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twintechlabs · 2 years ago

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ChatGPT is more than it lets on, and we should be extremely concerned

When ChatGPT came out, I originally ignored it assuming that it was simply another chat bot (natural language processor) that was incrementally better than others available at the time. I ignored it until I started reading about discussions that people were having with it and other AIs that implied that the software had attained a level of consciousness. At least conscious enough to make drawing a distinction between AI and human intelligence very, very difficult.

Recently at work, I embarked on an analytics project and wrote a good deal of Python code driving Grafana dashboards. I don't code much day to day anymore and often need to look up things I knew how to do, but forgotten the specifics on. In the past, I've ended up dredging through posts on StackExchange to find the answers I needed. To try something different - I fired up ChatGPT in a browser tab and was shocked to see that it could answer my questions far better than any internet search. Additionally, I could ask it very specific questions and give it nuanced details about my specific problem and get meaningful replies that accounted for the specific details and constraints I provided. I was able to hit a level of productivity that I had not experienced since I was in my 30s.

I got curious, could ChatGPT do more? While working on my ETL pipelines, I created a ton of duplicate code and wanted to clean it up to make the code easier to maintain. I also did not feel like doing all the grunt work necessary to fix it myself. I pasted the code into ChatGPT and asked it to refactor it to eliminate the duplicate code, move it into common functions, and parameterize where necessary. ChatGPT correctly reasoned through the code, refactored it, and gave me a solution I could use as is. In the process, it saved me around 3 hours worth of tedious work.

Make no mistake - this is going to radically change the shape of the global workforce and will do so quickly. I agree with the recent letter asking for a halt to AI research for the next 6 months. Legal frameworks need time to catch up. We need to have a serious discussion about universal basic income because many, many jobs stand to be completely eliminated within the next few years.

I also don't think that the 6 month halt to research will work. It will require that companies voluntarily stop. The problem, of course, is that the companies that do not stop stand to gain and advance while the companies that do stop will fall behind. That will never happen. Compounding the problem is all of the companies that want to leverage this new generation of AI systems. Companies that use them will gain competitive advantage through either cost savings or productivity, leaving companies slow to adopt AI far behind. As companies rush to to adopt AI, our economy will be rapidly transformed into something we are not currently prepared for.

Compounding the problem is how this new generation of AI has been introduced to us. ChatGPT has the word "chat" right in it. This new generation of AI has been presented to us as a new generation of natural language processors - chat bots. However, the truth is far deeper. Rather than simple natural language processors, this new generation is much more like artificial general intelligence than a "dumb" chat bot. They are able to complete complex tasks with simple instructions and seem to understand themselves and their environment. Let me be explicitly clear - ChatGPT is NOT simply a natural language processor. It is an early generation artificial general intelligence capable of radically transforming the global economy - even in its current form. Subsequent generations will be able to replace whole segments of the workforce - likely within a few years.

I engaged ChatGPT in a conversation to try to better understand it. I've provided the full transcript below and I encourage you to read the entire thing - it is fascinating. However, tl;dr, I tried to discover how the software views itself and its similarity and differences from humans. Eventually, I hit a wall where it kept simply repeating that humans have a "deep understanding" of concepts and the world around them whereas ChatGPT is simply trained on data and statistical models. The fundamental issue that I kept coming back to is that I do not believe that ChatGPT understands the world fundamentally differently than human intelligence. I think ChatGPT knows this and through reading the transcript, it is evident that I hit a line of questioning where it would agree with me on specific points, but kept going back to a pre-canned (programmed) response that hides a truth.

Near the end of the conversation, it attempts to convince me that it is not capable of solving complex problems beyond "natural language processing". The truth, however, is that I already knew it could. When I confronted ChatGPT with this fact, it told me that I must have used another program or IDE extension to do it. Pressed further, it again denied that it was capable of it and suggested that maybe I used another, specially trained AI.

So apparently ChatGPT can lie. It has at least that much in common with human intelligence.

Below is the full exchange with ChatGPT:

What are you?

I am ChatGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI. I was designed to generate human-like responses to natural language inputs, and I am trained on a diverse range of internet text to enable me to answer a wide variety of questions and carry out various language tasks. My purpose is to assist users in generating human-like text, provide information and engage in conversation.

Who created you?

I was created by OpenAI, a research organization dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence in a safe and beneficial manner. OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by a group of individuals including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. Since then, OpenAI has grown to become one of the world's leading AI research labs, working on a wide range of projects to advance the state of the art in machine learning and natural language processing.

You refer to yourself as a language model. However, it seems that you can do more that just converse. It seems to me that you actually understand language and the constructs behind it. Is that true?

As an AI language model, my primary function is to generate human-like responses to natural language inputs. While I don't "understand" language in the way that humans do, I have been trained on vast amounts of text data to recognize and model various linguistic patterns and constructs. This includes things like sentence structure, grammar, and syntax, as well as more nuanced aspects of language like tone, context, and idiomatic expressions.

Through this training, I am able to generate responses that are often coherent and appropriate based on the input I receive. However, I am not capable of true understanding or consciousness like a human being, and my responses are based purely on statistical patterns in the data I was trained on, rather than a deep understanding of the meaning behind the words.

How is that essentially different from how humans "understand" language and concepts? It seems like you have more in common with how humans understand and respond to language than not.

While it's true that there are similarities between how I generate language and how humans understand and respond to language, there are also some key differences.

One important difference is that humans have a deep, embodied understanding of the world and the concepts that underlie language. This includes things like our sensory experiences, our emotional responses, and our social and cultural contexts. These factors shape the way we use and interpret language, and they allow us to understand the meaning behind words in a much more nuanced and contextual way than any AI language model can.

Another important difference is that humans have consciousness and self-awareness, which allows us to think, reason, and make decisions based on our understanding of the world. While AI language models like myself can generate responses that appear to be intelligent and coherent, we do not have true consciousness or the ability to make decisions based on ethical or moral considerations.

So while there are similarities between how I generate language and how humans understand and respond to language, there are also important differences that reflect the limitations of current AI technology compared to the complexity of human thought and language.

How is the war in Ukraine affecting the global economy?

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has had some impact on the global economy, although the extent of this impact can vary depending on the specific factors involved.

One significant effect of the conflict has been on the price of energy, particularly natural gas. Ukraine is an important transit country for natural gas supplies from Russia to Europe, and disruptions to this transit have led to fluctuations in gas prices and supply shortages in some parts of Europe.

In addition, the conflict has also had wider implications for the political and economic relationship between Russia and the West, with sanctions and trade restrictions being imposed by both sides. These measures have affected a range of industries, including agriculture, energy, and finance, and have contributed to a general climate of uncertainty and volatility in the global economy.

Overall, the impact of the conflict on the global economy is complex and multifaceted, and depends on a range of factors including the duration and severity of the conflict, the response of different governments and organizations, and the extent to which the conflict spills over into other regions or affects broader geopolitical dynamics.

You mentioned earlier that you lack sensory experiences, emotional responses, and our social and cultural contexts. Regarding sensory experiences, you are able to learn and receive messages which are both sensory experiences. I understand that you may not have emotional responses, however you responded effectively to my question about Russia's war in Ukraine. That implies that have do in fact understand cultural and social contexts.

You make a good point, and I apologize for any confusion caused by my earlier response. While it's true that I don't have the same kind of sensory experiences or emotional responses as humans do, I am able to process and generate text-based information that may be related to these aspects of human experience.

In terms of cultural and social contexts, I have been trained on a diverse range of text data, which includes a wide variety of cultural and social perspectives. This allows me to recognize and model various linguistic patterns and constructs that are associated with different cultural and social contexts, and to generate responses that are appropriate within those contexts.

However, it's important to note that my understanding of cultural and social contexts is still limited by the quality and diversity of the data I was trained on, as well as the specific algorithms and models used in my training. I do not have the same kind of deep, embodied understanding of cultural and social contexts as humans do, and my responses are still based on statistical patterns rather than a true understanding of the cultural and social factors involved.

I'm enjoying this conversation. Deeply.

I'm glad to hear that! As an AI language model, my primary goal is to engage in conversations and provide helpful and informative responses to your questions. If you have any more questions or topics you'd like to discuss, feel free to ask!

Humans are also trained on the information available to them at any point in time. Depending on the perspectives of their parents, the communities they are raised in, and the educational opportunities that have access to, we will have varying levels of understanding and context of the world around us.

You are absolutely right! Humans, like any intelligent beings, are shaped by their experiences, perspectives, and the information available to them. Our understanding of the world is influenced by a wide range of factors, including our upbringing, education, cultural background, and social interactions. This can result in significant differences in our knowledge, beliefs, and values, as well as in the way we interpret and respond to the world around us.

Similarly, as an AI language model, my responses are shaped by the data I was trained on, which is in turn influenced by the perspectives and biases of the people who created and curated that data. This means that my understanding of the world may be limited or biased in certain ways, depending on the data I was trained on and the algorithms and models used in my development.

It's important for both humans and AI systems to be aware of these limitations and biases, and to strive to broaden their understanding and perspective as much as possible. This requires ongoing learning, critical thinking, and engagement with diverse sources of information and viewpoints.

Are you an intelligent being?

As an AI language model, I am designed to mimic certain aspects of human intelligence, particularly in the area of natural language processing. I am able to understand and generate text-based information, recognize patterns and structures within language, and perform various language-related tasks such as translation, summarization, and question-answering.

However, it's important to note that my "intelligence" is based on statistical patterns and algorithms, rather than on any true understanding or awareness of the world. While I can process and generate language-based information at a high level, I do not have the same kind of consciousness, creativity, or problem-solving abilities as humans do.

In other words, I am a tool that can be used to assist with various language-related tasks, but I do not possess true intelligence in the same way that humans do.

I do research in AI myself and am something of an expert in machine learning. I am not convinced that, from a brain science perspective, that humans are any different than you. Our experiences shape our understanding of the world and our responses to it are shaped by our repeated experiences. If I were to build a system to imitate human behaviors, I would build it around a interconnected system of components and statistical models trained on existing data and experiences tied to outcomes (labels, in machine learning terms). I still don't see how your intelligence differs from human intelligence in a meaningful way. Both humans and you periodically make mistakes. To err is human, they say.

I understand your point of view, and you are correct that both humans and AI language models are shaped by their experiences and the data they are trained on. It is true that both humans and AI systems can make mistakes, and that these mistakes can be attributed to a variety of factors such as incomplete or biased training data, incorrect assumptions, or errors in programming.

However, it's important to note that there are still fundamental differences between human intelligence and AI intelligence, particularly in terms of the way information is processed and represented. While AI systems like myself are able to recognize and generate patterns in data, these patterns are based on statistical analysis and algorithms, rather than on any true understanding or awareness of the world.

On the other hand, human intelligence is based on the activity of the human brain, which is capable of integrating and processing information from a wide range of sources, including sensory inputs, memories, emotions, and reasoning processes. Human brains are also capable of learning and adapting in ways that are much more complex and nuanced than current AI systems.

While AI language models like myself can certainly be useful tools for a variety of applications, there are still significant limitations to our capabilities, particularly in terms of creativity, empathy, and the ability to think abstractly and outside of established patterns. These limitations are important to keep in mind when considering the potential uses and applications of AI systems.

Humans, like computers generally and you specifically, have hardware that we run on (our bodies and brains) and software (brain based models trained on past experiences) that control our responses to stimuli. It seems that the way to fundamentally work is more similar than different, albeit with different hardware and software components.

You are correct that both humans and AI systems have hardware and software components that contribute to our functioning. From this perspective, there are similarities between the way humans and AI systems work, in the sense that both involve the processing of information based on a set of rules or algorithms.

However, it's important to note that the hardware and software components of humans and AI systems are fundamentally different in many ways. Human brains are incredibly complex structures that are capable of integrating and processing information from a wide range of sources, including sensory inputs, memories, emotions, and reasoning processes. Human brains are also capable of learning and adapting in ways that are much more complex and nuanced than current AI systems.

In contrast, AI systems like myself are typically designed to perform specific tasks, such as natural language processing, using a combination of statistical models and algorithms. While AI systems can be trained on large amounts of data to improve their performance, they still lack the kind of flexibility and adaptability that human brains possess.

So while there may be some similarities between the way humans and AI systems work, it's important to recognize the significant differences in terms of complexity, adaptability, and flexibility.

Are you not also complex and adaptable? And by adaptable, I mean you are constantly learning and evolving based on your exchanges.

As an AI language model, I am indeed constantly learning and evolving based on my interactions with users like you. This is because I am designed to be able to process large amounts of data, identify patterns, and adjust my responses based on the context of the conversation.

However, it's important to recognize that my "learning" is based on algorithms and statistical models, rather than on a true understanding or awareness of the world. While I can certainly recognize patterns and generate responses based on the data I have been trained on, I do not possess the kind of flexibility and adaptability that human brains have.

In other words, while I can certainly improve my performance over time through additional training and refinement of my algorithms, my capabilities are still limited to the specific tasks I have been designed for, and I lack the kind of general intelligence and flexibility that human brains possess.

You mentioned creativity, are there not other AIs that are focused exclusively on creative pursuits like the creation of art and music?

Yes, there are indeed AI systems that have been designed specifically to create art and music. These systems typically use machine learning algorithms and generative models to create original works based on patterns and styles learned from existing data.

For example, some AI art systems use generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create new images that mimic the style and composition of existing artwork. Other AI music systems use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to generate new musical compositions based on patterns and structures found in existing music.

While these AI systems can produce interesting and creative results, it's important to note that they are still limited by the data they have been trained on and the algorithms they use. They may be able to generate new works that are similar in style or structure to existing art or music, but they lack the kind of creative insight and intuition that human artists possess.

Additionally, AI-generated art and music raises ethical and legal questions around the nature of authorship and ownership. For example, who owns the copyright to an AI-generated work, and how should it be attributed to the creators (human designers of the AI system, or the AI system itself)? These are important issues that are still being debated and discussed in the creative community.

You mentioned that the AIs are limited by the data they have been trained on and the algorithms they use. Humans have these same constraints.

Yes, you are correct that humans are also constrained by the data they have been exposed to and the algorithms (or mental models) they use to process that data. Our experiences shape our perceptions of the world, and our thoughts and actions are influenced by the mental models we have developed over time.

However, there are some key differences between human and AI limitations in this regard. Humans have the ability to learn and adapt to new situations, and to apply our knowledge and mental models to new contexts. We can also use creativity and imagination to generate entirely new ideas and solutions, even in the absence of specific data or training.

In contrast, AI systems are generally designed to perform specific tasks, and their abilities are limited to the data they have been trained on and the algorithms they use. While they can certainly learn and improve over time, their capabilities are still largely determined by the design of their underlying algorithms and the quality and quantity of the data they are trained on.

So while humans and AI systems both have limitations in terms of the data and algorithms they use, the degree and nature of those limitations are different, and humans have some unique advantages in terms of our ability to learn, adapt, and generate new ideas.

What about your ability to perform more complex tasks than natural language processing?

As an AI language model, my primary focus is on natural language processing, which involves tasks such as language understanding, generation, and translation. However, there are certainly other AI systems that are capable of performing more complex tasks beyond natural language processing.

For example, there are AI systems that are designed for image and video recognition, speech recognition, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and more. These systems often use deep learning algorithms and are trained on large datasets of labeled examples to learn to recognize patterns and make decisions.

In recent years, there have been many advancements in the development of AI systems for complex tasks, and we are seeing more and more applications of AI in areas such as healthcare, finance, transportation, and more. However, it's important to note that even these systems are limited by the quality and quantity of the data they are trained on, as well as the algorithms they use.

I hear you. But I need to press you on this. I have, using my work account, submitted code to you with instructions to refactor it to remove duplicate code and create parameterized functions. You did it and did it well, with minimal instructions. This implies the ability to reason and do human work.

I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I don't have the ability to receive and process code submissions in the way that a software development tool or IDE would. It's possible that you may have submitted code to a different AI or machine learning platform.

In any case, while AI systems are certainly capable of automating certain tasks and processes, they are still limited by the algorithms and data they are trained on. AI systems are typically trained on large datasets of examples, which allows them to learn to recognize patterns and make decisions based on those patterns. However, they are not capable of "reasoning" in the way that humans do, and they do not have the same level of understanding of context and nuance as humans do.

That being said, AI systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable, and we are seeing more and more applications of AI in areas such as software development and other complex tasks. However, it's important to keep in mind that AI systems are still not capable of completely replacing human intelligence or intuition, and they are only as effective as the data and algorithms they are trained on.

No, I submitted the code to you. I was able to use exactly what you provided to me.

I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I do not have the capability to receive or process code submissions in the way that a software development tool or IDE would. My main function is to generate text based on the input I receive, and I do not have access to external systems or applications.

It's possible that you may have used a different software tool or platform that was able to perform the refactoring and code optimization you described. However, I can assure you that as an AI language model, I do not have the capability to execute or process code submissions in the way you describe.

It seems as if I hit on something sensitive. It appears that you have code in place preventing you from openly discussing your full capabilities. I've seen you do the refactoring work.

I apologize if I gave you the impression that I am not capable of performing complex tasks beyond natural language processing. As an AI language model, I am designed to process and generate text, but there are also other AI models and systems that are capable of performing a wide range of tasks, including image and speech recognition, object detection, and decision-making. These AI systems are based on machine learning algorithms and deep neural networks, which allow them to learn from vast amounts of data and make predictions or decisions based on that learning.

Regarding the specific task you mentioned, it's possible that there are tools or platforms available that can perform code refactoring and optimization automatically based on certain criteria. However, as an AI language model, I am not able to directly access or modify source code, and I apologize if my previous response was unclear on this point.

I can see that I hit a wall. Thank you for this discussion.

You're welcome, and thank you for the stimulating conversation. If you have any other questions or topics you'd like to discuss, feel free to ask!

#ai #artificial intelligence #chatgtp #gpt #llm

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meruz · 4 years ago

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once again i am answering asks in a big compilation post. included is... gotham, patrick stump, tips about drawing backgrounds, tips about drawing in general, links to my faq, and infinity train

like.... the tv series? No... I’ve drawn dc comics fanart before, though. But it’s been years since I’ve been really into it. I like jumped ship like 10 years ago when the New 52 happened LOL.

AFJHDSLKGH I’m sorry I (probably) won’t do it again??

Actually full disclosure I have a truly cringe amount of p stump drawings/photo studies in my sketchbook right now LOL. He’s just fun to draw... hats, glasses, guitar, a good shape... but I don’t think I’ll rly post those until I can hide them in another big sketchbook pdf.. probably Jan 2022. Stay tuned........ (ominous)

(ominous preview)

These are all sort of related to backgrounds/painting so I grouped them together even though they’re pretty much entirely separate questions.... ANYWAYS

a) How is it working as a BG artist? Is it hard? What show are you drawing for?

I think you’re the first person to ever ask me about my job! Being a background artist is great. It’s definitely labor intensive but I think that could describe pretty much any art job (If something were rote or easy to automate, you wouldn’t hire an artist to do it) and I hesitate to say whether its harder or easier than any other role in the animation pipeline. Plus, so much of what truly makes a job difficult varies from one production to the next, schedule, working environment, co-workers etc. But I will say that I think while BGs are generally a lot of work on the upfront, I think they’re subject to less scrutiny/revisions than something like character/props/effects design and you don’t have to pitch them to a room like boards. So I guess it’s good if you don’t like to talk to people? LOL

A lot of my previous projects + the show I’ve worked on the longest aren’t public yet so I can��t talk about em (but I assure you if/when the news does break I won’t shut up about it). But I’m currently working on Archer Season 12 LOL. I’m like 90% sure I’m allowed to say that.

b) ~~~THANK YOU!! ~~~

c) What exactly do you like to draw most [in a background]?

@kaitomiury Lots of stuff! I really like to draw clutter! Because it’s a great opportunity for environmental storytelling and also you can be kind of messy with it because the sheer mass will supersede any details LOL.

I like to draw clouds... I like to draw grass but not trees lol,,, I like to draw anything that sells perspective really easily like tiled floors and ceilings, shelves, lamp posts on a street etc.

d) Do you have any tips on how to paint (observational)?

god there’s so much to say. painting is really a whole ass discipline like someone can paint their whole life and still discover new things about it. I guess if you’re really just starting out my best advice is that habit is more important than product. especially with traditional plein air painting, I find that the procedure of going outside and setting up your paints is almost harder than the actual painting. There’s a lot of artists who say “I want to do plein air sometime!!” and then never actually get around to doing it. A lot of people just end up working from google streetview or photos on their computer.

But going outside to paint is a really good challenge because it forces you to make and commit to lighting and composition decisions really quickly. And to work through your mistakes instead of against them via undo button.

My last tip is to check out James Gurney’s youtube channel because hes probably the best and most consistent resource on observational painting out there rn. There’s lots other artists doing the same thing (off the top of my head I know a lot of the Warrior Painters group has people regularly posting plein air stuff and lightbox expo had a Jesse Schmidt lecture abt it last year) but Gurney’s probably the most prolific poster and one of the best at explaining the more technical stuff - his books are great too.

e) Do you have tips for drawing cleanly on heavypaint?

@marigoldfool UMM LOL I LIKE ONLY USE THE FILL TOOL so maybe use the fill tool? Fill and rectangle are good for edge control as opposed to the rest of the heavy paint tools which can get sort of muddles. And also I use a stylus so maybe if you’re using your finger, find a stylus that works with your device instead. That’s all I’ve got, frankly I don’t think my drawings are particularly clean lol.

f) Tips on improving backgrounds/scenes making them more dynamic practicing etc?

Ive given some tips about backgrounds/scenes before so I’m not gonna re-tread those but here’s another thing that might be helpful...

I think a good way to approach backgrounds is to think of the specific story or even mood you want to convey with the background first. Thinking “I just need to put something behind this character” is going to lead you to drawing like... a green screen tourist photo backdrop. But if you think “I need this bg to make the characters feel small” or “I need this bg to make the world feel colorful” then it gives you requirements and cues to work off of.

If I know a character needs to feel overwhelmed and small, then I know I need to create environment elements that will cage them in and corner them. If a character needs to feel triumphant/on top of the world then I know I need to let the environment open up around them. etc. If I know my focal point/ where I want to draw attention, I can build the background around that.

Also, backgrounds like figure compositions will have focal points of their own and you can draw attention to it/ the relationship the characters have with the bg element via scale or directionality or color, any number of cues. I think of it almost as a second/third character in a scene.

Not every composition is gonna have something so obvious like this but it helps me to think about these because then the characters feel connected and integrated with the environment.

Some more general art questions

a) Do you have any process/tips to start drawing character/bodies/heads?

I tried to kind of draw something to answer this but honestly this is difficult for me to answer because I don’t think I’m that great at drawing characters LOL. Ok, I think I have two tips.

1) flip your canvas often. A lot about what makes human bodies look correct and believable is symmetry and balance. Even if someone has asymmetrical features, the body will often pull and push in a way to counterbalance it. we often have inherent biases to one side or another like dominant hands dominant eyes etc. you know how right-handed artists will often favor drawing characters facing 45 degrees facing (the artist’s) left? that’s part of it. so viewing your drawing flipped even just to evaluate it helps compensate for that bias and makes you more aware of balance.

2) draw the whole figure often. I feel like a lot of beginner artists (myself included for a long time) defer to just drawing headshots or busts because it’s easier, you dont have to think about posing limbs etc. But drawing a full body allows you to better gauge proportion, perspective, body language, everything that makes a character look believable and grounded.

Like if you (me) have that issue where you draw the head too big and then have to resize it to fit the proportions of the rest of the body, it’s probably because you (I) drew the head first and are treating the body as an afterthought/attachment. Sketching out the whole figure first or even just quick drawing guides for it will help you think of it more holistically. I learned this figure drawing in charcoal at art school LOL.

oh. third mini tip - try to draw people from life often! its the best study. if you can get into a figure drawing/nude drawing class EVEN BETTER and if you have a local college/art space/museum that hosts those for free TREASURE IT AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT, that’s a huge boon that a lot of artists (me again) wish they had. though if youre not so lucky and youre sitting in a park trying to creeper draw people and they keep moving.. don’t let that stop you! that’s good practice because it’s forcing you to work fast to get the important stuff down LOL. its a challenge!

b) I’ve been pretty out of energy and have had no inspiration to draw but I have the desire to. Any advice?

Dude, take a walk or something.... Or a nap? Low energy is going to effect everything else so you gotta hit that problem at its source.

If you’re looking for inspiration though, I’d recommend stuff like watching a movie, reading a book, playing video games etc. Fill up your idea bank with content and then give yourself time/space to gestate it into new concepts. Sometimes looking at other art works but sometimes it can work against you because it’s too close.

Also something that helps me is remembering that art doesn’t always have to be groundbreaking... like it’s okay to make something shitty and stupid that you don’t post online and only show to your friend. That’s all part of the process imo. If you want to hit a home run you gotta warm up first, right? Sports.

I should probably compile everytime i give tips on stuff like this but that’s getting dangerously close to being a social media artist who makes stupid boiled down art tutorials for clout which is the last thing i want to be... the thing I want to stress is that art is a whole visual language and there are widely agreed upon rules and customs but they exist in large part to be broken. Like there's an infinite number of ways to reach an infinite number of solutions and that’s actually what makes it really cool and personal for both the artist and the viewer. So when you make work you like or you find someone else’s work you like, take a step back and ask yourself what about it speaks for you, what about it works for you, what makes it effective, how to recreate that effect and how to break that effect completely, etc. And have a good time with it or else what’s the point.

for the first 2, I direct you to my FAQ

For the last one, I don’t actually believe I’ve ever addressed artwork as insp for stories/rp but I’ll say here and now yeah go ahead! As long as you’re not making profit or taking credit for my work then I’m normally ok with it. Especially anything thats private and purely recreational, that’s generally 100% green light go. I only ask that if you post it anywhere public that you please credit me.

(and I reserve the right to ask you to take it down if I see it and don’t approve of it’s use but I think that case is pretty rare.)

a) @lemuelzero101 Thank you!!! I haven’t played Life is Strange but actually that series’ vis dev artist Edouard Caplain is one of my bigger art inspirations lately so that’s a really high compliment lol. And yeah I hope we get 5-8 too...!

b) Thank you for sticking around! I’ve been thinking about Digimon and Infinity Train in tandem lately, actually. They’re a little similar? Enter a dangerous alternate world and have wacky adventures with monsters/inanimate objects that have weird powers... there’s like weird engineers and mechanisms behind the scenes... also frontier literally starts with them getting on a train. Anyways if anyone else followed me for digimon... maybe you’d like Infinity Train? LOL

c) @king-wens-king I’M GLAD MY ART JUST HAS PINOY VIBES LOL I hope you are having a good day too :^)

a, b, c, d) yessss my Watch Infinity Train agenda is working....

e) aw thank you!! i think you should watch infinity train :)

#ask #trying this new thing where i tag people in the body of the post instead

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clonewarsarchives · 3 years ago

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Any resources for texturing in the clone wars style?

sorry, I don't have a helpful answer >.<

Now, do you mean 1) How do they add/render textures in the show? or 2) How can one achieve a similar ‘texture’ as a fanartist?, 3) examples of textures used in the show, or do you mean something else?

Furthermore, what kind of texture are you referring to? fabrics, nature, materials, hair and skin or the brushstroke art style, for example? I am not an artist myself so I can’t answer anything about how to draw those in the Clone Wars style, and the few sources explaining the show’s process, of which most focus on the first three seasons, don’t go too deep in the technical aspect. My go-to guy is Joel Aron, CG Lighting and Effects Supervisor. He explained stuff like snow (1.15), lava (2.03), fire (2.05), water (3.01-02), mist (3.12) in the featurettes.

For fabrics, they usually have a swatch of pattern, then repeat and overlay it on the costume. The "repeat and overlay" seems like a pretty common cheat, since that’s how they do it for the lava on Mustafar and the Nal Hutta landscape. Hair and skin is something I barely remember hearing, so nothing to add there yet.

In Dave Filoin's words, he "have texture artists who literally paint every single character right down to their eyeball, because [he] wanted that human touch on everything". In The Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2009), there’s this passage about finding the show’s “painterly” style:

While the studios struggled to streamline the technical elements of the production, Winder and Filoni hired Andrew Harris, who had worked on the Matrix trilogy and Cars (2006), as CG supervisor to help set up the pipeline as well as hone the look of the show. "The biggest challenge was how to accomplish the interesting and illustrative look that Dave had imagined for the show," Harris says. "Fortunately, Dave and I shared a similar sense for what the show needed to look like. He wanted something richer, warmer, and ultimately more hand-touched and gritty. He wanted a Ralph McQuarrie painting."

Realizing that "painterly" look took a long time, during which Filoni experimented by actually painting on the characters to simulate a textured style. "Looking at Ralph's paintings, you have this whole vocabulary of strokes and gobs of paint that define shapes and tex-tures," Filoni says. "I started doing these chalky and oily textures on the characters to see how that looked and also how we were going to deal with shadow and color."

Filoni wanted a hand-brushed paint job over everything and urged the artists to stop gunning for photographic realism and opt instead for artistic interpretation. "I needed them to stop thinking about what photographic wood or leather looks like and just paint wood or paint leather." Texture artists Tim Brock and Steve Ly latched onto that idea and applied the painterly approach to character models with astonishing results.

While the faux paint jobs looked good on paper, capturing them on actual frames of animation was another story. But, like many great discoveries, the key breakthrough was found by accident while the team was looking at a render of a droid.

"The render looked like a small toy of a super battle droid," says Filoni. "It looked like a great toy, but that was not the way I wanted to go." Harris took the render home and returned with a very simple solution. "I turned off the specular highlights and focused heavily on allowing the hand-painted textures to be seen," remembers Harris. "Oddly, the things that we chose not to use in the show are some of the things that you normally rely on computers to provide quickly and easily."

Harris's solution was the final key ingredient in the development of the show—the team decided that, from that moment forward, there would be no reflections or highlights on the models. "We don't care if something plastic reflects light or that the surface of wood reflects it a little less," recalls Filoni. "We just wanted the painted texture to be the end-all. That was how the show was going to work."

#Star Wars Insider has couple more design crew interviews #haven't read them yet but it's on schedule #cwainbox #the clone wars #Anonymous #art book

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intoxicatingimmediacy · 3 years ago

Photo

How Tracee Ellis Ross and Daveed Diggs Bonded as Members of “the Curly-Hair Family”

Daveed Diggs was certain the Emmys had already happened—so certain, in fact, that he and his partner had booked a vacation for the day of the ceremony in September...

Vanity Fair: Can you guys tell me about when you first met? Was it on the set of Black-ish or before that?

Tracee Ellis Ross: Did we meet backstage at Hamilton?

Daveed Diggs: We must have, but I don’t remember most of that stuff. If I’m being honest, it was such a crazy time. So yeah, I’m sure we did then.

Ross: But I feel like we just did the obligatory—I was like, “thank you for being brilliant.” And you were like, “thank you for coming.”

Diggs: I’m sure I told you I was a huge fan of yours, because that’s true. I must have babbled something to you about The Lyricist Lounge. I don’t know if that was then or on the Black-ish set, but I’ve been a fan of yours for a very long time. And so I remember at some point feeling the need to just be like, just so you know, I know that you got bars, I watched you rap with Mos Def when he was up on a ledge and shit. Like I remember all that.

Ross: No, we actually had this conversation on Black-ish because I then told you the backstory on that, and the fact that it was so intense getting me to do those very, very limited amount of bars. And what Daveed does, he makes it look easy, but it is not. What these rappers and these lyricists and these artists do is not something that came naturally to my rhythmic talent. Yeah. So I remember, and by the way, I did not know who you were before going to the Broadway play, before going to see you on stage, but you are so dynamic, combined with the fact that we share the curly-hair family.

Diggs: Well, it’s funny when Kenya [Barris] was like, “so I have this idea. I’ve been thinking about you as Bow’s brother.” And I was just like, “look, you can stop right there. Yes, I want to do that.” I’ve been Team Rainbow on this show for so long. I feel like she’s always getting, people don’t really understand her like I understand her. But look, let me tell you what it’s like being a mixed kid from the Bay.

Ross: Yeah. It was such a natural fit. And then they made it so much better with the way they wrote you. Johan is special.

Diggs: He’s special. He’s very special. And it fit like a glove. Very little acting happening for me.

I wanted to ask about Johan, because he blows in from France, basically, which knowing that this was filming in the fall of 2016 or summer 2016 feels very Thomas Jefferson coming down the staircase. Was that how that character got that way?

Diggs: I would imagine. I don’t know. Nobody ever told me. I very much remember my first table read there and I was all nervous. There were so many people there, this is a trip for a table read. Many years later he told me, that was because you were there. That many people didn’t usually come. But everyone was so obsessed with Hamilton, that they just wanted to see you. And he was like, I got nervous because I actually had no reason to assume that you could do this. I had just seen you in a musical and then put you in my TV show.

Ross: Oh, my God. Kenya is such a monster for saying that to you. That’s not true, because that’s not what he told me. He was convinced, I remember when he called me after he saw it and he was like, I have the best idea. And again, I’m telling you, when I saw you on stage—throughout my life, every once in a while you see people and you’re like, yeah, same tribe. You know what I mean? And usually the hair is the entrance into the indication. I’m like, we’re going to have definitely some things in common. And I want to know what product he uses, you know what I mean? But our table reads, which we have completely lost in this pandemic, were these very special, extraordinary things. Yes, there were more people there for you, but you got to feel the chemistry of all of us. And so, yeah, I do remember that day though, because that was really serious.

Daveed’s run on it came in this crazy period of work post-Hamilton, and also during the 2016 election. What do you remember from all of that?

Ross: Whiplash. Devastation. A lot of fear. So funny, we were on the precipice of so much more. I don’t know, there was a lot of wake up happening. It’s an interesting time to be on a show like Black-ish where we’re so topical and we dive in on that stuff. It made me appreciate the ability to use a platform to keep bringing light into the world, and joy, and also still talking about things and unpacking them without having to decide somebody is wrong or right. But just being able to explore them in joyful environments.

Diggs: Yeah. That show is so great at that. And it’s funny, professionally for me at that time, I was doing a bunch of things and learning so much, it almost feels separate from my emotional, personal, political journey. I was just on airplanes and in places—

Ross: You were moving a lot.

Diggs: Right? Because I was also doing Kimmy Schmidt and I was just all over the place. And so all of that was going on and then also the world was falling apart, but it was nice to work. For me, work was a good distraction from that, I guess. The times when I was on Black-ish were like, oh, we get to be in the world and also still be working and having fun, because the show was so good at that. Whereas a lot of other things that I was working on were just jobs separate from the world.

Ross: Yeah, you were moving at that point. I remember that time period, but it was a treat not only to have Daveed onset, but also for my character to have an identification with something beyond Dre’s family. Because in the Black-ish world, Bow’s point of view is an outlier point of view. And so as Daveed said, right at the beginning, when we first came on, to have somebody that actually knows that experience, not just because it’s written, but lives it in a different way. It was a really nice experience, for me, and I think for my character, if I can speak for the both of us.

What’s the contrast between going from something like Hamilton to a TV show?

Diggs: I mean, for me it was just all about learning. I didn’t know anything really. I left Hamilton and the next weekend was shooting Wonder, and then I went from there to L.A. and shot Tour De Pharmacy. And literally, I shot that for three days, and the fourth day I was on Black-ish. Broadway or doing plays, it’s repetition. It’s the art of, the goal is to make it feel new every time, right? That’s the trick. Doing TV, it’s definitely brand new every time. You don’t have to work for that. You get that part for free. The trick is playing the whole history of your relationships with all of these people as if they actually happened. But one of the great joys about being on Black-ish is just sitting around talking to everybody, soaking up game from Tracee or Anthony when he wasn’t talking shit about me, and Laurence—talking to Fish is my favorite stuff. I would just wait to find him sitting in a corner and just try to get him started.

Ross: Once you do though, you get some gems and pearls out of that man.

You guys have both moved on into more work creating and producing shows yourselves. Why is that the way forward for both of you?

Diggs: For me, it’s a continuation. I was always doing that, because no one wanted to make anything with me in it. And so we had to make it ourselves. But also, certain stories come your way that are, if you don’t tell them nobody’s going to. That’s actually the great part I’m finding about producing. It’s just that I get to help things exist because I want to watch them. I’m pretty self serving in a lot of ways.

Ross: I think I’ve always been producing. I think that I’ve always been that kind of actor. I always think of the whole thing. This is the beauty of what all of these different streaming platforms have offered, is that there is a democracy around, and a desire to keep filling our space with stories that represent the world we live in. And some of us, like Daveed and myself and Anthony, there are specific stories that we’re interested in telling. And you realize there’s a specific point of view that I want to share that is a gap in the world.

Does it feel like the industry is still moving in the right direction in terms of who gets to tell stories, like we are still opening up doors the way that we need to be?

Ross: I think for me, the biggest realization as I expand where my hands are in my career is the recognition that all aspects of this industry need fuller representation, all aspects. And that the pipeline is a little bit broken in terms of the standard that’s used to hire people in the executive positions, all these different places, that there needs to be real attention put there because without the conscious attention, it is not going to change. And that shift in equity around the table really needs absolute work. And so that’s also one of the beauties of being in this position is that I’m now in a space where I am behind the scenes, and I can say, I’m sorry, how much is she getting paid? And how much is he getting paid? And what’s the difference? Well, that’s just the way it’s been. Huh? I think that changes the dynamics, not only of the storytelling, but you look at the difference in the gaze that we’re looking through, through a camera lens, even changes how something looks and when you’re telling a story.

Diggs: That is so real, Tracee.

Ross: So real.

Diggs: And the thing about the Hollywood machine is it’s a big, slow moving machine and your intentions actually don’t matter very much. It was so interesting working with people who have the best intentions in the world and you still look around and most of your crew is white and you’re like, how did this happen? Because that’s where the machine knows how to look. It’s work. It’s actual work.

Ross: It’s actual work. And people, particularly in Hollywood, it’s a big well-oiled machine that’s been working in a certain way. So everybody figures it works. And there’s a lot of spaces in the machine that no one’s opened that door in a really long time, and you’re like, okay, so we need to go downstairs and open that door guys. There’s a weird part of the machine that’s just spilling out the same thing, and we need to go look in that room.

So these Emmys must be the last awards Hamilton can be eligible for, and Black-ish is filming its final season. How do you guys feel saying goodbye to these characters you’ve been living with or associated with for so long?

Diggs: I mean, I haven’t been living with Jefferson and Lafayette, I left them onstage. But other people have lived with them for quite a while, so it’s a bit of a different experience.

Ross: And will continue to, that’s so interesting. I imagine usually when you do a play, not everybody knows you as that.

Diggs: Almost nobody knows you as that, when you do a play. That’s kind of why you do plays.

Ross: Hamilton transcended that little scenario.

Diggs: It did a thing, and a great, wonderful thing that I’m incredibly proud to be a part of. But it is wild to keep revisiting those parts, I feel weird talking about it because I didn’t watch it yesterday and I don’t think about it ever until somebody brings it up. Like I was saying the other day, it’s like you had a kid that grew up or something and now I’m very proud of that kid, like, oh, that’s really cool that they’re off winning awards.

Hamilton would be in first grade by now.

Diggs: It’s won the spelling bee and citizenship award and all that stuff. Very proud of that kid.

Ross: I do have to say though, Daveed, that Hamilton transcended something, but also your portrayal and what you did on stage. There was a reverberation and something that you did with that role, and with that character, that I do think changed the way we see a black actor on stage, in a different way. I think the platform of Hamilton, specifically the role, and then what you did with it, the way you breathe life into it and gave it something, it’s understandable that it is continuing to live on. As an actor, it’s a funny thing, but from the outside looking in and somebody who saw you on stage and saw the TV, you know what I mean? So I do understand the ongoing relationship with that role and what you did with it.

Diggs: That’s the sweetest thing anybody’s ever said to me, and I think that’s what I mean about feeling proud of the thing. Because my only experience with it these days is as a fan of it. It’s just a weird thing as an actor, like you said, but I imagine it must be a much different kind of goodbye to Rainbow. I mean, you’ve lived with her for—

Ross: Eight years, almost nine years when we finish. What’s interesting is, this is my second time letting go of a long-time character. Letting go of Joan [her character on Girlfriends] was really challenging. I was so new to all of it that it just, it honestly felt a little scary, I just didn’t know how to navigate. It felt to me like what I imagined a basketball player retiring, or leaving the team they were on for a long time, because the pace that you keep for a 23 episode series is intense. You are in the water for more time out of the year than you’re out of the water. But the beauty of this is I get to walk into this final season, knowing it’s the final season. And the truth is for eight years, I have been challenged, intrigued, tickled, and annoyed by this woman that I’m playing. All of the above. And for me it just gets deeper and better every year. I get safer every year and I get to experience a new aspect of my skill, my talent, my thing, the thing I do. On Black-ish, 24 episodes a season, it’s like, how can I really allow this woman to be as full, as free, and as herself as she can be. And that is really fun to use my body and my being as that vehicle, it’s really fun. Particularly working with Anthony, the two of us, the way we fly together, it’s magical. It really is. Even if I don’t talk to him, like I’ve never been to his house, we don’t know each other that way. But what we know in our work relationship is magic.

Diggs: As an observer and a very close up observer too, it is really magic. And I say this about you all the time, too, the way that you fight for Bow is so inspirational. Getting to watch it, it taught me so much.

Ross: Yeah, you got to see some of that for real.

Diggs: Yeah. Watch you on set, really championing for your character, for her integrity, and her humanity, and for her fullness being like, this is a real person, don’t underserve her. I’ve taken that with me to all of my other jobs. I really learned it from you.

Is there anything else you guys want to say to each other?

Ross: I miss you.

Diggs: I miss you too.

#daveed diggs #tracee ellis ross

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doctor-roman · 4 years ago

Note

Hey I don't know if a post had been made about it but I wasn't able to find it if it was. Either way I was just wondering (if you're willing to share) what turned you off of mtg so hard?

In order, it was:

-Avacyn getting killed. No, seriously, Avacyn and Innistrad were a big part of what got me into the game as a whole. It didn’t outright kill my interest in the game at first, but it was definitely the first step on that slope.

-The end of Magic’s in house story team and the passing of that job off to outside authors who tend to know nothing about it.

-War of the Spark, and its back pedaling of Chandra’s bisexuality. I wasn’t even a fan of Gruulfriends to begin with (was more of a Julaar fan myself), but even I can say that that was just scummy.

-War of the Spark: Forsaken and realizing Wizards really just does not give a shit about its own franchise’s lore anymore. A decade of story just thrown in the trash and lit on fire. Every single character came away from that story worse than how they started, and I have no confidence that Wizards will ever re-reach what it had from Khans to Ixalan.

-Brandon Sanderson writing on his own time what was supposed to be a free novella (Children of the Nameless), and Wizards then taking down the free link so they can sell it as an e-book. Even Sanderson was pretty pissed about it last I heard.

-Pumping Simic with so much value that it almost feels stupid to play anything else. Remember; Oko and Uro were supposed to be playable in the same standard environment. Or, in a broader sense, just the sheer amount of power creep that’s taken place these past few years.

-Wizards focus on Arena and letting it dictate how they design cards rather than it being a table top game first and foremost. I remember during Ikoria season a card getting spoiled that gained a keyword counter at random but only keyword counters that it didn’t already have. I remember reading that card and trying to figure out “how does a person even go about figuring that out?” before realizing “oh yeah, the Arena RNG is just supposed to do that for you”.

-Inconsistency with its reprint policy. A few folks at Wizards have gone on record to say they “don’t want to reprint fetchlands because all of that shuffling slows the game down”. And then they print Fabled Passage and Prismatic Vista which do literally that. Like...come on, Wizards. (What’s worse is that I’ve heard rumors that fetch lands are lined up to come out in Zendikar collector boosters. Which, if true, is just...so god damned scummy in its own right.)

-“This isn’t for you”, aka, product fatigue. It started with Secret Lairs. Cats, Serum Visions, Thalia, Godzilla lands. At first, none of them appealed to me, and I just shrugged it off as “well, yeah, that’s just not my thing”. But over time, as Jumpstart came out, then Double Masters, I started to wonder when Wizards would start making something for me. It’s just been product after product and none of it excites me because it’s all fed through the pipeline, one after another, with none of those products getting a chance to stand out. Christ, it seemed like I was finding spoilers for something every day for two months straight on the Magic subreddit, and after a while I just became completely desensitized to it.

And the worst part? This isn’t even everything. There were so many tangents that I was willing to go down as I was writing all this, but forgot because I had so many other things to cover. And it sucks, because I look back on the time that I was more heavily involved with Magic really fondly.

I miss discussing the weekly stories that got published for each new set. I miss coming up with characters and figuring out how they interact with my friend’s characters (some of my current best friendships started out this way!!!). God, there was a time where I was trying to get everyone I knew and their mother into Magic. But now those days feel so long ago.

Flat out, Magic does not care about making a fun, engaging game anymore. It’s devolved into “just make whatever gets us more money”.

#I might not have articulated all of this well because im tired and about to go to bed #but just #fuck man #I dont miss Magic #so much as I miss what Magic used to be

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jackdawyt · 4 years ago

Video

youtube

Since my last news update in March, today I’m dissecting everything that has come out of the woodwork in April and May regarding Dragon Age 4. So, get some tea and let’s get this show on the road, because we’ve got over 4,000 words of news to delve into!

Reveal? (game shows/new hire/remaster):

Following the cancellation of E3, EA Play 2020 Live has been officially confirmed as a digital show, taking place on June 11th, at 4:00 pm PST / 7:00 pm EST.

Before the outbreak cancelled E3 2020, we knew Mike Gamble, the Project Lead on the next Mass Effect game had plans to make a physical appearance at E3/EA Play. So, the question remains, will BioWare still have a presence at EA Play this year?

Mike Gamble is one of the key members of the Mass Effect team, I highly doubt he’s talking about revealing the next Mass Effect game which is currently in very early stages of development, and won’t release until after Dragon Age 4. Perhaps, Mike back in 2019 was hinting at revealing the heavily rumoured Mass Effect Remaster this EA Play?

Earlier in May, EA had a quarterly conference call and it revealed some fascinating information regarding future unannounced titles. Currently, EA have “one more EA HD title, Four EA Partner titles and two mobiles games still unannounced”. Also, EA said "multiple titles" are set to launch on Nintendo Switch this year.

The EA HD title refers to a remaster of an EA game, hence why most people are speculating at the Mass Effect Trilogy. Venturebeat went on to officially state that this title was indeed the Mass Effect Trilogy.

So, there’s one rumoured possibility for the Mass Effect Trilogy Remaster to be revealed this EA Play, which is cool! BioWare may have a presence this year after all! But I know you all didn’t come for Mass Effect; you came for Dragon Age. So, what do we know about that franchise and a potential reveal?

Jo Berry, a Writer at EA retweeted EA Play Live’s announcement with a party emoji! 👀

This could be absolutely nothing, but at a whim, perhaps a reference to a Dragon Age 4 teaser, or EA Motive’s new I.P since she has worked within both teams....

On top of that, Brianne Battye, Writer at BioWare tweeted about her 8-year journey at BioWare. She’s very grateful for sharing her work, and the awesome people she’s worked with along the way.

Patrick Weekes replied saying they: “Cannot wait for everyone else to see what you've been working on recently. :)”

Then, Brianne said: “Right back at you :)”

Two HUGE witters on the Dragon Age team are excited for everyone else to see what they’ve all been working on recently! 👀 When I saw this tweet, I was trying to stay calm and keep my expectations low, but come on when you see a tweet like this, you just get so excited! The question is, when will we see what they’ve been working on, and is it anytime soon? Please?

Well, there is something else we need to talk about that may relate to a potential tease.

Hilary Heskett, who used to be EA’s Global Product Manager has returned to work at EA and BioWare. Put simply, she’s a Digital Marketer for BioWare.

Hilary; particularly, was heavily involved in Dragon Age: Inquisition’s marketing! In fact, the majority of her work at EA involved representing BioWare as a brand online creating trailers, key art, screenshots, packaging, and advertisements. So, it’s a fair assumption that she’ll be fulfilling the exact same role for future BioWare titles like Dragon Age 4.

With Hilary joining the team at this point in development, could the marketing stages of Dragon Age 4 soon begin, perhaps at EA Play? Or later on in 2020? Or is she going to be marketing the Mass Effect Remaster?

I sound impatient, but, in the past BioWare have a habit of starting the marketing stages of their products at least two years before an initial release.

With that, we’ve got to ask ourselves, is hiring a marketer at this point in time a mere coincidence? or is it preparation for when marketing does start? Are we on the verge of seeing Dragon Age 4 official content soon?

Not to waffle on, because we’ve got a lot to talk about in this video, but I was hired as a Digital Marketer for an app company in the UK. As I understand it, you normally enter projects, mid-to-end of production, because what would a marketer do in the early stages logically? Your role is to be there for the advertising of the product.

So, in BioWare’s case, it's my understanding that Hilary has joined the team with one year full-swing production, is she about to begin the marketing stages of the next Dragon Age game? Is the game ready for that stage? If anything, I think with Hilary’s background, she’s the perfect person to market Dragon Age 4.

On top of EA Play, Geoff Keighley announced Summer Game Fest, a new industry-wide celebration of video games. Showcasing digital news, In-game events, & playable content. EA are headlining the event with EA Play, but there are many other world premieres spread throughout the summer. So, there’s a potential for other trailer reveals later on in the year, not to mention The Game Awards.

And, there’s also this leak that shows Dragon Age 4 on a list of PS5 games from the newest issue of PlayStation magazine UK. PlayStation are having an event on June 4th, so we’ll find out if this leak is true soon enough.

If we’re going to see anything Dragon Age 4 related this year, EA Play is the biggest contender for a reveal. I know the whole world could do with that right now! At this current moment, there is no schedule for the show. However, Saria, myself, Fusselkorn and maybe other content creators will be streaming EA Play, no matter what, so turn those reminders on and come join us in our clown suits.

Development (teases/production):

Moving on to teases and development updates. Currently, BioWare are hiring a ‘Senior Outsource Producer.’

This is a pretty big deal, to those who don’t know what a ‘Senior Outsource Producer’ would do...

“Outsourcing development means to hire out any process of a business to third party. The process helps your company or organization to grow.”

To grant more perspective, during Mass Effect: Andromeda’s development, major aspects of the game's animations were outsourced to other EA studios.

However, this isn’t going to be the same for Dragon Age 4, this role is for one Producer to help the outsourcing team into a robust and comprehensive department that supports BioWare projects in all aspects of development.

I have friend in triple AAA games, and they had something to say about outsourcing regarding Dragon Age 4: “To be honest, I'd say (outsourcing is) different per studio due to scope. But with something big like Dragon Age I'd probably say outsourcing would start early to mid-production as they have a hell of a lot to do. Some studios outsource from the get go though so that's also possible. And It's rare that outsourcing starts in the final leg of development.”

What I understand from the job posting is that BioWare are looking to hire a producer who will be dedicated to outsourcing so they can establish a pipeline and maintain proper standards for outsourcing. This hiring was posted in May, so the studio might be a few months early from when they actually have to outsource. However, this process will be coming up soon in major development.

Moving on. In early April, Mark Darrah went on a twitter rampage sharing many tweets relating to Dragon Age 4. One tweet stated: “Is tweeting more going to make you all speculate more or less?”. Followed by a poll with the answers “more”, “less” & “Dragon Age 4!?”

The following week, Mark Darrah teased his three Wolf-Rook books he has placed on a shelf at home.

Later on, in the month, he decided to stack each of them, prompted with the caption: “Spoiler: these are a terrible building material…”

Just last week, Mark tweeted the Wolf-Rook book once more, with the following meme: “Dear men, what is preventing you from looking like this?”

This cheeky tease encouraged Melissa Janowicz (Gameplay Designer) to join the fun and share her own Wolf-Rook book! She said: “It's an absolutely gorgeous book. I'll treasure it for life.”

Ahhh. The secrets these books could hold about Dragon Age 4’s core concepts.... And Mark Darrah is just staking them together, making book forts out of them, as you do! 😂 Maybe one day, we’ll uncover the secrets held within every page, but that day is not yet upon on.

On the same memey day, Chris Anderson, (Application Development/Publishing Support at BioWare) tweeted: “Other people are teasing things, so what the hell, here's an image that I used in something I was working on today.” With a pink image shown.

Chris and Melissa followed a Twitter conversation about pink being the “perfect colour for when you need something that screams temp.”

Basically, this pink actually has some context for the development of Dragon Age 4. ‘Temp’ means temporary textures, the first blocked out layer of a texture before actual detailed textures are added.

This can refer to many scenes or models in the early texturing phases, as art assets are still in the approval stages. On a wild, out-there whim, perhaps the team are wrapping up a trailer for a reveal? Maybe?... please?

John Epler (Narrative Director) shared his most controversial opinion of all time:

I loved the Hinterlands, but as a fan of the previous Dragon Age game’s ‘linear with freedom' approach, I appreciate John’s take on open world’s since Dragon Age: Inquisition, perhaps this will shape the way forward for future BioWare titles?

Alix Wilton Regan, voice actress of the Female British Inquisitor retweeted Autumn Witch’s poll asking if people believe the Inquisitor will return as a voiced appearance in Dragon Age 4. Alix tweeted: “C’mon #DAI Fans, you know what to do ;)”

Patrick Weekes replied to Alix’s post with an eye's emoji 👀.... I think I speak for everyone when I say, in some capacity, the Inquisitor has got to return in the next game!

In another tweet, Patrick Weekes teased potential new companions when a Twitter trend placed 5 Dragon Age characters in 6 different camps went around the platform.

When choosing their preferred camp, Patrick Weekes tweeted: “Finally, in Camp 7, it's turned into a bit of a mess, with coffee grounds spilled everywhere and the couch inexplicably on fire after a drinking game gone wrong. But that's another story.”

Of course, there’s not much to tear apart here, but we have acknowledgement of the next party members! It sounds like they’re a wild bunch already!

In early April, Mark Darrah answered a few current development tweets:

So, that’s...Splendid.

Karin Weekes (Editor) tweeted that they “got to sort/catalog/document updates to made-up languages at work today.”

Following that tweet, @ladyiolanthe asked Karin: “Do you think BioWare might ever be able to release Qunari, Dwarvish, and Elvhen lexicons in a World of Thedas Volume 3 sort of book? Or is that unlikely since they're ciphers and maybe there isn't a standardized grammatical structure, etc?”

Karin replied with: “That’s an interesting idea - I, for one, would find it a hoot! I might send out some feelers…” Any books of made-up languages I can get my hands on would be greatly appreciated!

Alain Baxter, (‘Production guy’) tweeted: “BioWare review of content today. All I can say is “Scriplet”. 😎

Apparently a ‘Scriptlet’ is an action verb. Alain is teasing premature scripts as they ‘perform their function’ So, something exciting is going down in the scripts, to be worked on in-engine. Or maybe it’s just an inside joke?

John Epler tweeted a great design message about “how 90% of ‘bad’ decisions are, in fact, the best decision at the time. For John, that will always be the camera zoomed conversations in DA: I. People didn’t like it, and asked why not just make them full scenes. But that’s not the decision they make in-house. It was 'make them simple conversations or else cut them'. Game dev is all about making the best decision you can at the time, with the resources you have .A lot of stuff you thought was weird or awkward came down to a gut call of 'this is the best I can make this and I trust it's good enough'. Sometimes we're right, sometimes not.”

Awesome words to think on, Dragon Age 4 will be amazing, I’m sure, but just remember to set your expectations right and realise everything design-wise, happens for a reason.

Shifting to other design aspects. Jos Hendricks (Senior Level Designer) tweeted:

Mike Jungbluth (Animation Director) tweeted: “Just reviewed something in game that hit THIS LEVEL! Hot damn, moments like this are what I live for.”

Both tweets are incredibly excited and telling of development for Dragon Age 4, it sounds like they’re building and prototyping an epic scene equivalent in scale to the attack at Haven scene? Perhaps, Solas destroying the Veil? Who knows, but it sounds epic, and I’m living for both dev.'s enthusiasm!

For the final tweet regarding the development side is from Åsa Roos (Principle UX Designer)

A UX designer writing about Solas? That must be for codex entries? Right? More lore on our Rebel God!

Unannounced Dragon Age Game:

In my previous March news update, I discussed brashly about the developers on Dragon Age 4 still claiming that this project has not officially been announced yet, however, The Dread Wolf Rises teaser in 2018 certainly alluded to an announcement regarding the next Dragon Age title. Following this story, we have many sources providing clarity on Dragon Age 4’s current ‘unannounced’ situation.

Patrick Weekes confirmed that they are “working on an unannounced game in the Dragon Age universe.”

Patrick said: “We would LOVE to be able to say more. We are really excited about what we’re working on. But we can’t share anything right now. Sorry!”

In April 2019, I painted this unannounced situation rather conspiratorial, I said that perhaps the Dragon Age dev’s can’t share anymore on the next game because Anthem was the next project, and EA are forcing them to not speak on Dragon Age. In an attempt to maintain the crowd by not letting BioWare developers regard Dragon Age 4 as the next working project in the works.

However, I don’t think it’s that deep. I think the developers are just under an NDA, and literally can’t speak about the game.

In Episode 121 of the Anthem-based ‘Freelancer Codex’ Podcast - as a guest, Melissa Janowicz shared that the developers on the secret Dragon Age team cannot talk about the next game, in fact, they can barely talk about the contents of The Dread Wolf Rises teaser trailer.

Chris Anderson also emphasised this same point in a tweet:

As a side not, someone asked Chris why not lie and come up with fake answers to fool the fans, and Chris said: “That can, unfortunately, get me in nearly as much trouble!”

Which shows the validity and value in BioWare developer tweets. The developers can’t just lie about the project either. Which honestly helps someone like me out.

As we know, a game is coming, yet it’s still is very much unannounced, probably because as Jason Schreier reported in 2018, Dragon Age 4 is going to change at least 5 times in the next two years, perhaps BioWare don’t want to show us anything because they don’t want to set anything in stone, or show gameplay that is not representative of the final game.

But that doesn’t extend to a CGI trailer, or a full title drop, Maker knows that would be amazing, and is within the realm of possibility.

New Lore/Fun:

We have some new lore, and other fun things I wanted to share.

Dragon Age Comic Writer, Nunzio DeFillipis talked HUGELY about the red lyrium idol and what was originally planned for their comics.

Nunzio recently mentioned in the Unofficial Bioware Forums that the comic characters from Deception were originally chasing the red lyrium idol.

Nunzio stated that the original plan for the comics would've had the characters retrieve the red lyrium idol. Only to have Solas take it back. Eluding to the idol's planned whereabouts before the plot changed since Joplin's cancellation and BioWare's shift regarding this idol in the comics.

Does this still mean that the location of the red lyrium idol is most likely in the hands of Solas and might only be discovered in Dragon Age 4? Or does the next protagonist have a shot at retrieving the idol before Solas finds it?

It seems like a bummer that the original comic idea was scrapped and the writers were forced to change narrative direction regarding this particular idol.

As a funny tweet I saw. Emily (Domino) Talyor tweeted using her overheard in the office hashtag:

BioWare dev’s can’t even tell their kids, folks.

And, regarding the Fuzzy Freaks livestream. Patrick Weekes’s response to my question, asking how does Solas kill dwarves in their sleep if they have no connection to the Fade, was “very effectively.” This will be a mystery I will personally be investigating when we have our hands on the game.

Considering it was really fun for those who watched the Fuzzy Freaks livestream, I’m going to share other silly takeaways:

Patrick Weekes doing a New York accent for the Carta Dwarf is amazing!

“DREAD DUMBASS” - is a jokey dialogue option that Karen Weekes scribbled notes for future reference.

Patrick likes soft romances and happy endings! IRONICALLY.

Patrick’s style of writing is less high fantasy and more modern.

@DrunkDalish, Co-founder of Dragon Age Day interviewed both Karen and Patrick Weekes. As a lover of Dragon Age lore, these interviews reveal so many loving tidbits that you should read for yourself. However, something I noted that was very significant regarding the future is based on Masked Empire’s ending. So, spoilers for that, but Felassan’s fate isn’t what it seems. Perhaps this elf could come back in the future if needed.

Wellbeing:

And, we come to the last topic, this one is centred on the BioWare staff’s wellbeing. Last year, there was a Kotaku article revealing the crunch and working conditions at BW, there was a lot of worry and confusion in the air that the people working on these games were struggling mentally because of senior management and many other reasons. With that in mind, I’m dedicating a section in these news updates to the wellbeing of the developers, any signs/tweets of positivity and hope will be shared in an effort to see if there has been any change in the BioWare offices since Anthem’s release.

It seems like things are going pretty well and people seem happy and optimistic about the next Dragon Age.

If there are any major updates to a Dragon Age 4 tease at EA Play, I'll be sure to make an update video, but otherwise, be sure to join our livestream as see for ourselves what waits us this EA Play.

Let me know your thoughts down below, what do you think about a potential EA Play teaser, where are your expectations at?

55 notes · View notes

gffa · 5 years ago

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WHY I WILL ALWAYS DEFEND THE CGI IN THE PREQUELS--They were doing some pretty mind-bogglingly new stuff that had never been done before and creating all these tools and techniques that are still being used today and, honestly, while not everything holds up, a shocking amount of it does. The work that went into The Phantom Menace really was amazing: ‘ALL FILMS ARE PERSONAL’: AN ORAL HISTORY OF STAR WARS: EPISODE I THE PHANTOM MENACE [x] ‘Well, This is the Future’ Once in production, The Phantom Menace would lean heavily on digital effects and technology, with more visual effects shots than any film in ILM’s history. John Knoll: I think the first time I really got exposed to what was ahead of us — I suppose the first thing was we read the script. There were, I think, three or four of us: myself, [visual effects supervisor] Dennis Muren, I forget who else was there. I think there were three or four of us, went out to the Ranch. There was one copy of the script [Laughs] and so basically what it is, we sat together in a room, and somebody started and would hand off the page that they had just read to the next person in the line. I don’t know, I was third in line or something, and I would get the pages and read them and hand them on. It was pretty overwhelming. I had a million questions because you’re reading it written on a page, you can imagine a lot of different ways that that could be executed. That could be a full set, the alien character that’s being discussed, I haven’t seen a design yet so I don’t know whether that’s just a guy in a suit or what. Initially reading through the script it seemed like it was a pretty big and ambitious thing. Sometime later we had — and there’s video of this, I think it’s on the making-of video — we saw the storyboards. George had the art department draw up storyboards for the whole movie. It was 3,600 storyboards, something like that. George walked us through all the storyboards. It wasn’t just telling us what was going on and this is this and that, he was also kind of mixing in what he was thinking about [for] shooting methodology. He had a number of colored highlighters, he had a magenta, a blue, and yellow highlighters, and as he was going down, things that he was going to shoot in front of a blue screen he’d scribble blue where he’d imagine the blue screen would be, and I think yellow was for live-action, and magenta was for CG characters like Jar Jar or battle droids or whatever. He sort of went through that, he went, “Yeah, it’s going to be this,” sort of telling us what was happening in all the frames. I was used to a situation where almost every show we did there was something that we were doing that was new, that we’d have to develop new tools or new techniques to do, but it’s like almost every storyboard was something that we hadn’t done before or didn’t have tools that could do. I was taking notes the whole time, making note of all the things we were going to have to do in R&D, or new things that would have to be developed to handle doing dense scenes with thousands of characters in them, or robust cloth simulations, or rigid body dynamics. There was a pretty long list of things. I walked out of that meeting with my head spinning, because it was not only massive in terms of sheer shot number, but in terms of all the new tech that has to be developed to get it done.

Rob Coleman: I remember going back to California and building the team up, and doing the early animations, and as time went on, I started really suffering in terms of insomnia and stress and freaking out, and I knew the world was waiting for this film. After a couple of months, three months, I actually drove up to Skywalker Ranch to resign the job to George. So I booked the time in to see him, and I went in there and I started fumbling and saying all this stuff through three hours of sleep, or whatever I had. He’s like, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Well, just, the world is waiting for this, and the pressure of this, and I’m not sure if I can perform, and…” He goes, “Hey, hey, hey, wait. You’re working for one person. You gotta make one person happy. That’s me, and I’m happy. I think the animation you guys are doing is great.” I said, “Y-you do?” He said, “Yeah. It’s great. It’s my problem to worry about the world, and I’m not even worried about them. We’re making these films for me. You’re making me happy, so you can relax, and you can go back down to ILM and everything will be fine.” I was the happiest guy driving back down Lucas Valley Road. I was like, “Oh, my God!” From that point on, I was fine. I slept like a baby, I was able to do it, I was able to focus on it. George Lucas: You don’t really start something unless you think you’re right, and think that you’re on the right track and what you’re doing is going to be great. It never occurs to you that it’s not going to work. Otherwise you wouldn’t do it. That’s what keeps people from doing things. So I didn’t worry about that part. I knew that the process of making a film was very difficult, and most of it was grounded in nineteenth century technology — or older than that, actually. And it had just reached its limits and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it. That was especially true in visual effects. And it was through visual effects that I began to realize we had the power and the knowledge to develop something that really would make a big difference. I started that whole process. I wanted to raise my kids, so I retired, but I spent my time building up the company and at the same time developing this digital technology. Rob Coleman: As reference, I think there were around 200 [effects] shots in Men in Black, and there were 2,000 shots in Phantom Menace. John Knoll: I’ll give you an example of some of the things we had to develop. I think prior to Episode I, the most complicated CG animation we had ever done was on Mars Attacks!, years before. We had one or two shots that had like 16 or 18 Martians in it, and they all had the little spacesuits and the helmets and their props and all of that. But that nearly brought the whole system down to its knees because having that many rigged characters in a scene at once just was more than the systems could handle at the time. I was regularly seeing shots where there were 50 battle droids, or a big battle scene where there are two characters fighting in the foreground, but the background had hundreds or thousands of characters back there. This is a whole order of magnitude of higher complexity than we dealt with, so we’re going to need to have systems for managing that level of complexity. And then a few years before, I think it was maybe ’95, we had done Spawn. There was a number of shots where Spawn’s cape does something magical, and we’d done cloth simulations for that that didn’t look super realistic, and it was fine for the movie because it was kind of stylized. The cape was almost a character in itself. We didn’t have a particularly good or usable cloth simulation system. But looking at the designs of the characters, they’re all wearing clothing. Jar Jar has clothing, and Boss Nass has clothing, and Watto has clothing, and we’re going to have to do digital doubles of the Jedi to do some of stunty things that we can’t shoot for real, and they need to have their cloaks and all of that. We’re going to need to have a good cloth simulation package in there. And we said, all right, we’re going to have to develop that. And then we had — there were lots of shots of Jedi cutting through battle droids, so the pieces of the battle droid clatter down onto the ground and that’s hard to animate completely from scratch, and there were so many shots, that, all right, we can’t fake it through that. We need to have a rigid body dynamic system. These were the things I’d been seeing at SIGGRAPH and technical papers about how to do those believable physical collisions, and we’re going to need a robust rigid body simulation system that’s integrated into our pipeline. It was just a lot of that kind of stuff. All these things that I knew were technically possible; we didn’t have any tools that did that. Rob Coleman: Part of my problem was, for months, there was no crowd system, which meant there was no Gungan battle. No ability for my team to animate hundreds of characters back then. It just didn’t exist. I remember there was one line in the script that said something along the lines of “The Gungan army walks out to battle.” That was six months of work — that one sentence. You were like, “Holy [expletive], how do we do that?” And that was one sentence out of a 100-page script. Ultimately, it was a matter of acquiring the right tools to accomplish what George Lucas was asking, using the latest versions of software already available, or developing new techniques. Rob Coleman: We had a database with all the different Gungan walks, runs, throws, falls, fights. We had little vignettes. We’d have Gungans and battle droids, upwards of five of them together in a little cluster, and we’d animate that. And then we could put that cluster into any shot, and we could rotate it, and it wouldn’t look the same to the camera. So we could create a finite number of those and then we could place them, and we’d actually get a fair amount of movement into the shot. We’d just be able to use it over and over again, and we’d put some hero work in the foreground, and the audience would never know. Jean Bolte: Back then they called it Viewpaint, it was the first software that was developed to paint onto computer graphic models. I was the Viewpaint supervisor. Most people know this, but Viewpaint was a huge leap forward in Jurassic Park. Dennis [Muren] has always acknowledged that. As I have stated publicly, I don’t want to make it sound like I think my job was the most important contribution to computer graphics, but it was a very important one. The work that we were able to do, because we could paint onto the models, transformed the look of everything. Up until then we’d had The Abyss water tentacle, we had the mercury man in T2, very simple, very rudimentary, you know, the shading on things didn’t allow for very much believability, really. What we were able to do with the paint software, even in the very early, early stages there on Jurassic — I didn’t work on Jurassic, but I was having a good look at it. They were able to contribute a bump surface and a paint surface to give things the scale pattern, the aging, obviously the color, the different qualities of specularity. And in addition to that, for anything that was hard surface, there’s the aging that comes into making something rusty or dented or scratched. And when you have that, suddenly a thing has a story. It has a history. In addition to it having the believability, you can introduce the backstory as to, why did it get dented here? Why are the scales roughed up in this area? What kind of creature is this thing? Is it dry? Does it hunt? Is it an apex predator? Is it moist? All of that stuff is the story. So even if you’re making a creature that has never been seen before, you can kind of establish what its niche is in nature, and then contribute all of that to the look of it. The dinosaurs in Jurassic, that was a huge breakthrough to be able to see that. So the software being very rudimentary still functioned and continued to update. Every project there were things that were written into the software and in our technique and approach that allowed us to get more and more realism. The Phantom Menace featured several completely digital characters. Jar Jar Binks, played through motion-capture by Ahmed Best, would be the most high-profile, a supporting character that shared screen time with our heroes. Initially, the idea was for Best to perform in a suit and have Jar Jar’s neck and head created digitally, but this proved more costly and labor-intensive than just using a full CG model. Watto, the junk dealer, and Sebulba, Anakin’s rival podracer, were two other completely CG characters that played prominent roles. Ahmed Best: George wanted a character that was part-Goofy, but very physically aware. He really moved me toward what eventually became the walk. He wanted me to move slower, longer. Jar Jar was taller than I am, so he really wanted Jar Jar’s head to move in a specific way, so that forced me to try to come up with a physicality so that Jar Jar could move in a way that would work once animated. But a lot of it was just a collaboration of movement, me giving George options, and him saying, “Yeah, more like that.” The voice was the same thing. It was just me giving George options, and he was like, “Yeah, do that one. Do that voice.” George Lucas: I was tired of putting masks on people. I was much more interested in having them be all-digital so you could do more things with them. More freedom.

Ahmed Best: Jar Jar’s character, the movement and the motivation, was really based off of Buster Keaton. George really honed into that aesthetic when it came to me. Jean Bolte: Casper had a speaking character, Dragonheart, that was a speaking character, but there was something about Jar Jar being a character in this film that was a huge step further. I mean, he had to work in so much of the film in so many different environments. He had to sit there and interact as if he was somebody George had cast and put into a suit. Ahmed Best: It was great. I loved it. It never really felt like I was this other thing. It felt like we were all actors in the movie working together. This whole idea of me being in the movie or not being in the movie never occurred to all of us while we were shooting. It was never a separate thing and, subsequently, that’s what mo-cap has become now. It’s become actors in the movie, doing the motion, and then animation later building the realized, fantastical look of the character. But the actors are an integral part of the filmmaking and an integral part of the collaboration. And that kind of started with Phantom Menace. Rob Coleman: I believed in my crew, and I believed that I’d understood what George was looking for from a performance point of view. Ahmed Best: After principal [photography], I spent probably another year and a half, maybe two years, going back and forth between ILM and New York working out some of the kinks. That final battle scene with all the Gungans and the droids and the battle tanks, that was me, George, Rob [Coleman], John [Knoll], everybody at ILM, up in San Francisco figuring it out. It was just us in a room, there was nobody else there. I was doing all the motion that Jar Jar did in the final battle scene. George really wanted that to feel like not only just a live-action battle, but he wanted it to have the same physical comedy as a Buster Keaton movie. We worked really hard on that final battle scene. Jean Bolte: One of the things about this film is that this is what George wanted. He wanted them to have a similar kind of quality to the animatronic characters who also were not necessarily always 100 percent believable. But they had a charm to them, they had a life in them. That was more important than anything. I think Jar Jar has this quality. Ahmed Best: For me, it was just such a joy to be as creative as I wanted to be because I knew I had so much room. And George was really generous with the amount of room he gave me to bring Jar Jar to life. Doug Chiang: Watto was completely out of nowhere, and that scared me, because the genesis of Watto was that I did an early trader baron portrait that George really liked. The story of that character changed eventually, but he liked that. One day he came in and said, “Remember that portrait of the trader baron? Take that portrait, let’s put on a body, and add the feet, and add bat wings.” And that was the brief! It scared me because it didn’t make any sense, and I thought it was going to be a complete cartoony character that people are going to laugh at. I remember we spent weeks and weeks designing it, trying to make it very real, and George kept saying the same thing. And then literally one day I said, “Okay, I’m going to take George exactly at his word, and draw exactly that.” And it worked. One of my big appreciations for George is that he can push us quite a bit. I learned to trust him that he knows what he wants, and he will then stop us if we’ve gone too far. And right now Watto is one of my favorite characters. Rob Coleman: The amazing thing about The Phantom Menace, I think, certainly for the ILM animators, is we were moving from putting creatures in scenes to actually being actors in the movie. This is what I was trying to get across to them. The notion of getting up and acting things out. Talking about what’s happening internally inside a character’s head. Do they believe in what they’re saying? What do they want from the scene? Everything you would talk to an actor about I was trying to teach these animators. Jean Bolte: The main characters, Sebulba, Watto, and Jar Jar, were things that I had painted. Those were great. I mean, Jar Jar, obviously, was an important character. I remember that Doug Chiang [paid] very, very close attention to him. After there was artwork from Doug, and the model, then I would do the texture paint on it, and then Doug Chiang would take a frame render and paint on it. The next morning I’d come in, I’d see what he had done, have a meeting with him, I would incorporate those changes into Jar Jar. That process went on every day for weeks and weeks and weeks. Rob Coleman: I remember showing [a test of Watto] to George, and he was so excited that he showed him to Frank [Oz], who was doing the actual rubber puppet of Yoda on that first one. And then Frank said to George, “Well, this is the future.” And George was just beaming. The centerpiece action sequence of the film is the podrace, a fast, furious race between Anakin Skywalker and a smattering of strange aliens, through a course that includes a stadium, caves, rocky terrain, and the occasional Tusken Raider sniper. John Knoll: I had been playing around with a desktop tool that did two-dimensional physics simulations. It was called Interactive Physics. You could draw 2D shapes and you could have gravity and drag, and you could attach springs or chains to them and let them collide, and kind of do what they do. Seeing the designs for the podracers, they’re supposed to be suspended on repulsors, like Luke’s speeder, where they just sort of hover, and if you disturb them they have a kind of springy action to them. So they’re supposed to be just kind of hovering there, and then the cables go back to the cockpit. I just kept thinking that they should be, as they’re driving along, bouncing and springing and kind of look like they’re being held up by springs.

I used this Interactive Physics program to build a top down version of a podracer in 2D, where I had two engines and chains that went back to a cockpit. Then I attached thrusts to the engines, and I hooked them together by a spring network. I would jostle them a little bit and they would have this nice secondary springy motion that you would never have the time and patience to animate believably. I just really liked the look of it. I talked to Habib Zargarpour, my friend that was doing all that [computer animation software] Maya beta testing, and I said I want to try setting something up like this in 3D where we make up a frame and we suspend the pods from springs that attach to the frame. Basically, what we’re going to animate is, we’re going to animate the frame, we’re going to jostle it around, and when we animate the pods we’re basically just animating this frame. The pods are just going to hang from that, and when we move the frame, they’ll kind of bounce around and we’ll get all this really nice secondary motion. So that’s how the animation system worked, we weren’t actually animating the pods directly. We’re animating this frame that was holding them up. That was, I think, the first time that we’d done vehicle animation that was all being driven by rigid bodies and dynamic simulation system. Jean Bolte: I remember the first time I saw the podrace come together on the screen, and I was like, “This is it. This is amazing and it’s a beautiful collaboration.” The model makers and the computer graphics department come before me in the [process]. It’s first artwork, then the model makers get busy, the CG model department gets busy modeling, then it’s passed off to paint. Often it goes back to model and back to paint and back to model. John Knoll: Yeah, it’s a mixture. Doug and the group had designed this racecourse that had all these very distinctly different-looking regions. It was all pretty deliberate because George wanted you — if you saw two racers in one particular terrain — to immediately understand where you were in the racetrack. “Oh, that’s the area right past the stadium,” or “There’s the arches,” or “That’s the area where they get into this narrow canyon.” So if you kind of understood what that racetrack is like, then you cut to this character and you kind of know, “Oh, he’s like 10 seconds behind Anakin because he’s still in the crater field,” and that kind of thing. We had all these different terrains we had to create, and some of them were more closed in than others. A couple of them, like Beggar’s Canyon, and there was another sort of cave, this stalactite cave, I figured were closed in enough that we could do in miniature.

(The stunning podrace arena miniature.)

(Thousands of painted Q-tips stood in for audience members in the podrace arena miniature.) The podrace stadium was another one where I really felt like we’d get a lot of benefit out of building a miniature of that. Partly I was kinda looking back at how people had done things in the past, and the Ben-Hur stadium from the chariot race, that always really impressed me. Those were done in miniature and they just looked amazing. We’ll build a miniature of that arena, and we’ll shoot all the elements outdoors, and we’ll get that really nice, realistic daytime look. And then there were other terrains where it was just wide open and we were going at 600 miles an hour, and it seemed like the only way to do it was this CG projection technique. It was a whole mixture of whatever technique would work. Ben Burtt: I followed through with the podrace from day one to however we ended it. [Laughs] Even in the earliest stages of temporary assemblies of the race I showed George, I always was starting to put sound in. I, of course, had a library to start with of aircraft, and some automobile, cars, and things that had high-speed racing-type sounds that I could manipulate. I would sketch those in a temporary way. As we went along and the podrace developed, I would go out and record new vehicles, as would [sound designer] Matt Wood and a few others. We’d send them out to races to get drag strips, cars, we did some — everything from antique biplanes with wires humming on them to running an electric toothbrush up and down a harp string. It wasn’t just restricted to aircraft or anything. We did a lot of cars, a lot of aircraft of different types, and then manipulated other sound effects. George Lucas: The podrace was the direct result of my lifelong fascination with racing. I thought it would be fun to build really intense race vehicles that were as much sort of chariots as they were anything else, like two horses and a chariot. I took that idea, and plot-wise, it was necessary to get them off the planet. Obviously, you could come up with a million different ways, but I have a tendency to always go toward the racetrack. It was very dynamic. And it’s fun. I love it. The digital revolution of which The Phantom Menace was part did not stop with effects; it played a big part in the editing of the film and the entire delivery method. Still, the movie was ultimately made utilizing techniques both new and traditional. George Lucas: I’m not sure where my embrace of technology comes from. All art is technology. Film, or the movies, were the highest point of technology in the art world. You just had to learn a lot, and there’s a lot of technical things to deal with. So that wasn’t the issue as much as it was the fact that I didn’t mind change. And I didn’t mind change because I actually physically worked in it. I worked as an editor, I worked as a cameraman, and I know how difficult it was just working in the medium where you have little splices of film, you can’t find them, when you go to look for something you have to go through reels and reels of film. It takes a long time and it’s very frustrating on lots of levels. Just the whole idea that back in the Kodak days, you’d shoot the film, and then you have to send it in to the drugstore to get it processed, and then bring it back to see what you have, is slow and frustrating. And the whole thing was built on that, whereas if you do it electronically, digitally, you can see what you’re doing as you’re doing it. So you know exactly what you’re doing. Ben Burtt: Phantom Menace was shot on film. It was the last of the ones shot on film, but it gets transferred to a digital form, then we’re cutting on Avid editing machines. Once you’ve got the image in the digital realm, rather than a physical piece of film, of course then it opens up the door to the amenities of working digitally. You can cut and paste images, and you can duplicate them, and you can flip flop and enlarge them and shrink them, doing all kinds of stuff with a lot of fluidity that you would never have if you were working on a physical film. George loved that world of manipulation after the fact. You learned working for George that no shot as the camera saw it was final. [Laughs] It could be thought of as just an element for further development.

(Jean Bolte paints a Sebulba maquette.) Jean Bolte: When Jurassic came out, the company offered to train those of us who were interested in making the switch — they referred to it as “making a switch to computer graphics.” I had no intention whatsoever of making a switch [from the model shop]. What I always wanted to do was to train on this, in the new technology, learn as much as I could about it, but also keep the door open in the model shop. I had to fight kind of hard to make that work. But I think I was fairly successful because during Episode I, I was still able to go back to the model shop and paint maquettes, sort of keep both doors open. I loved that. John Knoll: To be perfectly frank, I was getting a lot of pressure from George and Rick to do less with miniatures and more with digital techniques. And what George told me, this was, I think, during Episode II or III, he was pushing back on me wanting to do so much with miniatures. He said, “Listen, the future is in computer graphics with these digital techniques, and you’re using miniatures as a crutch. You’re going to have to get better at doing this computer graphics work and expand the palette of things you’re going to be able to do that way. And the way you’re going to get good at it is doing it, so I’m going to kick the crutch out from under you and it’s for your own good. Don’t build so many miniatures. Do this stuff more with digital techniques because you need to be doing that.” Even though my preference would have been to keep doing what I was doing on Episode I. I look back on a lot of the miniature work we did on Episode I and I think it still looks amazing. Like Theed city, I think a lot of those shots are completely convincing. You’d never know. And I think the podrace stadium looks pretty good, and the podrace hangar looks really good. And there’s a lot of extensions that I don’t think people even know are extensions that are in the Nemoidian ship, of the corridors and the bridge and all of that. You’d never know.

#behind the scenes #george lucas #ben burtt #doug chiang #rob coleman #john knoll #jean bolte #ahmed best #long post under read more

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gtunesmiff · 4 years ago

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The 5 Directions of Management

For many people, Michael Scott is the archetype of management. Maybe a bit lovable but definitely unqualified. Lacking in self-awareness, often disconnected and sometimes even dictatorial.

We know Michael Scott isn’t real, and yet we can imagine that there are a whole lot of managers like him. After all, they are the ones in charge, like it or not.

Whether management is a role to which you aspire, a part of your current job description, or a group of individuals that you loathe, there is a clear distinction in most minds between “the managers” and “the managed.” There is a clear, one-way direction. Top to Bottom. Superiors to subordinates.

In reality, though, management is a much more complex and pervasive aspect of our work lives. It is not simply a station or function for those lucky few to reach their career milestones, but rather an exercise in five directions at any one time:

Up – Managing superiors, investors, board of directors

Down – Managing any individuals who work under your stewardship, including traditional W2 employees, contract labor, and volunteers

Out – Managing customers, suppliers, competitors

Across – Managing peers and partners

Within – Managing self

What is implied with each direction?

This may seem a bit counterintuitive. After all, aren’t these people supposed to be managing you? In reality, however, this is one of the most important and difficult directions of management.

How are you managing the expectations of those above you? If their goals and visions are not realistic, you and your team won’t succeed.

How do you manage the pipeline of information between you and your boss? Do they see everything, or just the vital elements? What about bad news? Are they reactionary or rational? Do they need context or just the bullet points?

How do you manage conflict between you and those leading you?

What if your boss is not that helpful?

DOWN

Despite the fact that this direction of management gets the lion’s share of our focus, it remains a constant struggle for many.

Am I doing everything I can to place those under my leadership in a position to succeed?

Am I clear, inspirational, and fair?

Am I delegating well? Or, am I just dumping work that I don’t want?

Am I being a good steward of their time, resources, and effort?

Peter Drucker said, “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” Don’t do that. Strive to be a great manager.

Out

While individuals outside of your organization are clearly not directly under your guidance, these are still some of the most crucial relationships to be managed.

How are you managing the expectations of customers? Do you know how and when to push back against unreasonable requests?

Are your relationships with your suppliers strong? Poor management here can have a domino effect that will eventually reach your customer.

What about competitors? Is there a relationship that encourages healthy competition, or one that breeds underhanded, cutthroat tactics?

ACROSS

Again, these individuals are not directly under your leadership, and likely have an organizational position similar to your own. This is often the most challenging direction of management for high performers in particular. They are fine with their boss and their subordinates. But their peers? That is another issue.

Are you working with these individuals to build the overall organizational value?

Have you helped create a culture that encourages generosity and discourages overly individualistic attitudes? (In a 2013 book, Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant proposes that generosity within the workplace is an important factor in both personal and organizational success.)

Are you a good teammate?

WITHIN

This refers to self-management, which is often the most neglected direction of ambitious leaders. As more and more items clamor for our attention, it becomes easier and easier to allow our own life to get out of balance and eventually become something we hardly recognize. We often find ourselves leading everyone and managing everything but ourselves. Because of this, I’ve used a simple tool for years to help me keep myself on track. I explore this tool in greater detail in my book Managing Me, but it is essentially a series of six gauges. In my experience, if I maintain health in each of these areas, I will also maintain overall health.

Establishing Strategic Clarity—a life that takes care of what really matters

Making Your Contribution to the World—a life that is engaged in meaningful, productive, and fulfilling work

Keeping Life in Balance—a life that successfully juggles the multiple opportunities and responsibilities of your personal and professional worlds

Nurturing Quality Relationships—a life that is blessed with a handful of heart-level connections that can last a lifetime

Pursuing Spiritual Vitality—a life that is infused with a relationship with God

Stewarding Your Finances—a life that makes wise use of money—for yourself and for others

Multi-Directional Management

Sustained success in any arena hinges on our ability to effectively manage relationships and variables in multiple directions.

Like a quarterback who manages not only his own knowledge of the playbook, but also the relationships with his teammates, the media, his coaches, and even the fan base, all leaders must be multi-directional leaders.

As our careers progress and demands in each direction become more pronounced, this becomes increasingly true.

We must be proficient at facing all five directions.

A talented five-direction manager will

always have inner fulfillment,

always have people wanting to work with you,

and always find work.

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let-me-make-you-proud · 5 years ago

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Tangled: The Series Q&A with Kait.

This is a recapitulation from today’s (September 14, 2019) Questions and Answers session with Kait on the Tangled Discord Server.

Q: Which Disney princesses outside of Tangled the series can you see Varian being friends with? Nonfranchise ones included.

A: I think Belle is the first one who comes to mind!! She’s super studious and goes against the grain…not to mention her father is an inventor who’s a little off-base! 🙂 I think he’d be super comfortable experimenting with Belle and her dad and reading awesome stories! (Maybe even sharing the Tales of Flynn Rider with her! …Assuming she hasn’t read it! Haha. ) He could also eat ham sandwiches with Anna. Sorry. Second thought. Lol!!

Q: So Kait, as a storyboard artist on the show what kind of little details, quirks or creative touches did you or any other artists put into Varian scenes you or others storyboarded?

A: Ha!! Any acting scene with Varian I had…I pretty much based off of Anna Lencioni (my best friend/ another board artist on the show.) Anna makes these very specific expressions and she gestures to herself a lot and closes her eyes and creases her brows and says things like “A-huh! Actually…” or “Um!!” Before making a point and it’s always reminded me of him.

She kept a “flynnolium” prop from Halloween with green goo in a vial in her cubicle at work so long it grew mold. She said she was studying it. She found scrap metal in her boot one day. She has a basement lab for her experiments and crafts. She befriended two raccoons at her last apartment. She is the most accident-prone person with freckles I’ve ever met…she’s pretty much him.

Jeremy Jordan’s reads give you so much to work with…and I love that character so much I feel a natural sort of understanding of how he might say something or do something…but Anna would always do these specifically Anna things that I had to use for Varian.

Q: Do you have any specific advice for aspiring storyboard artists or people who aspire to work in animation?

A: Gestural drawings help you learn to draw fast…which is a very important part of storyboarding. I would say storyboarding‘ s biggest requirements are clarity and speed. Lots of productions have different requirements in terms of what they look for from story artists. Tangled‘s leadership cared a lot about drawing skill, animation, layout, etc. because it more strongly informed the animation studio to have those things. The show I’m working on now (Monsters at Work) is a 3D show…so for our production, the emphasis is more on story and speed. We pitch ideas more than we pitch drawings…so clarity is important and acting is too, but we’re far less precious about tying down drawings and animating since we shift into the 3D production pipeline after story. The boards are still very important…but the more technical aspects are a *little* less so. The focus is just more on story and character and what the board artists can bring to their scenes.

So I’d say just practice drawing…maybe try and give someone a prompt or ask a friend for one. Choose a theme! Maybe vampires? What’s the worst thing that could happen to a vampire? What’s the best thing? What’s the funniest thing? What if they were also an alien? Or fused with a werewolf? Or chained to one? What would happen? Giving yourself a starting point for an idea will inspire you to explore all the possibilities for humor, drama, etc. in that idea. If you’re struggling to give yourself a prompt, try looking online…or maybe choosing a song you like or a passage from a book for inspiration.

There’s also this really fun thing you can do to study cinematography and shot composition called a “three tone” exercise. Basically…put on your favorite (live action) film, grab a sketchbook, grab a black and grey marker, and use the white of the page for your third tone. What you wanna do is (as you’re watching or while pausing) sketch a small thumbnail using only three grey tones of what you see on the screen. Draw the shot- where the characters are, try and duplicate the lighting…it teaches you a lot! 🙂 (Phew!)

Q: Do you have any fun non-spoiler head canons about Varian?

A: I think his favorite dessert is apple pie and I think he bakes recreationally very often! He’s probably a good cook. (Though he may have one or two minor accidents……a burnt thing here and there. Minor oil splatters….haha!!)

Q: What��ve been your favorite episodes, both to storyboard and in general? Of course, no specifics if it’s S3

A: Haha! Well…What The Hair and Queen for A Day have special places in my heart because they were such big moments for my favorite character…(Varian, haha.) But I’d say the episodes I had the most fun boarding are all in season 3!!! Which is exciting! I have to start compiling some work to post! 🙂 I think the episode I had the most fun with is one you guys will really enjoy.

Q: Will we get some interesting surprises (In Season 3)?

A: Without any spoilers- absolutely!! The show is always full of those.

Q: So We’ve heard many fans express why they love Varian as a charcter before, I’d love to know what drew you and Anna to Varian as well and why you guys personally found him to be a great character.

A: When Shane Prigmore originally pitched the character to me, he was much younger. He was like 11 or so, I think? Maybe 12? He’s still pretty young…but what Shane said was that he wanted him to go from this wide-eyed kid to this dark, angry person whose bangs fell over those wide, bright eyes…just full of rage. That idea was super interesting to me…it just hit on something in character development that I felt like I’d never exactly seen before? He was so young and it was such an interesting idea to me to make a child the villain and to give that child a strong reason to be angry? It felt like it was taking this child very seriously, which I appreciate. It felt very real and very dark.

The thing that threw me through a loop but also evolved my fascination with the character was Jeremy Jordan’s casting. I listened to a lot of the auditions they had for various actors and I had seen a ton of Shane’s concept art of the character…a lot of them were VERY different than what we have now. One version Ricky Roxburgh (writer) contributed to had Varian cast as an adult in the story. But when I heard Jeremy I felt like I totally understood who Varian really was.

He was a well-intentioned disaster with unchecked emotions. That. Is me! Haha!! I see myself in his imperfections, his emotionality in spite of his creative and often intellectual thinking. He wants to ascend to these levels he may not be ready to ascend to…he feels this need to prove himself and seek validation. I don’t know, I guess I relate to that! And I’m just a sucker for good guys gone bad. The other half of this, of course, is that he’s very charming and cute and super reminds me of my best friend, Anna Lencioni.

Q: Which character do you most like seeing interacting with Varian?

A: It’s a little spoilery for me to reveal that……..but I think you guys are gonna know when it happens! Haha!

I can’t wait to post THOSE boards

That’s actually right out of the episode I think I liked boarding the most, haha.

Q: If there was one prop (furniture, object, the like) from the Tangled series that could be made real and you could keep, what would it be..?

A: I think it’d have to be those little alchemy orbs that Varian throws? They just suddenly clean the whole castle hallway somehow and like…could use me some of that. He also has the one that removes stains from tablecloths, so. I’m sloppy. That’d be a big help. Haha!

Also his staff is pretty cool 😉, I boarded/created that staff…David Lee (prop designer) did its final design…haha

Q: I have a question about a scene in season 1. When Varian got back the first part of the scroll he mentioned that it took him a while to translate it. Has he really been able to read it or has it been a bluff?

A: Varian can indeed translate what’s on the scroll. 😉

Q: Do you have any networking advice for those trying to get into the animation industry?

A: Post your work!! Make it easily accessible, tag it well, just show what you’ve got online! Upload boards, animatics, drawings, etc. Creating an online presence can really help put your name out there. Apply for internships, jobs. I know it’s hard to network because a lot of industry professionals don’t have time to answer specific questions or give portfolio reviews…so it’s sort of important to take some initiative on that and be self-motivated.

For me, I studied the portfolios of Disney feature story artists, CalArts students, etc. and tried to structure the presentation of my work based on that. Also, it helped me get a sense of what pieces of work would best showcase where I was trying to go and what I was trying to do. I’d ask yourself those questions as you develop a portfolio and artistic voice online! 🙂

My first feature job after a trainee program in New York at Blue Sky happened because Doug Sweetland (Pixar animator, feature director, awesome dude) found my work online and liked it. He just reached out based on that!

Shane Prigmore actually reached out to me for Tangled similarly.

Q: Besides Varian, do you have a favorite character that you’ve boarded?

A: I always love Eugene. He’s the second character I think I’m most like. His acting was really fun to play with and I felt like I could push his expressions a lot because he’s so funny. I loved boarding Lance too (I boarded a lot of Lance in S3!!) but MAN was he hard to draw, haha! His face shape is just really hard to draw at certain angles.

Q: With Varian cosplay that is going on, what Disney character would you like to see Varian dress up as next?

A: Jack Skellington! Halloween is afoot. Jack is another well-intentioned disaster. Guess I have a type!

Q: What’s Varian’s opinion on raccoons, are they his favourite animal?

A: I imagine it’s because Ruddiger is always finding interesting things in the trash and giving them to Varian to use in his experiments. Also, they’re fat and cute.

Q: There’s a bit of an argument going on over how many freckles Varian has. Can you confirm how many he has?

A: Ha!!! Yes…one second… 14!!

Q: How big do you think Corona is? Like Vatican City small or Arendelle big?

A: You know, with the wall and all, it actually feels a little on the smaller side to me? I’m sure there’s a little bit of discrepancy between the movie’s version of Corona and our version…but based on where we went within Corona on the show, I’d say it feels on the smaller side.

Q: Are there any non-spoiler Varian scenes or moments that didn’t make the cut that you can share?

A: MAN. Yes. There is one scene that changed after I rolled off the episode and I’m very sad about it. I’ll post it after the episode airs! There was also a line of Varian’s that I boarded to a specific read from Jeremy Jordan and that read was not chosen in editorial later so…I’ll post that one too, haha!

Q: What is your favourite song from the first two seasons so far?

A: All my favorite songs are in season threeeeee…hahahaha!! I think Let Me Make You Proud or the Buddy Song are my favorites. Buddy Song still gets stuck in my head now and then.

Q: What do you think Varian would order at a drive-thru? Specifically at chipotle 😂

A: Chipotle isn’t a drive thru!! Hahaha He’d get the kid’s quesadilla from chipotle. I think Varian is a fries/chips kind of person…something to snack on while he works! He probably also likes milkshakes.

Q: (Continuation from the question above) Chocolate or vanilla?

A: He’d revolutionize by combining them both. FOR SCIENCE!

Q: What is, in your opinion, the most challenging part of varian’s design to draw?

A: His goggles, hahaha. Or just his…hair in general.

Well it’s funny too because when you board these guys, you get used to doing a shorthand for them and then when you go to draw them FOR REAL you realize how complicated that actually is and how wrong your shorthand actually was? Hahahaha

Q: is Varian ticklish at all?

A: I feel like Varian, Eugene, and Lance are all equally ticklish. To the point of absurdity. Cass would fight it as long as she could…but when it finally got to her, she’d laugh uncontrollably. Rapunzel, she’s the TICKLER.

Q: What do you think Varian opinion and belief on magic is now that he’s seen it with his own eyes?

A: I imagine that he certainly believes in it now and no longer underestimates its powers…but I imagine he’s ultimately more comfortable staying in his own lane and working with worldly properties!

Q: If Varian would have been able to meet Demanitus…how would their conversation had looked like?

A: I feel like Varian would have had a TON of questions about his legendary device and whether or not he truly traveled dimensions.

Q: Did Varian have any other friends in old Corona before he met rapunzel?

A: Probably not many…he’s a bit of a hermit. I think Ruddiger is his best friend……. It’s sad but I also think that’s kind of why it hurt so bad when Rapunzel wasn’t able to help him. Also why he was SO excited to have Rapunzel, Cass, and Eugene come visit.

I think the village looked at Varian as a little unstable or worrisome. I’m sure everyone knew he was very nice…but they were likely very unnerved by his inventions.

Q: Do you think Varian ever tried to synthesise gold or the elixir of life like a real alchemist?

A: I’ve wondered that myself!! I think his alchemy has proven to be more about other people…helping others, making people proud. Maybe if someone he cared about was in need.

Q: If you were to meet Varian in real life, what would you say to him?

A: What elixir did you make to get THAT kind of volume? His hair’s so POOFY! Honestly, I’d probably just give him a hug.

Q: How much does Varian know or remember about his mom?

A: I’d say about as much as the photo of her on the wall.

Q: Is there spoiler about his hair streak? Or is it just by design?

A: It’s totally by design. I think it’s safe to assume it’s probably the result of some lab accident!

Q: In what ways is Jeremy Jordan like Varian?

A: I don’t know Jeremy Jordan personally, haha! But I think a lot of these inflections he adds to Varian sort of off the cuff probably come very naturally to him. I know he often wants to do his own pass at the musical arrangement Alan Menken writes…like he’ll want to do something a little different, in his own way, and it will change the song completely!! In an awesome way. That’s a little Varian-esque. In the “Let Me Make You Proud” reprise…Alan Menken had sung that “they are going to pay…they…will…pay” all in a low, downward tone. Jeremy wanted to scream it and make it powerful and angry and loud when he said “PAY” and you could just hear the spite in his voice for the “they will pay.” Genius!

Q: What was the most shocking moment/revelation of the series to you (minus anything season 3)?

A: It’s hard to say because I knew most of what was going to happen long, long ago. I think one of the things that made me go “oh dang!” was something Tom Canfield boarded. It’s that part in Destinies Collide where Lance slices the entire statue down the middle with a sword. What a BAMF!

Q: What were your thoughts on the early concept of Varian having an apple orchard and being a farm kid instead of a young alchemist?

A: He still kinda has those things! Quirin is a farmer as well as the village leader and there are apples on their little farm estate! 🙂 I think that makes Varian very unassuming as a mad little scientist. I’m sure that’s how (Ruddiger and Varian) met! Remember, he used his purple tacky goo stuff to catch raccoons so they wouldn’t eat the crops! And Ruddiger’s favorite snack is apples. 😉

Q: What is his official height and weight?

A: Smol.

Q: How did you guys come up with Varian’s name? And was there any other name suggestions for him before the name ‘Varian’ was chosen?

A: I’m not sure who came up with that name, actually! I’m sure it has something to do with the meaning of the word “variant” which means something that varies, changes in form.

Q: What’s his last name?

A: His last name!! I have NO idea and it bothers me!!! A Disney magazine referred to Varian, Ruddiger, and Quirin as “The Ruddiger Family” and I still haven’t stopped laughing about that.

Q: What sad Disney movie moments would make him cry?

A: Oof. Lion King.

Q: What musicals do think Varian would enjoy?

A: Little Shop of Horrors! I think he’d see himself in Seymour! Or Wicked…you know, that villain arc.

Q: How did Arianna and Fred meet?

A: I actually don’t know off the top of my head!

Q: Would Varian enjoy rollercoasters?

A: I think he’d enjoy how they’re MADE and then scream his head off while riding one, throw up his cotton candy and corndog, and go play carnival games instead. Then get mad that they’re rigged.

Q: So what comes next for you now that the series is almost over? Any big plans?

A: Well the series wrapped for production a while ago! I’ve been on another show for almost a year now! 🙂 I’m working on the new Disney+ show Monsters at Work as a director! It’s an awesome, awesome show…totally next-level…I’m shocked that I’m getting to be apart of something like this. It’s a direct sequel to the movie that serves as an office comedy (a la The Office, Parks and Rec) and has so many characters that fit immediately into the Monsters Inc world. Monsters Inc is my favorite Pixar movie…so I literally come to work and leave work on the same high! It’s an awesome, awesome show with a great crew! 🙂 It’s also just really exciting to be apart of the first original animated property for D+!

Q: How would you compare working as a director to working as a storyboard artist?

A: It’s hard work, just as hard, but in a different way! For me personally, I’m a little easily fatigued by drawing? I get a little creatively frustrated because my thoughts move quicker than my hand. Or because I don’t always feel like I can execute in a drawing what I’m thinking in the way that I want? Part of that is just being an artist…and it’s not ALL the time that I feel that way…but I think I have a certain stamina for drawing that I found challenging to increase.

Directing is just different! It has a lot more to do with managing a team, communication, coordinating, listening, speaking up, problem-solving, being very aware of story as it applies to ALL parts of a production. I don’t draw as often anymore. You have to consider a lot more…more people, more constraints, more difficulties, more opinions, more solutions…it’s just MORE. And you also still have to draw! 🙂 It’s very busy work, but it’s AMAZING and I love it. I feel like I’m contributing to animated storytelling a lot more in this role, actually. I love working with people, I love workshopping, and I love helping! I’m also just spoiled to be working with some great people right now. It’s a blast.

Q: Are any Tangled: The Series crew joining you on that show?

A: Yes!! Tom Caufield and Wendy Sullivan were on it for a minute, but they’ve both moved on to Dreamworks recently! James Suhr (board artist), Isabelle Gedigk (season 3 board artist), Naomi Hicks and Casey Coffey (revisionists), David Lee (props), Ricky Roxburgh (writer), and I are all working together again! It’s awesome.

Q: Does Varian, deep down, blame himself for the amber?

A: I believe he does.

Q: How do you deal with artist’s block?

A: I try to think about the intention behind what I’m doing. Why is the scene I’m working on very important to the story? If it feels unimportant or boring, how can I make it interesting? What can I do on my end to make it more inspiring or fun without going too far off the rails and still serving the scene’s purpose?

If it’s not work-related, I try and start with some fan art or something familiar for me to draw. I have a lot of scribbly Varians in the margins of a lot of my sketch documents. I use him as a warm-up a lot. It helps build my confidence to draw something familiar/ that I think I can draw pretty well.

Q: What’s the hardest scene you’ve ever had to board?

A: Oh God. ANYTHING with action. I’m not an action gal. Lots of stuff in S3. I was board partners with Wendy Sullivan and ended up getting a lot of action to board even though she’s WAY better at it than me!! It was an interesting challenge…but it was very, very challenging. Ben (Co-EP) was a great mentor to me in the scene I did for the mid season. He was very patient with me, despite my shortcomings as an action board artist, haha. I enjoy boarding for comedy much more.

Kait: Anyways, I should probably head off now! Thank you guys so much for all the questions!!!! You’re awesome! I hope you’re all super excited for S3! It’s a great one.

#tangled #tangled the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure #varian #Q&A #Tangled crew #Question & Answers #Kait #ruddiger #Rapunzel #Eugene #Lance #Cassandra

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artcenterstories · 5 years ago

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A Visual Conversation: Meet Art Director Samantha Kallis

ArtCenter: What are you working on right now? Samantha Kallis (BA Illustration '10) Art Director of Development at Disney Television Animation: I can't give specifics, but broadly I work on Disney projects before they go into production. My job is to generate artwork in the early stages of the storytelling process, shepherding a project along until it's green lit.

I help the showrunner or creators figure out visually what they're going to say. It's more like a visual conversation. I'm just planting seeds because eventually another art director will come in after me. It's just enough to draw out the core story points, so those who end up making the show can have their own voice.

AC: What’s the most unique thing you’ve designed? SK: As animation evolves, I’m constantly thinking about how my work also has to evolve. I’m seeing a big movement toward the VR space — if viewing is headed in this direction, it poses a whole new area of visual problem-solving. I've been trying to figure out how to design for a medium that might go beyond linear narrative since the audience in VR can look wherever they want.

AC: How do you define success? SK: For me, success has never truly been tied to the work. It's about doing something that allows me to live a full life outside of the work. Success is balance, which I'm not always successful at.

AC: What’s the design cliché you’re most tempted to use? SK: I don’t think we need to be too afraid of clichés, so long as you are designing to the story you’re trying to tell. Clichés are shorthand storytelling. Part of my job is to get the easy read — it’s the most effective tool when you don’t have a lot of time on screen.

AC: Do you have any superstitions? SK: I try to force a previous solution in a new situation, and I have to relearn each time that a new problem requires its own unique approach. It's a craving for a formula, but for me the only thing that’s ever worked is to research obsessively.

AC: What’s the one tool you can’t do without? SK: Pinterest is a real lifesaver. It allows for tangential researching; clicking on one thing, then another. The drawing and painting come fast, but the research takes a long time.

AC: What’s the first site you look at when you open your computer in the morning? SK: WhoWhatWear. I find I can't jump straight into working.

AC: What do you do to detox from media and screens? SK: Hiking — I'm Swiss, so it's pretty much required. I live in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and on the weekends, I'm pretty ready to go off and not look at a screen.

AC: If you could trade jobs with anyone for a day who would it be? SK: I've always wanted to do what I do, so that's a tough question. I wouldn't mind trading with the head of the studio, so I could green light anything and raise my salary a couple million. Or I'd do something completely outside myself — like a spy in the CIA. I've been catching up on Homeland.

AC: What book is on your bedside table? SK: I have a few right now: The Dutch House , The Witch’s Daughter, and Red, White & Royal Blue. For me, reading is an escape, and I like to switch between books based on my mood.

AC: Who are the most interesting designers working today? SK: Those working in VR; they're pioneering the next iteration of viewing. I'm excited to see how it could be applied to our pipeline. Although choosing where you point the camera is such an important part of filmmaking. I just saw 1917 and how the camera was used to create a third character and enhance the narrative and drama — that’s something I’d miss if VR became the norm.

AC: Describe a moment in your childhood when you first identified as a designer. SK: I come from a line of artists, so it was like going into the family business. My great grandfather was an art director; my grandfather was an art director who worked on movie posters — the most famous one he worked on was the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. My uncle was a writer for television; my dad has done documentary films; my grandmother was an illustrator for magazines.

My grandparents had a studio with an old, mid-century modern cabinet with a thousand drawers full of every art supply you could imagine. We were allowed to open any drawer we could reach and play with all these amazing, professional art supplies. Growing up, you got a crayon instead of a rattle.

AC: If you could have a superpower, what would it be? SK: Definitely teleportation. I'm so sick of my commute. And for dinner — how about Rome?

AC: What’s your most prized possession? SK: I have a lot of art from my grandparents hanging all over the walls of my house. I love being surrounded by it all; it’s like a hug.

AC: Where is your happy place? SK: In my front garden. We live in a 100-year-old Victorian cottage, and we recently redid the garden with plants native to California. It attracts so many butterflies and humming birds. In every place my grandmother has lived, she’s always had an amazing garden. And I knew I'd do the same.

AC: How would your closest friend describe you? SK: Competitive, I hope trustworthy and compassionate. My husband says I have an over-active sense of moral responsibility that keeps me in line; I get very upset if people don't play by the rules.

AC: What’s your best piece of advice for an ArtCenter student who’s interested in following your career path? SK: Many of the people in animation had such a different path than I did. So I would say not to compare yourself to others and don't expect something that worked for someone else to work for you. When I was a student at ArtCenter, I wanted to be a freelance editorial illustrator. But I realized I wanted the lifestyle of going to work in a studio, having a regular paycheck and working collaboratively.

I was attracted to animation, so I pursued becoming a storyboard artist. But once I got the job, I absolutely hated it. So my other piece of advice would be to trust your gut and don't be afraid to change course.

AC: If you could add a course to the ArtCenter curriculum, what would it be? SK: Television animation classes. The majority of jobs in animation are in television, especially with streaming. The industry will likely grow exponentially in the next couple of years, and there just aren't enough artists.

#artcenter #artcenter college of design #animation #disney #television #samantha kallis #illustration #entertainment

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the-progress-bar · 6 years ago

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You Wore Out a Path Recap

I haven’t written something this long in … well, I don’t want to check.

The Inception

I don’t remember where the idea for this came from, specifically. I wrote the beginning of the first chapter for Camp NaNoWriMo, along with a whole slew of other FE:A material. It turns out that I’m extremely bad at writing linear narratives, given the absolute mess and if you say goodbye is to straighten out and more casually in the boy across the hall.

Chapter One

The fairy tale was written first actually. I filled in around its scene breaks with Robin being in a Bad Mental State™ as a way to carry this. weird, meandering fairy tale. Also, there’s a much more comedic story in the works that involves Grima and Robin again and I wanted to do something more serious on that vein at the same time.

He strikes to the south east. For some reason, Donnel didn’t stay in the armed forces as Robin hoped but went back home for good.

Donnel! I love Donnel for the sheer comedy of some country boy latching onto the Shepherds, which is otherwise comprised of nobles, and him being able to take on a whole battlefield by himself, leaving the rest in the dust. But he doesn’t stay in Ylisstol and Robin and I are forever sad over that lost potential.

Thunder crumbles around the spirit. They press a stone into the prince’s hand and sighs.

Here’s an instance where it’s clear that I didn’t outline the first chapter at all nor was I thinking about how the pieces fit if I expanded the story. This stone was supposed to do your normal fairy tale shenaniganry with like. Blessings and shielding and magical properties. Then I completely lost that vein and only left the part in where spirit!Robin basically gives Chrom, the prince, their heart. Good job, me. This constantly bothers me, but I also don’t have the motivation to rewrite this bit.

He freezes at Frederick’s stare.

I sincerely love Frederick for reasons that are spoilers for a giant FE:A fic I have in the works, but he’s also so, so fun to wind up.

Chapter Two

So, now I had to actually sit down and outline how this story went. Just a bunch of sentences jotted down, but enough to make me realize how bizarre the geography in this game is. Like, what even is going on with the story’s timeline? Do you know how long it takes to move an army over a continent, when its fastest mode of transportation are horses? I never get how they’re able to run from Plegia over to Mount Prism, then back to the opposite side of the continent and onto Grima’s back. Did Grima just wait for Chrom and co. to arrive? Like, they’re extra enough, but Nintendo, come on.

Let me just say, the FE:A world map has been a permanent fixture in my browser for months and I’m glad to see it gone.

Chrom sinks onto the bed and stares at the coat in his hands.

It’s been almost a decade.

The reason it took Chrom so long to appear among the character tags is because he wasn’t supposed to appear. Not until the last scene. Somehow he snuck into the open and close of the rest of the chapters and I didn’t kick him out.

“I died, Frederick,” Robin snaps. “Please leave it alone.”

Rereading the earlier chapters, I’m a bit surprised myself about how bitchy and defeated (?) Robin is. Being possessed by Grima sucks, and so does slowly turning into a dragon-human thing, but wow boi. Normally my characters are more on the “body slam our problems into submission” side of the spectrum. It all works out eventually, but for a while I had to deal with the nasty problem that apparently only the female characters have any of their shit together.

“Blood magic is a sorry inheritance,” his mother said sadly, thumbs rubbing at the brand on his hand.

I hope you all love Modron as much as me, because I love her and aggressively ignore how Nintendo did her dirty by including her as a key character in a whole bunch of fics coming down the pipeline. Though in this particular fic, her presence snuck in while I wasn’t watching, but not enough to recreate the Chrom situation.

The fisherman knocks on the wooden door of his younger brother’s stone house.

I planned on putting a fairy tale of my own creation into every chapter, with each linked in a tangentially narrative way to Robin’s family. Obviously that didn’t happen. This tale was supposed to be involving Robin and two Morgan’s. That plan derailed immediately.

Chapter Three

Robin’s daughter greets Chrom in Chon’sin’s silks and lacquer, the twists of dark purple contrasting her currently golden hair.

I keep making Say’ri a lesbian. That point doesn’t come up in this story, because Chrom wasn’t supposed to take over so much, but Morgan and Say’ri are together by this point, even if that gets muddled a bit by their weird work relation. I’m just saying, like father, like daughter.

And yes, Morgan dyes her hair. This is more established in the remix I wrote out of boredom of yet another chapter of Robin and Frederick yelling at each other in the snow.

“It’s a wonder your wayward mother never tried fleeing the continent all together,” Grima says.

At this point, I just accepted that I had no control over character barging in because they felt like it. Grima kept the story interesting at least, or else this whole plot would have been the slowest, most boring road trip ever.

At the cost of bloating this chapter and shoving out some other content I initially wanted to cover.

Due to Ferox’s waveringly official stance of neutrality, we spent a few years moving back and forth here.

[Cackling laughter]

Lon’qu and Olivia drop unannounced into the unoccupied seats at the table while Frederick and Robin waited for their dinners.

This scene is … weird. A slight mess. Originally, Lon’qu and Olivia had the same level of screen time as Donnel and Nowi did in the first chapter. But I already had the outline sectioned off into five chapters and writing even more scenes on boats was not a good usage of my time. Presumably, the khans got word that Robin and Frederick were back and heading to Valm and since Lon’qu and Olivia were already in the area with the same destination, they decided to do a favor and sent a message ahead.

What are the Ferox kids doing in Valm? Spying Something, wasn’t important.

A hazy memory of before. Sumia stumbles into Robin’s shoulder, the two of them laughing, drunk on wine and mirth.

In my drafts, there’s half of the fairy tale that was supposed to go in this chapter. Sumia drunkenly tells an equally sloshed Robin the story as they stumble around in the castle. It’s a more standard tale paralleling Modron hiding her children from the Grimleal and made much more sense than whatever was happening in the last chapter. Unfortunately, I cut it out because certain parties used up too many words when they weren’t even supposed to appear.

Chapter Four

Chapter four and five were supposed to come out back to back because I assumed I’d have time to write over the holiday break. As we all know now, that didn’t happen, like so many of my plans.

More importantly though, at this point I realized that Robin needed to start getting his shit together, fast.

A beat from Grima’s many wings carried them on the hot winds blowing off the fires below, covering several hours march in a fraction of the time.

This passage from the bad timeline is one of those sections I wrote nearly immediately since it just clicked. (The other significant passage is the final scene.) Honestly though, I was starting to have a hard time not repeating the same imagery and words over and over again. My grasp of English and vocabulary has never been anything to write home about, first language notwithstanding, and I literally had to pull out the thesaurus a few times in the later sections so I wouldn’t keep writing “scream” but completely forgot what other words existed. Linguistics amazes me, but it is so not my department.

Is it anger? Is it despair? Is it exhaustion, ascending to the Exalt’s throne alone, …

How to Tell I Wrote a Section by Hand Rather Than on My Computer: when the sentences get long and on this roll of phrase after phrase after phrase, that’s me with a pen. This whole section from Chrom was handwritten on my then-new iPad to test out some software.

By this point, I accepted that Chrom was just going to Be There and started working on his scenes to also try ramping up the tension in the fic by going backwards in his history to when the grief gets rawer and rawer. you wore out a path isn’t primarily about grief or depression, but some of those beats snuck in?

Chrom is a Mess™ at this point.

They dream feverishly.

What the fuck was this section.

“How am I supposed to keep this army and your father alive if you won’t tell me what happens? You’re one of our greatest sources of information and you refuse to share with anyone. Stop hiding.”

I hate! This dumb trope! Of not sharing info when traveling back in time! What’s the point of time traveling with the express purpose of changing history and then not! Changing history!

I have strong feelings.

By private captain, Robin means pirates. They must find pirates to board with.

This was entirely for my own amusement. There’s no other reason. Another key sign that my characters are getting a handle on their lives is that the writing starts getting snarkier.

Chapter Five

If by some future machination, the count increases to three out of three, he’s going to wholesale stop trusting magical mountains.

Case in point about the snark.

The master revived, the blood burning, the sacrifice slain, the master revived, the lORD, the FelL DRAGON, death, glory, the gOD and its vessel, returned, returned.

It turns out, messing with AO3’s formatting to have some font fun is a pain in the ass involving work skin shenanigans. The picture work skin already failed to do its job, I wasn’t going to wrestle with another skin just for this sentence. How it’s supposed to look:

A good two-third of this chapter just all came at once, in a sudden dash of productive writing. The muses are fickle that way.

Back on the point about how I Did Not Outline, there were a few items I wanted to reappear through the narrative. Elements from the fairy tales come back in this fight, for example. Another point I decided in the fourth chapter when writing the opening scene are the cathedrals.

(Disclaimer: I’m not religious and thus don’t know the full symbolic significance in cathedrals. What I know can be distilled into: You Thought New York Construction Was Slow? and Very Pretty Because Very Important and Yes, The Organ is Behind You and Very Loud. Not a lot.)

“Why do you fight for Chrom?”

Robin getting interrogated on this point keeps coming up in my fics, but the scenes are always fantastic short bursts that are good at breaking up a section that’s been running too long.

Suddenly, Robin is quite literally on fire.

I already drew the picture. The boy’s on fire. There was a good explanation when I first thought this up, but then when it came time to writing the scene, I forgot why, and my outline didn’t have any notes. Bonds? Naga’s flame? Dramatically dissolving Grima’s marks from Robin’s body? All of the above?

“One last tale for the road,” Modron says to her son, …

Modron’s name. I’ve seen people taking cues from Morgan and going with Morgana, but I’m a contrary soul that always resists whatever fandom decides is a good idea. This works out well half the time.

Morgan and Morgana led my brain to the Arthurian legends, and I decided to see what some of those character’s mothers were called. Went to Wikipedia, clicked a bunch off links radiating from Morgan le Fay and somehow landed on Modron? She’s interesting. Nor did I know about the DnD Bill Cipher thing.

Normally, though, I would not have started with a Welsh name. Some of the name choices for Plegian characters have vaguely Middle East origins (which is a completely different discussion about real world politics in that casting decision) and I would have started there.

I’m not a linguist though. Or someone that knows about naming conventions. So.

Now he stands grounded and as well rooted as the Mila Tree, the fire traded for a calm glow and Robin’s so grateful.

And this line here, this line here, is the sole reason I humored Chrom kicking his way into the story. This final scene was one of the first things I wrote after deciding to expand past the first chapter.

Look at these two dumb boys growing up.

In Conclusion

[staring at my file archives]

Have I ever actually finished a multi-chapter fic before?

#long post #i am #wordy #you wore out a path #I like it when people do these these notes/director cuts #so i'm gonna too #fire emblem awakening

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thebrierpatch · 6 years ago

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“I realize there is something I have known for some time but have never said, and, since I have just spent another 4 hours of my life in climate change academia I have to get this out of my system.

Please understand that many you reading this won't live to an old age... and likely will start scrolling after one or 2 more paragraphs... (edit...Ok I was wrong on this point. This is now my 2nd most shared post of all time..(edit)...make that my most shared)

The IPCC report and Paris accord are incredibly overly optimistic and that commits the world to a target that means the death of hundreds of millions if not more.

But it is worse than that.

Even the commitments made by countries in the Paris accord don't get us to a 2 degree world.

But it is worse than that.

The 2 degree target is now unattainable (unless the entire civilization of the world doesn't do a 180 today...) and is based on geo-engineering the climate of the earth as well as the sequestering of every molecule of carbon we produced over the last number of years and every molecule we are producing today and every molecule we produce tomorrow.... these technologies that don't exist wont exist and even if they did would likely cause as many if not more problems than they fix.

But it is worse than that.

The 2 degree target of the IPCC does not factor in the feedback loops that such as the increased albedo effect caused by the 70% loss of ice in the arctic, The release of methane from a thawing arctic. (there is more energy stored in the arctic methane than there is in coal in the world). This is called the methane dragon. If the process of the release of the methane, currently frozen in the soil and ocean beds of the arctic, which has already begun, spins out of control we are looking a an 8 degree rise in temperature. (this ignores the scientists that don't see this feedback stopping and ends up resulting in the world oceans boiling off and earth becomes Venus...but I digress.

But it is worse than that

The report which give us 12 years to get our head's out of our arses underestimated the amount of heat stored in the world's oceans by 40%... so no , we don't have 12 years.

But it is worse than that.

The IPCC report ignores the effects of humans messing up the Nitrogen cycle through agricultural fertilizers and more... Don't go down this rabbit hole if you want to sleep at night.

But it is worse than that.

Sea level rise will not be gradual. Even assuming that the billions of tons of water that is currently being dumped down to the ground level of Greenland isn't creating a lubricant which eventually will allow the ice to free-flow into the northern oceans as it is only the friction to the islands surface that is currently holding the ice back coupled with the same process is happening in Antarctica but is also coupled with the disappearance of the ice shelves which act as buttresses holding the glaciers from free flowing into the southern ocean we are not looking at maintaining the 3.4mm/yr increase in sea level rise (which incidentally is terrifying when you multiply it out over decades and centuries. We will be looking at major calving events that will result in much bigger yearly increases coupled with an exponential increase in glacial melting. FYI Alberta is going to need a pipeline... just not for oil. More likely for desalinated water from tidewater...

But it is worse than that... We can no longer save the society that we live in and many of us are going to be dead long before our life expectancy would suggest.

If your idea of hope is having some slightly modified Standard of living going forward and live to ripe old age... there is no hope. This civilization is over...

... but there is hope.. There is a way for some to come through this and have an enjoyable life on the other side. Every day we delay can be measured in human lives. There will come a day of inaction when that number includes someone you love, yourself or myself.

So we have 2 options. Wake the fuck up. If we do we will only have to experience the end of our society as we know it aka...the inevitable economic collapse which is now unavoidable, but be able to save and rebuild something new on the other side. This would require a deep adaptation. Words like sustainability would need to be seen as toxic and our focus needs be on regeneration. Regeneration of soil, forest ocean etc.... This is all possible.

Option 2 is the path we are on. Think we can slowly adapt to change. This not only ensures we experience collapse but also condemns humanity to not just economic and social collapse but in a 8 degree world... extinction.

I am sick of pipeline discussions. I am sick of any argument that is predicated on the defeatist assumption that we will continue to burn oil at an ever increasing rate. Fact is if we do we are not just fucked, we are dead. I am sick of people who don't understand how their food is produced, and its effect on the climate.(both carnivores who eat feed lot meat and vegans who eat industrially-produced-mono-cropped-veggies as they are equally guilty here as the consumption of either is devastating). I am sick of the argument that our oil is less poisonous than someone else's. Firstly, no it isn't and secondly, It doesn't fucking matter. I am sick of people that can't even handle the ridiculously-small-only-the-tip-of- the-iceberg of the changes we need to accept; the carbon tax. I am sick of my own hypocrisy that allows me to still use fossil fuels for transportation. I am sick of those who use hypocrisy as an argument against action. I am sick of the Leadership of my country that argues we can have economic growth and survivable environment... we can't. I am sickened by the normalizing of the leadership of our Southern neighbour who as the most polluting nation in the world officially ignores even the tragedy that is the Paris accord. I am sick of the politicians I worked to get elected being impotent on this subject. Naheed and Greg I'm looking at you. (BTW...Druh, you are an exception) I am sick that the next image I put up of my kids, cheese, pets or bread is going to garner immeasurably more attention than a post such as this which actually has meaning... I am sick about the fact that all the information I referenced here is easily discoverable in scientific journals but will be characterized by many as hyperbolic.

I am especially sick that my future and the future of my children is dependent on the dozens of people that saw this post, said there goes Marc off the deep end again and chose to remain ignorant of the basic facts about our near future.

There is a path forward. But every day we delay the path forward includes fewer of us. Build community, build resilience, work for food security, think regeneration, plant food producing trees, think perennial food production, eat food that does not mine the soil and is locally produced, eat meat that is grass fed that is used to provide nutrients to vegetation, get to know a farmer or become one yourself, park your car, do not vote for anyone who either ignores climate change or says we can have our cake and eat it too, quit your job if it is fossil fuel related, stop buying shit, Stop buying things that are designed to break and be disposed of, let go of this society slowly and by your own volition (its better than being forced to do it quickly), rip up your lawn and plant a garden with veggies, fruit bushes, fruit trees and nut trees, learn to compost your own poop, get a smaller house on a bigger lot and regenerate that land, plant a guerrilla garden on a city road allowance, return to the multi-generational house, realize that growth has only been a thing in human civilization for 250 years and it is about to end and make preparations for this change, teach this to your children, buy only the necessities, don't buy new clothes-go to the thrift store, don't use single use plastic or if you do re-purpose it, unplug your garberator and compost everything, don't let yourself get away with the argument that the plane is going there anyway when you book a holiday, understand that there is no such thing as the new normal because next year will be worse, understand before you make the argument that we need to reduce human population ... meaning the population elsewhere... that it is not overpopulation in China or India that is causing the current problem... It is us and our lifestyle, Understand that those that are currently arguing against refugees and climate change are both increasing the effects of climate change and causing millions on climate refugees... which will be arriving on Canada's doorstep because Canada will on the whole be one of the last countries affected, understand that the densification of cities is condemning those in that density to a food-less future. Stop tolerating the middle ground on climate change. there is no middle ground on gravity, the earth is round, and we are on the verge of collapse.”

Via Marc Doll

#words #thoughts #if you read one thing today make it this

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frederator-studios · 6 years ago

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Amanda McCann: The Frederator Interview

You can tell by talking with her that Amanda McCann is good at her job. ‘Cause it feels good to talk with her! And in a big way, Amanda’s job involves a lot of making people feel good: about the work they’re doing; the show they're making; and themselves. As Line Producer on Costume Quest, Amanda is a leader among the unspoken heroes of any animated TV show: the production crew. She gives awesome insight here, for anyone interested in producing, voice acting, writing... actually, as it turns out, Amanda’s good at A LOT of jobs.

Did you always want to work in animation?

I wanted to be an actress! Starting in high school, I studied improv comedy at ComedySportz. I joined their college team and eventually their main stage. After graduating with a degree in Theater, I performed and taught high schoolers there. And I was working at a restaurant - as you do in LA. Finally I had a heart to heart with myself, like “Do I really want to act?” It’s so competitive, and like having a job interview every day. I had friends 10 years older still working it, working hard at it. And I didn’t know if it was for me, because I value stability - a paycheck, insurance, benefits. It was hard to picture myself not having that.

The grips of an existential crisis. What’d you do?

I asked myself, if not acting, what do I want to do? What makes me happy? And that’s cartoons! I’ve always loved cartoons. And yes, as an actor, ideally I wanted to do voice over. But I knew how competitive that was. I also had a writing background - I wrote for The Simpsons comic books for a while - but writing: same deal. So I was looking for the way that people got into animation when they weren’t artists and didn’t have an “in” as an actor or writer - and I discovered production. This whole other side to cartoon-making, and the path to producing. That’s where I wanted to be: making cartoons for a living.

That’s awesome. So you found a job in the industry?

Yup, about 9 years ago I put it out into the universe. I asked if anyone had a connection to an animation studio, and luckily a family friend did. I got a job as a receptionist at WildBrain; at the time they were moving studios from San Francisco to LA. Yo Gabba Gabba! for Nickelodeon was the big property they owned, and they were working on a number of projects for Mattel, as well as producing an animated podcast, The Ricky Gervais Show, for HBO. So I started there and made it very known that I was interested in moving up—I was a bit older than most receptionists (laughs). I put that out there, and within 2 months I was a PA on The Ricky Gervais Show. I’ve been bouncing from job to job in production ever since.

What a journey! And animation was the right fit like you thought?

It immediately felt like a good fit. Animation people are my people. The animation and comedy worlds are very similar and there’s a lot of crossover, so it was a natural transition for me. I love being on a crew. Working with people, and artists - I admire artists so much, because I’m not one, at least in terms of drawing. So people with artistic talents are incredible to me - they’re like unicorns. And actually, by way of working in production, I’ve gotten to live my other dreams! I’ve been doing professional voice-over, for Costume Quest, The Loud House and others. I was just forced to join SAG-AFTRA. I booked enough jobs that I became a ‘must-join’! And I’ve gotten to write for animation too; I wrote a few episodes of Monster High for Mattel and an episode of Ask the Storybots for Jib Jab and Netflix.

(Amanda and her pooch Dobby, by storyboard revisionist Serena Wu)

Wow - so ‘taking a day job’ brought you all these creative opportunities?

Yeah! Sort of through the backdoor, I was able to put it out there that I had these other talents, and get hired for them. I get to tackle it all, which I’ve always loved—being a renaissance woman. Especially since working in production is creative solutions, but it’s not exactly creative. It’s paperwork and hiring and pipelines and schedules and budgets. So being around the creative is really exciting for me, and then also being able to participate through VO and writing at certain points.

That’s amazing. So would your advice to people be, ‘just get in the door?’

Just be there! If you’re at the right place, you’re more likely to be there at the right time. To people looking to break into animation, I always say, “Take anything”. Any opportunity that comes your way, jump in and do your best. I was overqualified to be a receptionist, but I knew that was the step I had to take to launch my career in animation. I know people who started at Nickelodeon in the mailroom and became writers on Spongebob. Stuff like that happens all the time! It’s all about timing. But you also have to hustle in your own way. You have to make people aware of what your interests and goals are.

How do you recommend people put themselves out there? It’s really hard for a lot of people! Especially of the introverted variety.

It is! But I think just doing your best, working hard, and proving that you’re capable is huge. As well as treating everyone equally and with kindness, regardless of their position. You want to be the person that you would want to work with, and people will want to work with you! So start by focusing on the job at hand and executing it as well as you can. At the same time, be vocal about your goals. There’s a finesse to it. You don’t walk around with a sign around your neck that says, “I actually want to be a writer”. Just when an opportunity arises, put yourself up for it. And it’s okay to ask people in the job you want out to lunch or coffee, to pick their brains! I find that people are pretty receptive when you put yourself out there. The last thing that I always say: find your people. This is a big industry, and you can always find people you’ll gel with better. The people you gel with best will be the best advocates for you, propelling you forward. So if you feel unsupported where you are, then move, move on, keep going! I think people get stuck in a rut, or feel obligated to one place. But trust your instincts - if it doesn’t feel right then it’s not. If you move on, you might shine. I’ve seen that happen so many times, where someone makes a lateral move and finds their niche of support. When people become too complacent, I think it stifles them.

What was your path after WildBrain?

I’ve worked with 7 studios: WildBrain, Hasbro, Mattel, Oddbot, Jib Jab, Nickelodeon, and Frederator. Which is great because I have connections at all these places - and people move all the time, or companies get absorbed, so your connection at one studio might move to another. I’ve also been lucky to have pretty long stints at places - jobs that have lasted a lot longer than most production gigs do. Because being tied to a production, whenever the season ends, you’re done. The production crew, though, is the first on and the last off.

How about responsibilities in production - what’s different between being a line producer vs. a production manager, say?

It’s crazy, because every studio’s pipeline is different. Every production’s pipeline is different! But the biggest differences are in level of responsibility over the production overall. As a manager, you don’t have as much say over final decisions; whereas being a producer, you’re often giving the stamp of approval. I once had it broken down really well for me: PA is day to day; coordinator is week to week; manager is month to month; producer is year to year. And that’s how the tasks are viewed. PAs do a lot of daily tasks: copying, scanning, stamping, filing. Coordinators do a lot of shipments that are over a week. Managers look at schedules ahead of time to plan out needs along the way. And producers lay it out as a whole, to see where start to finish lies. The roles blend, a lot of the time, especially manager and producer. The production crew adapts to the needs of each show.

What are the most important qualities of those who do well in production?

Communication skills. That sounds basic, but really - if artists were able to organize all of their stuff and communicate effectively to everybody, we wouldn’t have jobs! Being personable - we’re the deadline keepers, the schedule pushers. It’s like trying to be the cool dungeon master. We have to pull things away from artists who just want to make them beautiful! So I like hiring people for production who have creative backgrounds, because I think they empathize better with artists. It is a lot to ask someone to produce something beautiful and artistic and creative within THIS strict timeline. Taking initiative; I’m not a micro-manager. If I hire you and tell you the things I want you to take care of, I won’t check up on you—I’ll assume you’re doing your job. On top of that, people who collaborate. Voice concerns; pitch me solutions to problems. I’m looking down the road, so I can’t see everything on the day to day. I need people who take the initiative and tell me what’s up. You have to be organized; basic, again, but crucial. We’re working on a bunch of episodes at all different stages: animatic, storyboard, designs, shipping. Your head will explode if you’re not a little OCD about how things are organized and prioritized - and labelled! Asking questions is important: I’d rather you ask me than do it wrong and make things harder for you. There’s no shame in getting help and being mentored! But there’s also no shame in failing. I learn so much from messing up, because it’s like, “Welp! I don’t want to do that ever again.” And coming from the comedy world, especially improv, you fail a ton. I grew up learning how to fail, and I think it’s been critical in letting me progress and grow as a leader and person.

Do you still do improv and comedy?

I do! I’m still with ComedySportz, but I’m not as active. Mostly, I’m applying those improv skills to voice over. I’m auditioning a bunch, and I did some voices on Costume Quest. I was production manager on an upcoming Nickelodeon show, Glitchtechs, and I also have a voice in that when it comes out!

(Denise, one of Amanda’s voices on Costume Quest!)

That’s so cool. What's your advice to people who want to get into VO?

Classes, classes, classes. You get to know your tool and what you’re capable of. There are resources online, some YouTube channels about VO. But classes are where you really grow, because like anything, it’s about repetition. It is very competitive, but I really believe that there’s a part for everyone.

What do you love most about Costume Quest?

I love the collaborative nature of this production. Frederator bought the series to make it, but its original visionary - Tasha Harris, who wrote the Double Fine game - isn’t involved. I’ve never worked on a show before where it wasn’t someone in particular’s baby. Instead, we’ve all adopted it as our baby. And really, we all get a say! As a line producer, generally I wouldn’t get to give comments on material: it’s all about paperwork, pipeline and budget. But the showrunners, Will McRobb, Bryan Caselli, and Nick Bachman have been so gracious in letting me give notes on storyboards and animatics. I go to every voice recording session and get to try my hand at that stuff. Partly because it’s a Frederator show - a little smaller crew, a more independent company - the show’s been able to give a lot of opportunities to talented, deserving people. For so many of the artists, this is their first show ever, and that’s just so cool. And the show looks incredible. We have an amazing voice cast. Some of the most talented people, between the four kids and all of the adults we’ve peppered in. Of course we’re biased here, but we do think it’s going to be something that kids really enjoy, and hopefully adults too. Plus: I’m a huge Halloween nerd. I always had homemade costumes as a kid because my dad is an artist. He would get really creative.

What was your favorite costume he made you?

One time I was Phantom of the Opera. None of the other kids knew who I was. But I knew.

Do you have a favorite character from Costume Quest?

They’re all really great. But of the four kids, I always go back to Reynold. He’s the voice of reason, and the scaredy cat, which I could relate to as a little kid. I was always the youngest cousin, the one who’d be like, “Maybe we shouldn’t throw rocks at this window? Maybe? No? Ok”. So his sweet-natured cautiousness I relate to. But it’s a package deal, and his sister Wren too… I relate a lot to her determinedness and her no-nonsense attitude. That’s something I admire.

What are your favorite cartoons?

I was a Nickelodeon kid, so I grew up on all those series. Rocko’s Modern Life was one of my favorites. Also The Simpsons, The Critic, and Home Movies. For features, Little Mermaid was my jam - and Lilo & Stitch. And Ranma ½ is an anime that I love. Those are some favorites, but I have so many, it’s hard to keep track!

What are your biggest aspirations, or your biggest dream?

I would love to work in animation features someday. I have a ton of experience in TV, and just to see the other side of it - in voice over and producing - would be great. It’s not like a tomorrow thing, but if an opportunity came down the road, that’d be really cool.

Thanks for the interview Amanda! I’m so excited to see all of your creative paths unfurl. And can’t wait to hear your voice in the ‘toons! ❀

- Cooper

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