Category: Ramblings

Writing from the glands of scientific theory

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His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. -W. Faulkner

Recently, I’ve been quite busy working on a script narrative for a computer game that I’ve been working on for nearly 2 years now. It’s not the same game that I started out with. Indeed, I have had several major changes in direction, each turn became a personal revelation why the other idea just didn’t work for me.

One could look and say that I was fickle. Ultimately, I couldn’t concern myself with it whether it was true or not. For what is ‘fickle’ if only an external point of view used to categorise, and thus predict future behaviour? Why should I, of all people, predict my future behaviour?

One thing that I’ve learned is that the creative process is a process of thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling bounce off each other and influence each other in kind. From thinking and feeling, we come upon that collection of intuitions that we may call instinct.

In writing, of which I know little about, I have been informed that there are types of writers who are plotters, and those that are pantsers. I’ve discovered that I’m a little of both.

In animation, of which I know much about, there are two animation methods called pose-to-pose, and straight-ahead. As an animator, I don’t work exclusively with one method over another. These methods are not techniques per se, but the only two ways of thinking about technique. Hence, as an animator, you are use both principles in order to find multifarious methods suited for the works that you want to do.

Whether you take concepts such as these strictly or loosely, the most important thing for the artist is knowing how and why these concepts are applied. I call this the Grey Area, because there is no right or wrong, only why something is working or not.

The Grey Area is like the Grey Matter — our brain — where any external concept floating out there in the world can plop down and relax. It is our little private room where we can do anything we want with these concepts, and no one has to know about them. Privacy is key, because privacy is what makes it special to oneself and potentially to the rest of your external world. As far as philosophy and analysis is concerned, I confine myself to these coarse principles of creativity. I’m happy to let ambiguous concepts mutate and evolve in the Grey Area.

Unfortunately, because of that loose creative disposition, I become irritated by over-analytical people. Out there abounds articles of a scientific bent which seek to ‘optimise audience-user engagement’ and ‘define and measure suspense (anxiety) in terms of durability’. Presumptuous titles adorn most of these presumptuous articles, and sometimes follow a template such as: “How Science is Helping Art…”, ‘Art’ being things brought on by the creative process, I would assume.

The life that gives breath to these articles is a superciliousness of these business-minded scribblers who use the authority of science to convince us of what they think the bottom line art is supposed to be. Go scrounge a few measurements, researches, testimonies, call it science if you will; but what was it that caused them to think that art was made to catalyze ‘unconscious involuntary responses‘, or ‘meet audience expectation’? If art had to exercise techniques in manipulation, and to some degree it has to, why does this seem like the overriding function of art? Why does a biological and psychological research into, say, the ‘fear-anxiety process’ infer that such stimulus must be pandered to at all?

The idea that science is serving the purposes of art is one of willful ignorance: even if scientific researches don’t objectively presume to understand or even define art, but only to observe its effects, why are the results of its conclusions always encourage ‘scientifically minded’ people to presume that artists need to act on these effects? Let’s be honest and perceive that science does not conduct its business to serve art. Instead, its very insistence seeks to bring itself above art by defining it, by saying, “I know you better than you know yourself. This is what you really need.”

And that’s the point when I say, no, I don’t. You can tell me what makes me cry in a movie, but you can’t tell me if I should be crying at all. You can push all my buttons to make me keep from pressing the stop button on this crappy movie for a few seconds longer, but you can’t tell me that it’s truly worthwhile watching. And if we, as artists, keep conversing in the thoughtless language of statistics and obsessive yet irrelevant analysis, pretty soon that’s all ‘Art’ is going to become

(If it isn’t already.)

 

 

Tokyo Ghoul – 5 Years After

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I had started out as a freelance in my previous company, and then a year later, I became a permanent staff as a CG supervisor. A CG supervisor’s responsibilities may encompass many things. Or, inversely, may encompass only a narrow field. This depends on the company’s expectations from the role and the person. As such, some write certain things on paper, but are not carried out in reality, and vice-versa.

As a technical person in a supervisory role, I naturally supervised everything I had competent skills in. This meant everything in CG post-production, whether it would be as high-level as a pipeline development, or low-level as switching out a heat sinks from defective computers. This is just my nature. I like fixing, and designing things as well. There were some things that I initially didn’t always look forward to, like production shoots, but it was my job. And in the end, I learned to like it as much as a computer geek possibly can.

Through the intervening 5 years, the role remained as broad as I was. There was no need to do less work. In Sporty Drive, I had taken more responsibilities than before, but no more than a CG supervisor of my expectations would have. This would be the only project in 5 years that I can confidently assert that gave me a sufficient level of satisfaction after its completion. But from then on, as if on the downward phase of a sine wave, it became a challenge of enduring the tedium of the advertising world.

Tokyo Ghoul was the last major project I worked on in that studio. And I mention this because it serves as an end reference point for my role as CG supervisor just before I left. We hired a new great TD, originally from Weta, and both worked — in tandem with the main studio in Japan — on some shots for Ghoul. Our major task was rigging, though we also did some animation, too. Although I had been usually the one to work on rigging in the past, the studio execs and producer wanted to leverage our new TD’s expertise and occupational history to impress our Japanese counterparts, so all of the rigging work was assigned to him.

I was left to become a visual effects producer of sorts. I helped write the final visual effects breakdown; since our work was technical in nature, I wrote documentation and emails explaining the technical concepts to a non-technical Japanese translator: what problems we were having, the details of what we need, what the rigs are meant to do, etc. I created video tutorials for workflow suggestions (that sometimes had nothing to do with rigging, but simply a knowledge exchange between CG artists), and for explaining the rigs we were delivering. It echoed my Lifeway CG teaching days.

(I also did some animation: when we couldn’t afford to get animators in, I took over and animated a few shots in the end.)

You can say that my role was largely educational and social. It was challenging and it was important as well. I’m aware of that, and I’m fine with it. But this isn’t the sort of thing that I’d been wishing for. In fact, this was certainly a step in the wrong way, and a step that I had been forced to make gradually over the years.

The execs do not have any sense (tactically or strategically) for technicalities of CG production, so they habitually nod their heads in feigned consonance whenever I relate anything related to technology or software. Thus it becomes a difficult proposition to build anything of substance in an environment where pipeline is only just a word bandied about creative directors who want to sound cool among production people. It’s not real enough for execs; it’s not as real as clients’ whims, it’s not as real as the debates of the philosophy of creativity that I used to hear in our open-space office, it’s not even as real as promised money.

I am not exaggerating when I say that though I had been coding the studio’s pipeline for 5 years, the execs have assumed that I don’t actually code, and perhaps they think I just download plugins and scripts. Anyone who truly knows my development work will probably laugh at that bit of irony. And I’m laughing a bit, too. (Of course, never mind the 10 odd years prior of doing code; to some that’s ancient history.)

Perhaps they lacked confidence in my professional pedigree, or they didn’t know enough to understand any other aspiration apart from theirs. Perhaps, perhaps. Either way, I saw the trajectory of where I’d end up, and if I wouldn’t be out of a job due to redundancy, I would have been out of my mind in boredom.

So, in the end, when an opportunity presented itself to do a bit of original coding related to Iray, Janus, and LightWave, I took on a contract, despite its short term.

I think there’s a point when many factors for quitting converge. But some seem so charged with emphatic resonance that you’d think that was the primary reason for changing your job (or your life). People might say they hated working with so-and-so, or got paid peanuts, or felt no respect from others, or the workplace was stressful. But all of them helped to make it worse, until at one point, not any one of those factors is going to be enough to make it better. When the bad stuff accumulates, it hardens after a time. Then, even if they worked on getting new tables, lamps, decors, heaters, hardware, software, or whatever to make it seem that they’re addressing issues, everything wrong has accumulated to the point none of it matters. Because none of them, by themselves, matter anyway. As one the execs — an example of irony if I ever saw one — used to pontificate: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And so truly, it is: when the parts are faulty, the whole is more faulty than the parts.

Never forget.

 

Quiet air

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What cold light is…

What cold light is.

Aging past desperation. Someone’s idea of excitement is a rusty barrel of boredom. Searching for air to breathe, gasping for time to breathe. Hoping like a dying man. Choosing like a prisoner.

Writing notes, pathetic to the immensity of slipping time. It helps to hold on to that dream this morning. But the immensity sees the notes away, displacing all things.

The grieving of the stoic face. Someone’s smile that is impossible to share. Running to and fro futility and stupor, up and down promises and neglect.

The quiet air full of prequel wishes.

Iteration

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Iteration is the creative process of improving the work in incremental steps. I don’t know if it’s truly a buzzword, but from where I’m standing, it’s always buzzing around. But I think that iteration means something different depending on where you’re standing.

In an advertising agency, for example, the creative team goes through their own rounds of iteration, brainstorming ideas, solidifying them visually through thumbs for internal meetings, then a concept board (if it’s a TVC) to be cleared with client, then upon feedback, work the process up to a storyboard. The creative process is completely internal in that they have full control over their workflow with the client giving feedback. Ask the creative director what iteration means for her workflow, and she’ll tell you “it’s working up the Idea in small steps, making sure, all the while, the client is kept in the loop and making appropriate feedback, which we then apply, and advance the Idea into a final storyboard to be produced.” So far, so good.

In the post-production shop, the process is pretty much the same, only a bit more complex, naturally; we deal with lots of technical elements. So while an agency might have a single pipeline we have at last four going almost concurrently, and those pipelines intermingle with each other. We have models to be made, rigging to be applied to models, animation to be applied to the rig, models to be shaded, shaded models to be lit, whole scenes to render, renders to be comped, effects to be designed and comped, etc. And that’s a standard bread-and-butter job. Let’s not get into things like simulations, matchmoving, rotoscoping, and the like.

Now imagine the same creative director is working with a post-production shop to produce the TVC. Ask the same question, “What is iteration?” She’ll answer, non-verbatim, with this expectation: “I want to see the final product very soon, and iterate that until it becomes better.”

Because the post-production process is unknown to her, she doesn’t realise that we have many final ‘products’ to iterate over: models have their own iteration-cycle, distinct from the animation iteration-cycle; so is look development, so is effects development; and these come together as a ‘master’ development pipeline with a separate iteration-cycle as well. She doesn’t automatically think to apply her own iterative workflow principle to the post-production side because they are uninformed. But because they prefer not to know, they remain at arm’s length from the post-production group, as distanced as they themselves, as creative teams, are to their clients, who are equally indifferent of their process. The indifference is passed down from client to agency, from agency to post-production, generally speaking.

Now, all this time, I’ve been using the agency’s creative director as my example. This is not a fair emphasis, by the way, though it surely makes the point clear, and many agencies relate this way to post-production houses. But you will also find directors, be it art directors, TVC directors, or anyone calling the ‘creative shots’ are just as guilty of this indifference. But the worse of all, it should be noted, is that the indifference occurs within a post-production group, as some of the upper crust only pay lip-service to the very technical nature of their own operation. Though I began with the ignorance of an agency creative director, she is the least guilty of them all.

The post-production upper crust might have done well to learn the internal creative process of the agency. But I think they condescended to think they could be anything but the client, and thus distancing themselves from their own post-production group. Perhaps by assuming the superior client role, they thought can eke something creative out of the ‘headphone-hooded geeks’.

The agency enjoys a creative process that they themselves have built and enforce in order to serve their own purposes because doing so will yield a better product for the client and for themselves. Yet, the post-production group gets served up onto a plate of uninformed demands by uninformed folks, left undefended by the upper crust who are just as uninformed; and it would have yielded poor results if not for talent and lots unnecessary personal sacrifices. But even sacrifices have their limits.

Anyone who demands, “I want you to go hard out so you can get me the final product tomorrow, so I can iterate/nitpick/pixel-fuck that until it becomes better” does not know what iteration means and lacks the discipline of imagination necessary to mix the creative aesthetic with the highly technical processes, which is what this industry is about.

 

Over Time

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I think that when I was younger all that mattered was doing a good job. As I grew older, I wondered if I was missing something. I don’t mean promotions or salary raises. I thought of Time, that forever deal that no one gets to turn away from. I lie to my side at night and, before I go to sleep, I hear my heart beating under me. I wonder why I feel it more keenly now. I think of the day I finally stop trying to sleep and die. I wonder if everything I’ve done since would have been worth it, even just for me.

The strife of overtime is more than just about money, or boredom, or even health, or all the bad reasons why we burn Time this way. Rising onto the surface is waste: Life wasted on things I don’t love; on vanity, on mediocrity, on lusts, on fear.

I love differently, I love different things, as I bear Time. Now, the world has become unintelligible and malicious, and I feel as though I am being born yet again unto myself, coming out of a mystical womb with hysterical infantile cries that I myself don’t hear. The pain of a rebellious newborn — never known — is now remembered; dissidence grows desperately, yearning never to die with an old heart.

If ever I run free, in the present I will live, and all my moments will be as aeons are: more Time than I can ever hope to ask for.

 

 

 

Cold Light

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The Cold was a short poem I wrote in front of my workstation one night. Fittingly, I wrote it in my code editor.

The poem has given me much to remember, and through remembrance it holds me to account for all my present moments. It is where this blog’s name comes from, although at the time, I didn’t really consider it beyond the poem’s literal imagery.

The poem talks about dying in the middle of any conceivable night, when the world has gone to bed, except you (me), and the city lights, the office fluorescents still wave-pulsating, are droning a tiny sound. When death comes over, there is no noise above the silence, so that all is silent, and no one hears you, or sees you, depart.

I remember that one cold night. I was surrounded by the darkness, which I preferred when I worked late. The air was air-conditioned cold against the skin of my night body — a body that loses heat in expectation of sleep. I looked to my right and saw the dead streets, wet after the rain, yellow-orange under lights. I looked down to my hand resting on the keyboard. I saw the monitor drape its light over me. Underneath the office table, lit blue by the computer’s power light, was my sleeping bag.

I have cause to remember this poem, because I always come to the moment of wanting to write it again. Reading it, I find nothing needs to be added, nothing needs needs to be trimmed. It says everything I need to feel at the moment. To read about a quiet death in a quiet room filled with computer fans humming, fills me with an alarm that sounds at the back of my heart. I can hear a humungous gong, a devil screaming in another plane. But I see no vision except the physical sparkles of particles and aura around my eyes, which streak back and forth causing me to turn: is someone there?

The devil is screaming. Or is it my voice I’m hearing?

If I go on like this, I will die much like how I describe it myself. No one will close the lights before my eyes shutter themselves from knowledge of them. I will inherit this sadness in passing — forever. This cold light is the sky of a poor life. Only in leaving this room can there be hope of better chapters.

 

Refining the definition of voice

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I went one of the local libraries the other day with the intent of spending my morning there reading, and the rest of the afternoon drawing. As I moved closer to the book shelves, for one reason or another, I remained in the graphic novels area – a general genre of books that I have very little interest in. I still like some comic books: Asterix, Calvin & Hobbes, Far Side, Peanuts, TinTin, B.C., etc; I grew up with these. Thanks to my brother I was exposed to more serious minded comics like The Light and Darkness War, whose style and tone was, to a young teenager, something like a wide awakening – a baptism of imagination, if you’d like.  The panels were watercoloured, the lines were thick-thin, and the prose was poetic enough for me at the time to appreciate the authors’ collaborative voice.

I took some of this with me in my days in a fine arts college – my course was actually more oriented to graphic arts – and cultivated the inspiration as much as an under-achieving art student could. But diving into the labour force after college essentially marked the end of my adventures with serious graphic novels: comics which portray violence – often extreme – and gore, sex and explicit language. My foray into computer graphics turned my attention away from drawn stories.

It was only recently that, after longing to re-imagine myself and reassess my goals, I wanted to go back to basics and start drawing in earnest again, after ten years of professional CG work. And that’s where I found myself in front of the graphic novels area staring at a copy of DMZ. It featured mercenaries, and it described a dystopian landscape – I sneered on finding out that the story was set in NYC. NYC is over-mentioned, you see: ’nuff said.

I read the whole book. And despite the clumsiness of lines, the inexpert  description of form, and even the cliche of its language, I appreciated it mainly because it touched on subjects that I had swirling in my brain: guns-for-hire and wastelands of worlds. When I had finished I put it back on the shelf.

I wasn’t satisified: I wanted another to feed my mind. I laid eyes on one book. I wasn’t fully interested in the cover, so I scanned the shelf a bit more. I spent five minutes flipping through pages, then my eyes passed on the book again. I thought, “Hey, look, there’s a tired-looking Afghan with an AK47”. So, on account of sighting an AK47 I picked up The Photographer and started the story that would prove to be the closest thing to a second awakening.

The book is not a miraculous work. It’s not the most outstanding piece of literature I’ve read: I’ve been impacted more by other books, far deeper, and far longer. But this, being a graphic novel, it impacted me far more than any graphic novel I’ve flipped across.

As I read, it felt it difficult not to compare it with the recently-read DMZ. I became acutely aware of how dissatisfied I was with the other book, and how much more refined and expertly Emmanuel Guibert, the illustrator and visual director of The Photographer, had drawn, and – more surprisingly – had written the story of Didier Lefèvre. He had interspersed his comics with Didier’s photographs as he told of Didier’s travels to Afghanistan. Because the illustrations realistically depict people in a simplified (read: masterfully economical) style, the black-and-white photographs jolt you to the palpable sense that the story is really non-fiction. It doesn’t just fill in the blanks between the discrepancy that a photo-essay’s pictorial gaps suggests; it puts in a much more lucid level of storytelling.

Despite the fact that the subject matter was about doctors and a photographer, and that the only shot fired in anger was from an “asshole ‘muj'”, The Photographer thoroughly impressed, and more importantly, inspired me. In the CG field there is so much emphasis on detail, which involves real-world fidelity be it in photographic, or otherwise just physical terms. If it isn’t that, then it’s about resolving our work methods to conform to some pipeline: yet another detail to abide by. But within The Photographer, I found none of that. In the first place, the illustrations were minimalist, and yet I found excellent form posture, action, and human expression; detail was only necessary when it was necessary. In the second, the photographs were not used because they were photographic in quality, but because they, as photographs, told their part of the story. In the third place, the style of telling was uniquely individual: it wasn’t like one of those monthly high-profile, run-of-the-mill animated-feature-films (where almost every animated character motions with his hands and eyebrows the same (freakin’) way). The writing was powerful, brutally honest: honest enough that in two parts in the story it made me sad enough to tear up. A comic book has never had that effect, and I never thought it could have.

The Photographer’s impact on me as a reader and as an artist has caused me to re-evaluate what I am really about as a creative person. I would like to think I was a real artist, but I know that I am just a mercenary CG man with good artisan and technical skills. I’m not sure how much of being a professional contributes to creativity, but I can say that this book has forced me to confront the numerous habits and rules I have adopted as a professional. It is easy enough to say to think outside the square, than to realise that you are the square.