Lost

2006.10.30 - Monday

I watched a bit of Lost on DVD recently, right up to the end of season 2. It's pretty good and I can see why lots of people enjoy the show. I don't know how anyone can stomach it on broadcast television, with all of the commercials, unless they enjoy feeling like they're being toyed with. One of the things that bugs me in the show so far are the "alternate point of view" episodes, basically re-telling pieces of the story from the perspective of other characters. These segments tend to offer very little additional information, or at least nothing that seems to demand entire episodes devoted to it. They feel like filler episodes, and I suppose they are.

The flashbacks, which are something else all together, work well for the most part, though I wouldn't want to see that same format necessarily adopted by another series. The flashbacks work well for Lost, so I hope television producers don't get carried away with the "monkey see, monkey do" syndrome which seems to infect TV land every few years.

Here's another reason I like Lost: good, original music. Finally, someone understands that music isn't supposed to be "audio wallpaper", as Rick Berman put it; something you'd only notice if it wasn't there. I'm also glad that the Lost producers didn't opt for the horribly unoriginal practice of digging up contemporary pop music and slugging it into their show during important character scenes. Leave that crap for the teenagers. No, Lost is composed by Michael Giacchino, who is a solid composer who doesn't seem to mind what medium he's working in. I've got a bunch of his stuff in my library, from the "Medal of Honor" game to "The Incredibles" soundtrack. It's just nice to see someone finally spend some decent cash on their score, which is, and should be, a key component of any TV project.

My only complaint about Lost so far is that I haven't found the story to be intellectually interesting. It's kind of like X-Files in that way, or Buffy, or Angel. It's a series of cliffhangers which propel you through a mysterious story, always asking more questions than it answers. I find myself wanting to find out what happens, out of a basic human curiosity, but deep down, I don't really care. I hope at some point the story fleshes itself out a bit more, so that we can actually start thinking about what it means, instead of just wondering if there's anything there at all.

Battlestar Galactica 303

2006.10.21 - Saturday

Last night in the US and tonight in Canada episode, well, technically 304, airs. "Exodus, Part 2" has some of the most complicated space stuff we've done so far, as well as a few other neat effects. Between Atmosphere and the BSG in-house team I think the show turned out great, and I'm hoping we can get an Emmy nomination for everyone's hard work. Let me know what you think of the show if you happen to watch it.

I've updated the gallery with a bunch of stills from this episode, along with an Atlantis show from a while ago. I'd recommend not looking at this stuff if you haven't watched "Exodus, Part 2" yet, unless you don't care about spoilers.

1080p

2006.10.13 - Friday

Now that I've got the new screen hooked up to my PC as the primary monitor, I've been looking for some HD content to test it out. Obviously my own VFX shots and the PC resolution itself is pretty telling, but having some proper footage would be nice. I came across the IMAX film "The Magic of Flight" on Amazon.ca and noticed that its second disc included a Windows Media Video version of the film in full HD, meant to be played on a PC. I wasn't sure if my machine would be able to handle it, but I ordered anyway.

Wow, what a difference. The image quality is amazing. My machine is just barely capable of playing the file, albeit with some stuttering and buffering at the chapter changes, but it's good enough most of the time to enjoy the film. The picture is extremely clear, part of which I'm sure comes from the IMAX source. Normal films, with their colour treatments and increased 35mm film grain won't look quite as clear, but the difference will still be staggering. It's hard to go back to watching regular DVDs once you see some decent full HD content.

Ultimately though, I'm not looking to buy either of the HD players. I want to wait until there's a clear winner in the "format war" before handing over several hundred dollars on a new player, and what I'm sure will eventually be a couple thousand on HD versions of films and television shows. It's just not worth the risk right now. I think content like the IMAX films can potentially make the best case for HD, much more so than the looping demos of "Batman Begins", a dark, muted, grainy film, that you see in electronics stores. Once those NASA sponsored IMAX films get released in either HD-DVD or Blue-Ray, it's going to be hard for me to keep saying "no".

Art and Canada

2006.10.03 - Wednesday

During the course of a conversation a couple of days ago, I realized something that I thought was reasonably important regarding art. I'll see if I can fit it into a coherent post, though there may be a good deal of rambling, and I'll be speaking in the most general of terms. Art makes people cynical, which almost invariably leads to the production of awful, publicly irrelevant works, and in Canada at least, an entire government grant program designed to keep this pointless art on life support.

It's interesting to think that in terms of the general population, or those of us not educated in the ways of high class art, "modern" works are almost universally hated. People who don't live and breath art, so to speak, tend to prefer what most artists disgustingly refer to as "mainstream" entertainment. We like happy or sad sounding music with reasonably clear lyrics. We like paintings with bright colours that might feature beautiful landscapes or bowls of fruit and flowers. When first introduced to classical music, most people will immediately show a preference for Mozart, Beethoven, or similarly cheery and straight forward compositions. When first introduced to art, it is the child's natural instinct to create images and sounds using the brightest colours, most appealing music notes, and happiest subject matter.

As an artist's or art lover's tastes become "refined", they will almost always start to turn to darker, more "complex" works that supposedly carry more "meaning". Paintings become muted, styles drift away from realism to abstract. Music begins to abandon natural sounding instruments and themes, instead content to focus on strange time scales and perverted uses of instruments. The subject matter begins to turn inward, as artists begin to explore feelings and ideas, usually bad ones, instead of environments, objects, and figures. Art starts to become less and less relevant to the general public, and more and more about pleasing other artists.

Unfortunately for artists, most of them don't have very much money, and appealing to a market made up of broke painters, musicians, and poets isn't usually going to help you feed yourself. The general population has money however, and any artist who can hit the sweet spot of keeping their art interesting and simple at the same time stands a good chance of making some coin, as long as they can deal with the "real" artists talking behind their back about how they've sold out to "the man".

In Canada, there seems to be very little art that isn't subsidized by the government in some way. Tax breaks for specific industries are one thing, but giving someone $50,000 so they don't have to work and can focus on their art is something else. What kind of art is going to come of this grant system? Obviously it's not going to be anything that's publicly relevant, since there is no consequence to the artist for failing to appeal to anyone outside of a small clique of other similarly funded people. Such a system only results in yellow canvases covered in fecal matter, bubble gum, or single stripes of red paint. Such a system only results in musical compositions done entirely with african bongos, electric guitars, and violins, while the tempo changes from 2/4 time to 6/8 to 7/9 all within the space of two minutes. None of it will ever be profitable, and it's not supposed to be. It's all done because other publicly funded artists find it "interesting" and "fascinating".

Now comes the great part. With all of the government funded art in this country, you'd expect there to be a wealth of Canadian art and Canadian music in the world, right? So why isn't there? Oh sure, there are Canadian artists who perform American rock, pop, jazz, or rap music. There are lots of Canadian painters who are well known in Canada, and maybe if a few other places in the art world. However, what's missing is a Canadian style. There is an American style of classical music that is recognizable all over the Western world, rock, jazz, and rap were invented entirely in America. Where is the Canadian style? Surely there must be something, since we invest so much in it, right?

Maybe, what these Canada Council types don't understand, is that art only achieves it's desired cultural impact if the culture in question actually listens, looks, or watches it. Maybe, in order to advance the cause of art and allow it to evolve, it actually has to appeal to people enough that they'll want to pay to see it. No one in the entire country actually thinks human feces smeared on a canvas is art, apart from the person who made it and the council who paid them, and I guarantee you that in 500 years, art classes will still be focused around Da Vinci, Monet, Mozart, Beethoven, and probably a lot of American art that is yet to come. Neither the words "Canada" nor "Canadian" will appear anywhere in that future art textbook.