Riley Park Hell Funnies, Part 6

Working a Saturday afternoon one summer when an American comes in. He decides to pass some time chatting while someone else fills his camper.

"Can y'all tell me where the Canada Interstate Number 1 is?" He asks.
"Sure", I reply, "The Trans Canada Highway is at the set of lights at the top of the hill. Are you going to Banff?"
"Yeah, I am going to Banff - how'd you know that?"
"It's just the most common question I get. You'll want to turn left at those lights."

We pause a bit as he accepts my wisdom in all things spatial.

"Y'all got a beautiful country up here" he opines.
"Thanks, I like it alot".
Not really listening to me, he continues, "Yeah, I really like how there aren't any coloreds up here."

I choke abit, not sure if I really just heard this guy say what he said.

"You kept them out of your country like we should have done ours. I'm from Baton Rouge and they are all over the place there. You can't shake a stick without hitting one."
"um" I said. He still hasn't really looked at me to see the wide-eyed expression of shock and disbelief on my face.
"This whole trip has been great. Canada is nice and I also got to see the white heartland of America. It's been like a breath of fresh air."
"Your gas is $XXXX sir" I say, relieved that the camper has finished.
"Here you go, thanks for the directions, take care." he says.

And then he left. At no time would an outside observer who had not been eavesdropping think that anything was amiss. He never raised his voice, got angry or swore. He was unfailingly warm and friendly - and he was also completely racist. It was a little spooky.

On Movies, Animation and the Open Source Movement

Prediction: Within 5 years, someone will release a feature length animated movie that was created entirely by a single person.

True, that person will be using an assload of computers, but as someone who currently has five working computers in the home (and access to twice that many if I were doing something as cool as making a movie), access to many computers is not really a hardship. If you’re willing to dig, you can find Pentium IIIs for about twenty bucks a piece. With some basic networking hardware and open source software you could have your own render farm for less than the cost of a single high end computer now. It would be about as powerful as the hardware Pixar used to make Toy Story. Make sure you have a RAID and offsite backup though, or there will be tears.

Of course, the hardware isn’t really the issue. Whether this person is judged as a nerd with an agenda or a visionary filmaker depends entirely on the story. A good story will be rightly hailed (and the trail blazed will be followed by many others - some good, some bad). A poor story will be judged by it’s tools, rather than it’s maker. This might set the phenomenom back a few years, but it won’t stop it. Too many people who want to be filmmakers combined with the ever increasing power of computers and software will see to that.

Initially these pioneers will have to do everything themselves. This is why I’m not one of them. I have no skills as an artist, and no amount of computer hardware is going to make me one. I just don’t have the talent and nobody is going to sit through two hours of stick figures, no matter how well rendered they are.

But things will open up. Some people are wonderful artists, but that may be all they do. Nobody is going to sit and stare at a beautifully rendered set (or a wonderfully rendered character floating in space) for two hours.

We need to get these people working together. When I can buy a fully realised set of cowboys on a fully realised western set, then I can go and attach it to the wonderful western I’ve written. Pass the artist a couple of bucks, or a percentage and I’m off and running with my garage full of computers. If the models are all built to some kind of standard, then many people can pool their talent in an ad hoc manner to make movies. If the distributed community of Linux developers can make an operating system as good as Windows, then the movie buffs of the internet can make a movie as good as anything by Warner Brothers.

You could even finance the movie over the net. Auctioning off points on eBay for example.

I would not be at all surprised to find that people are already doing this. Legend has it that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow started off this way prior to being found by a major studio.

I know a couple who could probably pull this off by themselves if they had the tools. He is a decent enough writer and she’s an accomplished artist. Set them up with someone who could keep a basement full of computers operating and they could make a strange little movie in no time. It would probably involve cute little kittens and bunnies wearing diapers, but it would be a movie.

Want to make things even cheaper? Instead of rendering a fully animated movie, film a live action one. Several movies have been made on the cheap this way. A digital camera, a macintosh with the appropriate software and a lot of time can make you a movie. The internet is full of these kinds of movies. Mostly it's pornography, but people have made real movies, released to theaters and everything, with just that equipment. But lets talk about porn for a moment. The Internet's real strength (aside from allowing people to watch porn without having to leave their homes and risk embarrassment) is to allow rare sexual peccadilloes to flourish. No matter what your particular kink is, you can probably find a video of it somewhere on the internet. The low cost of making the video, along with a global audience, allows would-be pornographers to make movies of even the most bizarre fetish profitably.

Now apply this reasoning to normal movies. If you like a certain genre of movie that is considered unprofitable, you might be able to make it work through cheap production and distribution. Want to make a western? Go ahead, all you need is some people and horses. The idle son of a rancher with some aspiring actor friends could do it in a year. A musical based on the songs of Henry Rollins? Write a script, practice your hollering and find an abandoned factory and go to it (it would be better if you wrote your own songs though, I suspect ol' Henry would sue if he found out). If it is cheap enough, and if you're not completely talentless, you can find an audience.

Blank DVDs are cheap and so is colour printing, I bet you could even mass produce it for all the local video stores. Let the manager have a look and offer him free copies. One day, video stores will have a "local movie" section the way some comic shops currently have "local comic" sections.

I've gotten away from the idea that a single person can do this. How about this: Talent + People + Money = Constant. As one or two of these things goes down, another one has to go up. The sort of visionary who could make a movie by themselves is very rare, being highly talented in numerous, diverse fields. A few people could make a movie if they each have complimentary talents. Hollywood is full of movies made by hacks with access to money and people.

As time goes by, the technology becomes less expensive to buy. The constant goes down as we remove Money from the equation. This is the world we are in now. The constant is now low enough for a single person, and this also means it's also easier than ever for multiple people to get together and make movies.

If I had the time, I would put my money where my mouth is. I have the hardware, I know people who can use the software. Of the diverse talents whom I know I can count (off the top of my head) writers, actors, costume designers, set producers, grips and sound engineers. I bet we could fake a lot of the other requirements.

Writing Lots About How I Don't Write Lots

I haven't been writing much lately, and the writing I have done hasn't been that good. Some of it falls into the "I had toast, it was crunchy" category. There's nothing wrong with that if you can make it sound amusing (which I can), I just want to do something more.

So I write about politics. I've started and given up writing about Terri Schiavo a couple of times for example. My thoughts are contradictory and poorly organized, which leads to contradictory, poorly organized posts. I'll give you the short version instead: She died 15 years ago and her body was finally allowed to catch up yesterday. I hope that her relatives can move on in their lives and gain some level of closure. I doubt it though - I predict a "wrongful death" suit is coming.

I wrote a sort of meta-post about other people's writings (namely grog and evilscientist). Both wrote responses defending their actions. Guys, I wasn't trying to suggest that you were wrong, only that there is more than one way to approach these topics. For the record I enjoy both of your styles and I usually get something out of everything you write. You don't need to defend yourselves from me. That you are (defending yourselves) tells me that I wasn't as clear in my writing as I had intended. This is what I get for posting past my bedtime.

I guess I should be glad I don't drink, imagine what a dog's bollocks I would have made of things if I had.

I feel a need to write something and I tend to go through phases where it's like turning on a tap. The words come effortlessly from my mind to the screen and only my typing speed holds me back. Topics range far and wide, from reviews and daily updates, to humorous tales of my past and political or scientific primers.

Currently I'm not in one of those grooves. Writing is difficult, the words come hard and I agonize over every sentence, unsure if that is what I mean to say. I force myself to post when I probably shouldn't and my reputation as a decent writer must suffer for it. Thank god for online quizzes, they give me something to post when I'm like this.

My current writing nadir annoys me because I feel like I have an audience now. When I first started, I could write for weeks without getting any sort of feedback. In the last few months I seem to have passed some kind of threshold and now it's rare when I don't get comments. This holds true even when I'm writing fairly inane stuff. I think this is the penny in the beggar bowl phenomenon - nobody wants to be the first to post a comment, but once somebody has made that leap, others will happily join in. I know several people who got Live Journals primarily to comment on my posts. I like being popular, I want it to continue. I even have a few secret readers. I'm curious as to who they are, whether they know (or knew) me, or if they came across me randomly or from a friend's page as I have done for so many others. I'm not so curious as to scare them off with demands for their identity, mostly because I've been known to anonymously read a few pages myself.