#do they use polygons for hair? I haven’t gotten that far in 3d modeling

[infiniteheartsglitch]

300 gb and half of it is going to the polygons in Adler’s ass and hair.

[phantomofthepairofdice]

“You’ve Got Mail” and “Blackhat” – Network Connection

What could Michael Mann’s most recent (and hopefully not his last) movie about buff hackers and international tin mines have in common with Nora Ephron’s smash-hit, bookstore-driven romantic comedy? Dave Chappelle isn’t in Blackhat… Michael Mann is best known for tough guys snarling tough lines about codes in crime movies and Nora Ephron is best known for concocting scenarios in which Meg Ryan falls for a lovable but snarky, curly-haired guy while being stuck in a relationship with sweater-vest-clad dweebs. He has Daniel Day Lewis firing two muskets at once, she has John Travolta as an angel who loves sugar? On the surface, they’re totally different – but what happens when you listen to a podcast that explores their work in close proximity is that you start to see patterns (see: “Blank Check with Griffin and David”). These patterns rarely hold weight, are only mildly curious, or they’re just nonsensical. Some of these patterns can only be conveyed with frantic gesticulations, but the straight jacket they’ve put you in won’t allow it. You don’t see the code of the Matrix, man, you just haven’t gotten sunlight in four consecutive days. Open a window, put on clothes that have buttons, and stop talking to me about how Babe: Pig in the City is sort of its own anthropomorphic Mad Max sequel. But what if I told you that both Michael Mann and Nora Ephron opened one of their films with their own version of the same sequence? It says something different, sure, but the execution is almost parallel. It’s inevitable that any modern auteur who makes contemporary films will eventually express their opinions about the technology and how it effects the way people interact. What’s bizarre is just how closely these two filmmakers express themselves – especially considering the rapid changes that come with development of internet technologies. Oh yeah, and also because one is Blackhat and the other is You’ve Got Mail.

Let’s start with the one you’re more likely to have seen. While the opening credits roll for the reteam of Ephron, Hanks, and Ephron (the holy trinity, praise be), we watch as the director visualizes the connections that come through the then dawning but inevitably ubiquitous internet. The Warner Bros logo comes up with sounds of dial-up internet in the background. The studio logo digitizes and is revealed to be a desktop icon. With the click of a mouse, a window pops up and suddenly we’re travelling through the solar system past wireframe 3D models of planets, and on one of those planets, we see a city. It’s a Nora Ephron movie, so it’s probably New York City. Buildings start to digitize, and we move in on the Empire State Building (good guess on this being New York, Ross) before flying by. She’d done two movies in in between, but this still feels like she’s declaring that this is something different than Sleepless in Seattle where that building was the spot for the climactic meetup. Back on screen we’ve started following polygon versions of cabs and cars moving through streets and we even see a wonky digital jogger before we stop, and the digital image becomes film of an apartment. The pause was only momentary – Ephron continues the motion as the camera cranes up past a perfectly autumnal tree and in through the window of an apartment. In the same shot, the camera snoops around the specifically designed, yellow interior of the apartment and stops on a perfectly framed shot of Meg Ryan asleep. That smooth, fluid movement from digital macro to physical micro is deliberately undone by a jarring cut to a part of the apartment we just saw – and Greg Kinnear is in it. He comes in with a newspaper and wakes Ryan’s Kathleen up with some prognosis of “the end of western civilization as we know it” because desktop solitaire slowed down productivity in Virginia. Probably a good bet that you forgot that’s how it opened if you haven’t seen it recently.

While her published writing was certainly on the receiving end of plenty of acclaim, I think people often underrate just how much of a skilled director Ephron was. The sound design and the graphics have, like all specific representations of cutting-edge technology in film, become dated, but I don’t think that’s synonymous with them “aging poorly.” The movie is about a very specific point in time – and especially its version of the internet which would ultimately manifest itself in draconian capitalist behemoths like Amazon that would be the great equalizer/destroyer for bookstores of all sizes. Part of the reason the sequence still holds up is that it (and the movie) is not finger-wagging or making a mockery of computers and that worldwide web. This scene shows that there’s a simulacrum of us and our world in code, but there’s also the possibility to connect seemingly disparate people and things. She’s not making a cautious science-fiction movie along the lines of Philip K. Dick or David Cronenberg – although I think Julie and Julia has a scene with James Woods putting a video tape into his gaping stomach VCR if I remember it correctly. The point is that just because what Ephron is doing now may seem obvious or surface level doesn’t make it any less effective. Cities have always leant themselves to symbolism of machinery. Ephron just cleverly updates that for the year we were in and the way we interacted with one another. The traffic in New York used to be like a conveyor belt, now it’s data flow. But her credits are colorful and have a snap, unlike those of Blackhat which emphasize a cold, steely aesthetic – it’s Michael Mann, remember?

While I would never recommend the theatrical cut of Blackhat over the (obnoxiously difficult to find) director’s cut, its opening scene is far more streamlined in conveying the film’s connections between people and tech than that of the latter. The first shot is of a white orb with tiny sinews all over it. It becomes clearer that we’re looking at Earth when we see yellow lights of a city at night. Continuing to move closer, we see utility structures made of concrete and a nuclear cooling tower. The movie is obsessed with architecture and the way humans move inside of it - we’re just like the microscopic data that travels through hardware. There are lots of shots of buttons, screens, readouts, numbers, and windows, but then Mann pushes the view inside a computer screen. We follow electrical impulses through cords, over wires, and towards a motherboard. All of these shots are primarily gray and black. Then the camera begins to work like an electron microscope as we see things exponentially smaller than the human eye can process through chips and circuits. We see a visualization of computer commands in blue and white squares that go up, under, turn on sharp corners, and even crash toward the screen like a tidal wave on the instruction of the hacker we briefly glimpse. That flood of digital feedback then cuts to normal proportions and the reactor melts down. There are news reports with their busy screens covered in chyrons and corporate logos. Then Mann pushes further back and shows the human cost of such simple keystrokes: we see first responders and the bruised, bloodied, and burnt bodies of the people who were in the power plant. Then we cut to one of the leads of the film, Chen Da Wai (Leehom Wang) suiting (booting) up before he walks in front of white tiles that look just like the tiny streams we saw in the technology. He gets into a white car that we see cross a bridge from the sky – it’s a single object in the middle lane, between white dividing lines. Again, it’s the same imagery repeating itself but with humans on a larger scale. Mann is focused on how our entire world is built on a system that can be corrupted so simply – the tenuous correlation between an explosion in software and an explosion in a reactor. It’s a fearful warning of just how delicate and volatile our systems are with our reliance on tech.

Both Ephron and Mann start their films beyond the world and zoom in to visualize the usually invisible links chained together by the internet. So, what does any of this actually add up to? I think it’s mostly a helpful tool for understanding POV, tone, and style of an auteur. Ephron uses a Harry Nilsson needle drop of “The Puppy Song” while Mann uses generic music for tense action movies. Mann goes infinitesimally smaller and then pulls back out. Small differences, sure, but incredibly similar sequences. The palettes are different, the stakes are different, the technology is different, the end results are drastically different – and the outlooks are different. In 1998, we got to see the links between people and computers in a light romance created when the internet still had a glowing horizon to look toward. In 2015, we got a bleak and frightened outlook of it as a tool of chaos. The zeitgeist has clearly changed along with the technology. This is where a smarter person would talk about the content we share and the way we treat each other online devolving significantly and shifting towards shock and individualism. An even smarter person might diagnose cultural events as epicenters from which these behaviors and trends splintered off. But I’m not that smart person. I’m the doofus who spent time comparing Blackhat and You’ve Got Mail.

Thanks for reading.

[seens]

i just read your tags on that nintendo post and yes,,, pls post your rant about stylisation in modern games i'd really like to hear... well no,, see your thoughts on it :D

SFGFGHGF thank you Angie!! 

(popping this under a cut as I got out of hand kjghjfgkjhfg)

(alsO keep in mind this is primarily about home consoles. i don’t mention hand helds nor do i really touch on arcade games, those are topics for another day)

I’d like to open this by saying that I’m pretty childish in a whole bunch of ways, but one of my biggest is that I am very much attracted to bright colours. It shows in my art - everything I draw is very, very colourful. I love stylisation, I love colour. 

Colour, as it so happens, was vital to video games up until the late 90s - the advent of the 32-bit era. Even the fourth generation (think SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive) could typically only produce 64-256 colours on screen at a time, depending on resolution. 

(The bastard child which we do not talk about is the Neo Geo, which could display 4096 colours on screen at one time, but the Neo Geo was a super expensive ‘luxury console’ and literally a bunch of arcade level components, hence why it was so far ahead graphically.)

For this reason, palettes were bright and expressive. Add in the fact that all home consoles at the time were raster image based (except for the sole, bizarre exception of the doomed Vectrex) and stylisation is the obvious outcome - once we got the graphical output for it, of course. Third generation games began to show stylisation - Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy III may be visually similar, but the nuances in the spritework are still plain to see - and then the 16 bit era really drove it home. 

The late 90s brought home gaming into a whole new dimension - 3D! Glorious, blocky, polygon-y, 3D. And stylisation well and truly went bonkers, maybe even more so than it did back during the sprite-based 16 bit era. 

Something important to keep in mind when considering 90s to early 00s gaming however is that everyone, for whatever reason, had Sonic fever, and so was trying to whip up their own fucking furry mascot. Platforming had always been a prominent genre, ever since the early 80s when Donkey Kong debuted and was immensely successful. Suddenly, we’re platforming in 3D, and there are furry mascots everywhere. Seriously, think of as many platforming game with animal mascots as you can, and I assure you you’re not even scratching the surface. 

Even putting aside the bright and friendly animal-based platformers, there’s still a tonne of fascinating examples of styles. Tomb Raider, Metal Gear, and Silent Hill all went for closer to realism than cartoon styles, and yet were all stark and distinctly stylised in their own different ways. Graphical output still had distinct boundaries, and stylisation was the way it was overcome. 

I feel like stylisation hit it’s peak immediately before it’s decline, with the sixth generation heralding in some of what are, in my opinion, the most wonderfully stylised games out there. the original Ratchet and Clank games, Metroid Prime, Okami, Space Channel 5, the Legend Of Spyro games.....Hell, Jet Set Radio and Jet Set Radio Future come from this time period, and are some of the most famously styled games of all time. Just enough polygons to render some absolutely wonderful models, not enough to warrant photorealism. 

That was, at least, until the seventh generation. Bright and atmospheric stylisation was out, and photorealism was in. 

(Unless you happened to be Nintendo, of course. Nintendo just shrugged, gave us Miis, Super Mario Galaxy, a whole bunch of The Legend of Zelda, and some third party kids games, and carried on like that until today, where they show no sign of slowing. Thanks, Nintendo. Owe you one.)

But with everyone else, stylisation very quickly died. The rise of the FPS definitely didn’t help here, with every studio clamouring to have their slice of the pie, but very quickly studios turned to photorealism. Far Cry, Call Of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted.....Very quickly, stylisation was abandoned. There was also that god-awful period where everyone and their nan was cranking out games with gritty washed out palettes, though we seem to have finally pulled through that one. Thank god. Thanks for that one, Call Of Duty. 

My point is that graphical advancements seem to have killed a lot of the visual creativity that always went into games, and instead everyone seems to be intensely focused on how realistic a game looks. I’m personally sick of it - I don’t give a shit that you can animate every hair in generic white protagonist #897′s beard, when it looks incredibly visually similar to every other fucking game in it’s genre. 

If I were to take a screenshot of a whole bunch of the most popular games from the last 10 years and show them to someone who wasn’t into games at all, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell 90% of them apart, whereas games of literally any other generation can be told apart visually with ease. There is so little visual differentiation in modern gaming, and it frustrates the everliving fuck out of me. We have so much graphical power, and yet all anyone wants to fucking do is replicate real life visuals - why? 

Hell, the 10% of actually visually diverse games make it feel even more sparse. Take for example We Happy Few, Bioshock, and Borderlands (I haven’t actually gotten around to playing any of the Borderlands games but they’re on my to-do list) - wonderfully atmospheric and full of some absolutely fantastic visuals. They’ve found themselves art styles, all gloriously unique and notable in their own ways. Even Overwatch is notable, with it’s stylised characters and bright colours. Hell, I give Fortnite props for it’s fucking style, for crying out loud. 

Aside from that, the only people consistently pumping out games with stylised graphics? Nintendo - and small, independent studios. Small, independent studios who are constrained, much like the sixth generation - not by lack of graphical power, but instead by lack of budget. They don’t have the money to buy fancy software and pay some cunt to animate four billion hair’s on some white dude’s face, so instead they find a niche in the gameplay market and stylise to save time and money.

(Slight deviation here but Nintendo on the other hand are absolutely fascinating to me, in that a lot of their strength is in their franchising.  They’ve got gaming franchises which have been around longer than some other studios have even existed. They’re the sole survivor from the third generation, outliving Sega and Atari. Even their newer franchises, such as Bayonetta, Splatoon, and Xenoblade, still stick to a bright and stylised appearance. Each and every Nintendo property has it’s own style, but they’re still congruent enough that Smash Bros. doesn’t look particularly odd - unlike when Sony tried to do the same with their Playstation AllStars Battle Royale, which was one of the most bizarre things I think I’ve ever seen, to this day. Nintendo well and truly are the family gaming company - there’s something there for everyone, no matter how young nor old.) 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a time and a place for stylisation. One of the very few genres I still take interest in is racing games - a niche in which realism is fantastic and very often awe-inspiring. Realism can be gorgeous, and I don’t hate the style! I just hate the complete and utter bottlenecking of the industry and the fixation on making things look as realistic as possible when there’s so much potential in stylisation. There’s so, so little visual diversity in modern gaming and it’s honestly sad as hell. Also I really miss fun cartoony platformers as a genre and not just an occasional nostalgia-grab but that’s more an Axel thing than an industry thing. 

Jesus fuck I rambled on for sO FUCKIGN LONG BUT. yeah there’s my thoughts on that i guess!!!! O: