#recreate movie snippets with the Seeds

[fromathelastoveritaserum]

~Joseph’s New Groove Series~

[Part 1] ~ Johnny’s reaction after Joseph tells him he never liked his Spinach Puffs...Never!

Inspired by @nightwingshero reminding me of this awesome movie and how the Seeds would have been perfect in it!

Tagging you groovy sinners: @ayakashi-chan @bleudragonfire @chyrstis @closecry @corpsefun @deputyrhiannonhale @dep-yo-tee @deputy-alex-falls @dieguzguz @errordream @fadedjacket @farcry-5fan @f0xyboxes @gamer-purgatory @goodboiboomer-fc5 @isavuu @indigorox @jack-morrison @jacobmybeloved @ja-crispea @jollycultist @just-an-adventurer @mackie-hattwie @returnofthepd3 @risenlucifer @scarlettkat86 @shallow-gravy @shelliechen @smithandrogers @themosttypicaluser @thosetwistedtales @till-28 @tomexraider @trialandseed @twisteddoodles @unclefungusthegoat @v3ryvelvet @wewillryesagain @whatsinsideawritersmind

[littlethingwithfeathers]

Writing Update: 8-5-19

Publishing now!

Stolen Season (Friendship is Unnecessary): Steve/Natasha vignettes during Endgame’s five year jump. I thought I would do a set of scenes, some sexy some not, of how we get from Steve and Natasha working together at the end of IW, to them halfway living apart at the end of the five year jump. It also covers some of the hunt for Ronin!Clint, Steve taking up the mantle of group therapist, and Natasha stepping up as a sort of hybrid of Cap and Nick Fury. Definitely a trip to angsty-town, but I promise to fix it in the end. 

Excerpt:

Sometimes, when she got really low and her threadbare recreation of her old days at SHIELD wasn't enough to keep her going, Natasha would go down to the training hall and visit their old Avengers equipment. It had all been shipped over from Wakanda when they'd returned, but no one had ever taken it out of the crates. No one but Natasha on those occasions when she just… needed to visit it and put her hands on it and just… remember. 

She always did so under the guise of needing to make sure everything was in working order. In case they needed it… someone needed it. She felt a little like a grave keeper in that way. Since they didn't have actual graves, it was the next best thing. 

Wanda's earpiece. And her armored jacket.

Clint's collection of bows, and all his fancy arrowheads.

Sam's old wings. And little Redwing in his charging cradle.

Natasha's M249 SAW. Though she never thought of it as hers. It was the one Bucky always asked to borrow, even when she kept telling him to just keep the damn thing. Especially when he changed out the grip for one that better fit his metal hand.

She was field-stripping the M249 one night that second spring when she heard footsteps echoing off the walls of the equipment bay. She didn't need to look over her shoulder to know that Steve was home.

***

Other “Friendship is Unnecessary” fics at various stages:

But Most of All Because They Offend Thee: Based off this post. Probably just short, upbeat, porny little one-shot of Nat being a shit and teasing Steve. Because honestly… this series needs some levity. 

One of Those Things (Prologue): Since I’ve written this beast of a series completely out of order, and thus all my author notes are no doubt VERY confusing, I thought I’d put a short prologue on the front. Just a couple of short scenes to plant some seeds and give an actual starting place to this whole sprawling, intertwining mess, but also to give me a chance to address new readers so my forewords on the rest of the fics don’t seem weird. I’ve got a little more than a thousand words written on it which is probably about a third to half way.

Untitled Pre-War Steve/Bucky and Pre-Avengers Phil/Clint/Natasha: Partially a request from @crazyevildru that I’m toying with. Probably a flashback or a memory. This series really does need more Steve/Bucky, and I feel bad about it. I’m thinking of also adding a prequel/flashback of Clint/Phil/Natasha as well… maybe have the whole thing be a discussion over dinner.

Sweet and Honorable (Title pending):  Set post Civil War. Bucky insists on coming with Sam and Natasha to rescue Steve when he gets captured. This is starting to take shape in my head as a sort of work through for some of the issues that get raised in “Echo in my Soul.” Given what we know about the new Black Widow movie, I may hold off on this one for a bit. At least until I can figure out how I’m going to squirm around or ignore the added canon. (can’t wait for that movie BTW)

***

Other works coming soon!

Intercalation: A Ulana/Boris/Valery fix-it fic for HBO’s Chernobyl. 61k words and counting. This will be the next big thing coming after “Stolen Season.” And it’s looking to be very big. It’ll clear 70k words easy, I think. I have a few gaps to go back and fill in but it’s about 80% finished. Ten full chapters and an epilogue. It’s been challenging. Lots of moving parts. It’s a continuation picking up just after the trial and that arc is studded with flashbacks. There’s a lot of character exploration… and a lot of honest to goodness physics lectures which I’ve been getting help from an actual physicist and story enthusiast, @cactusowl, to write. Fingers crossed to start publishing on Sept 9.  STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT.

Hymn of Acxiom: Scarlet/Vision. I’m really just toying with an idea so don’t get too excited. It would be post Endgame, with Wanda helping a newly reconstructed Vision who has no memories and no personality without the Mind Stone to network all the pieces and facets of his personality. Again… I make no promises… but I have an idea.

A Maelstrom Whirls Below: I’m toying with the possibility of a sequel to my Darcy/Eddie/Venom fic “A Room for Rent in the Fourth Estate.” A rough outline is in place, and I’m starting to sketch around on a few scenes. But right now it’s just some ideas and a few zippy one-liners. It’s starting to get some traction though! Likely won’t start work in earnest until all this Endgame fix-it stuff is done, but I’m definitely letting it percolate.

Hang By Every Word: The outline for my Stucky fic is still coming along but it will be awhile yet before I start writing on it in earnest. The basic theme (and I’m sure this has been done, but fuck it) is the undoing of Bucky’s conditioning one trigger word at a time. And each trigger word locked down a memory that HYDRA deemed integral to Bucky’s personality. And of course… they all involve Steve. So I have to write things from Steve’s point of view, and all ten memories have to be written from Bucky’s point of view, and they have to tie together into a cohesive narrative. The memories are out of order, but Steve’s timeline isn’t and… It’s a challenge. I’m still largely in the brainstorming phase… writing little snippets here and there. Nothing’s solidly taking form just yet. Again… just letting it percolate.

Untitled Sarge/Melinda May fic: I know. I KNOW! Don’t give me that look. You’re watching the same show I am and you’re seeing what I’m seeing. This shit writes itself. I’ve been sketching on a few things, and now that the season’s wrapped up I have an idea of what I want to do. I might crowbar in a few days just so that I can have some exploration time... sometime between (SPOILERS) May shooting Sarge and them heading for the Temple.

[aion-rsa]

How Scorn Turned the Art of H.R. Giger into a Nightmarish Horror Game World

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Ebb Software’s long-awaited horror shooter Scorn is designed to make you squirm in your seat from the second you lay eyes on it. Set in a gruesome world of bone, flesh, and sharp steel, the game is meant to be repulsive, but it’s also absolutely entrancing. The imagery is visceral and gory — from tendrils of meat hanging down from big, grotesque statues to the bloody creatures crawling all over the walls to the webby, diseased-looking membrane covering the skinless protagonist’s head — but you also can’t look away.

According to game director Ljubomir Peklar, the game’s visual style is meant to challenge what we generally consider to be beautiful.

“Human beings are conditioned to like the external beauty of their bodies and see the internal organs, bones, and tissue as something repulsive. It’s a reflex,” Peklar said of the game’s art direction in an interview with Rock.Paper.Shotgun in 2016. “Our existence as a living organism is at the core of the game and human anatomy is the primary subject. Therefore we referenced many different parts of it as a starting point, then we morph, combine, and exaggerate them, change the shapes until we get something visually appealing. It’s not always about functionality but interesting forms that make sense for what we are trying to express.”

It’s clear the team at Ebb is trying to express a deep fascination with the organic while also making sometimes literal connections between living things and machines. Take the game’s main weapons, the pistol and shotgun, which are living organisms with mouths where you’re meant to insert the bullets. There are ribbed cables that run through structures resembling organs, while leaking phallic-shaped mouths protrude from the metal walls.

Scorn‘s challenging and disorienting art style could make it a defining work of horror gaming, but even if it’s not, it’ll certainly be one of the most visually interesting games on the Xbox Series X when it launches later this year. You can see what I mean in this trailer of the game running on the next-gen console:

It’s no secret that this Gothic hell is heavily inspired by the work of two of the greatest surrealists to ever touch a canvas, the Swedish artist H.R. Giger, who you may know best for his designs for the sci-fi horror movie Alien, and the Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński, whose grim creations are particularly responsible for all of the gore in the game’s environments. This isn’t the first time their work has shown up in some form in a video game, but Scorn could very well be the most faithful of the bunch.

Giger most famously collaborated with developer Cyberdreams in the early ’90s, providing access to his artwork for the psychological horror point-and-click adventure game Dark Seed and its sequel Dark Seed II. But the use of Giger’s work in that game can only be described as “quaint” when compared to what Scorn is doing. After all, the technological limitations of the time prevented Cyberdreams from truly building something out of Giger’s art, forcing the team to instead use his airbrushed paintings as backgrounds in the game to set the mood of the somewhat peculiar plot.

“Actually I think no one really did it the right way,” Peklar says of past adaptations of Giger’s work in an email to Den of Geek. “I don’t remember too much of Dark Seed, I played it a very long time ago. I do know that the artwork was just H.R Giger’s already established work collaged into the background. It was not designed from the ground up to be a setting in a game.”

Peklar asserts that no one has done what Scorn has set out to do. Peklar is not only interested in capturing the look and feel of Giger’s twisted work but also the meaning behind the pieces.

“Giger’s visual influence can be seen in many forms, from movies to games, but only superficially, to represent aliens, monsters maybe some strange planet, etc. Nobody truly dealt and realized Giger’s work thematically,” Peklar says. “His work is the most fascinating part but always sidelined, never the focus.”

Director Ridley Scott might take issue with Peklar’s comments, especially since so much of Alien‘s world is based on Giger’s unique vision, but even those movies don’t quite delve into the full breadth of the artist’s work, which often portrayed human beings in a physical, often erotic, relationship with machines, a style the artist called the “biomechanical.”

Indeed, you can see Giger’s “biomechanical” style in the way Scorn‘s protagonist “plugs into” an exoskeleton made of bone in the XSX trailer or how he sticks his arm inside of a terminal, veins like spaghetti running through the “computer’s” circuits to activate a machine in gameplay footage from 2017.

“It’s not about alien worlds, no matter how many people think that’s what his art is about,” Peklar explains. “There is a much more important subtext to it. It’s about the interweaving of human beings and technology. The organism as a structure that defined our existence up to this point, fused with our own mechanical creations in a ridiculous dance of libido and death. Freudian concepts that both move and terrify us.”

If Giger’s work emphasized the symbiosis between the living and the mechanical, the less well-known Beksiński was more interested in man’s connection to death. Many of his pieces, which often depicted dystopian settings riddled with skeletons and corpses presided over by red, bleeding skies, seem to have a singular focus: the apocalypse and what comes after.

Beksiński loved to paint decaying bodies and skeletal figures stripped of the features that once made them human, like faces and skin. One particularly haunting painting depicts a man’s eyeballs spilling — or perhaps growing out like roots — from their sockets in messy ropes of red. Beksiński’s work is likely the most responsible for Scorn‘s faceless protagonist, whose body is mostly made up of skinless muscle tissue and nerves, with the bones of a naked ribcage protruding from his chest.

Peklar tapped concept designer Filip Acovic to create the look of Scorn, from the levels to the protagonist to the weapons, but the goal wasn’t to just produce a “mere homage to Giger” or Beksiński, as the director told Shacknews in May.

“[Giger and Beksinski] are certainly the two main visual influences but their work was not chosen because it looks cool but because different aspects of their work relate to various themes and ideas in Scorn. We also tried to create our own style,” Peklar told Rock.Paper.Shotgun.

Peklar tells Den of Geek that he believes “the art style should always be in service of the themes and the ideas of the game.” But what is Scorn actually about? Peklar is more secretive about the game’s plot, which will unfold through environmental storytelling as opposed to cinematics. In fact, the director wishes he could have kept the game’s whole existence a secret for much longer than he did.

Since Scorn was announced in 2014 for PC, it has gone through two Kickstarter crowd funding campaigns and was initially set to be released as a two-part experience before announcing a full release on Xbox Series X and Xbox Game Pass in May.

“The reason you heard about the game in 2014, 2016, and 2017 was because we were running out of resources so we had to show it and gather interest so we could convince people to invest in the studio. I said it quite a few times, if I had the all the resources needed to develop the game without public knowing about it I most certainly would. You would be probably hearing about the game for the first time now and thinking it’s a new game.”

Yet, six years of cryptic trailers haven’t betrayed the secrets of a game that was “designed around the idea of being thrown into the world.” Like the Giger and Beksiński pieces that inspired him, Scorn‘s macabre dreamscapes may defy explanation, according to Peklar.

“Like the best of nightmares, that surreal imagery will start playing with your psyche the more you play the game,” Peklar told Shacknews. “When you wake up from a nightmare it’s really hard to define what you dreamt, only snippets remain, and the feeling of anxiety. That is something we are trying to recreate.”

In the Shacknews interview, Peklar compared the feeling of traversing through Scorn‘s work to the hectic opening Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece Suspiria: “It’s a montage of sights and sounds that creates the uneasy feeling. Nothing is set up story-wise and nothing truly graphic is happening. It just is.”

While Peklar looked to horror classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill for the environmental storytelling that ties Scorn together, Peklar told PC Gamer in 2017 that he wasn’t interested in a scripted story for the game:

���We are not trying to push traditional plot-driven narrative. That is where these games fail for me. Writing an interesting story requires a good writer, and game developers or writers that specialize in games writing are not very good. If they were, they would write a book or a screenplay. That’s the right medium for the job. Games for me are about interactivity and telling you a story through it.”

Ultimately, what Scorn‘s story is about may not be as important as what players take away from it. Peklar says that he’s ultimately happy to let “players to give their interpretation of the game.”

Giger and Beksiński aren’t the only influences on Scorn, according to the director, who says filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Dario Argento, and John Carpenter are also major inspirations.

“Cronenberg’s main concept that puts our organism at the center of human existence and Giger’s bio structures intersect in many ways,” Peklar says. “Lynch’s surrealness captures the strangeness of the world we inhabit and an oneiric sense of our own being.”

Peklar also cites surrealist writers Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, whom he says “mostly dealt with the absurdity and weirdness of human existence in this mysterious universe.” Then there’s horror writer Thomas Ligotti, “who deals with all the horrors that come with it,” and the dystopian J.G. Ballard, who “bounds it all together in technological nightmares of sex, violence, and decay.”

What we’ve seen and heard of Scorn so far points to this year’s most twisted game, perhaps even the most uncomfortable visual experience ever released on a console. As I rewatched the footage of the game in preparation for this article, I wondered whether Peklar was worried that gamers would find the finished product too revolting to complete or even play at all. Then I was hit with an even darker thought: was there anything in Scorn that was too fucked up for even Peklar?

When I ask Peklar whether there’s been anything he decided to cut from the game because it went too far, the director simply answers, “I’m hoping for that day to come. Either my imagination is too limited or I have become too numb.”

Scorn is out later this year for Xbox Series X and PC.

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The post How Scorn Turned the Art of H.R. Giger into a Nightmarish Horror Game World appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2GEEobG

[mindthump]

Princeton/Adobe technology will let you edit voices like text http://ift.tt/2rBHCzw

VIDEO

Technology developed by Princeton University computer scientists may do for audio recordings of the human voice what word processing software did for the written word and Adobe Photoshop did for images.

“VoCo” software, still in the research stage, makes it easy to add or replace a word in an audio recording of a human voice by simply editing a text transcript of the recording. New words are automatically synthesized in the speaker’s voice — even if they don’t appear anywhere else in the recording.

The system uses a sophisticated algorithm to learn and recreate the sound of a particular voice. It could one day make editing podcasts and narration in videos much easier, or in the future, create personalized robotic voices that sound natural, according to co-developer Adam Finkelstein, a professor of computer science at Princeton. Or people who have lost their voices due to injury or disease might be able to recreate their voices through a robotic system, but one that sounds natural.

An earlier version of VoCo was announced in November 2016. A paper describing the current VoCo development will be published in the July issue of the journal Transactions on Graphics (an open-access preprint is available).

How it works (technical description)

VoCo allows people to edit audio recordings with the ease of changing words on a computer screen. The system inserts new words in the same voice as the rest of the recording. (credit: Professor Adam Finkelstein)

VoCo’s user interface looks similar to other audio editing software such as the podcast editing program Audacity, with a waveform of the audio track and cut, copy and paste tools for editing. But VoCo also augments the waveform with a text transcript of the track and allows the user to replace or insert new words that don’t already exist in the track by simply typing in the transcript. When the user types the new word, VoCo updates the audio track, automatically synthesizing the new word by stitching together snippets of audio from elsewhere in the narration.

VoCo is is based on an optimization algorithm that searches the voice recording and chooses the best possible combinations of phonemes (partial word sounds) to build new words in the user’s voice. To do this, it needs to find the individual phonemes and sequences of them that stitch together without abrupt transitions. It also needs to be fitted into the existing sentence so that the new word blends in seamlessly. Words are pronounced with different emphasis and intonation depending on where they fall in a sentence, so context is important.

Advanced VoCo editors can manually adjust pitch profile, amplitude and snippet duration. Novice users can choose from a predefined set of pitch profiles (bottom), or record their own voice as an exemplar to control pitch and timing (top). (credit: Professor Adam Finkelstein)

For clues about this context, VoCo looks to an audio track of the sentence that is automatically synthesized in artificial voice from the text transcript — one that sounds robotic to human ears. This recording is used as a point of reference in building the new word. VoCo then matches the pieces of sound from the real human voice recording to match the word in the synthesized track — a technique known as “voice conversion,” which inspired the project name, VoCo.

In case the synthesized word isn’t quite right, VoCo offers users several versions of the word to choose from. The system also provides an advanced editor to modify pitch and duration, allowing expert users to further polish the track.

To test how effective their system was a producing authentic sounding edits, the researchers asked people to listen to a set of audio tracks, some of which had been edited with VoCo and other that were completely natural. The fully automated versions were mistaken for real recordings more than 60 percent of the time.

The Princeton researchers are currently refining the VoCo algorithm to improve the system’s ability to integrate synthesized words more smoothly into audio tracks. They are also working to expand the system’s capabilities to create longer phrases or even entire sentences synthesized from a narrator’s voice.

Fake news videos?

Disney Research’s FaceDirector allows for editing recorded facial expressions and voice into a video (credit: Disney Research)

A key use for VoCo might be in intelligent personal assistants like Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana, or for using movie actors’ voices from old films in new ones, Finkelstein suggests.

But there are obvious concerns about fraud. It might even be possible to create a convincing fake video. Video clips with different facial expressions and lip movements (using Disney Research’s FaceDirector, for example) could be edited in and matched to associated fake words and other audio (such as background noise and talking), along with green screen to create fake backgrounds.

Adobe has not announced availability of a commercial version of VoCo, or integration into Adobe Premiere Pro (or FaceDirector).

Zeyu Jin, a Princeton graduate student advised by Finkelstein, will present the work at the Association for Computing Machinery SIGGRAPH conference in July. The work at Princeton was funded by the Project X Fund, which provides seed funding to engineers for pursuing speculative projects. The Princeton researchers collaborated with scientists Gautham Mysore, Stephen DiVerdi, and Jingwan Lu at Adobe Research.

Abstract of VoCo: Text-based Insertion and Replacement in Audio Narration

Editing audio narration using conventional software typically involves many painstaking low-level manipulations. Some state of the art systems allow the editor to work in a text transcript of the narration, and perform select, cut, copy and paste operations directly in the transcript; these operations are then automatically applied to the waveform in a straightforward manner. However, an obvious gap in the text-based interface is the ability to type new words not appearing in the transcript, for example inserting a new word for emphasis or replacing a misspoken word. While high-quality voice synthesizers exist today, the challenge is to synthesize the new word in a voice that matches the rest of the narration. This paper presents a system that can synthesize a new word or short phrase such that it blends seamlessly in the context of the existing narration. Our approach is to use a text to speech synthesizer to say the word in a generic voice, and then use voice conversion to convert it into a voice that matches the narration. Offering a range of degrees of control to the editor, our interface supports fully automatic synthesis, selection among a candidate set of alternative pronunciations, fine control over edit placements and pitch profiles, and even guidance by the editors own voice. The paper presents studies showing that the output of our method is preferred over baseline methods and often indistinguishable from the original voice.