What "Interactive Animation" meant before Aeon Flux

Some of the current realtime CG in the current computer games are pretty astonishing. The level of sophistication in the visuals of the latest action games makes it feel increasingly pointless to try to compete by designing elaborate animated action scenes for films. (We'll see how this Terminator episode turns out-- yeah, it's got action in it...)

Then again, my viewpoint is from the audience side of the screen alone, so this could just be baseless conjecture.

about that... I've always thought it would be a rather great idea to have a game where a dead man's soul is trapped in their mind as it (and their body) decays. The man has to learn to seperate his soul from his body before his brain completely dies (esentially completely loosing his ability to perceive anything for all eternity, aka non existance). In that thought I had an idea of recurring visions that keep getting scrambled and squashed together as your mind decays around your conciousness.

I was thinking you could do that with a series of checkpoints that will save your state in that particular part for reference every time you come back to that vision. It doesnt sound to hard to do... yet I am no programmer

Another idea (incidentally has nothing to do with your above post), as your body decays, it will alter the speach of your visions so that certain words wont come up, or they will go off onto tangents, their grammar starts decaying ect...

I doubt it'd make 10 bucks but it would be a good game

I don't think that's impossible at all in a video game; you just have to have a certain amount of finesse about it. Give the player enough control to feel "absorbed" by the game, but occasionally pull the rug out from under them. I'll bet somebody already has and we just haven't discovered it yet.

@ ChristopherMichael . . . your idea sounds like the best fuckin' game EVER. It would so make 10 bucks because I'd gladly pay $20 just for a one-level preview. Maybe there are some nerds who hang out on these forums that could make a game like that, it could probably be done in Flash.

Here's a quick update:
I took time off last year after finishing the remastering of the dvd set to get married. I did a complicated commercial for a difficult client, which ended up taking most of 3 months to finish during which I flew to Hong Kong once and Seoul twice. (Never again...) Then the boxset and the movie came out and all the press, etc. In January, I started taking a course in Maya. Then another quick trip to Seoul for various meetings. Next I did some freelance character design for Cartoon Network (gotta pay the bills). For the last couple of months, I've been focused on writing. The ideas are starting to flow again, and I'm happy to say I've got about 5 different projects in development at the moment. I've mentioned the new Aeon Flux animated project, Terminator, and Luvula. I've just started on two more completely new and distinct projects-- these will likely be for younger audiences (marriage and getting older, I've found, causes some regression to childhood feelings and interests).

Lots of new stuff is on the way. Thanks for sticking around.

Going back to Matt's original comment--
yes, the Dragon's Lair 2 videogame is not filmmaking, nor does it suggest a meaning or purpose beyond a random series of obstacles for the player/hero to negotiate. There's no character arc or increasing level of viewer interest as the piece progresses. It's fast-paced, visually inventive, and precisely animated; as Matt says, it's candy for the eyes, but provides no food for thought.

I was comparing it to the AF short Tide, which is similarly a wordless series of precise movements, but composed in such a way that each gesture reflects on and enhances every other gesture in a tightly woven web of intersecting agendas (trains of thought).

I'm thinking about Tide because it's my favorite of the shorts and people have commented that I should do more with that kind of structure. (It's there in the cycles of Sybil's daily routine and the Food Bank ritual in the Purge-- though in a more open fashion). I've refrained from discussing the narrative content of the short Tide because to do so would negate the point of animating it in the first place. As stated on another thread, MEANING does not require words in order to be grasped by the "natural" human mind. In many cases, words inhibit understanding, they do not aid it.

Here's what I mean:

http://www.sadgeezer.com/aeon/short4.htm

I can imagine trying to pitch the idea for the episode to MTV with that description ("What on earth are you talking about? Why would we pay for that?!) It's detailed and accurate, but totally fails to convey what the episode is actually about.

I looked for previous discussion about it and came across this:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=008Cpn

Actually, there is no intended symbolism in the piece at all.
At the end of the U/D thread, I said I'd revert to not explaining what is going on in the episodes. Oh well...

So what is Tide about?
I'll skip the routine about it being an experiment in composition and the use of rhythm to induce expectation (oops, I just said it).

The initial inspiration was the experience of standing at a street corner waiting for someone I was supposed to meet. The street was busy, and I didn't know which direction my friend would be coming from. To make sure we didn't miss each other, I had to continuously move from one end of the block to the other. At the point where I'd be at one end, I couldn't see the other end and vice versa. It's an anxiety-inducing state (I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about), and I thought it could produce a similar anxiety if somehow conveyed on film. I found that being in that situation causes your mind to race and imagine things happening just beyond your field of vision. It's a strangely lonely feeling, being trapped in a single point in space at any moment by the rule of one body, one mind.

For all the LTV shorts, the point was to explore a particular aspect of Aeon's death-- and by extension, the event of dying in general.
Dying sucks because it is an interruption of the activity to which you've committed your life's energies. For an idle but breathing body, death is a loss. For an engaged, motivated, striving body, death is a waste. It is the nullification of effort left unfulfilled at the point of interruption. Perhaps worse is the possibility that your unfinished business will be taken up by a successor unaware of the intent of the original effort, so that effort expended in life may, by such ignorant extension, end up contributing to the opposite of its desired conclusion.

The rubber plug would have been used by Aeon to keep the island from sinking.

I'm not saying any other interpretation is wrong. Just that these were the thoughts that motivated me to make it.

The biggest epiphany I had when doing the AF pilot was solving the problem of getting the audience to gain intimacy with the dying Breen soldier lying in blood. We didn't care about them earlier; we watched them get shot with casual detachment Simple matter, though-- just show that each victim's life is precious because of their relationship to others they hold dear -- a family, a lover... ? Well, no. That's a fallacy because an individual with no family or loved one is still a life. A unique person whose death is a loss. Life is consciousness. Death, the absence of consciousness. Hence the singular witnessing of bubbles rising. (Keeping it in the moment, no backstory needed.)

In other words, I hate watching those scenes (in films) the sole purpose of which is to show how much someone else loves them-- so we will presumably "care" more when bad things start to happen.

Some of you may remember a while back when I was toying with the idea of creating a MUD (a virtual space made of text) based on the world of AF. I drifted in and out of interest with it, and in the end it failed (for me, anyway) because I arrived at the same conclusion Peter is hinting at above. I'd love to see what fans could do playing in a recreation of Aeon's world, but text probably isn't the medium for it. What you end up getting is just a bunch of long, extremely detailed but ultimately pretty meaningless descriptions of scenes that are purely visual.

No, Peter, thanks for another long, rambling post. Personally, I appreciate them. And thank you for the look into the life of an animator, too.

Matt, I think of that little 'mud' from time to time, I have to commend you for effort. Was kind of an interesting project of yours.

anyways you were speaking about the Breen soldiers death and I was thinking about Niishi's death in the gantz anime.
It started out alright... this kid who you hated moments before you actually started feeling sorry for. He was screaming moaning and crying in such a way you could almost imagine his pain. Then he started bitching about his life and his mom and I felt I needed to go take a shit after that. It started out I was almost in tears because of the suffering that kid was going through and then he started bitching and I had to leave the room.
I may have misunderstood that part of your post but I think they are related.

Here's my 2 cents. To me, the shorts seemed like they each took place in a different universe and were showing the multitude of ways a split-second decision could change everything. I'll elaborate: Some people (myself included) subscribe to the theory that there are an uncountable number of parallel universes, some vastly different, some only differing in the placement of a sub-atomic particle -- in one universe you get the rubber plug into the hole, and in another you get distracted for an eighth of a second and wind up cold-cocked by your "friend", then drown a minute later. I'm not sure if any of that was intended, but it sure got me hooked . . . along with the badass character designs and the fact that things were never, EVER simplified into "good guys" and "bad guys".

@PC: I could potentially wait years for your next project, because I'm about 99% sure it'll be well worth it.

Too far off-topic? Am I making any sense at all?

My own stance is that a film is most effective when presenting events "in the moment". The nature of moving images is that they are ephemeral, the way events in life are. When a character refers to events that happened outside the edges of the film frame, or before the beginning of the film (like Niishi talking about his mother, I presume) I get frustrated. I feel like I'm being denied a chance to witness the event directly.

To elaborate further: When we focus on the dying soldier lying in blood--
We could have heard him cry out "Mommy!", or flashback to him with his girlfriend, or his dog, or some other relationship that has nothing to do with the story we are actually watching, and it could have elicited a response of empathy from the viewer. That method would have been easy to execute and the easiest for the viewer to get. It would have been simple to do, so why not do it? For one thing, it would have been cheap. At that point, I have to remind myself-- why am I bothering to make this film?

The point of that scene was to startle the viewer with an unexpected shift in character point of view. To employ a cliché to achieve that aim may have worked, but it would also defeat the purpose of making the film-- that purpose being to trigger the viewer to find meaning in an event through his/her own spontaneous response to viewing it. That spontaneous response would not be evoked by the employment of a cliché. Not only should you risk momentary confusion to achieve the final aim of understanding, I'd go so far as to say that without that phase of confusion, true understanding does not arise. The process of enlightenment necessarily connotes an initial state of confusion. (Perhaps like the confusion being elicited by these rambling posts.)

Anyway, if the Breen soldier had cried out "Mommy!" instead of smiling while playfully moving his head to force bubbles to rise out of a gun barrel, would I be here, 15 years later, still discussing it? I like to think not. (And yes, the Breen uniforms were designed with those long neck spikes specifically to make that bubbling action possible.) (And yes, in the short War, I did resort to using Romeo's little girl and Donna's locked up lover as empathy triggers, but at least they have direct roles in the story at hand.)

That strategy is further elaborated in the short Gravity, where Aeon, falling to her doom, is suddenly offered the unique privilege of witnessing a compelling and important event (indicated by the urgency of the actions of the men on the ground rather than the nature of the Macguffin itself).

I presume people here have some working familiarity with the Macguffin principle. If not, look it up. It will certainly help in our ability to engage in discussion about AF, but more importantly, narrative technique that applies to all media.

And on the subject of Tide (and following Ray Lee's gynecological theme), RU-486, the "abortion pill", has such a strangely meaningful name (since it was designated by French doctors, so the pun is a coincidence) that I couldn't resist using it to name the blonde agent.
RU-486 = Are You For Eighty-Six?

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/eighty-six

On the subject of death, I was thinking today, thanks to this thread, that whenever a plea for sympathy is made in real life (not just film), a family/friend reference is made. "How can you joke about his death? He probably had a wife and children." "Think of everyone who will mourn his loss." That sort of thing. Peter, your comment earlier led me to thinking that it is pretty insensitive, actually, to give sympathetic priority to everyone but the deceased. Wouldn't the life carry the most meaning for the one who possessed it, the one who understood it best? And the one who lost it violently/painfully/too early/regretfully?

Additionally, this implies a chain between how death is received in reality and how it gathers sympathy in film, but I guess that's obvious. Maybe this chain is something built into us and, as a result, becomes natural in the art we create (hence its constant appearance). But then I guess it's also obvious that, by working with the theme of a personal grasp of death, you were trying to override that external perspective anyway. I guess it comes down to two perspectives on human life: one, that human life is nothing but emotional connections to others; the other, that life is the existence of a personal will. Of course it's not just one or the other, as with everything in life, it's a continuum between the two...

about gravity though. what I liked about that one was as AEon fell I found myself interested in what those men where pulling up. I felt the dissapointment when the screen went black. I am sure the forums were alive with speculation about what it was for the longest time.

86 usually meens nowadays to terminate (whether killing a living being or deleting something or terminating a program ect...) atleast they ways I heard it used.

To die is to be deprived of future revelations.
That's our biggest disappointment in knowing we have to die some day-- that we don't get to find out what the world will be like in a 100 years.

Why Tide is a better short:
The content of the locker IS revealed.
Its purpose to RU-486 is just a Macguffin.
To Aeon, the proper use of the plug is what would allow the film to continue beyond its rudely truncated length.
To the viewer the object's inferred function justifies the structure of the film itself, hence the act of viewing. Without the revelation the act of viewing the film as composed would be wasted time. (I think you'll agree, you'd feel cheated, and rightly so, if we never got to see what was inside.)

I've personaly never heard it used in the singular or present tense "86". But I am familiar with its usage as "86'ed" as in "your 86'ed dude" meaning kicked out or through, finished. Apparently its the same meaning, and "86" must be the original base term. But I've never heard it used in that way. At least not in northern california, but then we say "hella" so take that for what its worth.

:)

Hahaha, that's funny.

I know what the term 86'd means if it's brought up, but I'm not familiar enough with it to be able to pick it out of anything. I've definitely never made it’s connection to the abortion pill. I'll have to use that as my next dead baby joke when I'm swilling wine at a fancy swaree.

So, as far as I can tell, the Mcguffin principle is displayed when you reveal the presence of a monster without ever actually showing it. I think Hitchcock said something about how the imagination can create a more fearful beast out of uncertainty then anything that could ever be presented in true form.
I dig.
I defiantly see that element worked in gravity too. Plus having the object glow didn't hurt either.

"Without the revelation the act of viewing the film as composed would be wasted time."

THANKYOU!!! Did anyone else think Crash was a wonderfully insightful movie, but had the strange urge to ask for their money back?

“Why Tide is a better short:
The content of the locker IS revealed.”

Although we did get to see what was in the closet, it had somewhat of a backlash effect of raising more questions. To me it made the short more dependant on the objects eventual use, which was to keep the island from sinking. The gravity short had an easily accessible action. Curiosity, necessity, desire. I see someone pulling a glowing object out of a canyon and I don't ask why? I ask what the fuck is it? But in the Tide short, the objects purpose was so heavily dependant on an action that, in itself, had a great abundance of questions. Like, why would anyone possibly sink a floating complex with people still on it? And so casually!
So for me it was the opposite. I thought gravity was the better short because it's unsatisfied curiosity is more purposefully placed. While Tide was weaker because it's unsatisfied curiosity lay within the structure of the plot, rather then a defined element.
At least that’s how I see it.

I'm saying that is the strength of Tide, not its weakness. The meaning of the thing motivating Aeon in Gravity lies outside the events depicted, whereas Tide is self-contained without referring to anything outside its own structure. The value of the goal/object is defined by the film's form; in fact, the film's composition is built on the purpose of the object (plug) and the object's importance is not relevant outside the context of the viewing of the film. It is an integrated whole. The form is so perfectly tailored to its content, that (as demonstrated in the attempt at a verbal description above) to tell its story in any way that deviates from its existing form would ruin it.

Also self-defining are the relationships between all four characters (and an unseen fifth). Their motives, conflicts and alliances are defined entirely within the film's four-minute running time. For example, we can deduce that Aeon was effectively protecting Trevor from the assassin on the stairs, whose goal was to kill Trevor and escape on the rising platform. The film's structure is based on Aeon's search, which is based on her incomplete knowledge (and the viewer's), which is lost when she dies (as Trevor's is with his death). Its agenda is the process going on in the viewer's real-world head to experience how meaning is deduced (and examining the method for motivating that same process).

As for Gravity-- the unknown glowing object is arbitrary, just as is the first Macguffin, the documents from the briefcase. The documents' importance is not relevant to the story, likewise the mysterious glowing object's. The point of the film is to demonstrate the irrelevance of what those objects are. Death (Aeon's) is deprivation of information. The film's structure is tailored to suit that idea. To define either one of those objects (e.g. documents = Trevor's biological weapon formula; glowing thing = inexhaustible source of energy sent back in time from the future as an unintended result of deployment of Trevor's biological weapon) only serves to trick the viewer into thinking the story is making some kind of statement (political or moral) that it has no right to claim making. Any definition you choose to give to those elements detracts rather than enhances the effect. That said, Gravity does its job satisfactorily, that is to say, unsatisfactorily.

Gravity is a subset of Tide. All the ideas contained in Gravity are also contained in Tide. Tide takes the idea of Gravity and kicks it up a notch (or several).

Not quite-- a Macguffin can be shown. Whether it is shown to the audience or not isn't important. If, in your mind, you can replace the object with some other object and not affect the story, then it is a MacGuffin. However, applying strict definitions to the word is to fall into the same trap, since a "Macguffin" is whatever you want it to be.

God (or proof of its existence) is a widely used Macguffin, since it adds instant gravity to a situation.

The Davinci Code is a simple variation-- disproof of divinity.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, I think, is the most egregious exploitation of the God Macguffin. The divine power of the Ark of the Covenant proves the truth of the Old Testament-- yet this fact doesn't seem to have much effect on the characters' outlook on life. (Maybe because it's just used as a pretext for some elaborately staged stunts.)

The Demiurge could be seen as God Macguffin story. But the nature of the object and how that affects the characters IS the focus. So maybe not. You decide.