THE SIMPSONS NEWS
Wow, talk about stress. I woke up on Monday morning stressed out. I had a very fun, relaxing Thanksgiving weekend but the day I went to work, it was instant stress. I woke up with a headache and a neck ache and it hasn’t gone away in four days. I guess I have to get used to the whole quota thing again. Quotas haven’t been really scrutinized for years now so getting back to that mind set might take some more getting used to.

The good news is that the show I’m working on is really funny. It’s really good. It’s a Homer centric episode and he ends up teaming up with an unexpected character. It also has a goofy Marge subplot. It’s a lot of fun to work on. I just need to meet my scene quota.

MOVIES
So my brother, his wife Deborah, my wife, her best friend, and I went to see Beowulf this weekend. Overall I enjoyed the movie. Visually, it was fantastic. It didn’t quite follow the story it was based on very accurately and I’m sure there are a lot of English teachers out there having fits about that. I read Beowulf a while back and it’s funny how much of the language of this story J.R.R. Tolkien lifted from when he wrote The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. I got a kick out of that. According to www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tolkien.htm:

“His scholarly works included studies on Chaucher (1934) and an edition of Beowulf (1937) .”

The movie on the other hand, didn’t have that kind of language although there was some old English spoken by some characters, which I found really interesting. The changes to the story where a little odd but if you don’t take a purist point of view, you can get a little out of it. One of my favorite writers Neil Gaiman, co-wrote the movie. I found it interesting that the movie dealt so much with sin. I liked the idea the movie seemed to present, that personal sin effected not just the individual but the community as well. I also thought it was interesting how the pagan “heroes” of the story seemed to be annoyed by Christianity and would always dismiss it as something bad. They would grumble that after Christianity there were no more “heroes” in the world. Then they would turn around and sin so horribly that it would become a literal monster and effect the lives of many, many people. This would cause them to have to confront and take care of the problems they created at great personal cost but even after they did so, the problems wouldn’t completely go away. I got the feeling that, since they kept rejecting Christianity, they would have to keep fighting the monsters that they created because they would never go away. This is probably why they needed “heroes” and the Christians didn’t. I’m sure the writers didn’t intend that meaning to the story but that’s what I got out of it.

One of the biggest problems I found in the movie was that lack of animation in the character’s faces. They often looked like dolls. It took a lot of work on my part to suspend my disbelief that these characters were “real”. Occasionally they looked good but mostly they didn’t. In the The Lord of the Rings movie, Gollum was a computer generated (C.G.) character, just like all the characters in Beowulf. Theoretically they used the same techniques to make the characters in Beowulf as they used to make Gollum, namely “Motion Capture” (MoCap). Yet Gollum was so much more believably “alive” than the characters in Beowulf. Why?

If you watch “making of” documentaries of Lord of the Rings, you get the impression that the actor, Andy Serkis, who did the MoCap acting and the voice of Gollum did all the work. What you don’t know is that for every moment of real deep acting that Andy Serkis did, there was an animator re-interpreting the acting so that it would work as animation. This is why it looked real. A human being did what a computer could not. Capture the essence of Andy Serkis‘ acting and retranslated it so that it felt real on the Gollum C.G. model. An animator is like a motion caricaturist. A caricaturist looks at a person and exaggerates the physical features that makes a person look like themselves. They capture the essence of the person. An animator does the same thing but through motion. They are actors with computers. I think that the characters in Beowulf didn’t look right because either the animators that they used to interpret the acting weren’t good, the director of animation wasn’t very good about pushing the acting, the director of the movie didn’t understand how to direct the animators, or they didn’t use enough animators and thought the computer would do all the work. In any case, the animation on the humans was the biggest flaw of the movie. I think movies like this will really work great the moment people realize it’s the animators, not the computers that makes believable acting. I still think it’s worth watching. Just be warned, there is a lot of nudity in the movie. Beowulf butt cheeks anyone?

Gollum had really good animation acting in Lord of the Rings

Yoda, in the latest two Star Wars movies, was fully animated. They didn’t MoCap his acting at all. His acting was really good.

“Final Fantasy: Advent Children” had the same stiff MoCap acting problems as Beowulf. Great visual movie though.

Animatrix’s “Final flight of the Osiris” also had stiff MoCap acting.

PODCASTS

I listened to Rosary Army #194 this week. It was really great. Greg Willits ran a marathon this Thanksgiving. The Rosary Army podcast follows the adventure of Greg’s marathon, mostly through Jennifer Willits’ eyes. It’s a very emotional recording. It got me all choked up. I loved it. If you haven’t listened to it then I recommend you do. Afterwards I recommend you watch the video that Fr. Roderick taped of the event. It’s a lot of fun.

CONGRATS GREG!

ANSWERING COMMENTS
Tao responded to my post last week. He said he had an article similar to mine on his blog. I looked it up and I thought it was great. It’s called, “Why Play Board Games?” I recommend it. Check it out. While your at it check out the one called “From the Classics to Modern Board Games” as well.

Thank you for letting me know about you article Tao!

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