Elly Williams’ Weblog

I don’t have an unusual surname…this causes fun and games all the time.

My Dad’s name is Jim. This means he shares his name with a famous Thai silk company. People find it hilarious to buy him ‘Jim Thompson’ handkerchiefs.

My mother and I share a first initial. We’ve both arrived at the theatre before to be greeted with “Oh we thought you might be Emma Thompson“. We also share initials with a rather famous little alien… telling me to “phone home” is pretty much punishable by death.

My Brother shares his name with a phenomenon… and a serial killer I think…

What about you? Seen your name anywhere strange?

J Clark, originally uploaded by mollyeh11.

While skimming through my news feeds this morning and came across an article about a new campaign to get people to give up one of their kidneys for relatives needing a transplant. Now why did this article grab my attention… well, I’m blaming that on the headline.

Living organ donor drive launched .

A little too reminiscent of Monty Python: The Meaning of Life, and that scene where “an organ donor card holder has his organs forcibly removed in his own front room.”

The final Star Wars film has been leaked on to an internet file-sharing network just hours after the movie opened in cinemas.

A “work print copy” of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith with a time code, rather than the finished version, appeared online on Thursday.

A tracker site showed more than 16,000 people were downloading the film.

Hands up anyone who’s suprised? Anyone….? No….?

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film | Revenge of the Sith leaked online

WARNING LINK DUMP AHEAD

After a slow period on BBC Tech News , there’s now a whole load of stuff.

• EU to launch its own web domain - “.eu will be up and running by the end of 2005.”
• Search ads fire up Google profits
• Papal hotmail address goes on sale - and other emails and domain too!
• ‘Simple games’ rule mobile charts - Tetris tops the charts - couldn’t have seen that coming!
• The Cult of Mac - The BBC voicing what the rest of us knew ages ago
• Review: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - “not as bad as I had feared. Then again, it is not as good as I had hoped.” - I’m fearing the worst I’m afraid….
• Helpful users face virus danger - Another Sober variant

The Oscar nominations are out. (BBC list)

It starts off quite well. The Best Actor/Actress/Supporting/Director/Animation categories are all well and good. A few usual suspects, a few unusual suspects and a lot of reminders of how little I went to the cinema last year (in a can-count-it-on-my-fingers kinda way).

And then we get to the reason I go to the cinema. The effects, the makeup and the costumes. If only there was a category for set design. And I’m suddenly disappointed. I’ve got nothing against the effects in Harry Potter, or I, Robot or Spiderman-2 (admittedly I only saw one of these and haven’t seen any in the makeup or costume categories) but none of them are Lord of the Rings or The Matrix or even StarWars. I guess I’m kinda missing the hordes of CGI Mordor….

I meant to write this about a week ago when I was sent the link, but I’m being hideously disorganized since finishing my degree (woohoo!!!) and so have only just gotten around to it.

Anyway, this article discusses the relationship between how realistic an artificial human is and how attracted we are to it. The basic concept is that as a robot or animation becomes more realistic we get more attracted to it (a microwave compared to R2-D2 or C3P0 perhaps.) However there is a point where the gap between the robot/animation and a real person is so small that the eye focuses on what’s not there. This discrepancy is known as “Uncanny Valley” and facial expressions are generally the hardest thing to get (convincingly) right.

Given that the face has more independant moving parts to it in a smaller space than any other part of the body the complexity of getting an expression right is fairly straightforward. And given that many of these elements aren’t actually that independant at all and each reflects slightly differently on another, you have yet another layer of difficulty. Also given the range of expressions that can be created by really tiny movements and it’s hardly suprising that it’s apparenlty so easy to “just miss” an expression. And there are, of course, other factors.

So, what next?

Do we keep pushing for the potentially unreachable lifelike proto-human, and put up with the Uncanny Valley for a bit longer or do we opt for stylized graphics?

There’s a piece on BBC - collective talking a bit about games being adapted into films, with specific reference being made to the forthcoming adaptation of Metroid.

The basic thrust of the argument is that games tend to get mangled when adapted for film…. this is not a new argument. In the same way that films tend to get mangled when adapted for games, or books tend to get mangled when adapted to film or game. And I’m not even going to start on the mess that can happen when you start adapting comics (*cough* League of Extraordinary Gentlemen *cough*)

The way I see it, it all comes down to separation of style and content. There was a piece on OK/Cancel a while back asking whether style and content were really inseparable.

“Take a book for example. As a media, a book affords for lengthy prose. It is portable and its pages can be turned at the user’s pace. Once published its content is static unless the user marks it up, and physical pages afford dog-earring of the juicy parts. As a result of these characteristics, one writes differently for a book than they do for the web. A skilled author might take 400 pages to get things going in a book, but on the web, this just doesn’t fly. No one reads a 400 page anything on the web.”

So how does this relate to games and films… well, in exactly the same way. If you go to the cinema the longest you are probably expecting to sit there is about 3 hours - probably less. More is certainly an exception and probably involves Leonardo diCaprio drowning. However many games take that long just to START getting into the plot/proper action - and the same goes for books. So stuff is going to get compressed and rejigged and potentially quite horrifically mangled.

So is there an answer… well….as long as there are people who stick fanatically to the original, probably not. And lets face it, with video games the ones with a following (and hence fanatics) are probably the only ones that are going to get adapted.

“One of these days, someone has just got to make a decent video game movie. How about Peter Jackson doing Zelda?”

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King scooping a massive 11 Oscars, out of 11 nominations - equallling the record number of wins of Ben Hur in 1960 and Titanic in 1998, and being only the third film ever to win every award they were nominated for (the others being Gigi in 1958 and The Last Emperor in 1988 - both of which received 9 awards)

Oscars 2004 on the BBC

Last Saturday the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honoured “the people and companies that have advanced the process of filmmaking” in the 2003 Scientific & Technical Awards hosted by Jennifer Garner at the Ritz Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena.

The technical Oscars are usually presented a few weeks before the main Academy Awards in an annual gala that positions itself as something of a revenge of the Hollywood nerds.

One honoree joked that Garner was the best part of the evening.

“I want to thank the Academy for inviting Jennifer Garner here tonight,” said Henrik Wann Jensen…….. “Now I can brag to my friends I spent Valentine’s Day with Jennifer Garner.”

Wired News covers the evening

There’s an article on GameGirlAdvance about the portrayal of console gaming in the movies.

The article raises some very good points. How often do you see movie characters “with one thumb repeatedly mashing buttons while the other twirls the joystick mindlessly” ? It’s fairly often.

There are some games you can just about get away with this on - StreetFighter, Mortal Kombat etc, where it might be preferable to press some buttons in certain orders (special moves etc) but random button pressing is sometimes -depending on your opponent - a viable strategy.

I agree with the comment that it is unlikely to be “purposeful victimisation of our upstart industry”

It’s all in the same vein as improbable hacking abilities, implausible flying kicks, dangerous driving and various other activities where the reason the actor looks like can’t possibly be doing whatever is because they aren’t.

So while an actor may go and spend a month shadowing a doctor in preparation for a medical role, or even watching gamers for a gaming role - they’ll never be playing the game while the cameras a rolling.

Why? Well, part of it may be that doing things for real isn’t in their job description, they pretend to be gamers, so where’s the harm in pretending to play games… after all, “most people won’t notice”.

The Oscar Nominations are out.

Unsuprisingly Lord of the Rings is up for a whole load - Including Best Picture, Best Visual Effects, and Best Make-up….although it does have to compete with Johnny Depp’s eyeliner on the last one!

Other people’s thoughts:
Suprises at the Golden Globes - “I’m not from these parts… I’m from a little place called England. We used to run the world before you”
Nominations Overview - One Ring to Rule Them All? (I can’t believe I said that…..)
Brits in the Nominations - Jude Law, Samantha Morton, Ben Kingsley etc…

Yet again I’m a bit lost for time for a proper entry so here’s a few things that caught my interest this morning.

OK/Cancel are talking about HCI and GUI design in games this week. Go and read…. at least to laugh at the comic.

Daniel Etherington has been comparing next generation consoles. And yet again I am stuck in a “do I get one now or wait for the new one which may or may not be out soon” loop. Oh well.

And this is just cute. A bit of an homage to movie animators who leave jokes and personal tags. I know we do this on my (architecture) course…. I have to put people in my drawings so there will invariably be movie stars, fictionaly characters, aliens and demonic babies. It makes the world a little less tedious.

There’s a bit of a debate going on on GameGirlAdvance about the way the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies were programmed and whether it was “borrowed” from computer games.

I can remember being impressed 2 years ago when Fellowship of the Ring came out - and I can remember reading in Empire Magazine (can’t find the exact article - their archives don’t appear to go back that far) about how each of the soldiers in the HUGE battle scenes had their own minds (and how human, elf, orc, etc, etc minds were all slightly different) but I hadn’t previously equated it with anything in videogames…..