Story Space and Reality and Lots of Filmmaking Thoughts about Avatars

In which Ian babbles way too much about adaptations of animations from his childhood.

I don't do a lot of written posts, but after typing out a few (10+) thousand words just to get my thoughts together, it seems weird to re-record it all just to be a video! Also this month is a bit wild (been working on my talk for the Blender LA conference, but I need to go harder (and do taxes)), so I'm trying to get out what I can here :D

These are just my opinions, and I'm definitely going to say a lot of incorrect contradictory bullshit, for sure, but I like writing thoughts out occasionally because even just putting them into words forces me to get them organized, and recognize patterns I hadn't noticed yet. Also- I talk a lot about CG on the patreon (cause I think that's what most people are here for), but I have a bunch of thoughts about writing/directing/cinematography, especially as I'm wrapping up another year-and-a-half-in-the-making episode and questioning why I'm doing things the way I am, so if anyone was ever curious about how I think about that side of things, this is that!

People love saying that story is the most important thing, or even more than that, The Plot. The Things That Happen. But I don't think so.

Actually- and this isn't directly my point but I want to talk about it- recently I've been feeling like actors are the most important factor. A good script can't save a bad performance, but a good performance can save a bad script, because anything can be recontextualized, even poor writing. When I look at the scripts of some of my favorite movies, it's wild to see how flat and dead or cliche/obvious the text can look on the page before an actor breathes life into it. I'm of the mindset now that when you hire an actor, what you're effectively doing is renting their certain charisma for your project.

The point of being the director is you're the steward of the audience's experience. You have to have a sense of what they're feeling at any given moment, where their attention is at. And I used to think my job on set as a director was to draw out good performances, because back then it effectively was; I had a "vision" of what I wanted the final scene to be, and since that didn't include bad acting, most of my energy went into trying to prevent it (by which I mean, basically, telling all the actors to not do all of the things they were trying to do (if you try to "do a micro-expression", invariably on camera it's going to be enormous). But that's the fun of casting random friends in your teens/twenties :P Also- to be clear- I was an idiot, too, who rarely knew what I wanted or how to get it. I still am and don't, but I think I'm getting better.

But ideally at a certain point in your career you get to start working with Proper Experienced Actors, and by-and-large every performance you see is going to be good, or at least competent, so all that's left for you to do as director is provide context so you can nudge that already-good performance into one that works best for the scene, and for the entire movie as a whole. It's a blast.

Back in community college, I took an acting class from a local actor who also gave a lot of directing tips which I tried to take to heart. Things like not telling the actor exactly what to do (and never giving a line reading!), but to give them the proper context so that the scene can play out naturally, and to create the space for it to happen. If you want to be a nerd about it, you can think of it as a physics simulation; you can set up all the pieces, but once you hit "Go", you have to be hands off and watch things progress as they naturally will and you try to cancel it but Blender's like "naw I need to calculate this to frame 3000" for some reason.

But it's not totally hands off, because the actors can still guide themselves, and at this point I'm convinced the big secret is that good actors are actually good directors (and if you think of a great actor, often times they have directed something, and it was pretty darn good). Because the important thing isn't just the ability to recreate/capture emotion, it's the ability to do it in the best way possible for the scene (also- if you've ever been to karaoke, it seems like half of people think the secret to good singing is to just belt it out as loudly and passionately as you can and- not to be a hater, I swear- but I do think the average person dramatically underestimates the importance of experience and control in performance arts. The trick is rarely to "just believe in yourself and go for it as much as possible" (unless if, of course, you're just trying to have a fun night with your friends)). They have to understand the scene's dynamic, their place in it, and how all of it affects the audience's experience. One of those "what you don't do is just as important as what you do do" things. I'm sure there's a million examples of actors understanding the nature of a scene even better than their directors.

Oh but yeah most of the rules my teacher gave were assuming you were working with an experienced actor. If you're not... it's a bit more of a wild west. Actually the direction I've given most is "let's try it again, but don't do anything. Just say the words," because when you're not trying to do anything, you're still left with the muscle memory of what it's like being an actual human being.

Actually, the big boat shoot I did a couple years ago was one of my first times working with professional experienced department heads (and, to a large degree, professional actors), and I was totally delighted to see how much easier it was than what I was used to. I'd always thought I was a bit of a hack, but once I was in a situation where all I had to do was think about the audience experience, and provide context to department heads (who all knew how to kick ass at their own stuff), well I could do that! It was a fun realization.

I think the first trick to acting is learning how to turn most of your brain off, and the second trick is learning how to turn bits of it back on while maintaining the previous headspace.

BUT- enough about actors.

Because my point is, the important thing isn't the plot- it's the audience's EXPERIENCE of the plot. A plot is a series of bulletpoints, saying what happens. Plotting points on a graph- like making a map. You could read those bulletpoints listed out and you'd know the story, but that's not the same as watching the movie, in the same way that you can look at a map, but that's not the same as going on a trip. Although sometimes I read folk's opinions of movies and think they want that, just the bullet-pointed version.

Actually okay so- talking about myself for a second. If a story's momentum were plotted on a scale of 1 - 10, I usually tend to start at 0. A small character existing near-invisibly in their environment, going nowhere. Which in theory could make it all the more interesting when stuff starts to happen, because you've already established normalcy, but it's also the absolute wrong way to start things on the internet- "the first 15 minutes are intentionally as boring as possible. You want to keep watching? No? Weird!" If it were a full feature film and the first 15 minutes were at zero? That's maybe okay- just world introduction- but when your entire first episode is over and it's still at 0, that's no good. And since I'm so slow at making things, every Dynamo episode all the way back to 2012 has always floated around 0, and I'm getting tired of it.

It's the reason I'm releasing the next episode as ep 1.5, to ideally be watched immediately after Salad Mug. Because the next episode (coming later this Spring- it's in sound!) ends at a plot momentum of maybe 2 or 3, and combined with the first episode actually works fairly well to demonstrate the trajectory of things. But still, my goal for future projects is to try to have them start at- at least- 5.

Because it all comes down to audience engagement, and an audience's engagement is often just a synonym for their anticipation, which is them holding you to a promise that you've made. Wanting to see a payoff for something you set up. The ol' "Chekovs gun" thing. We've set up these two characters, they're falling in love, but one has a secret! Do you want to see how it goes??

Even base level plot exposition is making a promise, handing the audience some information (I picture it like Legos or marbles) and saying "Hold this- it'll be important later" and ideally they're holding it thinking "cool- I can't wait to see how this this stuff I'm holding gets used." And that's fun! That's a way the story can engage with the viewer. "Hold this, and this, and this..." and then an hour later you take them back and say "Look at this they all fit together the entire time" and the audience goes "oh shiiiiit!"

I remember as a teenager noticing Tarantino do it- he's so good at making a promise at the beginning of each scene (typically, because it's Tarantino, a dynamic that promises to end in dramatic violence), and then letting the audience stew in anticipation of that resolution. And one thing that he seems to demonstrate is that once you have an audience on the hook, you don't have to use much energy to keep them ON the hook, as long as you don't fully take the pressure off.

It bugs me is when writers exploit that, and make promises that they'll never fulfill- especially in that "just wait to see how this all fits together!" sort of way. Because the audience wants to believe your promise, and if you imply that something will all fit together that never does, that's a violation of that trust.

If you just look at Salad Mug, it's made a few promises. 1.) The ending, where stuff gets weird on the train; we'll find out more about that! 2.) Jackie and Jo will meet each other (this is pretty under-developed in Salad Mug, which is why the upcoming episode puts a lot more energy into establishing why we'd want them to meet each other). 3.) A lot of weird intrinsic promises in the world building. Things you can see and wonder "why is it like that?" with the assumption that, at a later time, it'll be explained. And 4.) hopefully a few meta promises (if nothing else, that I spent 3 years on a 15 minute episode because I believe the story will eventually be worth it, even if it's not obvious why yet).

Which is actually pretty light as far as promises go. But that's okay! Because plot isn't the only thing at play. And a lot of it comes down to how you approach filmmaking:

PLOT DELIVERY MEDIUM vs EXPERIENCE SIMULATOR

I've started thinking of this as a spectrum. On the extreme Plot Delivery side, you literally just have information. Opening text, "Oceans are now Battlefields", "3 Years Later", voiceovers stating information, just straight-up plot points.

On the other side, you have Experience Simulator. The ability of moving pictures and sound to simulate doing something or being somewhere. When you film the ocean crashing on rocks at the beach, you're capturing the experience, and watching it later can make you feel a lot of the things you felt when you were there in person.

It's the difference between a character saying "I work in a cafe" and actually trying to give the audience the experience of working in a cafe.

I could talk about this for ages, and it's been a fun way to start appreciating movies. I watched Dune 2 recently, and it's great at doing both at the same time. The opening scene starts with [spoilerssss I guess??] people hiding behind a sand dune. And the camera is locked to the character's POV; we can't see what they can't see. And when we look towards a different character, the bottom half of the screen is blocked by the person next to us also laying in the sand. It's not just saying "they're hiding"- we're hiding with them. So many scenes aren't just progressing the plot, they're also showing what it'd be like to be in that situation. (And from what I recall, it mostly does this for the "good guys". It makes us know what side we're on. When the Harkonnens start flying around on their little jetpacks, it suddenly stops trying to be a simulator- we as the audience are now just watching them from a distance, moving like a force of nature- which increases the eeriness. It's great.)

Because in general I think you want a mix of both. I always enjoy it when the audience is discovering information at the same time as the character, like in a plot twist: both the character and audience are reeling from the same unexpected development! In "A Single Point in Space", I can see the YouTube metrics for when people stop watching, and the scene with the highest audience retention is when the black hole is appearing, even though it's a 45 second shot looking out the window of a spaceship. And that makes me happy because it means the character and the audience were doing the same thing- looking out the window at the phenomenon being like "what is that thing??"

I have a similar moment in the next episode- a solid 40 seconds or so of watching a Weird Thing happen. When I do test screenings with friends, I have a little "chat test", which is just me making a mental note of whenever someone turns and starts talking to me over the course of the episode, because that means they're getting vibes that whatever's happening in the episode isn't important (and/or they're just bored). No one ever looks away during the Weird Thing. I'm fairly proud of my Weird Thing Experience Simulator.

"Nope" (2022) did that so well. There are so many times that film made you experience scenarios [spoilers] - hiding from/watching that monkey, scanning the sky looking for the spaceship in the clouds (so good), hiding from the spaceship, seeing the aliens appear in the stable (folks in my theater literally gasped), and a bunch of other things I won't say in case someone ignored the spoiler warning, but that you'd definitely remember.

But sometimes there's going to be a difference between the audience/character experience. In Salad Mug, Waterworks Market is normal to Jo. It's not a "fantasy world" to her, so she doesn't look twice at all the weird stuff in the market. As the audience, though, it's our first time there, so I intentionally took a minute to let the camera "wander", exploring hallways and booths like a tourist until we make our way back to her.

I'm working on a scene for the next episode where the characters are collecting cans on a beach, and the scene was fine, but it wasn't really working for me. I went out and filmed a few shots of small creatures in tidepools and on rocks- extreme closeups of things Jo might notice- and suddenly the scene felt more like an exploration, and a collection of memories from the day. There's also a nostalgia to it- we spent a lot of our childhood down on the ground looking up close at small things, bugs and tidepools, so having some of those shots in there helps it feel like a memory. I think most everyone, when they're a kid, is fascinated by the rules of insects and the secret worlds of lawns and bushes and puddles.

Also I was delighted. I had no idea that the gunk that grew on the sides of docks was a weird rainbow alien garden.

I like to mix between simulation and plot delivery, depending on the point of the scene. And a lot of it is defined by the perspective of the camera. Both of these shots are in the next episode. In the first one, I really wanted to cement the main character with the audience, so I made a semi-POV type shot, trying hard to capture the actual experience of being in an airship coming in to land (specifically trying to capture that familiar feeling of landing in an airplane, seeing the buildings grow larger, weird airport structures passing below, and the stomach-drop as the vehicle lowers itself through turbulence) he IS our pov. But in the second one, I mostly wanted to say "The Plot is Moving Forward Now. In a minecart."- it isn't trying to simulate being in a minecart.

It can also help you leverage your resources. It's hard to make an entire city, showing "city city city". But it's not hard to create the experiences of a city. Someone waking up in the middle of the night, hearing the police sirens driving by in the distance, and the thumping bass from the bar below their apartment. Or sitting on a hill looking at a distant city on a hot summer night, focusing on the physical thumbprints- a breeze shifting the grass or blowing hair, tangible specific reminders of what things FEEL like. Film in general is bad at that. If you show someone standing in the sun in a film, the audience isn't going to waste a lot of energy imagining what that sun must feel like, unless if the film specifically goes out of its way to encourage you to do so (stumbling through the desert, skin burnt red and peeling- extremes). You have to go out of your way to poke those buttons. Close-ups help.

Also- you can see a breeze, or hear a breeze, and things being blown and shifted in that breeze, but showing a specific direct human experience draws the audience in. Wind in the grass- great- wind blowing someone's collar up into their face? Greater. Can you imagine in Dune 2, when Stilgar's peeking over that dune, if the wind cresting off the top of the dune blew a bunch of sand in his eyes and he's like augh augh augh this happens every time augh as he's trying frantically to get the sand out and Chani's like don't rub you'll only grind it in and he's like auuuugh- and it's good that didn't happen in the movie, but it would be an example of what I'm talking about.

It also helps me identify what I'm hoping for when I go see a movie. With films like Pacific Rim or Godzilla, more than anything else I'm mostly just hoping for a "giant beast" simulator- use all the tools at your disposal to convince me I'm looking at a Big Thing Punching Another Big Thing. Let me feel the weight.

My favorite part of "Avatar: The Way of Water" is the middle bit when it stops worrying about Plot Delivery and just becomes an Underwater Swimming-With-Aliens simulator. Like as far as I can tell, the entire film was mostly an excuse for Cameron to build his state-of-the-art underwater-swimming-with-aliens simulator and share it with as many people as possible. What a great weird guy.

REMAKES

I'm going to try to analyze some stuff and rip it apart a little, not in a disrespectful way, but because filmmaking is a learning process of trial-and-error, and since it takes so long to make a film, if you only learn from your own trials, you don't get many chances. In fact, the stuff I feel compelled to "rip apart" is the stuff that reminds me of my own work.

Also- if something's done well, it's often invisible and feels effortless, natural, and obvious and is hard to really appreciate, whereas if something is bad, it frequently sticks out like a sore thumb and it's way easier to get a better sense of the shape, and why it doesn't work. That thing of, "I can see what you were going for, and I want to go for similar things, so if I can figure out why you couldn't pull it off, maybe I can keep myself from failing in the future." The only downside is it's easy to become so critical and invent so many self-imposed rules to avoid failure that you don't leave yourself much room to operate (the reason I've never finished a music album :P My ability to self-criticize vastly overpowers my ability to come up with actual ideas.)

For the past few years, I've been obsessed with remakes. Especially those live-action versions of previously animated properties. And I think they're interesting (and intrinsically kinda rude), because the implication is that animation is a lesser medium, and it was only made animated originally because it couldn't be live action.

Jokes are a good example of this. Think of a joke-

"A sandwich walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve food here.”"

But now imagine it were live action! 15 million dollar budget! Filmed in an LED volume! WETA created a state of the art digital sandwich! Sir Anthony Hopkins playing the bartender! The way the joke was MEANT to be told! Wouldn't that just be way more hilarious??

Like, no, obviously not. You'd be too distracted staring at the sandwich's uncannily realistic legs and discovering new things about yourself. There's an emotional core to things, and only details that work in favor of that core add to the experience.

A lot of my favorite jokes force you to imagine a scenario in your head:

“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.” -One of those great Jack Handey "deep quotes".

That's maybe my favorite joke, because to get it you have to imagine living in a world where trees are just being annoying and screaming all the time. It's great.

"Saying, 'I'm sorry' is the same as saying, ' I apologize.' Except at a funeral." -Demetri Martin

You can't "get" the joke until you actively imagine being at a funeral and saying "I'm sorry for your loss" and "I apologize for your loss".

"I think drowning would be a horrible experience, but a little lose horrible if right before that you’re really thirsty." - Demetri Martin

I don't know how well that last one demonstrates my point. I just like Demetri Martin. Which leads me to another spectrum:

STORY SPACE vs REALITY

The Story Space vs Reality spectrum is sort of like ""Plot Delivery Medium" or "Experience Simulator"", but different enough that I want to use different terms.

Jokes take place in what I'm going to call a story space. Where it's understood there's at least one layer of abstraction. And that abstraction can be a lot of things. It could be a framing device- "The Princess Bride" isn't just a movie, it's the story being told by a grandpa, reading from a book. (And even the actual book has a fantastic framing device where William Goldman pretends he's just abridging a much longer book by a fictitious S. Morgenstern, and only keeping "the good bits"- it's great.)

When you read a book, you're reading words that, just like the trees could scream joke, force you to imagine a world, and the voices of everybody. And that gives some flexibility; there's no such thing as a cheap budget or bad acting in a book. Some authors give incredible details, painting intricate pictures in your head, and that's cool, whereas others just stick to the basics, leaving your mind free to imagine whatever it wants, and that's cool, too.

Same is true for watching anything with subtitles where you don't understand the language- there's abstraction. Everything sounds so cool in anime, "with the wings of a thousand eagles I fly onwards into my destiny" or whatever, and you hear the grumbles of some Japanese guy being wonderfully dramatic, and it kicks ass. But in a the dubbed version, 9 times out of 10 it just sounds like some random guy saying weird over-the-top stuff. And I don't think it's always because the voice actors are bad- I think the layer of abstraction helps. Once it's dubbed, it's too real, and you're forced to engage with it in a more literal way.

Or superheroes- when you see a drawing of Superman, you can see his outfit is big and blue without having to specifically imagine what it's made out of. Latex? Spandex? Denim? Every answer feels kind of wrong, but that's okay, because in a comic book it can be understood that it doesn't matter- it's not a thing that has to be addressed, and the illustration can be abstract enough that it can be more symbolic than literal. In a live-action version, though, it has to be made out of SOMETHING, so you're forced to address it, and make the audience address it, too, even though it doesn't have anything to do with the story experience.

Because of all this, story space is vastly more forgiving. When someone tells a joke, no part of you is wondering "yeah but how is the sandwich talking?" because you understand the nature of the space.

Animation exists behind a layer of abstraction; these aren't the things, they're drawings of the things, in a chosen style- even if it's a realism-centric style.

But live-action films tend to exist more in a Reality Space, and the promise of a literal Reality Space is that you're Actually There, and that works best when the adaptation leans into being an Experience Simulator. So in my opinion the only times adaptations to "higher fidelity" media work well are when there's a long enough running time to actually Simulate some Experiences.

Unfortunately, so many adaptations have to move SO FAST to fit the whole book into the run time that the entire focus becomes optimizing the plot delivery medium side, with the goal being having the plot work, from a bullet-pointed-list standpoint. Honestly I tend to hate seeing adaptations with people, cause invariably they're like "well they cut out so much from the book" like- good! If you want everything that's in the book, read the book! If you want everything that's in the book to be in the movie, it's not going to be a good movie! And if someone's making an adaptation, something should be adapted or changed, otherwise I'm not sure why they're making it in the first place except that an algorithm decided it'd make The Disney Corporation more money? But I'm cynical.

I remember "The Golden Compass" movie in 2007 going so fast. The entire film I just wanted it to slow down- let me hang out at the college, or on the boats, or in the ice- but it had to keep moving to fit all the Plot in there. There's no reason you couldn't just have the opening narrator list every plot point in the movie as quickly as possible (and- hoho- that's kind of what they did), and technically you'd have the entire plot, but it wouldn't necessarily be good. (Although- if I watched it again now, I'd probably appreciate it a lot more. I remember having similar feelings about the Hitchhikers Guide movie in 2005, but I watched it recently and hot damn. That film is absolutely great. We were spoiled.)

It's also why the new Dune movies works so well as adaptations (along with the generous pt1/pt2 runtime of over 5 hours)- you've read the book, and had rough images in your head, but then it shows you, with a lot of detail and texture, what it could look like, with a very simulatory focus. It's putting the effort in to deliver on the inherent "but this time it's real" promise of the live-action medium.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM BOTH AVATAR: AIRBENDER SHOWS

I watched Netflix's live action Avatar: The Last Airbender series, and then immediately rewatched the old cartoon, specifically with the thought of this patreon post here, actually. I really wanted to compare them both and see what I could learn, but mostly what I learned was that the abstraction of animation makes it really powerful.

Even just the idea of actors- it's not Harry Potter, it's Daniel Radcliff on screen, playing Harry Potter. Your immersion in the story is very actively affected by having recognizable actors. When you're watching Snape being a dick, 50% of your brain is thinking, "Ah hell yeah I love Alan Rickman (he's in Hitchhiker's Guide too damn I should re-watch that)". Maybe that's not bad- and I like that meta-engagement of recognizing actors in different projects, and in a weird social way seeing familiar people in different stories is one of the closest things we have to the greek gods, and to a collective unifying mythos, helping keep our societal brainwaves in sync so we can operate as a global superorganism "WE ALL LOVE ALAN RICKMAN". But voice actors being able to embed themselves deeper into the project through that layer of abstraction really helps my immersion. It's not a famous actor doing a voice- it's just "the character" (except for times when it's very definitely a famous actor doing a voice).

Also- connecting The Last Airbender remake back to what I was talking about earlier, since they were trying to compress the show so much for the live action version, the first thing they cut was all of the scenes that actually demonstrated friendship. Around episode three they abruptly start talking about how they're best friends and all these adventures they had, and you realize "oh- I'm supposed to imagine they did all their bonding and everything offscreen".

Which is only a bummer because I legitimately feel like if they had a single scene in the show where the characters were just being themselves without trying to push the plot forwards- just setting up their camp, eating, relaxing, existing in the space without bringing up their mission every 10 seconds- getting a chance to develop actual chemistry- it would have been the best scene in the entire show. Or scenes where they're just "hanging out", but the story is still happening (man I miss Firefly). In contrast, it was wild rewatching the original cartoon and seeing just how much of that first season's runtime was dedicated to play.

The actors in the new Avatar weren't given much to work with- there were a lot of moments where I thought "that's not great acting", but when I tried to imagine a good delivery of the line, I couldn't do it, because usually the line itself, as written, was dramatic exposition being blurted out without conversational context/padding. There was no chance for an actor- especially a child actor- to lock into the reality of the scene when the scene is just "plot point" "plot point" "plot point", so the acting becomes point-by-point, too ("The Fire Nation is attacking that old woman!" [furrow brow angrily] "But at least we have our friendship!" [smile!]) I'd actually be really curious to hear the experience of the actors that worked on it.

In the first episode, there's a bit where two main characters are in a boat, and the entire conversation is just a list of exposition, "I have to protect the village since our father the leader of the tribe left to go fight with the earth kingdom in the war against the fire nation but you're the last waterbender so you have to (etc.)" and it felt so hamfisted, and I was curious to see how the cartoon handled it. And honestly, the cartoon is almost as hamfisted, but it doesn't matter. The suspension of disbelief is a lot softer. There's more forgiveness, because the medium isn't looking you dead in the eye saying "watch this thing literally happen. This literal 12 year old boy who furrows his brow a lot is literally the avatar". It's in the Story Space.

And more importantly, because it's in the Story Space, that also means that it's able to access emotions in a more direct way. It can be more on-the-nose without feeling false. You don't have to go as far out of your way to obfuscate your point so it feels "natural", because the naturalism isn't nearly as important as the story point you're trying to make. And that can be really powerful.

PRODUCTION VALUE

There's a reason I'm obsessing on this. I spent the last- what- 14 months, working on a 20 minute episode, trying to add as much texture/detail/realism as possible, so when the episode says "watch this thing literally happen in literal 4k" you can be like "yeah alright". And I think there are some times where I got fairly close! But the bar has to be high because the medium is so unforgiving, and I'm finding myself wanting to exist in a more playful medium.

Production value is held up to so much scrutiny, and takes so much time and money, but often doesn't actually have all that much to do with how you connect to the characters themselves (apart from, again, the acting). And I really really want to get to a space where I can help the audience connect with the characters more directly, without wasting months and months of my life on high-fidelity backgrounds that don't emotionally affect the audience experience.

Occasionally I wonder- what if IT happened and somebody was like "hey here's a bazillion dollars and all the resources- now go make Dynamo Dream fast," and I get scared at the thought because I don't know what I'd do with that??

Or whenever I'm watching one of these new live action adaptations I'm thinking "what would I do in this situation? How would I approach this?" Because while I don't think most adaptations should exist, if they're going to, what's the way to make one that best justifies its own $100,000,000 existence?

But it's why it's so interesting to watch the Live Action Airbender show, with it's 15 million dollar budget per episode, and see how they approached it. Because it actually had a really interesting balance. There were 3 aesthetics-

1.) Full Wide CG Shots. These look absolutely amazing.

2.) LED Stage Stuff. This stuff is not great!

3.) On Location Stuff (the woods)

So let's look at some full Wide CG stuff! 

Hell yeah! Interesting high-contrast lighting interplaying with cool environment lay-outs and and camera angles and solid motion! Lots of texture! Details! Intriguing world-design decisions! This is totally delivering on the promise of "the cartoon, but real". So much fidelity. Especially in motion and full 4k, this stuff was stunning. Give these guys an award. And I assume it's because they had more freedom to do what they want, and weren't beholden to any source footage, because up next:

The LED volume stuff! At this point I have to assume everyone is familiar with that technology. The cool Mandalorian thing. You're innnnn the computer!

It's maybe the worst I've seen? Again, with a "I'm sure there are many talented people pulling off miracles" caveat, but also with the mindset of "what if I ever got a chance to shoot in one of those crazy things", I want to see if we can learn anything.

Cause- and to clarify, the characters in the above image are supposed to be outside- this is the lighting (and the look) of 95% of the show. Ambiguous, sourceless, soft, off-screen lighting for every scene. I'm not exaggerating- it's wild. It's that increasingly familiar look of something shot in a studio- probably on an LED stage (and the equally familiar visual of every set ending in a weird row of rocks/bushes/boxes to hide the boundary between the screen and the practical set).

Soft lighting is great- it's flattering, and I assume that once you have it set up it's really easy to transfer from shot to shot, and it's delightfully efficient. And (talking out of my ass a bit) since we had to use harsh bright lighting to get film to expose properly for most of the last century, there was a period after we got more light-sensitive sensors that I suspect it felt modern and realistic (and still can when used well). But the biggest thing light does- even more than make things "brighter"- is reveal material/texture, and demonstrating texture is one of the best ways of making an image feel tactile. Soft lighting reduces the impact/specularity of rough textures, which is why it's flattering on faces, but at the cost of that "reach out and touch it" feeling (which is, again, one of the only reasons I can think of to make a live action version in the first place).

So if I ever got a chance to film in a volume, I think it'd be important to figure out how to work in some sort of directional texture-revealing lighting to keep it from feeling too studio-y.

One thing I've wondered (and there are a bunch of reasons this might be a stupid idea), but since it's so hard to get proper bright sunlight in a studio, could you underexpose everything else, so that by contrast, once you boost the exposure back up in the grade, the sun has a proper brightness?

There's also no composition- every shot is just people sitting/standing in front of soft-focus Unreal Engine backgrounds.

Which is fine. I'm not the composition police (unless they're hiring?). And while the cinematic language is the lens through which an audience experiences a film, it's just one tool (I mean it's an aggregate of many many tools). But for an example of what I'm talking about, check out this vfx breakdown- apart from that aggressive sourceless soft lighting, it shows just how much every shot is just them standing in front of a wall with a cg environment on it. There's no composition. It's just Person In Location. (Also I'm not commenting on the CG itself- I think they did a good job matching the style to the footage).

Having any sort of actual high contrast lighting in there would have helped the shot design. The lanterns being actual light sources, interacting with anything. The bounced light from a bright beam of sun hitting the stands could have given a complexity and directionality to the entire scene. I get why they didn't do it (it's harder), but I think it would have made all the difference.

It's a thing I've talked about with greenscreen shots- even good DPs sometimes film them like a middle-school play, straight on- just an element for someone else to comp later. Whereas ideally you already have the final shot in mind, and you're filming that shot, not an element.

I'd really hoped the volume stuff- by its nature- would inspire better shot design, but I think it still comes down to the skills/inspiration of the cinematographer.

Also the soft focus. One thing I've found in editing is every shot has a "texture density" (how much texture is visible in the shot) that affects your experience of it. Shallow-focus shots have a lower texture density, since all the texture is blurred out, and cutting between low and high density shots actually feels fairly jarring, edit wise (especially in fast-paced sequences).

And at this point since I feel like deep focus (a very deep depth-of-field (a.k.a. most of the shot is in focus)) translates directly to an increased texture density, which in turn translates to the overall "tangibility" of the shot, I really like deep focus. I don't mind having a little dark blurred stuff in the foreground for framing, andcontrolling the focus and depth of field is still an important part of the cinematic language- directing attention, limiting distracts, creating looks/vibes, and other things- but if you're always doing it, I have to wonder what you're hiding.

If I had to guess, probably the moiré patterns from the LED grid behind you. Is that still a thing?

Though again- this is only an issue because we're in a higher fidelity medium. Cause this is what the cartoon looks like:

Literally the same. Soft ambiguous offscreen lighting as characters stand in front of backgrounds without any composition to speak of.

Actually no. I was about to say it's just as bad and we just don't care "because it's a cartoon" and it exists in The Story Space, but I just rewatched the cartoon version of the rock-arena battle I linked to the vfx breakdown of a few paragraphs above, and it's totally using cinematic language. Closeups, wides, push-ins, pans- every shot is working specifically to compliment the story beat. Like it's totally "low fidelity", but it's doing the thing.

And then I stop, cause I get confused and disgusted with myself, cause I'm saying "lower fidelity creative freedom is where it's really at" and the moment the live action show is like "Right! So we'll blur the background a little- don't worry about it, and look- characters in costumes in environments, everything you need for a story" I'm like "ugh but why doesn't it all look amazing." And maybe it's because Netflix is worth 275 Billion Dollars and I don't think this adaptation needed to be made in the first place? I think the reason I'm frustrated is I want there to be a happy medium, where things don't have to look like they cost hundreds of millions of dollars just to not look cheap. Which is probably why in 2 years Disney'll have some AI filter they can throw over more cheaply-made movies to give them the style-transferred look of a more expensive film, at which point I'll invariably be grumpy at that because it's only ever going to be used to save costs and fire people and wring every last drop of value out of things that already exist and I like it when things look like a lot of hard work because they were a lot of hard work because that's a value system we have in place because as humans we tend to respect hard work, but if everything just looks like it was hard work while becoming easier what does that do to our appreciation of hard work, or our desire to do hard work to begin with?? And maybe people would say "you can say that about any technological improvement! Folks probably said the same thing about belt sanders being able to make all wood look nice" and I'd be like "whattttt"

Anyways last one! The On Location Scenes!

So, I live in this biome- the show was filmed in Canada an hour or so north of me- so it doesn't feel like I'm being transported to a foreign place as much as it feels like being transported to my backyard, but maybe it hits different for folks in other places.

That said, they filmed "Shogun" in the same area, in the same weather, and it feels significantly better, even though it's still just people in the Vancouver woods- it'd be fun to compare them. And X Files.

Also just- quick thought on costumes. I think the designs are pretty good. It's really hard to adapt an illustration to real life and have it be believable. But I look at them and think "ah they need to dirty them up more"- but do they? It's like the over-prevalence of edge-wear in CG; if you look around, most objects you see don't actually have all that much edge wear. And in lots of situations it doesn't make sense for clothes to be all muddy and aged. Is it the color? Too bold/graphic of shapes? Is it a near-subconscious awareness of.... something?? It bothers me that if wardrobe showed me the costume, some part of me would think "I don't buy it", but I wouldn't be able to articulate why.

Don't get me wrong- dirtying/aging the hell out of everything would totally help. But it also seems like too easy of an answer. I like waxed canvas. Cover it all in wax make it crunchy. Hell yeah. Put wax in their hair. Put wax on their little boots.

Actually, short of a real answer, I think that's the best cheat I have; texture. Make sure key pieces of clothing have some sort of feel/texture to them. Also costumes are an aspect I love being able to delegate to folks who actually know what they're doing. Kaitlin's got a knack for it:

She designed her own outfit, and I think the combinations of colors/materials/patterns work so well. And the bright red knit hat. Cozy, lived in, familiar, sci-fi-ish.

So in my mind the question becomes- how do we get that "Wide Full CG Feeling" in more shots than just the Wide Full Cg Shots? And one of the biggest ways is definitely to match the visual density better across shots. There's crazy impressive CG stuff here, but then it cuts to shallow DOF Unreal-Engine-ass close-ups. I think trying to push both towards the middle could do a lot. Yadda yadda.

BUT MOSTLY just base-level shot design. Figure out more actual compositions. Use the language of cinema to show how the characters exist within and relative to the environment. Once you know what you're trying to say cinematically (instead of just pointing a camera at a person's face as it says something), it dictates so many other decisions, and also lets you cut corners because it helps you figure out what's actually important.

Admittedly, that's so much easier to say than do. Usually I'm on set with folks, and even with pre-planning I'm still running around like "wait where's the 'sauce'? Why does this just look like I'm just pointing a camera at people in an environment? How do I make it feel Intentional?"

And intention really is the answer. Worst (or best) case scenario: identify the one thing, if nothing else, that the scene is trying to say, and figure out a master shot that exemplifies it visually. And stay in that shot as long as you want. In fact, I guess my hot take is if you have a good wide master shot, you should have a darn good reason for why you're cutting away from it at all. If you can't make it look good, at least have it work in the best possible way for the dynamics of the story at that moment.

WHILE WE'RE HERE

Netflix did another adaptation of an animated series from my teenage years, Cowboy Bebop. And I want to clarify, I actually watched the live action version a second time wondering "why doesn't this work?" but the closer I looked the more it became obvious how much love went into it- I respect it- but it's super intriguing to me.

IS IT JUST THE SOURCELESS SOFT LIGHTING? Everything has texture and patinas and aging! Frayed edges, specular highlights! But there's this inescapable low-budget feeling to the live action stuff.

There's something at play here. The shows don't share a cinematographer, but it's uncanny how this is to Avatar. Constantly locked-off live action shots with unrelentingly shallow DOF and ambiguous lighting and that stupid Netflix Warbly Lens, then cut to fantastic wide full-cg shots with high dynamic range.

Where does this look come from? Is it a Netflix mandate? Who makes this happen??

LOOK! They're in a spaceship! They built a spaceship! It's a cool set!

Why are they always blurring it?? And the closer I look at the set the more I'm like "this kicks ass" but there's something about the cinematography. The lighting or the grading. The DOF?

Show me the characters existing comfortably in their space! I do feel like John Cho "gets" it- you can see him actively trying to plant himself in the set, or lean on a wall or railing.

also- LOOK AT THIS DOOR:

That's one of the coolest sci-fi doors I've ever seen. It's got some proper layers.

Actually- this shot was my favorite from the show.

Just the dynamic range and texture and the bright sun actually feeling like sun, and the bold colors without feeling too cartoony, and the dark-to-bright foreground to background, for immediate readability of a somewhat complicated composition.

And then on the next shot they punch in and hohohohoho!

I know that vending machine! Oh man that made me happy. Also hell yeah to whoever made that shot if you're still floating around here!

And okay I found another shot I like. Or at least one that doesn't have that Netflix feeling:

Which I think helped me figure out... something? Maybe? Because in both of those shots, we're in a darker space shooting into a brighter area. Which means foreground things are naturally darker, and frame the shot, while still totally existing in the reality of the light. And if you want to make natural footage look good/cinematic/intentional, the biggest thing my cinematographer friend Johnny Valencia taught me was you shoot towards the light. It seriously makes all the difference. That way the light can sculpt the shapes and reveal texture, forming patterns of light and shadow. I've found whenever I keep my foreground dark (I have a whole video for doing it in Blender), I like the results more.

From Terrence Malick's "A Hidden Life" filmed- maybe entirely?- with natural light and wildly wide lenses. Such a good film- and gorgeous. Check out this trailer. Always shooting towards the light.

90% of the shots in this show (and Airbender) look like this:

Just sort of soft light hitting the front/sides of people's faces. All of it's just lit the same. All the time. If there's a face in the shot, that's how they light it. Maybe it's an actor/contractual thing?

I'm curious if they'd angled her a bit different so her face was actually being lit by the practical window, and existing a bit more in the reality of the lighting, and turned down the bounce/fill, if it'd feel more tangible (although I'm starting to wonder if they were trying to make it feel like an anime?)

Also I think I really like it when the camera has a bit of movement to it.

But I'm a bit out of my depth on all this. If there are any actual cinematographers reading this, don't hate me- I'm just trying to figure stuff out :P

Regardless- for the "Cowboy Bebop Movie", made after the original show, at the peak of everyone's powers (and budget), they made an intro that was a slice of life montage in a Martian city. They could have drawn anything- and what does the Martian sci-fi city look like? New York. It's a wonderfully high-fidelity animated representation of, like, Brooklyn.

I think that's literally the Manhattan bridge. I haven't seen something that audacious since Gotham in "The Dark Knight Rises" hohoho.

But it's an active challenge to the audience. It's saying, "we're not going to come to you to match your expectations, you're going to have to come here" which is important! Because if you're going to the audience, to match THEIR expectations, how can you take them anyplace?? Which sounds like I'm getting lost in the metaphor, but it's true! Because the audience agreeing to watch is them saying "I see your challenge, and I'm in". There are films that are actively "challenging" (I still think Tarkovsky's "Stalker" is supposed to be a slog. Like, thematically), but any film saying "this is what we're about" is a conversation it's having with its audience.

I think that's my only skepticism with Dune 2- and I know I'm being nuts. It didn't make any wrong decisions. Every decision was the "right" one. It came to us, and said "I understand what you want, here it is". And it was right. There were bold decisions, but it was also safe- people go "oh that one planet was black and white that's so crazy"- but, like, that would never be polarizing- it's just cool! And look I don't even know what I'm saying right now. It's just this thing I feel deep down, and the fact that everyone is like "this movie is great I want more movies like this" makes me think about the importance of... vulnerability? This isn't really about Dune 2- I genuinely loved it, and I'm excited to see it again- but it's uncannily stoic. Someone said Stilgar was the comedic relief, but he's just the only person who's acting like an actual person.

As opposed to David Lynch's Dune- actually, mostly Lynch in general- he's like "hey you wanna see something?" and you're like "maybe- what is it?" and he's like "come here and look at this weird thing I found" "what is it, David?" "Come look at it!!!" Which- again- is the agreement. The agreement of watching a David Lynch movie is David Lynch looks you in the eye and says "I'm going to take you somewhere" and you have to decide to follow, and half the time I love it and half I don't and half the time I'm not sure, but I'm always glad I saw it.

At this point there are two "crimes" which bother me in filmmaking. I used to think I hated pretention- the cinematic equivalent of saying, "I'm doing to do a double backflip" and then it's only a success if they actually do the double backflip. But these days if a movie says it's going to do a double backflip but instead it eats shit and bashes its face on the concrete I'm like hell yeah look at that. I've never tried to do a double backflip in my entire life. Is it because I'm wise... or a coward????

Cause that's the big crime- cowardice- trying to play it too safe, and just being boring, which is the other crime. Don't be boring. I mean, I love slow paced deliberate stuff. Let me stew in it- but you have to give me something to stew in. I saw "Lamb" (2021)- it's doing a lot right, all those good A24 cinematic things, letting me stew, but it didn't give me much to stew about. "What if a baby had a lambs head, but people treated it like a normal baby, wouldn't that be weird?" and you go "yeah that would be weird" then an hour later you're like "Well I mean it's not THAT weird." (It could be I totally missed the point of that movie. That it's brilliant and I just didn't get it. I mean I don't think so, but it's possible.)

Last night I watched Female Trouble by John Waters- it's low budget, absolutely nuts, but it has things to say and it's not going to bore you. It's fantastic. It's like "hold my beer I'm going to do a double backflip" and then instead it starts spinning and flying around the room and you're like "What are you doing?? stop" And then it starts punching drywall.

THE "REAL" VERSION

Also- so- I think people think they want the live action version -"the real version"- because they think live action has the potential for that increased visual fidelity. And often it does.

Fidelity- a word I'm using to mean resolution, complexity, and immersiveness. The degree to which you can peek between the cracks and there's still stuff in there. that's why they want to see the live action film.

But what they really want is that feeling of experiencing the thing for the first time all over again. In a new way. Moreso! They want to feel the same way, which has everything to do with tone. If you want a remake to work, you have to have a director that understands tone, how to establish that tone, and appreciates the tone of the original property. I think most other things can change as long as the tone is respected, or scratches that same itch.

Or- as often needs to happen- an update on the tone of the original. It can change your memories retroactively, "yes yes this is how it felt!" because times change. If you're doing a remake, the tricks that worked 30 years ago aren't going to hit the same anymore, so to make it feel the same, it has to trigger that same emotional headspace, but in a modern context.

I think one of the biggest challenges, especially these days, is nostalgia; when you're doing a remake/adaptation, you're trying to match the tone of how the audience remembers it feeling- which is often very different from how it actually was (especially stuff you first saw when you were 12). I actually think the new season of Twin Peaks does that fantastically- it's weird and dark and ridiculous and wild and surprising- everything I remember the original Twin Peaks being, even though I suspect the original couple seasons, if I went back and re-watched them, were like 97% mopey high school soap opera.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban- Alfonso is fantastic at tone. I almost think it'd be a fun video just to go through that movie and just analyze it, because he's doing so much right in that movie. I'll also say that's the biggest thing the Netflix Cowboy Bebop struggled at- for all the stuff they put into it, it wasn't able to put it's finger on the right tone.

Melancholy is powerful, and tricky. I think most of it is an awareness of things unsaid and done. And there's ways to trigger bits of that feeling, with, you know, sad music and pacing, but I think there's a core truth to it I want to understand a bit better.

Wow. This is way longer than I meant. If you're still reading, I'm stunned.

But in terms of experience simulators, there's visual fidelity, where every glint of light and piece of grime make sense, but there's also emotional fidelity. The feeling that whatever a character is feeling isn't just the most obvious thing for the plot, but part of a larger tapestry.

I've loved playing Cyberpunk 2077 (which is in itself a remake of a 1980s tabletop game)- when you walk into a bar, there are a bazillion details and the latest pathtraced reflections courtesy of a state-of-the-art 9090GPU. It's stunning. Especially during the pandemic, it was a blast to run around and get the experience of being in a lived in city.

Look at that! It's just a corner of a bar! You can walk to the window and see dozens of people selling things outside, look at anything, climb on anything, hack it with a manchette, all at 60fps 4k- it's unreal.

Screenshots don't really do it justice. And the new expansion in particular is designed with "shot composition" in mind. As you exit certain hallways and passageways, you can tell that things were subtly optimized to look particularly dazzling from that angle, to give you a little "oh whoa" moment. It's great.

But if you go up and talk to anyone (outside of the story mode, which is, again, very well done), they'll grunt at you or say a filler line "hey." "What." "Watch it", because they obviously can't record audio and get motion capture for every single random person in the game. Great visual fidelity, but almost because of that, the social fidelity is limited.

But I've also been playing another game (for the first time in like 25 years)- Final Fantasy 7. Another 90s cyberpunk staple that's had a few remakes in the past few years.

And when you walk into a bar, it looks like this:

And you can talk to everyone. Often multiple times. And they'll say different things based on recent events. It's great conversational fidelity (I'll stop using that word in a second. I'm sorry).

And weirdly enough- in terms of being experience simulators for going into a bar and seeing people- they're about the same? I actually love in FF7 the knowledge that I can (and am supposed to) talk to everyone. And for all of it's mind-boggling visual achievements, it's a little depressing in Cyberpunk 2077 knowing that everyone around me is a ghost/filler to make the city feel "lived in".

Also- I'm aware I'm seeing things through nostalgia glasses. But my final point is I'd love to find a way to slip more into the social/emotional fidelity side of things, and be less dependent on the visual.

The biggest thing we're doing is building a big spaceship set here in the workshop- Lux is about to go wild! There's a big pile of lumber outside my office! I'm going to put out a video about it. It's ridiculously exciting- two stories tall in places. And we're going to go hard enough on it so it has that texture density, but instead of just being a one-off for some random scene, it's going to be a core location we can use over and over. I'm going to set up the story to very deliberately lean more into audience engagement/anticipation in characters instead of just a bunch of montages. All of this with the goal of being able to shoot a scene and at the end of the day have a scene full of actual footage, instead of just greenscreen shots to spend the next 12 months on. I want to save CG for key moments, instead of just being literally all the time.

And also- hoho- we're going to try to make a video game. We'll see if it's possible to keep the scale small- if nothing else, it'll be a great learning opportunity.

2024's going to be a fun year, I think! If you made it this far, thanks for sticking around!