Horses in Motion Saturday, May 22, 2010

1) According to Ross King, Ernest Messonier, exemplar of the Beaux Art style during the decades in which it was being toppled by Impressionism, went to great lengths to add realism to the many horses appearing in Freidland, the painting he worked on for the better part of three decades:

"Unfortunately for Messonier, the technology required for these motion studies, a multi-exposure camera, was still just out of reach in the late 1860's...Messonier had a team of workmen lay a set of iron rails in grounds that had formerly featured only the bucolic delights of cherry trees and grazing livestock. He next installed on the track a small carriage, or what one witness called a "wagonette" and another "a rolling sofa." Parallel to this length of track he fashioned a bridle path along which the horse could gallop. With these two lengths of course complete, he climbed into the wagonette, whose motive power was not steam or even horses but a pair of men. These two unfortunates were ordered to push the painter as quickly as possible along the rails in his wagonette as a horseman galloped full-pelt down the bridle path beside them. This bizarre feat was performed time and again as Messonier, whisked along the track with pencil and paper in hand, "jotted down the action, the strain pf the muscles, every detail of the motion and the different transitions." Entire albums were filled with these scribbled observations."

2) Josh Bass, Rockstar Art Director, on motion capturing horses for digital recreation in their new Western-themed video game, Red Dead Redemption:

"The horse we used was a long-time Hollywood ‘stunt horse’ named Blanco. His owner was a proper old-time cowboy, and we were assured that Blanco had seen far more studio time than any of the staff on the shoot...Blanco didn’t have to ride a treadmill, but we did have to glue positioning markers all over him in order to capture the movements correctly, which was definitely an unusual sight.

"At first, we had to spend some time trying to determine where we needed to place the markers in order to capture the best data. Once we resolved that issue, we went straight into shooting, pausing after each take to replace the markers that had fallen off the horse during the take. After every take, we literally had to pick up a dozen markers off the floor and glue them back on, trying to figure out where they’d fallen from before we could continue.

"Once we’d mo-capped the horse, work began on modelling the barrel and hindquarters of the horses, as this was the anatomical area we knew would be viewed most by players, given the third-person camera. We then shifted our focus to the specific types of movement: the various types of motion, or gaits, that horses use. Research came from live, image, and film studies, as well as a state-of-the-art motion capture recording, breaking movement down to five common states that translate best into in-game motion: idle, walk, trot, canter/lope, and gallop.

"As the primary mode of transport in the game and one of the most significant animals in every aspect of Western iconography, the horses needed to move realistically in all contexts..."

The Problem Tuesday, May 11, 2010

The problem with many otherwise perfectly good science fiction movies is the way it splits the audience. It's that point where something happens on screen completely at odds with science or history or the mundane course of human perfidy ("Bond, I will tell you exactly how my scheme works before I kill you"), something totally insane. The majority of the audience will at that point shake their heads and proclaim that all science fiction was ever thus. Another small minority will actually start chewing on their own fists. That decisive moment happens in the new MIA video at the 6:50 mark, at which point one realizes that these antagonists want neither food nor money nor information nor revenge. They are a fantasy before which we are rendered utterly aesthetic, utterly helpless, like Obama T-shirt silkscreeners:

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Science Fiction, Your Kids, and You Tuesday, May 4, 2010

In an effort to catch up on all the science fiction reading I did not get to when I was thirteen--we're not counting the Marvel family of comics, here--I've recently picked up the Science Fiction Association of America's Hall of fame picks. That's the short stories in Volume A and the two books worth of novellas represented by Volume B, everything the mostly male members of the newly-formed SFWA voted in as foundational when the Nebula Awards were begun in 1964.

Reading through the first hundred or so pages of the first volume, it's much easier to see why science fiction got its reputation among the general public as a vast garbage barge of adolescent sexual and political philosophies, written in great hacking strokes by its practitioners.

Based just on this sample, the wizened twenty-something grandmasters of science fiction chose, as the work best representing them, some damnable stuff indeed. The scenarios sound like an International ANSWER leaflet produced under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. A trio of spacefaring adventurers steal a Martian blood diamond. A pair of bachelors accidentally create a robotic housewife whom they threaten to "shut down" lest she relinquish her feminine illogic. "Negroes" are praised for their "primitive musicianship." Most extraordinary is the Heinlein story, "The Roads Must Roll," in which a John Galt-like figure rolls around on a little wheelie-tron beneath a massive moving highway and busts up a striking union with fatal (but fun!) results. In Heinlein's world, as in Ayn Rand's and Rick Santelli's, "parasites"--the word is used in this story--are never those with the power to siphon massive public resources, but are instead those people who democratically organize in order to make them accountable.

But that's kid's stuff. There are stories I've yet to read in this collection by Sturgeon, Vance and Bester, and I expect more from them. Rather, it's important to realize that the reason science fiction is avoided these days has little to do with any of this. The difference between Science Fiction in 1964 and Science Fiction in, say, 1970 is vast, and those changes have remained with us permanently. The level of writing still is likely often to flub it (yet nowhere else can you find technical jargon elevated to the level of art), and now and again a book will begin with a loving quote from Milton Friedman, yet since the seventies the gatekeepers of written SF have broad responsibilities and sharper eyes than they did in the past. Ignoring all of it denotes a lack of curiosity bordering on self-imposed illiteracy.

Adults have to work long hours these days; the vast commercial cosmology of Star Wars has a lot more thought put into it than does the cosmology of your average libertarian. Only an adolescent has time to poke through the Lucas timeline, or the timeline of Dune, or invent the sort of ongoing scenarios your average Dungeons and Dragons game requires. The threat is not that our adolescents are swimming in a purile sea of sex and republicanism--it's that our adolescents are smarter than any clockpuncher can let herself become. Kids want their Batmans self-critical and their histories operatically vast. We want to punch out mentally after 40-plus hours of work.