September 2011 – Brian Crick

Scopa King, Rough Draft

I mentioned a while ago that I wanted to try doing some board game art illustration, and have made a little progress there.

I’ve actually had two leads, but one of them wanted pin-up style stuff. Ugh. They also wanted 1920s style sci-fi which would have been really really cool to work on, but… yeah. Couldn’t ever take that work.

The other bite was a custom set of Scopa cards. It’s basically like a poker deck, with some numbered cards and some face cards used in an abstract trick-taking game.

I’m not a big fan of abstract card games, but making stylized face cards sounded kinda fun. I decided to do a modern spin on the symmetric, double-sided people used on regular playing cards, so each suit would have people in different types of dress: business attire, formal, military uniforms… and I haven’t decided on the last suit yet.

If I’m going to be doing illustrations for other people, I need to figure out the most efficient way to do that. I can’t just lovingly tinker with something until I believe it’s done. So I’m trying to change things up here.

I thought I’d try a businessman first.

I started with a very simple pencil sketch and inking:

I just wanted to make sure the basic proportions of everything were right, and do the minimum amount of penciling and inking necessary to get this into the computer. That approach is new to me, but I suspect it will work better than my previous attempts to more fully flesh something out on paper and then import that. I always have to re-do all my fine details in Illustrator anyway.

Since my old scanner doesn’t work with my new computer, I just took a picture of my sketch with my phone, and that’s what you see above. Sure, there are going to be perspective issues if I don’t get the angle just right, but it’s much faster than using a scanner. And it’s easier to see my light pencil lines.

Having gotten the photo, I then started tracing in Illustrator. I’m very particular about vectorizing everything, so I would never use a tool to do that for me… chances are, it would create paths with too many points and be hard to edit later on.

After I had my basic shapes, I added some temporary shading. So while there’s no color yet and the shades are far from final, you get a general sense that the suit will be very dark, the skin very light, the shirt white, etc. Never done that before, but this is supposed to be another efficiency improvement.

When I was working on these stylized fantasy characters a while ago, I was having trouble, because just looking at line art like this…

…it was difficult to tell how coloring would affect the line quality on a finished character like this…

…the problem being, the colors completely change how you look at the lines.

So here, I was all nervous because I was looking at a black & white drawing and thinking to myself, I won’t know if this is going to work until I do the coloring, but the outlines really have to be nailed down before I start coloring, or I’ll end up trashing all my coloring work and starting over if the outline of something needs to change.

And then it finally occurred to me that I could just fill things in with temporary shades of grey, and that’s enough to tell me how the final colors & shading might affect how you see the linework. And I can quickly adjust the linework based on my rough shading, if necessary.

I haven’t actually decided how I’m going to color this, whether it will be Illustrator gradients or Photoshop painting or my own paint program. I may just try them all and see what looks best or can be done the fastest or what the client likes most.

Next up, I need to add more detail like shading and seams and pinstripes, and de-emphasize the word ‘King’ in favor of a simple number (at the client’s request).

Pan Am, Part 2: In Which I Argue with Myself

First, a picture:

Aren’t those engines lovely? So… retro and stuff in a way I didn’t expect actual jet engines to have ever been retro.

Anyway, on to more Pan Am. I came up with a counterargument to the bit in my last post comparing this to Mad Men, and thought I’d share.

I’m generally of the opinion that it’s the job of fiction to exaggerate the crap out of the protagonists’ struggles. I’m not a huge fan of naturalism. That’s part of why I like science fiction; I like how you can take mundane personal issues and explore them through made-up technologies and discoveries.

So if the mundane issue you want to explore is sexism in the modern, mundane world, it makes perfect sense to explore that in the 1960s, so you can make things a whole lot harder for your female characters.

Now, personally, I don’t like that approach; I want to see (and write) characters who have basically the same mindset and values as modern people; I find the characters in period dramas kind of alien sometimes. (That’s mostly why I preferred the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice to the BBC one; in the former, I felt like these were modern people with modern values, and I could easily empathize with their frustrations with this whole formalized approach to courtship.)

But anyway, that’s just a personal preference, and I’ll still accept the 1960s setting of Mad Men as a valid approach to heightening your drama and presenting the world with positive role models.

Of course, this is all dependent on the extent to which the show actually highlights the struggles of the women and the extent to which they either succeed outright or grow as characters through their struggles. I’m not through the first season yet, and so far, I’m not sure I’d say the women’s stories are the focus of the show. But my understanding is that that may change later on, so I’ll try to keep myself open to that and see what I think if the show goes that way.

Friendly Skies

So I wanted to talk about Pan Am a bit.

Pilots

I really like television pilots that don’t quite know what they’re doing. I like how eager they are, how they’re all like omg omg look at all these cool ideas we have! and yeah, some of those ideas aren’t real solid, but it’s hard not to get caught up in how excited the show is at merely existing.

Pan Am doesn’t quite seem sure what it is yet, and I’m ok with that. Not knowing exactly where this is going to go is part of what makes it fun.

Mad Men

It’s sort of impossible to talk about this without mentioning Mad Men.

I’ll start by saying that calling these shows competitors is kind of insulting to both. For better or worse, Pan Am isn’t Mad Men on a Plane, nor is it trying to be.

What I think is worth talking about, however, was the two shows’ different approaches to feminism. I could write pages and pages about this, but I guess the basic idea is, if your goal as a show with a feminist agenda is to make the world a more egalitarian place by having people watch you, I think Pan Am has the more viable approach.

The show itself is easy to get into. I was pretty much sold on the show before the first commercial break. It’s fun, it’s zippy, it’s visually stunning. Whatever it’s saying, I suspect it’s at least going to communicate it to a wide audience. Yes, I’ve started watching Mad Men, but in the sort of way you’ll choke down a new food for a while so you’ll eventually develop a taste for it. Mad Men is many things, but I wouldn’t call it approachable.

Perhaps more importantly, Pan Am is trying to present some positive, strong female role models. Sure, they’re not terribly three-dimensional, but the show makes it fairly explicit that this is what it’s trying to do. There’s even a scene in the end where a little girl is staring in awe of the female leads… it’s beautifully un-subtle.

I don’t care if having women this independent and men this ok with it isn’t historically accurate. If glossing over history is what it takes to get some strong female characters out there, than I’m all for it. To the extent that television shows are consumed within the real world; to the extent that many people will connect to television characters and stories as strongly as real people and real situations, the world is a more egalitarian place because this egalitarian fantasy world was created within it.

I prefer that to littering the airwaves with a bunch of sexist male characters with sexist male dialogue. If we took the characters in Mad Men and plopped them in a show set in an ad agency in the modern world with a sexist sort of work culture, would we complain that the writers and writing were sexist? Does it matter what time period it’s set in?

To me, it feels like sitting around complaining about the problem rather than actively solving it.

Eye Candy

Not that Pan Am is all that high-minded. (Though I don’t think you have to come off as high-minded if you want to effectively advance your cause, whatever it is.) I’m in it mostly for the style, not the substance. Things as mundane as airplane cabins are beautifully lit; I love the over-saturated colors and over-designed costumes; the shots are stylishly composed and edited. Sure, the dialogue wasn’t amazing, the plotting not terribly solid and I wouldn’t call the pilot a self-contained, satisfying story, but I think I’ll keep watching the show on style alone.

Who knows, maybe it will get deeper as time goes on, but I’d be sad if it got less happy.

Sanity Check, Part 2

Since her vacation is nearly over, I guess it’s time to evaluate my progress keeping things together while Marie is away. This will, by necessity, be fiercely dry.

To recap: in the past, I’ve noticed a tendency to become slightly unstable when the following triggers are present (I’m not sure which are important):

Marie is away…
…and unreachable via phone, IM, etc.
I’ve started working in a new environment…
…with new people.
It’s early fall.

Said instability has, in the past, manifested itself in the following ways:

General confusion.
Vague feelings of being unable to keep friendships alive.
Inventing memories about hurting a friend, and then being distracted or incapacitated by guilt over said memories.

So. As for the current situation, triggers (1), (3), and (5) are present. It just so happens that my company moved offices recently, and I have just now started coming in to work at the new place.

However, only result (b) has actually happened. And maybe a little bit of (a), but only very little. I am presently regarding the insecure feelings I have with massive amounts of suspicion, and am confident that my concerns lack any real factual support.

As for (c), said friends I’ve worried about have historically had consistent physical characteristics; I have therefore identified a couple potential candidates for the person I’d be obsessing over now. Thankfully though, this has not actually happened, and my perception of my relationships with said candidates has appeared perfectly normal in the last few days, as far as I can tell.

To sum up, this has largely been a non-event. I credit:

Being aware, for the first time, that problems were likely to arise;
Frequent contact with Marie;
Frequent breaks to stop and think about past experiences with Marie (this is not something I naturally do);
Going into this while genuinely happy with my social life and life in general (unlike previous episodes);
The distinct possibility that nothing bad was likely to happen anyway, despite my stressing out about it.

So, that’s a very long-winded way of saying: yay, nothing happened. 🙂

Looking forward to seeing Marie again tomorrow.

Keys and Locks

It’s a little late, but I have a new Tinselfly build up.

(As much as I like being able to embed the player directly in blog posts, I realized it would make the home page on my site here load horribly slowly after a while, so I’m gonna just link to them from now on.)

So anyway, there’s a more structured map now. Whee! Though, sadly, it’s somewhat difficult to talk about at this point, since the structure doesn’t really mean anything yet.

The basic idea is that the map is divided into these different areas. Which are different colors right now just for debugging.

You start in the red area. Somewhere in the red area, you’ll find a yellow key (not in this build, but later on). The key could be a plain old key that opens a door, or it could be a new equippable item that lets you cross rivers, or a map that helps you through a maze… it’s a very metaphorical sort of key, and the point is, the yellow key will let you into the yellow area. So somewhere on the boundaries of the red area, there will be a metaphorical locked door, an obstacle of some sort, that once unlocked lets you into to the yellow area.

Somewhere in either the red area or the yellow area, there will be a green key. And somewhere on the perimeter of the combined red and yellow areas, there will be a locked door leading to the green area.

And it goes on like that.

So right now you can’t see the keys or locks, but you can see the boundaries of the areas.

And that’s the basic idea behind the map generation I’ve been working on here. Which I’m sure will be much more exciting once, say, you can’t just move through the area walls. 😉

Zombie Game Trailer, Part 2

Here’s some more babbling about that Dead Island Trailer; I realized last night I missed a few things. (And, same warning as before: it’s very gory, and, I forgot to mention last time, possibly quite unsettling in other ways, especially if you have kids.)

Inevitable Doom: Zombieland

I find myself comparing the music in the trailer to Estasi Dell Anima, the big climactic battle cue from Zombieland. Maybe just because they’re both about zombies, but they’re also sort of communicating similar emotions in similar ways. And hey, if you’re going to score something about the inevitable destruction of the good guys, chances are good that you’re doing it for a zombie-themed something or other.

So… inevitability. First off, both pieces are very repetitive. They’re not about a changing, dynamic scene so much as a single moment, stretched out to the length of a song. They also have very simple beats: the relentless quarter notes in Dead Island; the whole notes in Zombieland that give way to some 3/4 violin wailing. Nothing says endless like a waltz. Worked so well for Gladiator. 🙂

From what I can recall, this sort of incessant, repetitive drum-beating is pretty common to slow-motion scenes of death and destruction.

(Incidentally, it occurs to me that Zombieland, structurally, is very similar to what I’d like to do with Tinselfly. Simple coming-of age story wrapped in an end-of-the-world scenario. I may have to watch that again.)

Shortcuts: Star Trek

It’s not like I was invested in the characters in the Dead Island trailer. It’s not like we get to know them real well. They’re an archetypal happy family who thought they were going on vacation. There’s a rugged dad, a panicking mom, an innocent little girl. By the time the trailer was over I was a bit misty, but if I was engaged, it was only because the characters were easily recognizable archetypes. Would this have worked if the kid were a scruffy teenage boy? With a same-sex couple? An axe-wielding mom? I don’t know.

Reminds me a bit of the opening of the latest Star Trek, where we spend a few minutes with a couple we really know nothing about. We’ll never see them again, but the scene is touching anyway because there are certain backdoors into our collective psyches that just work, despite our best attempts to be cynical about them: family; protecting a child; someone giving birth.

I have mixed feelings about this, but despite my aversion to gender-specific stereotypes and whatnot, I mostly don’t have a problem with using archetypes, at least not in something this short. Again, from that interview:

On the subject of the Daughter character specifically, we were aware that there was an impact about that choice for sure, but I think that choice fitted the narrative we wanted to tell and was appropriate in that sense.

As the audience you feel that fear much more strongly through the eyes of a child. Some people will see that as being ‘manipulative’ which is fair enough. It draws you in, makes you care. That’s quite a hard thing to do in 2 minutes and as some commentators have pointed out all effective fiction is ultimately manipulative in that sense.

I totally agree that all fiction in manipulative. It’s your job as a writer to produce specific reactions in your audience at specific times. That’s manipulation. And the shorter your work is, the more dirty tricks you’re going to have to use.

I guess the line I’d draw is that I’m ok with archetypes as long as you’re communicating the nature of said archetype using their clothes and body language and grooming — stuff independent of their gender, age or color. So you could have had a clean-shaven, panicking dad in a festive Hawaiian shirt, and an axe-wielding mom with scruffy hair, visible muscle definition and a sports jersey, and you’d still get your easily identifiable family that you can connect to.

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from a 3 Minute Zombie Game Trailer

Guess I’m a bit late to the party, but I just saw the much-talked-about Dead Island Trailer. (Warning: it’s very gory.)

Despite some slightly janky motion capture, I think this is the most beautiful game trailer I’ve ever seen. Not that I’ve seen a lot of video game trailers, but hey, I found it more moving than most movie trailers anyway. And I find myself obsessing over this. Maybe it’s just that I’ve had a lot going through my head lately and my thoughts decided to all coalesce here. Who knows. So here are some random thoughts.

Music

More than anything, I’m obsessing over the music. It’s really elegant and effective. So I thought I’d try to reproduce it as best I could.

Here’s my version of the first phrase. It’s not quite there, but I think it’s a solid effort.

Despite — or perhaps because of — the simplicity of the original piece, this was really hard to pull off. Here’s what I learned:

Pay attention to velocity. If you play all the notes at the same velocity, or loudness, the piece sounds like crap. There’s no sense of forward movement, no rhythm. Just a bunch of monotonous quarter notes. There’s no percussion or anything keeping the beat, so it’s up to the melody itself to tell you where each measure starts. So apparently, you want the first note (of four) to be loudest, and your third note to be the second loudest. So the beginnings of your measures are well defined, and the beginnings of each half-measure are pretty evident too. But it’s got to be pretty subtle… seems like one of those things where if you do it right, everything sounds even, even though it’s really not. Sadly, I don’t have the coordination to do this in realtime, any more than I can use the pressure sensitivity of my pen tablet effectively, so I had to manually alter the velocity of each of my notes after playing them, one by one. Gotta practice doing this for real.
Use your mod wheel. The mod wheel is this dial on a keyboard that does… stuff. It’s different for different instruments. Sometimes it gives things more vibrato; sometimes it makes things warble in this really strange way. For the violin I used here, it softens the sound of the instrument — both in terms of volume and the sharpness of the sound. I’ve never really used the mod wheel before, but here it was essential to get the violin to swell and taper off like it does in the original piece.
Tremolo is fun and easy. The violin does this barely audible tremolo in the beginning. At first I wasn’t sure I could do it since I don’t have a ‘tremolo violin’ instrument, but it was easy enough to get that effect by, well, doing tremolo — by rapidly vibrating my finger on the note being played.
Filters can do more than make echoes. So there’s this piano in my music software. And yeah, it sounds like a real piano, and I could play the song on that… but it sounded totally wrong. Too bright, too happy. The original piece’s piano has this sort of muffled sound. I started with a reverb filter, which is the only filter I’d used before, mostly to make things sound like they’re being played in big stone halls. It helped, but wasn’t quite enough. So I added an equalizer filter too, to chop out high frequencies. That dramatically changed the sound of the instrument, and I got much closer to the sound I wanted with that.
Key matters. My inclination when analyzing a new song is to transpose it to C — to change the pitches of everything so you’re just using the white notes of the piano. I did that here, and something felt off, so on a whim I put everything back in the right key. And then it sounded a lot better. I really don’t understand why yet.
Simple, common chord progressions are fine. This starts with a I-V-I-V-VI progression, which as I understand it is fairly common. (Also recently noticed that How to Train Your Dragon uses a very common pattern.) I should study some of the more commonly used progressions out there; I have a list in one of my books already.

Gimmicks

The bulk of the trailer is filmed backwards. It works extraordinarily well, and there’s a great sense of closure to the way it ends (begins?)… to the father reaching for the daughter, but since it’s backwards, he’s getting ever farther from her.

There’s a scene in Tinselfly I’d wanted to go backwards, but it’s not a particularly emotional scene; it’s more expository. There is a particularly emotional scene I was planning on doing forwards, but now I’m wondering what it would be like backwards.

You could rightly call that gimmicky, blatantly aping this or Braid or whatever, but as far as I’m concerned, if the story is better communicated by doing this part backwards, then I’ll do it backwards. It’s only a gimmick if you’re using some avant garde approach because you think it’s cool and not because you think it will work.

Game Trailers

There’s this interview about the making of this trailer, and I found this quote particularly interesting:

To an extent a full CG trailer is always a different experience to actually playing the game. It isn’t trying to pretend to be game play, like a lot of CG trailers do, at all. It’s more trying to tell a story in the same world but in a different medium that describes an event that is illustrative of the type of interactive experience you might have when playing. All we have tried to do is tell that story as effectively as possible.

I have to admit there’s a certain logic to this. And the results are kind of refreshing. I never get much of a sense of gameplay from trailers anyway, so why not use this medium to do what it’s best suited for?

Though on the other hand, you could apply this logic to demos and argue that they should ‘tell a story in the same world’, but in a highly abbreviated fashion compared to the game story proper. I think that might be interesting.

Damage

Here’s another thing related to Tinselfly. On its own, I don’t mind gore, but here, it weirds me out a little because the characters are a little cartoony. It’s like… dismembering Wile E Coyote. Sure, you can flatten him and have bombs explode near him, but it’s all cartoony violence to go with the cartoony character who will react like a rubber toy, not like something that’s made of skin and muscle and brain matter.

I don’t intend for Tinselfly to have particularly violent gameplay (not in the story mode proper anyway, but that’s a long discussion). However, there will be violence here and there, and I have every intention of making said violence come off as brutal and visceral as I can make it. Now, that’s different from gore, but the issues are similar. She’s not finished yet, and I’m not saying this will happen, but could I, say, have my Robin character model be crushed to death on camera? I think I’ve asked that before, but I still don’t know the answer to that.

Basic

Found this picture while cleaning the other day.

So here’s the start of my amazing career as a computer programmer. You can see most of a latch-hook duck that I was working on in the foreground; that’s not so much different than making pixel art, when you think about it.

This picture is kind of freaking me out. Sure, everything is so horribly dated, with an awful 70s couch in one corner and a barely visible open-reel player in the other. And I don’t see old pictures of myself often; I didn’t think we had any at all around here.

But mostly, I’m thinking about the Basic programming book that came with the computer I’m sitting in front of. It’s sitting on top of the grey box behind me; you can see the blue spine with white and black stripes on top. Presumably, I had been reading this book around the time this picture was taken. Given the position of the television and non-avocado carpet, I actually suspect I had gone through it or had already finished it a year or three before the picture was taken. I’m not a good judge of age; I was 6 or 7 when I started and I’m not sure how old I am in the picture.

I can’t believe I read that book. No, really. I don’t mean, I think it’s incredible that I read it. I mean, I’m doubting that I did. It’s almost 150 pages long. It’s written for people completely unfamiliar with programming, but it’s not exactly written for kids. While illustrated, it’s got fewer pictures than the programming book I’m reading now.

But I did learn Basic around this time, John has no memory of teaching it to me, my parents didn’t know how to program this particular computer, and I can’t find any evidence out there of a different, more beginner-y type book that would have come with the computer. Though I do remember typing in programs verbatim from computer magazines, which itself was a good way to learn.

So most of my knowledge must have come from that book.

In many ways, that’s kind of an anachronism. I’m having trouble imagining what the modern equivalent of that would be. Computers don’t come with programming books anymore, much less languages to program in. I suppose a motivated kindergartner could do HTML & Javascript, but they’d have to go looking for instructional material. That’s really different than stumbling across a book that was bundled with the computer you’ve got, a machine that wasn’t really bought so anybody in the house could learn programming.

Though I guess I can’t really complain that modern kindergartners don’t have access to spontaneous, unexpected avenues to learn new things. That’s what web surfing is for. 🙂

Reticulating Splines

Well, this is very Hollywood OS.

I’ve been working on map generation for Tinselfly, and have been having some trouble with that. And last night, I wasn’t just having trouble with my code; I was having trouble figuring out how to even begin debugging my code.

The world here is made of a bunch of triangles, and I wasn’t sure I was creating them all properly. So after an hour or two of slogging through my debugger and inspecting properties for my objects, I thought I’d just add some debugging information directly to the game world. So all the text you’re seeing, that’s information about what order my triangles were created in, what their unique IDs are, and which other triangles they’re adjacent to.

As you move around, the text moves too. Because the text is, after all, part of the game right now.

It looks like overkill, but it’s been immensely helpful.

* * *

1993. SimCity 2000 has just come out. I’m sitting in a computer lab, working on a 3d vector-graphic tank game in Turbo Pascal, a little like BattleZone.

Sure, it’s just primitive vector graphics, but it takes an insane amount of preparation to get a 16mhz computer to do this, in a programming language designed for learning, not for efficiency. Before you can draw a single graphic, you need to create a bunch of tables that the program can look at, so instead of solving complex, but common math problems every frame, it can just look up the solutions in a table.

Creating these tables takes the program a couple minutes. To make the wait a little more tolerable, I add in some messages about what the program is doing and how far it’s gotten. Some of the messages are useful. Some of them are not; they’re just silly, nerdy technobabble. Like the ‘reticulating splines…’ message in SimCity.

A not-so-nerdy friend of mine walks in and sees my program running. While he’s not as into programming as I am, he immediately picks up on the fact that this technobabble isn’t what it seems to be. He accuses me of trying to make my stuff look more involved than it really is, and walks out.

It isn’t a playful jab. He’s sincerely disappointed.

I’m mortified. Because he’s right. Sure, there really is some complicated math going on here, and getting this to work was no small feat. I want people to know that. Even the simple act of drawing a single line on the screen requires custom code that I’m proud of having implemented on my own.

But my status messages should have communicated exactly what I needed to know; no more, no less. I strip the messages out. They weren’t in my program for more than fifteen minutes.

But for years after this, I’ll be very nervous when talking to non-technical people about programming tasks. I’ll be very careful to choose words and phrases that are clear rather than impressive.

* * *

The moment I saw that globe with those numbers floating around it, I started to worry that this was more about making me feel proud about doing something complex, and less about solving a problem.

However, my problem with Tinselfly right now is all about spatial relationsips. It makes sense for my debugging information to be presented in a graphical way, rather than the text-only debugging screens I’m used to.

I kind of like silly, overproduced computer interfaces in movies. I sometimes think those computers might be fun to use.

Though in reality, overproduced interfaces just get in the way a lot of the time. You’ve got to have exactly as much interface as you need. And sometimes, just sometimes, what you need is a bunch of transparent numbers swirling around a colorful sphere. Which is kind of cool.

Anger Mismanagement

Time for some just-before-bed rambling, though I think the danger of posting something I’ll regret is minimal.

Been feeling kind of cranky for the last day or so. (I won’t get into the why; that’s a separate issue that I should deal with, since my tendency is not to deal with such things at all.)

But anyway, what I wanted to talk about was my propensity to try to capitalize on that sort of thing.

Like many people, I’m more productive — far more productive, and creative, and willing to stay up late working on things — when upset. Wired recently did a piece on how this may have worked wonders for Apple. And I’d definitely say my output the last day and a half has been pretty great.

I don’t like that this happens. Thankfully, I’ve stopped going out of my way to willfully upset myself for the sake of increased creativity… but I’m wondering if capitalizing on being angry when it organically happens is just as bad. It makes me value being upset. It might serve as a disincentive to, say, repair the situation that’s causing this.

See, I knew this was going to happen. I knew yesterday morning that, at some point yesterday afternoon, something was likely to happen that would make me cranky.

So while I’m confident that I’m not, by my own actions, getting myself into a heightened emotional state anymore, I may still, by inaction, be willfully allowing this to happen, and continue.

Maybe.

Just something to think about for a while.