Friday, October 6, 2017

Why it would be cool to be able to draw





I can't. I really can't draw, and I realize that what passes for animation on this blog is kind of like those flip pictures we used to make on note pads (sometimes only using two images). But I am still fascinated with making things move. It is all an illusion. If I see a series of still pictures, it just screams at me, make a gif! And the mind is so gullible, it will move from still picture to still picture, and fill in whole seconds in the middle.






I have always been fascinated by these things - "pencil tests" they're called, where I guess the animation is roughed out. You can see through all the characters, which fascinates me. It has an air of shifting, swarming unreality (just like my life). The smudgy grey-and-black is dreamlike, a nightmare in fact. This is a deleted scene, a nasty one, and it's a good job the kiddies weren't subjected to it. 

I have mixed feelings about Disney, the whole megalomonarchy. Of course I was saturated in it as a kid. There was no escaping it. Disney is like eating a whole cake at the same time, or going on a swell carnival ride that leaves you feeling a little sick afterwards. There's a much-too-muchness about it. It's too good, somehow, or just a little fake, and then you feel bad that you were so taken in. I could never abide that falsetto-ish, diaper-wearing little snot with the round ears that always face to the front. Since when is vermin cute and appealing and something you want to welcome into your household? I was more of a Warner Brothers kid, with all those bizarre, smart-alecky characters like Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam. 






Good Christ! This is incredibly violent! Dwarfs punching each other's lights out. I thought those seven little men got along just great, though what their role in Snow White's life was, I never figured out.

At various points in my life, I've tried to draw something or paint or do SOMETHING artistic, because I just long to. I can't, because what I turn out is so mediocre it's laughable. I once painted a face of Jesus that set me back about six years. I thought I was a great artist then, which tells you something about my mental state. I kept sending scans of my paintings to people, then wondering why they didn't say anything. I truly thought a major new talent was blooming out of nothing.


I thought a lot of other things, but fortunately they didn't come true either. 





Here Yosemite Sam appears to be romancing Granny, who must have come in to some money or something. You can see what looks like fragments of dialogue actually written above his head. He is standing in the middle of nothing, not even blank but dirty brown. At one point he disappears except for his face. Fascinating. Maybe I really live inside an unfinished cartoon, but just haven't realized it yet.

I have watched people sketch who really know how to do it, and it confounds me. I watched a bit out of a movie where Terry Gilliam was sketching storyboards for his aborted Don Quixote movie. I just couldn't believe how he knew to do that, to make an image that was coherent and even vital and alive with one or two simple, even primitive strokes. Like an ear for music, I guess you have to just have it.




DIRECTOR'S CUT. That horrible Snow White scene in slow-mo. Note that various dwarfs appear and disappear as they annihilate each other.




Slow-motion Sam. Downright creepy, especially the way Granny vanishes when she is no longer needed. The one-frame colorization, or whatever you call it, is startling. 





Never look a gif horse. . .




Moon bug, golden sparkler, fire devil





Glow worm, lightning bug, firefly, fire beetle, candle fly, fire bug, bookworm, elaterid, pyrophorus nocticula, lampyridae, moon bug, golden sparkler, fire devil, Big Dipper, blinkie


Wednesday, October 4, 2017

A remake of Safety Last? Here it is! (I think).


Safety Last - teaser from Philip Lee on Vimeo.

Safety Last is a remake of Harold Lloyd's 1923 classic silent film. While preparing to pitch this romantic comedy script to Dreamworks SKG, director Will Bigham couldn't figure out how to adequately describe this one scene. Figuring that "seeing is believing", we culled a bunch of favors and shot this on the Universal backlot with almost no money to demonstrate how this unusual scene could work.
The picture is currently in development at Paramount Pictures.

Directed by Will Bigham
Director of Photography: Philip Lee


Now this is a really strange one. Several years ago, I heard that the Lloyd family had sold the rights to Safety Last to Sony Pictures so they could do a remake. The whole thing seemed impossible, but then I found this little clip (on YouTube, actually - it doesn't seem to be there any more). I have to admit that I find the idea of a remake excruciating, and I have no idea why the Lloyd family decided to do that, how they could so casually sell the rights to such a masterpiece, which surely would receive a mediocre treatment at best. But there it is.

And to think, they could have had the rights to my novel and make a really GREAT picture! But I dream. . . I dream.




This video is the wrong size, of course, but I'll run it anyway just as a curiosity, and because I really didn't expect to see it again. I've mentioned it to a few people (Rich Correll?) and gotten the blank stares I so often seem to inspire when I know something they don't. 

For one thing, no one seems to believe the rights were ever sold or has even heard of the idea, or believes in the possibility of it. It's either an internet rumor or something I cooked up all by myself.  I'm in a different universe, apparently, but at least now I have some sort of proof.


Monday, October 2, 2017

Borealis burning bright





Aurora borealis over Inuvik


Wiggle Wiggle Woo
















 







A long time ago, I don't know how many years ago it was, when I first started making gifs for my blog (which now seems like a very long time ago), there was a fad: 3D gifs (or GIFs, as they are usually called - I just use lower-case letters because "GIFs" is so bleepin' ugly). The 3D gifs were just what you see here - two very slightly different views of a scene which were rapidly wiggled back and forth to make them sort of look 3D. Technically it's a gif, but a very inadequate one because gifs usually express movement, and these look like the participants are either experiencing a mild earthquake, or sitting on jell-o.

The 3D effect is there, kind of eerily, not unlike the stereoscopic images from my Grandma's old viewer (and didn't YOUR Grandma have one of those, too?). These are a little more disquieting because they just won't stop moving. I'm not sure of the age of them, but it's well over 100 years, so that the pictures would likely be hand-tinted. As a matter of fact, it's very likely these gifs WERE made from those old stereopticon cards with the double image on them. I'm not sure what else they would use.

So what does this prove? Anything? I just analyzed one of them using my gif-making/editing program, and they each have exactly two frames. I don't know why the eye is fooled into thinking it's 3D, when it most decidedly isn't. 




Then people started making their own, and this sort of thing was popular for a while, though I guess you had to have the right equipment to take the pictures. This one has not two, but six frames, but is still limited by that incessant (pointless?) back-and-forth movement which makes the subject of the picture seem so utterly frozen.




I had to try slowing this one down. Not very exciting, is it? But it's typical of the kinds of images I was seeing back then. I remember all sorts of excited entries on web sites with a kind of "WOWWWWW!!!" tone to them: NOW YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN GIFS IN 3D! Even ready-made ones were considered the marvel of the age. Look! Oh wow! They're in 3D! Just like in the movies! All I could see was a lot of jellylike shaking.





Speeded up, you can see that everything seems to be moving in the picture except the main figure, who is just hanging there. The effect is more disquieting than ever.











































WOW.

Or. . . not.

This turned out to be a fad which fizzled very quickly, mainly because it just looks so DUMB and not really 3D at all, just annoying. All the images I've gathered here are from posts from 2011, so my guess is that 2011 was the height of the fever. 2011 now seems like approximately one billion years ago. Six years is a long time, and on the internet it is an eternity. 

I can't leave this topic alone until I present a couple of truly hideous historical ones I found. I don't know how these were made, but probably with a double-sided stereoscope image. I just wish they hadn't done it at all.





History comes alive.


Friday, September 29, 2017

William Shatner's Shatoetry





Everyone should know by now that I ADORE William Shatner. The man has mastered the eerie art of reverse ageing, so that he looks a little younger every time I see him. I'd say he looks about 62 now, and is . . . I have to take a breath to say it - 86. Even Betty White, the infamous hot dog-eater of my recent animation, is not quite so ageless, and though she's an attractive old lady, she is just that - an old lady. This guy is  just - what? An anomaly?




If I ever get to meet him, I need to ask: so what's the deal here? Did you really make a deal with the devil when you were 25 years old, or what? And what was the deal? To serve humanity until the end of time? It's all so enthralling. He just seems to go on and on. And that's not even getting into the horses, and how he rode that horse at full gallop in Alexander the Great, without a saddle and in a short skirt.

I saw an incredible video that said he's going to be in Cirque de Soleil, but I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing. Maybe it's even true?




OMG, yes, it was last March! The last time I saw such agelessness, such an easy vitality and effervescent life, was when I watched Ringo Starr in concert. He has reverse-aged as well, in his own way, going from hangdog to hip, from mutt to marvelous. 

I don't know how these guys do it. Put it in a jar for me, will you?





Thursday, September 28, 2017

When good rabbits go bad





Just when I think I've seen the all-time worst movie ever made (Plan 9? Glen or Glenda?), something like this comes along.





It's one of those super-low-budget creature-feature things made in the early '70s. It has a noble cast, from Janet Leigh (yes, THAT Janet Leigh) to Stuart Whitman to Rory Calhoun, not to mention DeForest Kelley, the legendary Bones on Star Trek. This makes you wonder if the rent was overdue or what.

For the evil menace in this movie isn't giant locusts or rogue apes or killer ants or Godzilla. Not even Gila monsters filmed to look big, or anything like that.





It's bunnies.

Bunnies which supposedly have been made real big and bloodthirsty by some sort of experiment. One escapes (ONE?), and within a couple of days, the whole area is swarmed by "thousands" of giant rabbits (though we see only a dozen or so at a time, hopping along in slow motion).







The only problem is, they're so darn cute we can't believe they'd be a menace to anyone, let alone snap off someone's arms and legs like they're made out of china.






This isn't one of those tongue-in-cheek horror-movie-parody things like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It's in dead earnest. This movie is trying very, very hard to be a scary movie. The rabbits, filmed against dinky little sets to make them look big, are depicted as bloodthirsty marauders as they hippity-hop along the bunny trail, leaving humans sprawled in a wash of maroon house paint. This just drags on for an hour and a half, but it's unintentionally hilarious. I watched it one night and my husband came downstairs and said, "WHAT are you watching?" He hadn't heard me guffaw like that in some time.





This one is listed under "comedy" on YouTube, though I assure you it's made with the utmost seriousness. The filmmakers ask us to accept the fact that when the rabbits wouldn't cooperate, actors in bad rabbit suits and even hand puppets acted as viable stand-ins. What ISN'T so funny is what happens to all those fluffy-tailed, hippity-hoppity, twitchy-nosed, lop-eared Peter Rabbits: they're all electrocuted and end up lying in a heap of smoking ruin. 





I hope nobody took their kids to see this. It's the one horror movie where you hope the "monster" will win.



And here's what the critics said. . .

Robert Sellers
Radio Times

A total bloody shambles.

TV Guide

The mind marvels at the bravery of the person who walked
into the producer's office to pitch this idea.

Dennis Schwartz
Ozus' World Movie Reviews

Well worth watching for those enamored by bad films that are
unintentionally funny.





Bob Baker
Time Out

Impossible not to admire the total withholding of irony in
Claxton's approach to this kamikaze project.

Eric Henderson
Slant Magazine

Rabbits produce two things in obscene quantities: other rabbits
and rabbit pellets.

Christopher Null
Filmcritic.com

One of the worst films ever made.

John J. Puccio
Movie Metropolis

The only thing more lifeless than the corpses in Night of
the Lepus is the movie itself.





Roger Greenspun
New York Times

It is this technical laziness as much as the stupid story
or the dumb direction that leaves the film in limbo and
places it in neither one camp nor the other - neither with
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman nor with Flopsy, Mopsy and
Cottontail.

Staci Layne Wilson
StaciWilson.com

Here comes the 'eater' bunny!

Shane Burridge
rec.arts.movies.reviews

A failure on every level.





Glimpse of heaven: roll cloud