Archive for February, 2009
Nice (if somewhat cut short by Audrey going to bed) music practice session today. I’m feeling more fluent on the bridge of “Well You Needn’t” and have mostly internalized the chords for “Someday My Prince Will Come” (which, after hearing Keith Jarrett’s recording, I associate with awesomeness rather than sappy Disney movies). I was hunting for the camera so I could film my practice session, but it turns out I left it back at the apartment (I’m still at my aunt’s in recovery mode, though my productivity is rising back towards normal levels now).
I came across this on Planet Inkscape and couldn’t resist.
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If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Frank Warner’s Foundations of Differentiable Manifolds and Lie Groups.
I give a clear, detailed, and careful development of the basic facts on manifold theory and Lie Groups. I include differentiable manifolds, tensors and differentiable forms. Lie groups and homogenous spaces, integration on manifolds, and in addition provide a proof of the de Rham theorem via sheaf cohomology theory, and develop the local theory of elliptic operators culminating in a proof of the Hodge theorem. Those interested in any of the diverse areas of mathematics requiring the notion of a differentiable manifold will find me extremely useful.
Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test |
Cleaning out old links and things as my laptop backs itself up in preparation for migrating from Ubuntu to Fedora. My guess is that I won’t notice a difference – I just don’t use my laptop in a way that makes it extraordinarily important to me what distro I use. I wonder why others use the distro that they do? Do they notice a difference? Are there killer features? Did they just get really into a particular distro’s community.
It’s nice to not have a pile of “links to read later.” Seriously, I read fast enough that I can just… do it now. A few things as I go along:
- I like Tim’s Flash Forward idea, wherein he writes about options for his future self. Maybe I should try it out.
- I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout-out to Joel and Tim’s OVPC game. It is, alas, not an Activity, as it is based on pyglet. It might make a fun porting project for someone who wants to learn pygame or pyGTK.
- SVGbuild is pretty awesome; it builds movie frames from .svg files; after ffmpeg, you get cool drawing animations. Rock on, Ed Halley. (It strikes me that this would be an easy way to make kinetic typography, but it wouldn’t look very good.) I have not yet gotten SVGbuild to output multiple frames. Working on it…
- The blogosphere adventure game has some nicely hilarious moments.
- The IMSA OLPC deployment intersession got a nice writeup in the Acronym, IMSA’s newspaper.
- A small and curious obsession with metrics and tracking has been starting to spring up in my head. (If you want to improve something, you need to measure it so that you know that it’s actually getting better.) It’s nice to know I’m not the only one.
- Ben Fisher rocks my world with autoshoop. Better: autoSparta. I’m just waiting for someone to take a FUDCON photo and run it through…
- I have now added Stormy’s blog to my “oh my gosh! people do community work for a living” feed list. (I’m still amazed that people get paid to do this stuff I’d do for free. I have to have some component of community work as part of my next job.)
- At some point, it might be fun to actually go through some certification books just to see what stuff in it I know and whether there are any foundational gaps in my knowledge that I want to patch. I’ve heard A+ isn’t all that fun/useful and is mostly Windows-based, so I’m not so keen on it. However, I have heard good things about LPIC, so I should keep an eye out for that. (And now I’m geeking out over the design of course material – I find this pedagogically fascinating, as well as interesting from an evaluation design standpoint.) If I want to go distro-specific, there’s the Ubuntu certification, or RHCE, which I find intriguing because of the hands-on exam (no multiple choice, says Wikipedia). Has anyone played with any of this kind of thing? What did you think? Is it actually useful material that you might not pick up otherwise? I’d do it for the learning, not the piece of paper.
I did pretty well for productivity today. The hard drive I was backing up my laptop on in preparation for the Fedora migration was acting up (I do have a separate partition for /home, but make backups anyway just in case) so I ended up troubleshooting it instead of proceeding straight to getting Fedora, though the backup is finishing now so I might be able to squeeze it in before I go to bed and check off everything on today’s list.
Tomorrow: Call the bank, ask my aunt and the internet about how this “taxes” thing works. Get screenshots of the IRC Activity up on Remora and move its tickets into SL Trac; set up for Sugar 0.84 testing next week with Colin (this one will take a while). Get a good stretching session in and try to memorize “Someday” (I’ve mostly got it already). If there’s time, throw up a different color palette on your website and get SVGbuild to work; use it to animate one of the DigitalFoundations chapters you made. If there’s lots of extra time, check out NoteEdit and Canorus (and heck, lilypond) by making chord cheat sheets. Try to figure out how you’re going to get all your stuff from your aunt’s house to your apartment.
Friday, February 20th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
As an exercise in conciseness, I decided to see if I could trim this post in half. 725 words to 354. Win!
I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns in teaching myself community engineering. I can no longer learn purely by asking smart people specific questions. I need to apprentice on a team with mentors I can watch and learn from, day-by-day. Fedora/Red Hat, Ubuntu/Canonical (and Debian), GNOME, and Inkscape are on my list of projects (and people) I adore and want to learn from and work with; maybe I should write down interviews and short learning sprints and send “you are my hero!” letters. The world is big; I haven’t seen a lot of it, and now is when I lay down my foundation.
Those who move up the ladder too quickly find themselves in a precarious place. They think they are heroes, but when real challenges and the realities of failure hit them, they’re unprepared to deal with them. –Dan Schulman
I’m getting tired of building without a blueprint. I want to work in good systems built and run by smart people before I have the audacity to jump in for another round of improvising up my own everything. Scott’s post about litl filled me with admiration of how much it takes to make a simple system that makes people effective. It’s hard because it’s supposed to be invisible and look easy. I’ve tried to make these things and failed.
This isn’t a desire to be lazy and let others think for me; it’s the desire to not operate in a vacuum. I’m stagnating due to a lack of models to learn from; I’ve had weird schools and jobs so far, and don’t know how they’re outliers. OLPC taught me how important processes were by showing me what things were like in their absence, and now that I’m convinced of their importance, I’d like to compare my shoddy reinvented-wheels answers with what the greats were able to build.
I think this probably means that I am going to have to get a job soon; I hear that’s a good way to learn.
Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I’m having one of those “oh man I have so much to grow into” moments right now. The “grow into” is still undefined; I need to pick out small bits I can more concretely tackle (prioritizing, measuring, apologizing/ being reliable, killing perfectionism, and forming trackable daily habits are the current lineup).
You need those early experiences to learn the lessons that will help prepare you for challenges later in your career. Those who move up the ladder too quickly find themselves in a precarious place. They think they are heroes, but when real challenges and the realities of failure hit them, they’re unprepared to deal with them. –Dan Schulman
Some folks have asked me why I don’t start my own business or go the startup route. I would – if I had good mentors and good bosses at that startup. I’m still building my foundation. I’m getting tired of building things without a blueprint; I need more raw material. I want to work in good systems built and run by smart people before I have the audacity to jump in for another round of improvising up my own everything. I read Scott’s post about his new job at litl with growing admiration of how much it takes to make a simple system that runs well and makes people effective. I’ve tried to do that, and I’ve failed repeatedly; it’s hard because it’s supposed to be invisible and look easy.
This isn’t a desire to drop back and be lazy and let others do the thinking for me – far from it. I want my mind stretched, and I’m stagnating due to a lack of models to learn from. In terms of being a good community engineer, I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t teach myself more by floundering around. I need a team, I need mentors, and I need resources, and I need to be constantly exposed to those people and projects every day; I don’t have specific questions or problems I can call in one-off consultations for. I need to see how they operate in regular life. I need to watch the sort of problems I might face; right now I can’t see them very clearly. I want to watch people I respect and admire make decisions, act, and just be people so that I have a sense of the space I can grow up into. You improvise with greater inspiration and facility after you listen to the greats take on a melody.
I think this probably means that I am going to have to get a job soon. I hear those are good ways to learn things.
One of the greatest gifts that Olin gave me was the privilege of watching the construction of a system from the ground up. I got to see the advantages and disadvantages of experience. I got to hear a lot of “at the school where I came from, we did things this way” stories from my professors, which was immensely valuable – they gave us knowledge to draw from when we were choosing what we wanted our school to be like at that moment. But Olin also gave me a working system. It gave me a complete image – one image – of what a school could be like. TOPP and OLPC taught me how important building good technical and community processes were – by showing me what things were like in their absence as they were being put together.
Fedora is an inspiring example of a working open-source project system that interacts with a commercial entity (Red Hat). I’d like to see how they work – Debian and Ubuntu, would make good compares-and-contrasts, too. I’ve heard great things about the Inkscape community’s integration of coders and artists. And then there’s GNOME, which I would love to learn more about the workings of, but just don’t… know about. I need to find a way to get involved. Maybe I should show up at a bug day.
Okay. I’m out of raw material for this topic. Now comes the fun part: one of the things I’m trying to learn is how to be concise. Can I cut this down to something half the length?
Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
While looking for color schemes today (I’m using these four color palettes as a jumping-off point for my own website; I want it based on a warm orange, with some combination of muted oranges and bright yellows as secondary colors and highlights, and a dark desaturated greyish-blue for contrast) I found out that there are blogs about color. I added a few to my feed reader in the hopes that more exposure will help me get a baseline; right now I’m pretty much color-illiterate and don’t know how to start looking at things, so watching other people talk about them is great. I’m thinking about baselines a lot today because of Sumana’s great blog post today on skills and lenses.
One of the greatest gifts you can give your children, your employees, the people to whom you are a role model, is the knowledge that some field of endeavor is in a sense No Big Deal. Knowledge — belief backed up by experience — that they can do interesting and rewarding projects in it without fear of public embarrassment.
I grew up thinking that writing, editing, publishing, public speaking, community leadership, hobbyist programming, and using the Net were No Big Deal. To this day, though, I’m leery of trying home improvement, car repair, sports, camping, and childcare. I don’t have a baseline, I don’t know where to start, I don’t know how to know if I’m doing okay, I’ve never played around in a context where results don’t matter, so I have that vague fear…
Leonard suggested a conclusion: you should treat everything like it’s No Big Deal. Danger: you turn into one of those jerks who scorn strangers’ struggles… Self-efficacy demands that I treat my own attempts like No Big Deal; compassion demands that I recognize my privilege and help others build their skills and confidence.
I have an even longer way than usual to go towards training for a martial arts tournament. Step 1: reach a non-embarrassing fitness level. Yes, lying in bed for a week does awful things to your circulation, but seriously:
- 85 situps in 1 minute and 48 seconds. (Audrey forgot to stop the timer and tell me a minute had passed.)
- 8 normal pushups and then 15 wimp pushups from the knees before I had to pause.
- 34 squats in 1 minute. If I do a second round immediately afterward with weights, I can croak out 18 in the second minute. (I’d also like to take a minute to say that my cousins are sadistic. Melanie, I don’t see you doing pushups here. C’mon.)
- I can still touch my toes. It’s harder than it used to be. I’m halfway to a side split, which sounds great until you realize I’m talking about 90 degrees out of a hypothetical 180.
I sent my two tough emails and am about to fire up that Fedora install. In the meantime, a piano calls.
Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
When you admire and like working with someone, and think you’ve disappointed them, you don’t want to come back and face them until you’ve done something spectacularly awesome for them to make up for it. It’s not really about them; it’s about preservation of your own self-image as a Good Person. It’s about saving your faee, not about helping others.
I’m not proud of doing this, and even when I realize I’m doing it, I let it fester (“maybe if I don’t acknowledge it, nobody will notice and I’ll still look good!”) And going back and admitting this to the people I’ve disappointed does not get easier with time. It doesn’t feel good afterwards because you’ve “done the right thing.” In fact, it feels terrible.
It does clear the air and take that thing off my shoulders. It does give me some closure and force me to say “okay, I learned from that mistake.” It doesn’t mean I won’t make it again (I do and will), but at least I won’t make it in the same way. I’ll be more conscious of it. I’ll do everything in my power to keep from disappointing the other person again. If you want my unending loyalty, forgive me for messing up. That’s all.
It seems like if there’s a person I want to be totally rock-solid reliable for, I should find a way to disappoint them as quickly as possible, and then face up to it and get over it and Never Do That Again. (I may have to do this multiple times for extended relationships.) Over time, I’m learning how to get more quickly over the “disappointment” hump, in the hopes that it will vanish entirely if I keep working on it.
This post is an attempt to state this bug in words so I can kill it more effectively, and to give myself a template for the sort of response I want to give: first draft below, suggestions welcomed. (The actual wording will be different and refer to specific incidents; right now I’m trying to get the gist of what I should rephrase each time.)
I’m sorry. I should have done this, but I didn’t, and things sucked for you as a result. I can’t fix it or make up for the loss I’ve caused you, but I do want to acknowledge that I’ve caused you trouble, and apologize for it. There are a few things I can think of that I could do to mitigate the trouble moving forward; here are some things I have already done. I feel awful for disappointing you, as I admire and respect you and would like to keep on working with you, though I know that it’s going to take time and results to regain that trust. It’s taken too long for me to tell you this because I was afraid of losing your respect, and I’ll do my best to be more vigilant about keeping you informed in the future. Can we try again? What can I do to help?
There. Now that I know what I need to say if I disappoint someone in the future, I can avoid doing it; it’s just turned from a Big Awful Thing Of Undefined Scariness into a concretely defined self-imposed consequence that I can now go “okay, yes. I’m going to manage things so that I do not have to do this.”
It strikes me that I forgive others much more readily than I forgive myself.
Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Hah. I’m down to a email backlog of 293. At this rate, by the weekend, I’ll be back in the black with my inbox. This is a good exercise in defeating my perfectionism.
Also a good exercise in defeating my perfectionism: sleeping before I have all of the things I want to do done. Tomorrow’s plan is to do the three things I’m most reluctant to do: formally drop two projects (I can’t keep them all up – I’m sickness-recovery-sleeping way too much to do all of the things I want to do right now) and distro-switch (Ubuntu to Fedora, after 2.5 months of saying “well, maybe it’s time to try something new.”)
On the daily practice front, I should polish up the B section of “Well You Needn’t” because I’m flubbing chord transitions at high speed, and… hm. I haven’t set a benchmark for how flexible/strong/fast I am for a while, and the results are likely to be… let’s call them “motivational.” So we’ll see how far I can stretch, how many pushups and squats I can do to failure, how many crunches I can get through in a minute, and (if I can measure out a mile) how fast I can run one. Ah, yes. And Inbox Zero. Can’t forget that.
If I have extra bandwidth, I should do some character sketches for my novel, and possibly try out Eclipse as an IDE. Bonus points if I read an academic paper and write notes on it, though I’m guessing the day is going to be full (I already have some meetings and conversations that I have to have, some work to do now that the IRC Activity has a Trac component, and some Harvard class stuff to work out). I won’t work on my resume until the weekend, because every time in the last few weeks I’ve tried to start that, I ended up futzing around with pretty formatting things in LaTeX instead of working on the actual content. Same with websites that I’m supposed to build.
I haven’t been on IRC much lately. That should slowly start to change as well.
Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
It is with some sense of glee that I’ve declared pages 133-158 (on battling decentralization) of The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom to be required reading for the Harvard law school seminar I’m working with. My team is breaking with the past mold of “ask questions to guest speaker talking at the front of the room” by throwing our entire class into a rocket pitch competition workshop and having our esteemed guests wander around as team mentors rather than talking heads sitting at the front. We’re also prohibiting laptops in the classroom.
It should be fun. Mm, I love running classes. If there’s something I’ve learned in the last few years, it’s how to work the energy levels of a room; I can get people jazzed up or calmed down, though the notion of this as a conscious skill is still a new one. But as I work through course planning this semester, and attend workshops and seminars and classes on my own, I’m learning that I now have a sense for what sorts of effects the different pacing and setup of activities and environments will create, and how an event could be tugged and shaped differently. It’s still mostly a spur-of-the-moment reaction; I need to learn how to translate this sense more into being able to pre-plan and set down instructions so I can shape events I’m not physically running around.
I’m still a little woozy and wobbly from being sick; I’m sleeping 8-10 hours a night and eating uncharacteristically tiny portions, and am still dehydrated since I can’t drink lots of fluid at once and keep forgetting to sip small amounts constantly. I’m feeling sort of marginally productive again, though. In my waking hours in the last few days I’ve been studying guitar; the piano in my aunt’s house has a weird resonance with the room that makes it sound weird when I play it, but I should extend my disciplined practice outwards to the piano as well. It’s nice to be able to read sheet music on the guitar now, and to construct chords from knowing the notes rather than going “and my hands go like this for a G7!” I’m still just playing from the Berklee textbook I got with the guitar, but should record myself playing “Blackbird” or “Diamonds and Rust” sometime. If I’m very brave, I might even sing.
For piano, I’m stepping back to the basics a bit more, going around the circle of fourths with basic chords and then adding inversions and shell voicings on top of that. I’m inherently not comfortable on the keyboard for anything except the simplest of sheet music; it constrains me from being able to play anything that isn’t explicitly written down. So I’m getting familiar with a different kind of sightreading now. Again. And being utterly baffled by Monk, even when playing what’s probably one of his more straightforward songs, “Well You Needn’t.” (Even Philip Glass sounds normal compared to Monk, for me.)
I would eventually like to get around to doing classical improvisation; Gabriela Montero is amazing at this. I mean, listen to her improvising at home or on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Classical music and structures are what I’m used to. When Yifan and I went to the Acetarium one night, I ended up playing the left-hand part of a Beethoven with my right hand while accentuating bass notes with the beer bottle in my left. The third movement of the Moonlight might be a good piece to do classical improvisation on top of, but I should probably learn it properly first. (Aah, but there’s the Rachmaninoff bit I want to learn, and the Bach-Busoni, and the Schubert Impromptu I’m still dusting off.)
I think it’s just constant time I need, time to play with the keys again. I started using the keyboard as my laptop desk in my room before I got sick so that I’d idly pick out tunes while reading, and I’m beginning to do the same with the guitar while lying with a book on the sofa or in bed. And slowly, these things I want to become start creeping into the fabric of my life.
Wow. Fedora’s Community Architecture team has… goals. (Heck, they have a Community Architecture team. I should… learn from this.) There’s this whole strategy side to the business of open-source that I have to study, along with tons of development methodology stuff from software engineering. But I can’t forget that I have to actually do development and testing and engineering work in order to solidify learning the more meta stuff. Which reminds me; I’ve got an Activity to maintain and some bugs to check out…
Also, I should make a list of software I maintain. That way, during idle moments when I’m looking for something to code, I could pull up enhancement requests and go for it. Intertrac tracbacks might be a good next hack, but it’s only really a compelling itch to scratch if I persuade the OLPC and SL Trac admins to use Tracbacks (in which case it then becomes very compelling for me to implement it, since it’ll make my life way easier hopping between the two projects).
Eh, I guess I’ll just go ahead and make it. There are a lot of projects I’m ignoring here. But I’m just accepting that the Heavenly Overhaul Of My Website isn’t going to happen and making incremental improvements as I actually want them right this moment.
Eventually I’ll regain the ability to make blog posts on a single topic.
Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | music, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sadness: I’m going to have to let my IEEE membership lapse because it’s Just Too Darn Expensive. Of course, as soon as that happens, I think of all these things I want to do that stuff like journal access is incredibly useful for. Well, when I find something I’m blocked on due to lack of membership, and find that I have discretionary income to spend on that sort of thing, then… golly, I’ll be back with a vengeance.
My friends are right; I’m bad at relaxing and don’t know what to do when I don’t have too many things to do. In fact, I can’t not have too many things to do; when I feel idle, a swarm of low-priority tasks comes and buzzes around my head, and it’s uncomfortable because I can’t get to anything important in that state. These two months of forced semi-idleness are good for me if only to force me to learn how to deal with that sort of state in ways other than running away towards being governed by urgent impending deadline panic doom.
Down to 319 unread emails, which means I cleared out half of them today. Fistpump!
Wow, being sick has made my mind much more scattered than usual. I’m still sleeping a lot and it feels like a struggle to pick up long streams of coherent thought. Must hone powers of concentration. However, I am getting faster at typing with Dvorak. The biggest timesink for it is when my hands vibrate back and forth between layouts and I have to keep on saying “No, not qwerty, not qwerty.”
One thing that I’ve been finding lately is that I… don’t actually get excited about children. I mean, I get excited, but only the normal excited. Not the deep “this pulls me from an unconscious stupor into productivity” excited. That, apparently, is reserved for universities. I am ridiculously – it’s like a trigger I can’t stop – ridiculously excited by engineering education at the undergrad and up levels. Inasmuch as educating younger children relates to that (and it relates a lot!), I adore it completely. But it’s always about reaching uni students through having them do something for the younger ones, or tapping uni students to help younger ones, or somesuch.
This is problematic when your primary projects are centered on an audience you just don’t get all that excited about. I feel strange writing this, as if my declaration of love for education at the university level is somehow a betrayal of the projects I work on that focus on younger kids, K-12, even K-8. (It’s not that I don’t like kids that age, or don’t want to work on things for them! I do! It’s just that – it’s like… I enjoy gum, I like a good lollipop, they’re great, but fudge is in this whole other nirvana of sweetness entirely.
I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what about universities attract me so much. That you get more students in there by choice rather than rote? That you have great minds from many disciplines in one place? That you can do both survey courses and in-depth, multi-year research studies on a subject? I don’t want to go back to academia now; I want to work in industry, but keep some sort of academic ties. Argh. Not being coherent tonight. Stupid sick tired brain….
Maybe it means that instead of just looking at doing community facilitation for my next job, I should also be looking for university outreach potential/positions. (Yeah, but I actually want to do engineering, so that in a way that’ll force me to get my hands dirty and greasy…)
Maybe it means that I should go to sleep. That… seems like a prudent plan. I think I’ll go for that one. Sleep.
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
John Tiernery has created a screenshot walkthrough [pdf] of how to make a blog on wordpress.com. If you’ve been thinking about joining Planet Sugar Labs but don’t yet have a blog, it’s a good way to get started.
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 | sugar | No Comments »
Feeling much better now. Biggest accomplishment of the day: consuming a bowl of noodles in broth, which took most of this morning and afternoon. (I am newly thankful for the ability to eat and sit upright.) Other accomplishments include reading my 8th grade cousin’s books and watching my 5-year-old cousin’s movies (so stuff like Walk Two Moons and Surf’s Up!) and taking yet more acetaminophen on the basis that sleep was a good thing and pride was a dumb reason not to get it.
There was a somewhat familiar-looking comic out today.
Anyway, continuing on the subject of Surf’s Up! - I continue to be amazed by the strides CGI (computer-generated animation) movies have taken in the… whoa. The last 14 years? Must be, if Toy Story was released in ’95; I would have been nine. I remember walking into the theatre halfway through (in that theatre, back then, they showed the same movie on endless loop and a ticket would get you admission into that theatre at whatever time, for however long). It was the shot when Woody is standing in Andy’s room, which is shifting from cowboy to space ranger mode, and the camera pulls up! and Woody realizes that he’s standing on a Buzz Lightyear quilt, and I went “WHOA! The camera… it… moved! And the lighting!”
I sat through the movie. And then I sat through the movie again. (And then I sat through it again.) And then I wheedled my parents into buying the video, which I watched over and over. Okay, my love for that movie probably had something to do with it being about toys and me being nine. But the CGI; I was most definitely captivated by the CGI. How did they get the light to refract through Buzz Lightyear’s helmet so that it looked like plastic? What was this magic, magic math that made art and stories?
Later – in middle school, I think, when I had chased that train of thought down and found out about raytracing and a bit of optics and as much of the geometry as I could understand without having been told of the existence of trigonometry and calculus – I found out that I’d fallen in love with CGI much earlier, when I was 5. It was the first movie I’d ever seen in a theatre, the now-closed cinema at Randhurst Mall. My aunt June took me and my friend Randy to see Beauty and the Beast. (Randy, by the way, developed a lifelong love of all things Disney, and can pretty much tell you about all the park histories, employee culture, etc. you ever wanted to know.) I think I had to close my eyes for the ending fight scene, but there was – again – one shot, just one shot, that captivated me.
It was the ballroom dance scene shot (in this clip from 4:25-4:32) when the camera starts by gently panning around the dancers and then sweeps up towards the ceiling and the chandelier – which is more complex than any hand-animated object has a right to be and still be rendered properly at that rate of change of angle and direction… years later, in middle school, I still couldn’t figure it out. The camera is twisting in multiple planes, so maybe if they rotoscoped? But… no, that seemed… no. Something wasn’t right.
And then I found out (through a Disney Channel special, or something) the background had been CGI. And then I went “OF COURSE!” and watched the film again, and sure enough – camera, sweeping up… and other gentle cues from other scenes, just nudging magic in the edges of the story.
And that’s the point. The story. It always comes first, always. I didn’t start out as a 5-year-old who wondered about complex geometric problems. I started as a 5-year-old who was caught up in the magic of the moment, and remembered that grand sweeping feeling as the camera went up. And then I grew a little, and I went “well, wait, okay, somebody made that. How did they make that magic happen?” Because that little (okay, littler) kid that used to be me still wondered. (She still does. I still feel a thrill now, 17 years later, as I watch those 7 seconds of film in grainy YouTube.)
You make the story, and then if you really, really need the tech, you make the tech to make the story happen. You can geek out – I do! – about the particle dynamics that enable realistic sludge drops to dribble down the back of ogres, or the gorgeous specular rendering of human skin in recent movies (a far cry from early CGI humans, which looked like they were coated in shiny plastic makeup; real human skin reflects different amounts of light at different angles; there’s a term for it that I’ve forgotten). But it’s all about the story, in the end. And the beginning. And the middle. And heck, all the way through.
The thing about really great technology is that you forget it’s there – you become immersed in it, or it becomes a part of you, and you enfold and use it without thinking, eventually. But you can think about it; great technology also lets you peel back the onion skin of layers and go “and this is the motion capture system we put on Andy Serkis to make Gollum,” or “watch the different layers of light and ocean spray we had to render to make these penguins surf,” or “how do fur and cloth interact when pandas do kung-fu?”
For many CGI movies, the “behind the scenes” sections are still fairly shallow, MTV-style snips that barely scratch the surface. I understand those limitations; you’ve got to hold the interest of an audience that might not care so much, it takes a lot of time to shoot and edit and produce those extras, and so on. As a kid, I wished (and still wish) that I could go around the animation studio and just ask questions. Lots of questions.
Edit: My cousin Melanie – the 8th-grader – came in as I was writing this post, and it turns out that she’s a big Behind The Scenes fan as well. I may have accomplices in geeking out on this. Hurrah!
I’m not sure what the point of this post is; it wasn’t intended to have one. To try to express the magic that these movies have given me, I think. The magic of stories so strong that I can still remember single shots from them, quite vividly, from 17 years ago, when I was still in kindergarten. I do not remember the names of all my classmates, or… oh, possibly the vast majority of what I was supposed to have learned that year in school. But I remember my teacher (Mrs. Liss), and I remember that gorgeous moment of soaring up to meet the chandelier.
Those are the kinds of magic moments that I want to make, no matter what I do.
Friday, February 13th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
