Graphic Engine | Bob Rehaks Blog about Special Effects, Videogames, Film, and Television

Time 2021-01-09 13:04:45

Web Name: Graphic Engine | Bob Rehaks Blog about Special Effects, Videogames, Film, and Television

WebSite: http://graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu

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By the first class meetingWatch all screenings.Review all assigned readings.Draft all assignments.Set up Moodle.Before classWatch every assigned screening.Do every assigned reading.Plan the approach.Create a PowerPoint.In classSet aside time to discuss every assigned reading.Set aside time to discuss every completed assignment.Leave time at the end for questions and unfinished business.End class with a preview of what’s coming next.Outside classRespond promptly to student emails.Be friendly, courteous, and patient in person and online.Be on time for office hours. The only mainstream writer to whom Heinlein acknowledges a debt is Sinclair Lewis, and it is not for literary style. Lewis laid out extensive backgrounds for his work which did not directly appear in the story. That way he understood how his characters should react in a given situation, since he knew more about them than the reader did. In Heinlein, this ultimately grew beyond the bounds intended by Sinclair Lewis, whose characters performed against a setting with which the reader might be familiar. The Sinclair Lewis method couldn t work for science fiction unless an entire history of the future was projected: then individual stories and characters in that series could at least be consistent within the framework of that imaginary never-never land. In following just this procedure, Robert A. Heinlein inadvertently struck upon the formula that had proved for successful for Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Frank Baum, and, more recently, J. R. R. Tolkien. He created a reasonably consistent dream world and permitted the reader to enter it. Heinlein s Future History has, of course, a stronger scientific base than Burroughs s Mars, Baum s Oz, or Tolkien s land of the Rings, but is fundamentally the same device. Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction (New York: Ballantine, 1967). 194. Executed rapidly by Trevor in what was almost a lightning sketch. Inspired not by the sight but by the sound of the music, that tinkling ice-cream-truck tune that still, after all these years, resonates with a deep internal chord laid down in my childhood, one that my own kids already seem to have internalized at a primordial level. Note the sound waves emanating from a rooftop speaker, along with accompanying musical notes, as well as the characteristic cutaway view displaying driver behind steering wheel and, at truck rear, cold storage apparatus and prep table. Great star-clouds glittered all around them, the swarms of suns that in the Sagittarius region of the Milky Way made brilliant the summer nights of faraway Earth. But beyond all of these loomed a vastness of light, glowing like a furnace in which stars were forged, stretching across whole parsecs of space. Groups of double and multiple stars shone from within that far-flung nebulosity, some of them fiercely bright and others dim and muffled. And the whole shining mass of the Trifid was riven by three great cracks that were themselves light-years in width and that formed clear roads into the inconceivable interior. Edmond Hamilton, The Star of Life (1947) Two Megs, or giant sharks, by Trevor. The first was started at school and finished at home, with an assist from Zachary, who added the dorsal, ventral, and tailfins following a brief debate over whether Megs have such fins at all. Part of a larger wave of skepticism from the older brother directed at the entire premise his science hat on, he evaluated the drawing as not resembling an actual Megalodon in the least. (He kept using the longer version of the creature s name to establish the primacy of his knowledge.) Trev shrugged off the criticism, accepted the fins, and went on to do the second drawing, in which another Meg is sucking in water to create a waterspout. Of note in both pieces of artwork is the impactful rendering of the eyes wide, hungry, glaring and the fiercely toothed mouth. Exteriorization of the jaws in picture one, and the shadowy mechanism underlying the hinges of the mouth in picture two, may be referencing the book on sharks we ve been looking at before bed. A thick book encasing an entire plastic shark, skin and skeleton and organs keyed in layers so that each turn of the page lifts away another slice. We learned from the section on Eating that the great white s cartilaginous jaw can unhinge and thrust forward for a maximized bite. This is the LEGO Republic Fighter Tank 75182, modded by Zach, basically built out with extra guns and cool stuff. The four racked missiles in the front are new, as are the spotlights/sensors (borrowed I think from the Scuttler?) angling from the prongs. But the best additions for me are the pair of Troopers riding sideboard, a binocular viewing station portside rear, and my favorite bit of bricolage a weaponized turkey leg.[UPDATED WITH CORRECTION: Zach informs me that what I called the binocular viewing station is in fact a rocket launcher. Also, the turkey leg is not a gun but is there for the Troopers to eat.] Below, preliminary cover art for my forthcoming book, due out from NYU Press in Spring 2018:I really like the way the designers have integrated artwork from Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902)—tucking it into the corner so that it seems to glare down at the Enterprise refit from the filming of 1979 s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The story behind the latter image element is a saga in itself, which I will have to wait to address in a future post; right now I m too busy going over the copyedited manuscript.Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created An Empire and Transformed Pop CultureDavid KushnerNew York: Random House, 2003Review originally published in January 2004 at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS)David Kushner s Masters of Doom, a spirited, winningly naive history of the personal-computer boom and the offbeat souls who design and play videogames, reminded me a lot of Steven Levy s Hackers. Published in 1984, Levy s sprawling book was an early and influential attempt to condense thirty years of computer culture into a form fit for mainstream readers. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, computers went from private to public, from mini to micro. Room-sized ENIACs housed on college campuses and guarded by priesthoods of elite technicians were reinvented for the home market as funky desktop boxes, built from kits or purchased from companies like Tandy, Commodore, and Apple. Possessing little in the way of storage capacity or graphic capability, these machines meager 8K and 16K memories would nonetheless be jammed with programs written in BASIC by home users eager to code a better mousetrap—or the next big game.Hackers, which took its title from the term for virtuoso teenage programmers increasingly visible on cultural radar through films like Tron (1982) and WarGames (1983), appealed on multiple mythic fronts: it was a tale of ingenuity (most hackers were self-taught), of nonconformity (many were socially misaligned nerds), and of profitability (for a famous few, like Bill Gates, were able to turn their programs into products, making millions and founding empires). Hackers, in short, told a pleasingly American story, despite its high-tech trappings. And one of the book s incidental but not insignificant functions was to cast in homely, unthreatening terms the single largest upheaval in society and commerce since the Industrial Revolution. Computers aren t scary; they re fun! Just look at all the nutty kids who ve fallen in love with them!Masters of Doom picks up where Hackers leaves off, breathlessly detailing the rise to fame (and fall from grace) of two such nutty kids in the late 80s and 90s, John Carmack and John Romero. These superstars —if we accept Kushner s rather streamlined hagiography—dreamed up, produced, and marketed to a ravenous community of joystick jockeys the first-person shooter or FPS. Offhandedly defined by Kushner as paintball-like contests played from a first-person point of view (x), FPSs are notoriously violent, fast-moving games in which players peer over the barrels of large weapons (grasped in their own avatarial hands ) while racing about mazelike levels, locked in combat with opponents dreamed up by the computer or virtually present through local-area networks (LANs) or Internet connection. The latter play mode, called deathmatch, is the defining function of FPSs such as standard-bearers Quake 3: Arena and Unreal Tournament 2003. (Ironically, Carmack and Romero created deathmatch almost as an afterthought, an extra feature on their seminal 1993 Doom.) Deathmatch is also, of course, the (anti)social practice that brings FPSs in for condemnation by the likes of U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman, who argues in high-moral-panic mode that violent videogames produce violent kids—epitomized in school shootings such as the 1999 Columbine High murders. (Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who orchestrated the killings, happened to be Doom fans.)Thankfully, rather than focusing on the FPS s controversial political status or debating the cultural effects of videogames, Kushner pitches Masters more intimately. Carmack and Romero s collision of talents and personalities led to interpersonal firefights at least as entertaining as the digital melees engineered by their company, id Software. Tracing the duo s evolution from colleagues to friends, then from competitors to enemies, and finally to battle-weary but apparently reconciled veterans of the game industry s incandescent 90s, Kushner characterizes the team in language reminiscent of the Lennon-McCartney partnership: Carmack is the intense, driven genius (the rocket scientist ), while Romero is the flamboyant, crowdpleasing publicity hound (the rock star ).These traits are made clear—perhaps reductively so—in the initial chapters, which join Romero at the age of 11 in 1979, toting up high scores on all the Asteroids arcade consoles in Rocklin, California. Romero went on to write his own games for the Apple II, publishing them in game magazines and eventually landing a job in the industry. Carmack, born in 1970, followed a similar path, though with a technological emphasis. Grasping the promise inherent in the primitive games of the early 80s, a time when arcades crumbled economically and the home-computer and console market had yet to take off, Carmack wanted to push the envelope and create immersive experiences to rival the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation.This theme runs throughout Masters of Doom: the sense that early gamers such as the two Johns were always looking toward the next great thing, whether it be a sequel to a prizewinning game or a world of networked subjectivity. Refreshingly, the book doesn t bother to defend the importance of videogames; instead, it takes for granted that games are forerunners of virtual reality, fantasy spaces realized within computer hardware and populated by human beings in avatarial masquerade. Describing Romero s love affair with the role-playing game Ultima, for example, Kushner writes confidently that gamers overlooked the crudeness for what the games implied: a novelistic and participatory experience, a world (11). Later on, he assesses an arcade game whose side-scrolling graphics broke new ground: Compared with the other games in the arcade, Defender felt big, as if the player was living and breathing in a more expansive virtual space (46).And against the backdrop of the Internet and World Wide Web, Kushner—presumably emulating Carmack and Romero s own fascination with the medium s possibilities—repeatedly invokes the science-fiction constructs of William Gibson s (1984) cyberspace and Neal Stephenson s (1992) metaverse. Such lofty allusions have the effect of elevating Romero and Carmack s mission while inoculating Masters against dismissal by a nation tired of get-rich-quick stories. The equation of videogames and cyberspace implies that game designers are, in fact, engineering future society (a claim also put forth by John Gaeta, special-effects supervisor of the Matrix films [1]), and that Carmack and Romero were the visionaries who laid the groundwork for this online world.If you buy that philosophy, you ll enjoy the book. Even if you don t, you will get something out of the insider s perspective on the game industry, which Kushner portrays as an analog of videogames themselves: colorful, loud, profane, cheerfully violent. The bulk of the book centers on id s profitable series of FPSs: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. Each game, along with its sequels and expansion packs, is presented as a risky undertaking, a dream of a product that might or might not find its audience. Each game, of course, turns out to be enormously popular, lending Masters the feel of a Broadway musical about underdog victories and overnight successes. Come on, kids, let s put on a show!Some will find this picture of software development disingenuous—hackers can t all be scrappy outsiders—but it works well enough to fill 300 pages of fast-moving prose. And among the exuberance of all-night programming sessions, endless pizza deliveries, and the fleet of Ferraris so fetishized by Carmack and Romero, Masters of Doom casually outlines the emergence of a new business paradigm, one keyed to the breakneck rhythms of Moore s Law. That maxim, coined in 1965, states that the power of microprocessors doubles every 18 months. For id, this meant that not just the outward design of games, but their underlying architecture, had to undergo constant reinvention. While Romero hyped each upcoming release (in terms that often landed him in trouble with the avid but skeptical gaming community), Carmack labored to produce software engines capable of rendering 3D graphics with unprecedented speed and realism. And each new version of the FPS encouraged, or forced, gamers to upgrade their computers in order to run the new software. At the same time, id s practice of releasing its games as shareware (downloadable files whose first levels could be played for free, with the full version requiring purchase) cut distributors out of the circuit, amplifying the profits of developers.The end result is that id s games pushed the industry in specific directions. Cyberspace may not yet be here, but according to Kushner, the world of computing in 2003 would be radically different (and a lot less fun) if not for Carmack and Romero.In a Wired cover story on the Matrix sequels, Gaeta warned of the dangers posed by advanced image-manipulation techniques. You have these paranoid films about the Matrix depicting how people are put in a mental prison by misusing this technology . . . maybe our technology will become the actual Matrix, and we have inadvertently spilled the vial of green shit out onto the planet. Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.Levy, S. (1984: 1994). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York and London: Penguin.Silberman, S. (2003). Matrix2.  Wired 11.05.Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books. Back in January when I sent out my book manuscript, I had the weird sense of waving goodbye to a cruise ship I built myself, standing at the pier while this giant, white, overstuffed artifact bellied out to sea.It was not the first time this particular ship had been launched. In August 2006 I printed out the whole thing, some 350 pages. This was after my dissertation defense but before I dropped off the text at the print shop in Bloomington where Indiana University dissertations are bound. Lots of other stuff was going on at the time—I was in the midst of packing for the move to Pennsylvania, my thoughts mostly focused on coming up with syllabi for the two courses I was contracted to teach at Swarthmore starting in the fall. But I took a moment, amid the mess of cardboard boxes and sorting stacks for the yard sale, to balance the fat block of pages in my hands, marveling that I had managed to produce such a thing.About a year later I sent it out again, this time as a book proposal. I got polite notes back from two academic presses—saying, essentially, thanks but no thanks—and shelved the project until 2011 or so. It went out again at that point, and this time was met with a yes, just in time for my tenure case.Then came the reader reports. Mostly positive, with a handful of suggestions for changes, they stopped me in my tracks; it would be almost four more years before I got around to patching holes, updating case studies, and clarifying ambiguities needed to clear the final hurdle.I should explain, if it isn’t clear from the outline, that I am not a good writer. Process-wise, I mean. Faced with a task, I put it off; encouraged, I dig in my feet and work even more grudgingly. This goes deep with me, all the way back to childhood. Though I have, for the most part, achieved the level of wisdom that involves accepting myself as I am, procrastination is one of the traits I most want to change in myself. As soon as I get around to it.Anyway, it turns out that publishing a book, at least a scholarly one, involves more than one goodbye; it’s less like Ilsa and Rick lingering heartlost in the fog than like dropping off a child at school, morning after morning. That’s probably the wrong metaphor here, because I adore my children, but have come to detest the book. Still, the other images that spring to mind—repeated skin biopsies, for instance—might express in a Cronenbergian way the connection between writing and excrescence, a putrefaction of words shed like skin dust, but they don’t capture the idea of an object consciously built. A model kit, seams puttied and sanded, paint sprayed and retouched, decals and weathering conscientiously applied. Doomed to show only flaws and mistakes in the eyes of its maker; to everyone else it’s probably, y’know, okay.My book is looking more okay these days thanks to the copyeditors at NYU Press. I got the manuscript back for review, have been going through the chapters, reviewing changes. There are a few on every page, and I see the wisdom of every single one. That’s generally my response to being edited—gratitude. Harlan Ellison and a mob of similarly perpetually disgruntled writers would kick me out of the Tough Kids Club for saying so. You can find me over by the janitor’s closet, eating lunch with Strunk and White. There’s nothing like a suddenly lost object to demonstrate the precarity of our systems for keeping order—the flimsiness of the illusion that the spaces we inhabit are at our mercy, rather than the other way around.There are many sorts of object, of course, and many sorts of loss. I daily shed millions of dead skin cells without thinking about it, and it doesn’t trouble my world if a Lego block goes missing from the Tupperware footlocker where all our Lego pieces entropically end up. The absence I’m talking about is the shadow cast by a specific kind of item: it must be something so critical to daily function that I need it—at least need easy access to it—almost all the time; by the same token, its ubiquity as both physical item and psychic token must make it easy to take for granted. Glasses, keyring, wallet, phone, various iPods and iPads. Made almost invisible by ritualized use, these small but vital technologies don’t often vanish from the map. But when they do, they threaten to take the map with them.This week I spent a disturbing and disorienting couple of days searching for my laptop, a silvery sylph of a MacBook Air, which did not disappear so much as slowly slip off my radar—not a jump cut but a slow dissolve. Like Pasteur’s germs, the loss became an official fact only retrospectively. First I had to shamble from spot to spot around the house to check all the places the MacBook tends to get left: the high shelf kids can’t get at, the table beside the wall outlet, under the couch, under the bed. Meanwhile my thoughts probed an alternative theory, treating the missing computer as a theft. Hadn’t I left my car unlocked, work case in the front seat plain for all to see, when I dropped my kids at school? It was only a few minutes. But how long would it have taken, really?I did not like the feeling of these suspicions germinating and spreading vinelike through my view of the world. Too much of the U.S. is ensnared and immobilized in such thorny psychic tendrils. And just as the presidency is in a way the mass projection of a schizoid populace—a country whose constituent blocs have lost the ability to comprehend each other, an imagined community angry-drunk on its dark and fearful imaginings—my worries about some faceless thief are just a way of externalizing anxiety and disavowing my own responsibility for losing track of something valuable.The computer finally turned up (isn’t it I who turned up? the laptop didn’t move) in my campus office. It was on a shelf at about shoulder height, a place where books belong. I had no memory of setting it there, but set it there I must have. So now my theoretical thief has become an inferred Bob.That word: absentminded. Quick flash of Fred MacMurray and an infinitely receding four-dimensional array of old academics wearing one sock and polishing their glasses. A little past that tesseract of cliché is one very real person, my mother, whose memory loss has in recent years become profound. Because of her I suppose I watch my own slips and failings with a diagnostic eye, sifting random problems for systematic ones, signals in the noise that point to a larger noise in the signal.The computer vanished the instant I put it somewhere it doesn’t usually go. What does that say about where the coordinates and position of any object reside? Is it all and only relational? Are there, in fact, only negative differences, dark matter? I think it’s less important to answer those unanswerables than to note how close they are to the surface, a magma of existential worry coursing under the brightness and rationality of waking life. Note it, remember it, honor it.

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