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canmom · 2 years

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Animation Night 120: Richard Linklater and Bob Sabiston

Hi everyone! Apologies to friends back in Europe to be running so late today, I am afraid I’m on American time now.

And speaking of America... since I’m here I think I should probably show some American animation! Some American animation whose story is set right here in Orange County, California even.

[animation night archive]

Or more precisely, American rotoscopy!

So. Back on Animation Night 65, we shone a spotlight on the subject of rotoscopy!

Back then we saw how the rotoscope - the technique of drawing over live action film - was used extensively by Fleischer to animate the dances of jazz artists like Cab Calloway, then to a greater or lesser degree in many of the early films of Disney... and every so often revived for a new generation, e.g. by Ralph Bakshi in the 70s-80s, or a number of directors including Hiroshi Nagahama, Shunji Iwai and Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman in the 2010s. [And closely related is of course motion capture (Animation Night 85), now a staple of CG animation.]

On that night I gave a brief mention to Richard Linklater, and the Rotoshop software of Bob Sabiston, but deferred that to another day. Well, that day is today!

The tricky part of rotoscopy is that it involves a lot of drawing. So does animation in general, but the rotoscopy pipeline is a little different - you don’t have a division of key animation and inbetweening, and it’s a lot harder to figure out how to use labour-saving techniques like loops and hold frames.

There are other difficulties, like working out which features on a photo to turn into lines, and keeping this decision consistent even when those features go into shadow or otherwise become hard to identify in the video footage. Cleaning up rotoscope animation is not fundamentally different from cleaning up traditional animation, and may even be harder because there are many more features in the drawing - small bumps on a contour line for example - that must be kept consistent.

For these reasons, rotoscoped movies often end up having to compromise a bit - reduced framerates and lowered drawing detail as in Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil), or giving up on rotoscopy entirely and just putting in solarised video footage as in Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes these work (I will absolutely die on the hill that Aku no Hana is good actually), and sometimes they don’t (sorry Ralph.)

To try to make rotoscopy less time consuming while maintaining higher detail, former MIT researcher Bob Sabiston came up with a software called Rotoshop. The idea of Rotoshop is to help with interpolating vector animation: the artist can draw the extremes, and the program will match up the vector shapes in each frame and smoothly interpolate between them. If it doesn’t work right, the artist can tweak the parameters and try again.

This allows rotoscopy at high detail and a high framerate, with detailed visual elements like shadow and highlight shapes, plus the option to add a variety of digital textures and effects. The result is something that feels a little uncanny: you have the underlying 3D form of the actors coming through with startling clarity that would be nigh impossible in traditional animation, but all covered in oddly shifting vector shapes that don’t quite maintain their forms.

Sabiston got involved in animation during his time at MIT. Using early computer graphics, he created a number of short films such as God’s Little Monkey shown at the Siggraph Electronic Theatre in 1994, and Beat Dedication (1988) and Grinning Evil Death (1990), the latter two of which were shown on MTV’s Liquid Television block. I can only find GED, which you can watch here on youtube...

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The film combines 3DCG and traditional animation credited to Sabiston, and you can see that he really knew what he was doing as an animator even at this point - handling a lot of tricky angles at honestly a very high framerate. I feel like some kind of digital interpolation must have been involved, unless Sabiston was just drawing like an absolute demon.

Sabiston released the first version of the Rotoshop software in 1997, and MTV was involved again as sponsors for the animation contest that motivated him. He used it to create a series of 30-second animations in New York called Project Incognito, followed by a short film called RoadHead in 1998 then Snack and Drink in and Figures of Speech in 1999. I believe I showed a few of those back on AN 65. Frustratingly, someone seems to have chopped Figures of Speech up into roughly nine second long clips which make it hard to determine if the full film has been uploaded anywhere, but here at least is Snack and Drink...

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Compared to the films we’re about to look at, Snack and Drink features a constantly changing art style, interpreting the video in a different way every few seconds. It made a tour of film festivals, and presumably at some point caught the eye of director Richard Linklater, the other character in our story.

So, Linklater! This particular Richard grew up in Texas, and dropped out of school... not to animate but to work on an oil rig, where he got into novels, which developed in turn into a love of film when he returned to land and found a repertory cinema in Houston. So, he bought himself a Super-8 with his savings, founded the Austin Film Society with a number of academics and a SXSW founder, and started shooting short films in 1985, around the age of 25.

These early films were mostly short experimental films. In 1988, he finished his first feature film, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, a sizable undertaking; a Wikipedia editor writes...

a Super-8 feature that took a year to shoot and another year to edit. The film is significant in the sense that it establishes most of Linklater's preoccupations. The film has his trademark style of minimal camera movements and lack of narrative, while it examines the theme of traveling with no particular direction in mind. These idiosyncrasies would be explored in greater detail in future projects.

His next two films, Slacker (a day in the life of ‘misfits and bohemians’ in Austin) and Dazed and Confused (a day in the life of a bunch of high schoolers on their last day), were similar: low-budget comedy-drama films drawing on his life, that saw cult success as Linklater toured film festivals. The next few, like SubUrbia (1996) and The Newton Boys (1998) - his ‘first Hollywood feature’ about a family of bank robbers - weren’t so successful, but it seems he was undeterred...

So, where does this come to animation? That turn comes in (engage echo) the new millenium, with Linklater turning to a 20 year old idea that he hadn’t quite figured out how to handle:

I think to make a realistic film about an unreality the film had to be a realistic unreality.

Sabiston’s software held the answer. Linklater and Sabiston (between them, I guess, my sources are contradictory) gathered thirty artists from around Austin, and assigned them different segments of the film so it would have a shifting style like his short films.

What’s it like, about? Waking Life is about a boy passing through an ethereal series of environments having philosophical and literary discussions with the various people he meets, gradually realising that he is in fact in a dream that he cannot wake from. As he starts to dream lucidly, he starts to despair at his inability to escape this solipsistic world...

Other scenes do not even include the protagonist's presence but rather focus on a random isolated person, a group of people, or a couple engaging in such topics from a disembodied perspective. Along the way, the film also touches upon existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and lucid dreaming, and makes references to various celebrated intellectual and literary figures by name.

The visuals of course do a lot to help lend the film a suitably surreal mood - there is in a sense an underlying ‘reality’, showing through in the hard-to-draw perspectives and rotations, and yet it’s a view that’s constantly jittering and shifting and made of hard-edged shapes.

After this film found a large success, Linklater and Sabiston went their separate ways for a while. Sabiston continued to make short films with Rotoshop, including Yard, Earthlink Sucks, Grasshopper and a collection of shorts for Life360 on PBS, as well as a taking segment in the von Trier film Five Obstructions in which von Trier was challenged to shoot the same sequence with various gimmicks. Linklater meanwhile returned to live action, directing Tape (2001), School of Rock (2003), Before Sunset (2004) and Bad News Bears (2005). With a couple of mainstream comedies under his belt, he started to get more widely known.

So, A Scanner Darkly. This is based on the 1977 semi-autobiographical novel by famed science fiction author Philip K Dick, set in a near-future dystopian version of Orange County (where i’m staying!!! spooky) and following a group of heavy drug users. Per Dick’s account, it’s only lightly fictionalised, with its ‘Substance D’ taking the role of Dick’s use of amphetamines.

During this time, Dick lost a number of friends to the effects of heavy drug use in unsafe circumstances; his wife at the time Tessa Dick was heavily involved in supporting him. In fact, let me just quote the entire ‘background’ section from WP:

A Scanner Darkly was one of the few Dick novels to gestate over a long period of time. By February 1973, in an effort to prove that the effects of his amphetamine usage were merely psychosomatic, the newly clean-and-sober author had already prepared a full outline.[5] A first draft was in development by March.[6] This labor was soon supplanted by a new family and the completion of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (left unfinished in 1970), which was finally released in 1974 and received the prestigious John W. Campbell Award.[7] Additional preoccupations were the mystical experiences of early 1974 that would eventually serve as a basis for VALIS and the Exegesis journal; a screenplay for an unproduced film adaptation of 1969's Ubik; occasional lectures; and the expedited completion of the deferred Roger Zelazny collaboration Deus Irae in 1975.

Because of its semi-autobiographical nature, some of A Scanner Darkly was torturous to write. Tessa Dick, Philip's wife at the time, once stated that she often found her husband weeping as the sun rose after a night-long writing session. Tessa has given interviews stating that "when he was with me, he wrote A Scanner Darkly [in] under two weeks. But we spent three years rewriting it" and that she was "pretty involved in his writing process [for A Scanner Darkly]".[8] Tessa stated in a later interview that she "participated in the writing of A Scanner Darkly" and said that she "consider[s] [her]self the silent co-author". Philip wrote a contract giving Tessa half of all the rights to the novel, which stated that Tessa "participated to a great extent in writing the outline and novel A Scanner Darkly with me, and I owe her one half of all income derived from it".[9]

There was also the challenge of transmuting the events into "science fiction", as Dick felt that he could not sell a mainstream or literary novel after several previous failures.[citation needed][10] Providing invaluable aid in this field was Judy-Lynn del Rey, head of Ballantine Books' SF division, which had optioned the book. Del Rey suggested the timeline change to 1994 and emphasized the more futuristic elements of the novel, such as the "scramble suit" employed by Fred (which, incidentally, emerged from one of the mystical experiences). Yet much of the dialogue spoken by the characters used hippie slang, dating the events of the novel to their "true" time-frame of 1970–72.

So a tough and very personal story to adapt, and at the time, Dick’s daughters Laura Leslie and Isa Hackett were hesitant to take further film adaptations after seeing what became of Minority Report and Paycheck. Linklater’s producer Tommy Pallotta wrote an entreaty to Dick’s agent Russ Galen, and after talking it over with Linklater, Dick’s daughters became convinced he wouldn’t treat it lightly and gave the go-ahead.

Despite Linklater keeping the budget small, the film involves a bunch of high-profile actors including Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson, all won around on the strength of the script. (Must have been a damn good script).

Still, we’re not here to talk about actors, we’re here to talk about aaaanimmattion! The film was shot in live action, with some unusual considerations. For a rotoscope film, it was not necessary to worry about things like mics appearing in shot, and the approach to lighting would be different - more important to give the rotoscopers enough information than to perfectly light its subjects for film. Rotoscopy also made it very straightforward to composite footage shot in Austin into backgrounds of locations in California.

Compared to Waking Life, this time Linklater wanted a much more detailed and consistent visual style... which was extremely tough for the animators, who had trouble getting to grips with the software and fell behind schedule. The answer to Linklater’s dissatisfaction was... unfortunately, crunch.

Animation and training for the 30 new artists had begun October 28, 2004. In late November, Mark Gill, head of Warner Independent Pictures, asked for a status report. There were no finished sequences, as the majority of animators were still learning to implement the film's highly detailed style.[2] Under pressure, some animators worked 18-hour days for two weeks in order to produce a trailer, which seemed to appease Gill and Linklater.[2]

After this it got rather worse. The animation fell behind its punishing six-month(!) schedule, straining the budget; in answer to this, Pallotta changed the locks while Sabiston and his team were out at lunch, and replaced them with two new artists, crediting all the original team leaders (Patrick Thornton, Randy Cole, Katy O’Connor and Jennifer Drummond) as ‘additional animation’ despite the fact they basically did the entire pre-production.

Following thi quick disappearing-commissaring of the animation team, the parent studio extended the animation period and increased the budget; Pallotta installed himself in charge, and ran things a lot more strictly, ‘Disney style’, with shorter segments, deadlines, and a style manual. In the end the animation still took 15 months in total.

The result of all this effort is a film that really doesn’t look like many others, with complex blocky vector shadows that are constantly shifting over oddly perfect drawings which capture all the little bumps and contours in the human body in a way that would be nigh impossible for even the greatest animators from observation or imagination. The line style... I think also uses vector shapes to have a sense of tapering line weight, with the figures themselves outlined at the contour and significant folds, but interior shapes like hair often lineless.

And most significant is of course the incredibly detailed lighting - hard-edged like cel-shading but with many more layers and gradations of colour. The result is actually oddly flattening, since the shadow and highlight shapes are tracking underlying soft edges, so inevitably they become a little inconsistent. It’s a fascinating style and seems appropriate for a kinda surreal story where everyone’s taking a lot of drugs.

The film landed to ultimately mixed reviews; the people who liked it really liked it, while the detractors felt it went nowhere despite a lot of dialogue. Which means... after the struggles in production, it is probably going to be the last movie of its kind. I’d imagine any future rotoscope movies are more likely to use AI ‘style transfer’ filters to get the effect, rather than drawing over each frame this way.

So! Two fascinating and very distinctive films, both of which I’m very curious to experience at last. If you’d like to join me, they’ll be playing over at twitch.tv/canmom in about half an hour - please drop in chat and let me know when you’re here!

#animation night

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apadaily · 4 years

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New Post has been published on Ashley Parker Angel Daily • APADaily.net

New Post has been published on http://apadaily.net/2020/03/ashley-parker-angel-recalls-making-a-band-in-real-time/

Ashley Parker Angel Recalls Making a Band in Real-Time

Diehard pop fans want nothing more than to feel close to their favorite artists. Twenty years ago this month, ABC and MTV fulfilled that dream with the creation of Making the Band. The reality show is probably best known for its second iteration when Diddy modernized the program with R&B groups like Danity Kane, but in 2000, it was all about boy bands. Lou Pearlman, a manager and con man fresh off successfully creating Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and LFO, decided the next step in the lucrative teen pop business was to give fans what they always wanted: day one access, so that they, too, could feel like they participated in the creation of their beloved groups. And it began with O-Town.

After hand-selecting members in a countrywide search, Pearlman assembled O-Town with Ashley Parker Angel, Erik-Michael Estrada, Trevor Penick, Jacob Underwood, and Dan Miller, who replaced Ikaika Kahoano. The success of the show’s debut season inspired the network to continue the series, documenting the entirety of the band’s existence, including their discovery of Pearlman’s financial crimes and rumors of his alleged sexual abuse. O-Town broke up after only three years (a short run, even for the most flash-in-the-pan boy bands) but left the world with two memorable singles—“Liquid Dreams,” and the ballad “All or Nothing”—and a shockingly prophetic show that would influence future reality TV programming.

To mark the 20th anniversary of Making the Band’s premiere, I called up O-Town’s frontman Ashley Parker Angel to talk about the show. Our conversation below is condensed and edited for clarity.

JEZEBEL: On Making the Band, O-Town became television stars before you were music stars, and becoming a music star was the entire point. That feels like a really modern way to pursue a pop career. I guess in 2020, it’s social media instead of TV.

ASHLEY PARKER ANGEL: Me and my acting manager, when the audition came through, we thought [Making the Band] was a scripted TV show. We thought it was going to be scripted the same way the Monkees was a scripted show about a band, and then the Monkees obviously used that TV show to launch a legitimate recording career. Having talked to Lou Pearlman once I actually made the band, I’d come to find out that the Monkees were his inspiration. He wanted to make the next iteration of that, and who better to do that than the guy who just created the two biggest superstar boy bands of the day? *NSYNC and Backstreet were just dominating.

At the time, we didn’t have tons of reality TV. The ones that did exist were like Real World or Road Rules. It wasn’t the most popular format. O-Town was essentially two worlds crossing: the world of reality TV shows and the world of boy bands. Those two worlds emerged into Making the Band as an experiment. Nobody knew if it would work. They would even refer to us as lab rats throughout the whole process. The first season was a full 22 episodes, and by the time 20 episodes had aired and it was a hit TV show, we still did not have a record deal.

Because of the success of the TV show, we were able to get the interest of Clive Davis. Cameras flew with us to New York. We signed the deal the week before the finale was going to air. They very quickly edited in the footage of us signing. If you look at what’s happened now with American Idol and The Voice, I think Making the Band really proved that that format could not only be a successful television series, but it can actually launch a legitimate recording group that could have legitimate hit songs on the radio.

And then other people caught wind. Simon Cowell ended up being in one of the early meetings we had with Clive Davis. Very quickly after that, he goes and does Pop Idol. We’d always heard on the record label side that Simon Cowell had been really inspired by what happened with Making the Band and O-Town—so he started Pop Idol, that becomes a huge success, and then, of course, Pop Idolbecomes American Idol.

Pop music has a storied history with reality TV—like everything you were saying about American Idol and The Voice, but also One Direction 10 years later. They were made on The X-Factor UK, and they lost. The experiment with boy bands and reality TV has continued.

Right. And it doesn’t always work. Just because you have a TV show doesn’t mean it’s going to translate to actual radio play. ABC tried to launch a show based on Making the Band called Boy Band. Nick Carter was a judge on it. Timbaland was a judge on it. There was a big primetime push. And then nothing. Those guys are not around. I don’t think they were able to mount a successful single.

I actually really liked that show, but I also love boy bands.

I did, too. As I watched it, I was like, “Oh, they’re doing Making the Band but with a new spin, those superstar judges, which is going to add that American Idolelement.” But it just didn’t pop.

I was listening to a podcast recently with Paris Hilton and she was talking about The Simple Life, which debuted in 2003. She argued that unlike reality television today, reality TV of the early 2000s wasn’t as manufactured or fabricated. Do you agree with that?

I tend to agree with her comment. Yes, there are things being manipulated behind the curtain when you’re in that world. Yes, good reality TV producers see where the conflict is happening, and they massage your life from behind the scenes to make sure those conflicts occur, but those conflicts are real. They’re capturing real life. Obviously, you can do a lot in editing, but primarily [Making the Band] was a very real situation we were all going through.

We had cameras living with us in the house we were living in as O-Town. We had hidden microphones in the house. In Making the Band, if you had a conversation in the middle of the night, these huge production lights would pop on and some guy, another guy with a boom microphone, and a cameraman would rush in. It didn’t matter what time it was. They would film everything. You couldn’t leave the house without telling them because they wanted a camera crew on you. As it went on, however, even by the third season of Making the Band, there was a lot more soft scripting going on. A lot more of producers saying, “Hey, we need you to have a conversation on camera about this.” They’re really kind of directing it more.

How did O-Town try to differentiate itself from the other boy bands at the time?

Making the Band came about at a time where you had a pretty dense field of pop bands. You had LFO, BBMAK—outside of Backstreet and *NSYNC, you had so many offshoots of bands in that style—of course, 98 Degrees. Without the show, there was a lot of noise in an already crowded room. I think the TV show set us apart because now it’s a window into this life that you would never get from just listening to an album. You’re now living in this world. You get the chance to be a fly on the wall and watch that process in a TV show. It set us apart in a way that would’ve been very difficult had we not had the show. I’m not saying we weren’t talented guys, but we had the benefit of being a part of something manufactured, which allowed there to be a higher degree of talent pulled from all these different cities.

I agree. But also, I think of the pop songs of the era—“Liquid Dreams,” come on, you were the boy band unafraid to get sexual. That separates you.

[Laughs] Thank you! I will add to that, too, we were set to do a fourth season of Making the Band. The TV show was always a hit, even though music changed and started to go more R&B and alternative rock again. The second album didn’t sell what the first album did, but the show was still getting really awesome ratings. So we moved into production for Season 4. At that point, a lot of guys in the band were not as excited to keep living on camera. We had a lot of internal debates about whether or not we should be a TV band or if we should move away from that and try to convince people of the longevity of our career. I, personally, always felt the two were connected. Then things started to change. When we got dropped by our record label, MTV also dropped the show. In the end, [the band] did mutually decide to call it quits for a while and all go our own ways with the idea that maybe we would come back in the future.

For the first two albums, we had this unbelievable hitmaker, Clive Davis, and we had ABC and MTV supporting our careers. Once we kind of lost those things, I could see the writing on the wall.

Not only does that sound like a clean break, but you also have a documentary of the entirety of O-Town in Making the Band. That’s unique to your group—even considering later seasons of Diddy’s revamped Making the Band. I think the only thing that’s comparable might be K-pop boy bands whose social media streaming is archived.

You’re so right; it’s so rare. It’s this little window into your life for three or four years. Who has that? And what a crazy time to have captured: a life-changing moment, and here it is in these well-produced, well-edited snapshots of your life.

At the time, were you cautious about working with Lou Pearlman? The show premiered a year or two after both Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC cut ties with him, so litigation must’ve been going on while you were filming.

There was a really specific 20/20 special that aired that was all about *NSYNC and Backstreet’s legal troubles with Lou. Up until that point, Lou was the most charming businessman you’d ever meet. He was obviously making the careers of young pop stars. He was a fun character to be around. Once it started hitting the mainstream media, and you’re hearing all these legal terms and trouble, that definitely started to throw some salt on the situation. And Lou started getting really pushy about us signing contracts. I’ll never forget the first lawyer we hired to look at our initial contract with Lou and said, verbatim, “In my 30 years of entertainment law, this is the worst contract I’ve ever seen.” That added fuel to the fires of what was already happening with Backstreet and *NSYNC.

Some of that actually ends up spilling out onto Making the Band; some of the storyline gets shared. Things start getting sort of intense because he wants certain things we are not signing. So he cuts off our money supply. There were weird scenarios like that that started to occur. But once Clive Davis came into the picture and we had two managers, we side-stepped a lot of trouble with Lou, whereas Backstreet and *NSYNC were right in it with him. We had a lot of other people around us, caretakers to say, “Hey, by the way, there are some other rumors about Lou. Don’t be alone with him.” Those kinds of things.

I remember at one point we were with Lou in his office, and literally, he said, “Guys, I would love to keep this meeting going, but the FBI are here, so we’re going to have to wrap this meeting up now. Because the FBI are here.” And, no joke, the FBI came in and they investigated the offices while we were there.

What? Where’s that footage?

I know! It’s all come out now. Lou was sharing with me, in private, some of his con man-style tricks. Like, he had pictures of himself in his offices where it looked like there were these 747 airplanes in the back, supposedly he had this airplane company, and he goes, “Look at this picture of me with this airplane on the tarmac. Do you see anything weird about that photo?” And I go, “No, it’s you with your 747 airplane.” And he goes, “That’s a model airplane, hanging from fishing string, held from the right perspective so it looks like a full 747 airplane.” He was using little miniature models, and using little tricks of the eye, to make it look like these little miniature airplanes were real airplanes. He would use pictures like that to convince investors that he had all these companies and airplanes. As an 18-year-old kid, I’m thinking, Wow, this guy’s really smart, but also, Wow, this is so illegal, but he’s bragging to me about it.

I’m surprised he revealed his tricks to you.

It was total Catch Me If You Can, that movie. You’re kind of impressed because it’s this evil genius type of thing, but it’s still lying and fraudulent. Now it’s all coming out after years of being investigated by the FBI. That was when things really started to go South for Lou.

Some of your issues with Lou are documented on Making the Band, but he was also an executive producer and creative consultant. Did he have to approve the storyline? The show doesn’t paint him in the best light, but now it’s well-documented that he was guilty of so much more than what was presented on the show.

I wasn’t there, so this is speculation, but I imagine Lou regretted involving himself on camera and not having complete control of it. Lou didn’t think he did anything wrong. Lou’s giving hope to these young, talented kids that would never have a shot. He’s Mr. Money Bags. He’s coming up with millions of dollars behind the scenes—for rehearsals, styling sessions, and putting demos together to actually get you to the place where you can sign a deal—so he never looked at himself as having done anything wrong. The guy could sell anything to you. He was a master salesman. If you sat in a room with him, he’d have you convinced that he was Mother Theresa. He was very good and very shrewd at business. He was just taking advantage in so many different ways. And yet, he was the Berry Gordy of the Motown era, but it was all in O-Town, this whole new pop phase of music that he ushered in with *NSYNC, Backstreet, Britney, Aaron Carter, O-Town, and LFO. His fingerprint was on all of that, and that was a huge movement in music. It’s too bad that he was as crooked as he was.

How do you view the legacy of Making the Band, 20 years later?

There are always going to be gatekeepers, but I think the barriers of entry started coming down with shows like Making the Band. Now you have an opportunity, on a national level, to hear about an audition and show up for it. Making the Band was a shot for someone who would’ve never had a shot. Shows like American Idol and The Voice have continued to take that concept even further.

Making The Band really was the first of its kind. We proved the platform could work because we actually transformed it into a legitimate music career. For young, hopeful, talented people out there, I’m glad that Making the Band could pave the way, and I’m glad there are even more formats like this for young, talented, hopeful people who’d like a shot at success.

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