Perpetual stasis

In some countries government support is given to the less profitable end of filmmaking in the interest of protecting and cultivating that countries culture. As absolutely vital as this support is if it’s not managed with delicate insight it can become a bureaucratic development hell.

The French government has recently made moves to give its game industry the same incentives and protection that it has heaped on it’s film industry. Sounds good doesn’t it? A good friend of mine was on a government panel to assess funding for a bunch of short films. Everyone on the panel was like him young and passionate about filmmaking. They were peers and respected each other’s work.  Everyone had a film in the batch of submissions they were terribly excited about and wanted to champion to be funded. But no two people on the panel liked the same film. For every film in the batch that was loved by someone on the panel there was someone else who detested it. Not one of the favourite films got through. Only the less provocative second options got funded. Only the mediocre ones got to see the light of day.

Big Prizes

Richard Branson has announced a thirty five million-dollar prize for whoever can come up with a way of effectively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is a great idea in my opinion. Prizes seem to get things moving. This move would seem to be influenced by the great success of the “X” prize.

The “X” prize was a ten million dollar award for the first team who could put a passenger craft into space and return it to Earth safely and do it all again within two weeks. The craft had to be capable of carrying at least five people.

Many serious contenders took the challenge. They raised a lot of money and practical support. On the scale of things the dollar value of the prize was not that big a deal for the people competing. They already had the entrepreneurial skill and apatite for things to do with space. Does the competition give them a kind of approval to do something so outlandish? If they had set out to do this independently would people think of them as kooks?

The winning design is relatively low tech by aircraft standards. All the controls for flaps and rudders and so on are connected by steal cables. No electronics no hydraulics. Much more reliable, less to break down.

Richard Branson signed a contract for five of these to be built for his new space tourism venture.

The guy who won has been a designer of supersonic aircraft for most of his professional life. After having gotten it all to work he realised he could have done it in the 1970’s with the existing technology.

What else could we have made then with the right kind of encouragement? Why does it take someone else offering a prize?

I believe there is a statistic that there are more film awards around the globe than there are films in a given year. Can that be right?

It reminds me of an award night for junior ballet students in a small country town. At this particular evening. They organises didn’t want any of the little girls to miss out so everyone got the same prize. They all got up on stage. They all got an award. They all took a bow. And all the mums clapped.

Deadwood is fantastic!

Deadwood is a HBO serais out on DVD starring Timothy Olyphant as Seth Bullock and Ian McShane as Al Swearengen who was also in the excellent English film “Sexy Beast”.

I’ve never been fond of westerns. But Deadwood does amazing things with the genre. The profanity keeps coming like waves on a beach. I’ve never heard it used in such a poetic way. How can such questionable and ruthless characters be so sympathetic? It seems to lie in them being so full of vulnerability and contradictions.

How can characters be so much at odds that they might kill each other one moment and then the next be allies and I still believe it? It’s like a war zone. Anyone can die at any time. There’s a delicate balance of power. It verges on melodrama in the sheer quantity of death and mayhem but it has an authenticity and a truth to it.

One of the reasons I’m drawn to it is that it is set in a “fantastic” world. There a many well-written dramas set in the present day. They take on issues that are in the news. They often do this in a sophisticated complex way that does justice to the issue. But this is in danger of becoming a dramatised doco.

Deadwood has some real people and events from history like Wild Bill Hickok. But it uses them to create a world where anything can happen. When you set something in a fantasy world you are not forced to take it so literally. You can get closer to the pure forces that drive these characters. I believe this has the potential to give you access to the more intangible qualities of these kinds of characters.

Touching the Unreachable

Scientists have been finding extra solar planets all over the place lately. The latest “hot Jupiter” that’s been found is so close to it’s sun it only takes four Earth days to go once round it. Its year is over before our weekend. They’ve been using the Spitzer Space Telescope. They have stretched it beyond what it was designed for to the point where they can measure the difference in temperature between the side of the planet always facing the sun and the dark side. They do this by recording the brightness of the star over many observations. When they have enough readings they get a bump or dip where the planet does a “transit” of the star. That is it passes between the star and us looking at it on Earth. In this way they get a lot of information about something that they can’t even get a picture of.

A doctor has been working with patients with “Locked in syndrome”. It’s like a waking coma. They are fully conscious and aware but paralysed so there is no outward sign.

He gives them a stimulus like a repeated sound and does multiple MRI scans of there brain. On close study of all the images from the MRI if a regular patten shows up at the same time as the sound pulses happened he knows the patient can hear. Like the star watching this is information you can’t get in a single shot. It’s the pattern that emerges over time from what seems like chaos.

With a more sophisticated test he talks to the inert patient and asks them to do simple mental exercises like imagining themselves walking from one room in their house to the next. When you do these series of tests with healthy people there’s a clear difference in the pattern of activity from one task to the next.

With a particular “locked in” patient he ran these tests and the brain scans were identical to a healthy person. He told the doctors taking care of him and within weeks the patient walked out of the hospital. The only thing he did not regain was his ability to speak.

I would be surprised if the makers of the MRI machine could have predicted this particular application way back when they were first putting the thing together.

It’s invigorating to see how rethinking the application of existing technology can be used to seek out a distant planet or a distant mind.

Escape velocity

Currently the most expensive part of any kind of work in space is getting stuff up there. The space shuttle has to reach eighteen times the speed of sound to fight Earth’s gravity well just to reach orbit.

There are some ambitious alternatives on the horizon that hope to make this safer for a fraction of the cost. One of the main problems with the present system is that a tremendous amount of fuel is needed just to carry all the fuel to make the rocket go so fast. It’s a catch 22. The following are some of the more serious alternatives being explored.

The Space Elevator is a tether that reaches from the Earth’s surface to a geostationary counterweight (satellite) in orbit hundreds of miles up. The main concern is that the weight of this tether is beyond its breaking strain if made from currently existing materials. The Space Elevator plans to use a ribbon made of “Nano Tubes”. This ends up being something as light as aluminium foil but twenty times stronger than steal.
For more detailed information go to.
http://www.elevator2010.org/index.html

The Lightcraft looks just like a flying saucer from “Mars Attacks” but the science is very solid. And it works. The power source stays on the ground. It’s a Laser canon that generates a vertical beam. The beam hits the underside of the craft. Parabolic mirrors under the craft focus the light so that it heats the air it’s moving through to the temperature of the sun. This transforms the air into a plasma. Th continuous explosion or expansion of the plasma drives the craft up.
For more detailed information go to.
http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/news.html

The Magnetic rail launch system uses the same idea as a magnetic levitation (Maglev) train that floats over a powerful magnetic track. The track just needs to be long enough and powerful enough to make the projectile fast enough.
For more detailed information go to.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/80369/
Magnetic_Launch_Ring_to_Fling_Satellites_Into_Space

Serious Anti-Gravity research has been conducted independently by both NASA and Boeing. A mathematician has worked out that it is theoretically possible to shield a craft from the Earth’s gravity.
For more detailed information go to.
http://www.aeronautics.ru/archive/gravity/gravitsapa.htm

Flock of Dodos

Flock of Dodos is a new documentary directed by marine biologist/filmmaker Randy Olson.

It’s an even-handed look at the fight between proponents of intelligent design and scientists defending the theory of evolution.

Randy Olson is himself a scientist. He has a natural bias in favour of scientific reason. But in making the doco he realised how bad the public relations of the scientists is. When they are forced to explain what they do to lay people they can get very condescending.

As unbelievably irritating as I find the whole intelligent design argument, it may be quite a healthy thing for scientists to have to explain their work in ways other people can understand.

Personally I find that taking an elusive concept and framing it in a way that can be easily communicated often gives me a new perspective on things I thought I knew inside out.

I remember a friend talking about the frustration of teaching someone how to play a card game. He rattled off all this jargon specific to cards saying they didn’t know any of it. I had to confess I didn’t know the actual meaning of most of the terms he was using. I found myself saying, “You have to understand their ignorance.”

Keeping It Fresh

Yesterday I was contacted by a journalist who wanted to ask me a few questions about “Stolen Life” for an article about Machinima. She sent me a bunch of questions that I sent back answers to. I quite like this because it’s great to have at least a little bit of time to get the wording right for these answers.

Writing works in a strange way, at least it seems to for me. Even for something as short as an e-mail interview the ideas come out in unrelated fragments onto the page, but all at once like a sneeze. At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done with it. I try to keep in mind what the particular piece is for.

Because of the nature of reporting on a project like this you often get the same questions. I try to give a fresh angle on it if I possibly can. It’s surprising how much effort goes into making it feel casual but still entertaining.
I worry that I can tend to sound a bit pompous.
We love talking about what we’ve done, about every little detail. But you have to give the journalist a “sound bite” they can use. So much effort for something that feels like conversation.

Mark Twain once wrote, “If I had more time this letter would be shorter.”

Stolen Life is a feature length Machinima movie starring Claudia Black of Stargate and Farscape and Chris Jones of Tex Murphy.

The story Machine

I’ve been in correspondence with a research lab at a local university that studies all sorts of things about robotics.

They have a snake like robot that learns how to improve its slither by trial and error. Another can find it’s way through a maze. The place is full of cool gadgets.

One of there latest projects is to write software capable of constructing a narrative story. One application of this would be in interactive adventure games. At the moment this can only be done with a finite list of predetermined options.

What they are trying to do is very ambitious. Even if they don’t reach their goal it would seem to me there is an excellent opportunity here to learn about the fundamentals of story.

They are still in the process of applying for funding. They are talking to me because they need input from someone who has had practical experience writing fiction.

They sent me a paper a student put together as part of their submission. It was full of references from Aristotle and theory on story and even mathematical formula attempting to describe narrative structure. Very impressive. It was quite a lot to try and get your head around, so I chose to focus on one particular element.

The feedback I offered was this. It’s often necessary to talk about plot or character separately just to simplify things to solve a problem or develop a story.

However I believe that in a good story character and plot are inseparable. A plot that ignores character becomes arbitrary. A good plot tells you a story of what a character chooses to do when they are confronted with a given situation. What they end up doing should reveal a truth about the character and hopefully about the human condition.

Character is not embodied in superficial mannerisms it exists in what the character “Does”, in what actions they take. Character is revealed in the plot they play out in pursuit of their needs.

“To be is to do”, Socrates.
“To do is to be”, Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Do be do be do”, Frank Sinatra.
A quote by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Off the Cliff

I’ve just recently finished production of “Stolen Life”, a feature length 3D sci-fi animation. After three years 24-7 on production I feel a bit like Wile E. Coyote off the edge of the cliff in mid air. But like the old Coyote any problem can be tackled with more re-invention.

It really is ironic. We have this complete movie the whole team are so happy with. But we are in the eye of the hurricane until we secure a distributor.

Having put all my time and energy into the project I’ve let everything else go by the wayside. I’m completely skint. So I’m hustling for writing work for games. As I explore this there seem to be endless opportunities for work anywhere in the world without your ass leaving the chair. You’ve just got to be willing to be versatile and ready to reinvent yourself to catch that elusive opportunity.

Stolen Life is a feature length Machinima movie starring Claudia Black of Stargate and Farscape and Chris Jones of Tex Murphy.

The Placebo Effect

Scientists pride themselves on pursuing the truth without bias. Some of the pure science theories certainly are way out there. But there have been many occasions in history when a scientist has successfully pursued a revolutionary idea that was initially rejected by the rest of the scientific community.

The reaction that strange new ideas get looks to me like fear. Of what? Aren’t scientists trying to discover new things? The rebel scientist is punished.
They can lose their jobs or sometimes even lose their career. They have this terrible struggle against people who should be allies. There’s no room for descent.

I wonder if anyone has attempted to research this adversarial approach to the pursuit of knowledge. If the tribal belief systems in the scientific community could be better understood surely there would be a benefit.

A common explanation for why new age medicine sometimes works is the placebo effect. How much research is going into how the placebo effect works and how it can be harnessed to keep people healthy?