Roger Ebert R.I.P.

I remember watching Siskel and Ebert's original review for "Halloween" on their first PBS movie review show in the late 70's. I remember how adamantly they championed the film and it's director John Carpenter against the many detractors who panned it for it's "mindless violence". S & E defended the film vigorously calling it smart, edgy, and brilliantly directed. Time proved them right of course. As critics they were always insightful and took chances in their commentary. I remember how passionately they defended Spike lee's controversial "Do the Right Thing" in 1989. I cant say I agreed with his opinion all of the time (He disliked much of David Lynch's work for instance) but when Ebert loved a film, you knew it and he defended his informed position with vigor, prose and intelligence. He will be sorely missed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c3nXYo-51M

2001: a space Odyssey. 45 years young today

45 years ago today (april 3rd), “2001: A Space Odyssey,” premiered at the Uptown Theater in Washington D.C.. In celebration of the release of this groundbreaking and influential film, please enjoy these archive of photos from the production and release of the film. Although advertised as a "Cinerama" feature, 2001 was not shot with the three-camera Cinerama true process but was instead shot with 65mm cameras for screenings on teh large format curved Cinerama screens which are now all but extinct ( a few remain, most famously the Cinerama dome in Hollywood, CA). The film when originally released was received with mixed reviews and box office returns. But in a case of pure word of mouth, 2001 became a monumental hit.

Enjoy these photos celebrating this seminal film...

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.405827082840779.94324.394337563989731&type=1

Star Trek: a look at the Past

With the impending release of the Star Trek: Into the darkness, JJ Abrams follow up to his successful reboot of the Star Trek Franchise, CoolVFx is taking a look back at the beginnings of the saga that has spanned 4 decades. From the various feature films to the many spins off of the original series, Star Trek has been the quintessential vessel for fantasy fiction in all forms of media, from books to TV to video games....

What many people don't always recognize are the many innovative visual designs and effects the series has produced. From the fantastic "genesis" planet demo reel from ST:II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) to the academy award winning make up effects in Star Trek (2009). The incredible production design work of Bob Jeffries from the original series which included matte painting work from the unparalleled effects painter Al Whitlock and the amazing miniature effects from George Lucas' ILM are all featured here. Please continue to check in to the archive as it will be updated regularly

Link Here:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.407132522710235.94547.394337563989731&type=1

Enjoy

Comedy One frame at a time. A look at the making of ROBOT CHICKEN

In one of Hollywood’s many industrial back streets sits a nondescript building. Inside that building is ShadowMachine Films, the home base of Adult Swim’s comedy mega-hit Robot Chicken.

Robot Chicken is the brainchild of actor/producer/ director Seth Green and producer and editor Matthew Senreich. Both are long time toy and action figure collectors.  For years Senreich was editor of the popular magazine Toy Faire, which utilized action figures to create comedy sketches fumetti-style. Green, being a huge fan of the magazine, saw its potential for an animation off-shoot and contacted Senreich about expanding the strip into a television show. Legend has it that the name for the show was inspired by a dish on the menu at a West Hollywood Chinese restaurant where Green and Senreich had dined several times.

The show itself diverges from the common format of most comedy shows. It has an uninterrupted 15-minute running time and the sequences are not usually linked together by any typical narrative device. Explains head writer Tom Root, “Our show set out from the start with a different format where it’s like channels being flipped on a television set. From the start we knew it was going to be short-form and that no joke was ever going to over-stay its welcome, and we knew that there were going to be many, many short little bits. Almost immediately we realized that it was maybe the hardest thing we could ask our set builders and puppet builders to do, because even though our show is a quarter-hour we are cramming it with 20 or 25 different set pieces.”

Robot Chicken’s non-stop content presents challenges for the writers and artists alike and both groups are required to make concessions to time and budget. Comments Root, “We make compromises in the script phase when we can, but mostly we just sort of write the scripts that we all think up and we don’t worry about how feasible it is until farther on down the road. That’s when we have to get into compromises and so forth.”

The show fixed its sights on spoofing anything embedded in pop culture, fusing cultural reference comedy with religious and social satire. Root explains the references are so diverse that not every reference made on the show will be understood by everyone, including himself. “The writers are all aged between late 20s and late 30s, and a lot of what we make fun of is just kind of what occurs to us from our backgrounds as being stuff that’s right to make fun of.  A lot of it comes from the late 1970’s through the 80’s and 90’s and because we are in our 30s, I find that we are kind of aware of things, the culture being the way it is in this country you can be well aware of what’s popular without actually having to watch it or be a fan of it.  So even though I am completely out of the target age, I know that Hannah Montana is huge, for instance.  So last season I wrote a Hannah Montana sketch and I just went to Wikipedia and tried to figure out what the show is about.  The gist of it was a girl in a blond wig who pretends to be a singer and by day she’s a brunette who’s in high school.  That was really all it took for me to come up with a story about it, because we were never going to get deep into those characters in the first place, we just wanted to violently kill the star and then watch the other characters run around and try to deal with it.  It turned into sort of a Weekend at Bernie’s sketch, where they were chopping up the Hannah Montana corpse trying to get her through a day so she could pass some sort of test in school, and the corpse ends up waterskiing.”

Walking through the corridors of ShadowMachine, one can’t help but think of the days before digital technology, when effects facilities were teaming with sculptors and the walls were lined with off-the-shelf model kits and bits of lumber and plastic. The company feels like a memorial to the effects houses of the past such as Boss Film Studios and Boston’s famed Olive Jar Animation Studios. The interior of the shop includes many cubicles where individual sets are positioned for photography and where the animators work their magic. In an adjunct building is the fabrication shop where molds and sets are constructed as well as the puppet fabrication area. The walls are adorned with sets from past shows and various stop motion puppets or action figures harvested for their vital parts.

Stop motion methodology seems like a natural for a comedy show utilizing modified toys and action figures. Production designer Ross Schuman came to the show with considerable experience in stop motion. “I got a call from the producers out in San Francisco.  I had done a project for the Klokeys, who did Gumby, and they had just done a re-emergence of the Davey and Goliath Christmas special.  I’d just come off that and I got a call randomly from the producer, and some of the key people involved. Basically less than nine of us had done an hour of stop-motion in a year and I was the only set guy.  So that work was really some high-end stuff, if you work for Art Klokey you’d want to bring you’re A-game, so I really worked hard on that.  And then from there I got the call and they showed me a clip.”

It was at this time that Schulman was introduced to Green’s early prototype of the show “It was called Sweet Jay initially, recalls Schulman.  “I think Fox owned it for the web and it never really made its way, and then all of a sudden the producers got it on Adult Swim and it became an untitled Seth Green project at that point.  What I saw from Sweet Jay was a whole lot of very crude puppets and crude sets, and I thought we could do that. But when I got down here and talked to Seth, they were limited by what they had in terms of the budget at their disposal.  But he wasn’t interested in making a really crude show.  They were interested in making a sketch comedy show that was funny.”

Soon Schulman would be joined by other talented artists who emerged not only from Los Angeles’ burgeoning effects scene but craftsmen, sculptors and photographers from around the world. One of the artists was set designer Scott Schneider, a veteran of dozens of visual effects projects, feature films and commercials including the Batman features, Down Periscope and The Shining. “First we get either the script or an anima tic that’s already been generated, basically just storyboards cut to the soundtrack, to the dialogue,” relates Schneider.  “Ross will actually start breaking it down as to what he wants to see and what he wants to build.  Then we’ll pull together a bunch of reference and go over what specifically we want to see.  And then from that point I take that information and start generating 3D models of the set at the scale that we’re going to build it at.  And we’ll put a couple of lenses on it in the computer and make sure that we’re covered for what we want to get in the shot.  From that point, I can take that 3D model and generate 2D construction drawings and put dimensions on everything, and then get that printed out for the guys in the shop to start building. “

To the untrained eye it may appear that the animators are manipulating off-the-shelf action figures, but there is a lot of modification and mechanical work done to create the puppets used on the show. Explains Schuman, “It’s articulation. That’s the key to making it work. That’s what we talk about in stop motion — how articulated can this puppet be?  And basically the process in the first season was taking action figures and modifying them.  But then Rob Browning, who’s a legend in puppet making, came into the company at a time when we had a crew chief who was leaving. Rob brought an understanding of puppet making that we could apply to this kind of; I like to call it slash-and-burn stop motion.”

Sometimes the overwhelming quantity of puppets needed for any given show can be a daunting task in and of itself. Explains Schuman, “The amount of puppets sometimes is 100 puppets per episode.  We’ve had as many as 70 sets for an episode. So it’s the quick thinking.  Rob Browning brought in the technique of molding the action figures and then doing a foam injection with an armature — armature wire and propoxy and creating these very simple armatures that are really effective.  And over the years, we’ve moved into silicone.  So they’re no longer toys any more; they look like toys.  But this is knowledge; it’s not anything that people can’t do.

“In the past traditional stop motion artists and photographers would use film cameras with stepper motors so the movement of the puppets could be photographed a frame at a time. Digital technology has now entered as a viable solution to the shooting component of the production. We started with digital cameras from the beginning,” states Schulman.  “Typically back in the day, it was a Mitchell/Fries [camera] that had to have perfect frame accuracy. And now everyone uses the digital camera for many reasons. You can buy the camera at relatively low cost and there’s very little expense involved except the upkeep.  A big bonus is you can then transfer this information directly to the editing system and see your shot immediately.  You can cut in the work and you can do rough comps on the set.  What’s better than taking all these different plates that you’ve shot, putting the puppet in there and looking at the relationship of the set and the perspective? So doing the rough comps enables you to really waste no time as to if this is going to work or not, or maybe we have to think about something differently. We line right up to that frame and then we’ll bring in trees, etc. So what we see is what we get the shot, the aperture, everything is right there in front of you.”

The pop culture mainstay of the show’s target audience are the Star Wars films, which have proven to be fertile comedy ground for the writers and artists at ShadowMachine.  Robot Chicken’s two Star Wars specials have been amongst their highest-rated shows and the crew members of Robot Chicken are big fans of George Lucas’ double trilogy. “The coolest part about our new Star War special is that there were over 40 original sets that I designed, which weren’t in the Star Wars legacy,” recalls Schuman with much pride. “So I did a lot of recreations, but the ones like the storm trooper apartment, which was so much fun because you get to take all these elements of the original films and expand on them. We had Jon Berg (stop motion animator of Empire Strikes Back) here as guest animator for the Star Wars II project, because I had met him at one of the celebration events and these guys created such a great universe to live in.  So creating the Sarlacc pit, making it animate-able and breathable, that’s a really cool challenge.  The barber shop sketch in the second special, where the emperor gets his hair cut, was a lot of fun.”

Was there a concern about upsetting the Lucas film empire? Schuman is quick to dispel any rumor that there was anything but harmony with Lucasfilm. “The thing about it is, they know that we are honoring it at this point.  When they saw the emperor sketch, they [Lucasfilm] called Seth and Matt and wanted to talk. They recognized that we honored them; we didn’t bastardize it. There were some things that he’s fought for, comedically, that were set up in the movies.  There’s nothing that we’re going to make up that’s some back story about Anakin and the sunflower sketch where he cuts all the sunflower heads off… that was in the movie.  He came in and all the little Jedi kids were slaughtered.  And that was something that Seth felt was really bringing humor to that, so it’s not played any other way than showing it for what it could have been.  He created an atrocity, killed all these kids, so how do you go about it?  Maybe he visualized Naboo and being in love and in the middle of all the sunflowers.  But we all have a respect for it, so when it comes to Star Wars, and we’ve been invited to the ranch twice and George has been there and has been super gracious and really cool.  And he knows that at this point we are the fans, so there’s no way we’re going to make these characters any more or less heroic than they already are.”

Although the Robot Chicken crew tries to remain faithful to the Star Wars universe in the look and tone of the photography, their resources are not nearly as grand as their Lucasfilm brethren.  “One of the tricks with Robot Chicken is we have very little time and usually very little money,” notes Schneider.  “You have to be very creative with what you use and what you get away with.  Of course, a lot of the materials we use are right from the local hardware store, because we don’t have time to do fancy silicone molds or anything like that.  Some material we have laser cut, but we don’t have time to do all of that.  On the [Star Wars] blockade-runner, that was one of the exceptions to the rule.  After I designed that, I had suggested to Ross that we actually have the main sections of walls wire cut out of bead foam.  The reason for that is because we could get nine feet of wall for $100-200, and it was already the shape of the wall and then all we’d have to do is add material and styrene to the surface to smooth it out.  And it got us there fairly quickly.  That took care of the main wall.  Model builder Logan Paine fabricated on wood the individual bulkheads. Those were made out of MDF and he just made up a template and cut out several of those. We had the actual doorframe and the door itself and the control boxes that are all mounted along the wall, those very pronounced kind of tapered boxes that are mounted on the wall.  Those components we had rapid prototyped.”

According to Schuman, the creative process emerged organically, often involving the director and Seth and Matt bouncing ideas off each other.  “Our director, Chris Mackay, will have meetings with Seth and Matt; they’ll chat about certain things that they were thinking the writers wanted to see happen or Seth thought of something he’s really psyched about. At one point during the Star Wars project, and even though it was Star Wars, Seth said, ‘This is a studio apartment in Studio City.’ And we would riff about the vertical blinds with the hibachi outside on the deck, and just start riffing that way.  But often, I will do preliminary sketches where I just riff.  You know, mostly for stop motion I have to make sure that there’s animator access, that you can get the shot that’s needed and that it’s appropriate to the genre or the parody.  For things like Batman, obviously there’s a lot of great stuff out there, so you can find reference and see every single angle. With Star Wars there’s something like 35,000 books written on the subject.”

The Robot Chicken crew didn’t limit themselves to what existed in the known Star Wars cosmos as seen in the films. Creative and comedic license allowed them to explore the fringe areas of the galaxy far, far away.  Although the Robot Chicken team had the blessing of Lucasfilm with their parodies, the artist learned to be autonomous in acquiring their own reference material. “We wouldn’t even ask them,” notes Schulman.  “It’s just the fact that we’re doing the project, so we can find our own reference.  And we’re always going back to the masters to try to get the truth of it.”

Schuman and his team take incredible pains to capture the essence of the Star Wars universe and all the other pop culture icons they parody.  “Seth would bring everybody through the studio and he was excited by the fact that we had just replicated the blockade runner spot for spot. We had originally talked about making it shorter and doing all these things, and I said I had some ideas. Scott [Schneider] and I were working together in the computer and I laid out the blueprint and it was nine feet long.  It was a dream model, we came in on Saturday and cut all these shapes out and then when the builders came in that following week and saw what we were doing, everybody was on board, and we cranked this model out.”

Star Wars was one of Robot Chicken’s most popular pop culture targets, but the creative minds at ShadowMachine did not limit themselves to childhood fetishes.  “You name it, we’ve done it,” says Schuman.  “We’ve done Iron Man, Davey and Goliath and the Brady Bunch as well as political and religious satire. The greatest thing is you get people in here…we’ve had Christian Slater do some voices, and John Favreau as well. When Mark Hamill was here we were in the voice recording studio and it was a dream come true for me…and he sticks his head in and he goes, ‘Wow!  I remember this.’  He had just been looking through it at head-level, and he was like, ‘That’s the set, man.’  And that was just huge.  Our crew worked so hard and we just loved doing it.  That was a seal of approval, because Mark lived in it.”

It is the dedication of the artists and the tireless efforts of the writers and creative minds at ShadowMachine that have made Robot Chicken Adult Swim’s most highly-rated show. Now entering its forth season, Robot Chicken continues to be as popular as ever. In 2008, it was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Animation Program. It won Emmys for individual achievements in animation in 2006 and 2007. Thanks to the artists and writers at ShadowMachine, stop motion animation and miniature creation will still have a venue, making us laugh out loud along the way!

Special Thanks to Scott Schneider, Tom Root, Ross Schuman and everyone at ShadowMachine for their assistance with this article.

This article was originally published in Sci fi Fantasy Modeller

Interview transcribing and additional research by Kathie Louy