writing anything of importance for television.”

For what it’s worth, I consider The Twilight Zone to be the best TV show of all time, but that certainly wasn’t a popular opinion at the time. Sci-fi was Captain Video and Commander Cody… silly trifles for children. The idea then, and today, of fantastic elements being taken seriously still rubs people the wrong way. Write about poor people in the South, or lonely drifters in diners, and you deserve seriousness. Write about wars in the stars or mobile suits and you’d better have your tongue in your cheek. Or go camp. Or better yet, become a complete parody of yourself.

Yet how often does this approach actually work? Tongue-in-cheek rarely works — a Princess Bride is a once-in-a-generation thing — and usually the subtext that gets through to the audience is the voice of the producers saying “you’re a fucking idiot to be watching this shit.”

I think that’s what pisses people off about a lot of cultish entertainment: it dares to take itself seriously.

Perfect example of what not to do: Sci-Fi’s recent Flash Gordon series. Stuck with a license that the producers apparently had no belief whatsoever in, they changed so many of the details as to end up with a bad season of Sliders (and that’s saying something). Yet, knowing that what most people remember of the property is the gawdawful 1980 Dino Di Laurentis movie, they aimed for camp. Unsurprisngly, the intelligent viewers who came for the intense drama and dark political metaphors of the new Battlestar Galactica had no need for camp nonsense.

Much better was the 1979 animated TV series, which I recently picked up when Right Stuf had a sale on BCI titles. Looking at it today, it’s clearly the most faithful adaptation of the 1930′s newspaper comic strip, and despite numerous flaws, it’s clearly a labor of love on the part of its producers. The series has a number of fascinating stories behind it, not the least of which is that it started as a live-action movie which proved unaffordable to Filmation, which sold the live-action rights to Di Laurentis, in exchange for more money to make an animated version. The movie was shelved and re-cut into the first four episodes of the Saturday morning series, finally airing as The Greatest Adventure of All, shown only once, in 1982, in the middle of the night on NBC during a week off for Saturday Night Live. It’s practically the stuff of legend, by cleverly starting the story with Flash as a resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII, discovering that Hitler’s getting weapons from another world, which eventually leads him to adventures on the planet Mongo. Someone dumped their VHS recording to YouTube, but it wasn’t licensed for the DVD box. Oops.

The DVD does describe some awfully clever tricks on the part of the usually-pedestrian Filmation to achieve visual effects way beyond the norm for 1979. They took models, painted black with white lines, ran them on wires while shooting on high-contrast film, then inverted the image to get black lines, skipping the pencil and xerography steps and being ready for painting. You can see the results, along with a hell of a lot of rotoscoping, in the opening credits.

Clearly, this project was a labor of love, and it shows. The first four episodes, cut down from the movie, are all you need to watch, as the rest of the first season really doesn’t go anywhere, and the second is dragged down by wretched changes requested by NBC, such as saddling the show with a cute mascot-type character. It’s also a sign of the times that NBC hated the show’s serial nature, as it prevented them from rerunning more popular episodes more frequently — remember, this was a Saturday morning cartoon, meaning they generally made 13 a year and re-ran them four times a year already.

The problem with a serial story at that time was that they didn’t have the creative freedom — or the faith in their audience — to have the story make permanent changes. They couldn’t alter the basic premise of the show, kill off main characters, or even have anyone learn a lesson important enough to matter the next week. Or, most importantly, end. It may have been good work at its time, and underappreciated then and now, but it pales to contemporary work from overseas. After all, in 1979, Doctor Who was in its salad days with Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor, wryly explaining to Romana atop the Eiffel Tower (in “City of Death”) that in the vintages of years, 1979 is “more of a table wine.” Blake’s 7 was putting the “anti” in “anti- Star Trek” with a fine, polished cynicism. And anime saw its biggest franchise launch in the form of Mobile Suit Gundam. Scenes like the famous Ghiren’s “Hail Zeon” speech, in which we see the reactions of a number of characters to a neo-fascist using his brother’s funeral as rallying cry to war, show a complexity, a nerve, and a desire for relevance that American television was nowhere close to in 1979.

After all, in that year, US prime time had the robot dog and “Hardy Boys in space” drivel that was the original Battlestar Galactica.

See how much better things can be when you take your premise seriously? And it only took us 30 years to catch up.

A while back, I mentioned planning to start work on an anime music video (AMV), as a means of improving my Final Cut skills, and thereby getting my developer head more in line with what’s needed by actual users of media software. I also blogged a couple times (1, 2, 3) about how the process of ripping, de-interlacing, and re-encoding the video from DVD was going.

So, update. Earlier in the month, at the Java Posse Roundup, I did a five-minute lightning talk on AMVs (hey, the topics were wide open, and this has genuine geek culture relevance), so I wanted to get mine started before then, to show it as a work in progress. Joe Nuxoll of the Posse and Dianne Marsh of the Ann Arbor JUG and CodeMash recorded the talks by hand with a digital camera, so you can see my AMV mini-talk on YouTube.

Also, I’ve exported what I’ve got done as an MP4:

Note: the above video uses the HTML5 <video> tag, falling back on the QuickTime plugin if that’s not available. Works in Safari, WebKit nightly, and Firefox… haven’t tried anything else

A couple thoughts so far:

• I think I spent 5-10 hours just logging, creating subclips for use later.
• The Bella Final Cut Keyboard is a massive time saver for editing. I did the last three edits with mouse and keyboard while travelling and it was burdensome compared with the ease of just jogging to the needed frame and clicking the in- or out-point button.
• Some of the source video is a little jumpy (the second edit might merit a redo, because I cut into it right on a jump). Going frame by frame through the source material, there also seems to be a little bit of frame damage at the bottom of every frame preceding an edit… presumably evidence of its being hand-edited film, from the time before anime production techniques went all-digital
• After tightly timing the first few edits to the guitar “ping”s, I allowed them to get looser during the guitar intro. It’s probably too loose, too vague, for some of the “Miyazawa vanity montage” (losing the source video’s dissolve to the flower background shot, and finding a different way into the “towering above the crowd” shot, might help)
• Probably want to lip synch Miyazawa in the doorway on that first line of lyrics.

Update: Ah, I’m my own worst critic. Looking at it again, I should at least chalk up credits for the parts I think work:

• The establishing shots on the guitar “pings” work, and gradually establish the location by getting closer each shot.
• Continuity holds up, as the sequence gradually moves down the hallway and into the classroom. Most of those shots are from the same sequence in the first episode, but I remember one (Arima’s reaction maybe?) was actually borrowed from much later. There are lots of great shots I didn’t use here because of continuity (location and costume, mostly). I imagine each sequence will largely use video from a narrow period of time, so shots match.
• The idea for this first sequence is to establish Miazawa, and I think it’s going in the right direction. Her crazy moments in the first few episodes should work with the lyrics, up through and including the chorus “I’m bad news, baby I’m bad news/ I’m just bad news, bad news, bad news”, cutting to another outrage (like her punching Arima) on each “bad news”. General road map after that:
  • Break and second verse: establish Miyazawa/Arima romance
  • Bridge (“I’m just damage control…”, etc.): inner monologue sequence (His and Her Circumstances has lots of these).
  • Instrumental break (“‘cuz we’ll all need/ portions for foxes”): Maybe super Miyazawa into the solarized effects shots of the classrooms, hallways (there’s a spinning shot from like episode 20 that could cap such a sequence), then back into the establishing locations for the reprise of the opening pings that gets us into the…
  • Third verse: Switch to Arima’s POV (“there’s a pretty young thing in front of you/ and she’s real pretty and she’s real into you”)
  • Third chorus: Back to Miyazawa’s POV (“you’re bad news/ my friends tell me to leave you”)
  • Final chorus: Joyous romantic shots (“you’re bad news/ that’s OK, I like you”) get us to big conclusion and out

Still, it’s good to have it started. Of course, now I’ve committed a massive amount of time to iPhone projects, so I don’t expect to look at this again until sometime after June. I’d originally planned to do this AMV — Rilo Kiley’s “Portions for Foxes” audio with His and Her Circumstances video — as my “learning experience”, then move onto a second video for which I have distinctly more concrete plans. But Anime Weekend Atlanta‘s cut-off for the AMV expo is usually in mid-August, so I’ll be lucky if I can even get this first one done in time to enter it in the expo.

Rather than continue to post comments to my previous blog about trying to rip a DVD, de-interlace it, and convert it to an editing-friendly codec, I’m posting the followup as its own message.

The overnight re-encode with JES Interlacer failed just like the previous attempt that made the 40GB file: it got stuck on one frame of the complete video track and padded out the last 40% of the movie with that. At least with a fixed data rate of 3000 Kbps, the broken file wasn’t 40 frickin’ gig…

So then I opened the full-length video track m2v file with QuickTime Pro (which pinwheeled for like 10 minutes) and, noticing that the Pixlet export dialog had a “deinterlace” checkbox, tried using that for my export.

Unfortunately, it too ended up getting stuck on the same frame.

So, plan D (or was I on “E” by this point?) was to go back to MPEG Streamclip, open the demuxed m2v file (which, remember, was created by Streamclip in the first place, from all the VOB files) and do the “export to QuickTime” from there, again depending on the Pixlet exporter to handle the deinterlace. The 3000 Kbps export from before looked like ass, so I went up to 10 Mbps.

Ah, finally! After a three-hour encode, I finally got the whole thing exported to Pixlet, with deinterlace:

The file is about 10 GB, and there are still some artifacts on a few high-contrast places (e.g., panning across dense black-on-white text). However, it scrubs like a dream, something you don’t get with a codec meant for playback, like H.264. We tend to forget how you need different codecs for different reasons, like whether you can afford asymmetry in encoding and decoding (e.g., a movie disc that is encoded once, and played millions of times, is a scenario which tolerates a slow and expensive encode so long as the decode is fast and cheap). In the case of editing, you want codecs that allow you to access frames quickly and cheaply in either direction, which tends to rule out temporal compression. The Ishtori tutorial’s editing codecs page recommends the RLE-based Animation codec, Pixlet, Photo-JPEG, or the commercial SheerVideo codec.

I might encode at an even higher bitrate for my second AMV project, but for now, I’m not super keen on burning up the last 100 GB of my drive space, so I’m OK with the current quality/size tradeoff.

Now to rip discs 2-5 of His and Her Circumstances and either start storyboarding or at least writing out a rudimentary shot sheet (smart) or throwing down edits like I know what I’m doing (dumb… but probably what I’ll do, since this is more experimental than anything).