Sometimes, well, things don’t come in exactly on time. Nonetheless, here it is:
If you love me you’ll watch it in HD instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdFfrgbyDfE&hd=1

I’m pretty happy with it, overall. The most significant problem is that it wasn’t delivered on time, failing in its desired purpose of generating buzz in advance of the magazine’s start date, and this is directly related to the second most significant problem with the short, namely, the relatively shoddy bluescreen work.

We tried a couple of new things with this, most importantly, it’s the first short I’ve cinematographed that I’ve actually done lighting more complex than flipping different combinations of light switches around the house to get proper exposure levels. We had a pretty impoverished setup: one two-lamp 500 watt halogen work light, one 100 watt halogen spotlight, appropriate bulbs for each, an alternate amber bulb for the spotlight, wooden clothes pegs, parchment paper, coloured gels. Basically, we just clipped some parchment paper in front of the big light and then blue gel in front of that to get some good blue fill light on one side of the room, and then we put the amber bulb in the spotlight and used that to light the other side of the actor’s face (placing it to make it look like this was the light coming from the onscreen lamp). Not fancy, but I think it definitely helped with the mood of the peice.

The whole thing was done handheld. There were shots in there which clearly were meant to have been done on a dolly or nice fluid head tripod or a steadycam, none of which we had available. It shows. Still, I suppose at least pretending that my body could emulate those devices (it couldn’t) led to some more interesting shot choices than I might have stuck with otherwise.

Blue screen failures. The blue screen looked relatively evenly lit to our eyes (not really, I was too eager to move on to the next step to let myself believe that a bunch of hideous shadows all over the blue screen would have caused a problem). We attached it on the inside of the room, rather than the outside — this, because attaching it on the outside would have required a ladder, and we’re not ladder climbing folk. Had it been outside, Keylight could have rendered all of the semi-transparent window reflections, opaque window frame and segmentation, over the beautiful background of space. This would have looked amazing. In front, being backit but interfered with by the shadows of the window frame and other windowy elements, and also, by virtue of being in the window frame, not properly coming right up to the edges of the sill, simply keying out the blue produced a window rich with amorphous shadows and bizarre aberrations. To work around this, I used Adobe After Effects CS5′s new and amazing RotoBrush feature. It managed to eliminate the screen and not our actor, but the edges sometimes move, and are occasionally ragged. I don’t want to make some kind of actionable statement about Rotobrush, but when I used it, I found that it ran pretty slowly, After Effects would become more crash prone, and frequently, my entire computer would outright freeze and require a full reboot. In spite of this, though, it’s a really interesting tool that managed to get me out of a tight spot much faster than masking by hand would have, and I can imagine that as it’s refined and extended, it could allow for some really advanced, incredibly easy post work. In the meantime, it is not meant to replace a good blue screen. Holy god. Hours and hours were wasted because of this. Even if setting up the blue screen properly had taken us three hours, it would have repaid itself in post many times over. And the video would have been finished on time. As part of this process, I’m going to install the Magic Lantern Firmware Hack for my T2i; it includes a handy histogram feature, which should help us properly confirm that our blue screens are evenly lit.

Another reason for the lateness is that we didn’t shoot until early January. It’s best to shoot early, always assuming that editing and post will not be nearly as easy a process as we’d like.

Another valuable lesson we learned, was to keep adding until there’s no time left. The costume for Rod started out pretty plain: a blue jumpsuit and a rocket ship badge. In the morning, as we were getting ready, we went to the Dollar store, and began looking for any way to spruce up Rod’s space suit. There, we collected a belt and two water bottles, and some tubing for his air tanks. We found some red electrical tape to add some handsome detail lines to the suit… these were attached after the actor was already in costume. And then, in the children’s toy section, we found our sheriff’s badge. Steven already had gold spray paint. Gold makes everything better. I think the changes we made to the suit made a huge difference, and frankly, without the suit looking like it does, I don’t think I would have been nearly as happy with the way this turned out.

I’m sure there’s more to discuss about this, but I’m exhausted, and I have the flu, so I’m off to bed.

As an aside, the bluescreen and compositing work is officially credited to Hobart Butterworth. This is not a real person. I think it has been decided that from now on, when something we try doesn’t quite work out, we make Hobart Butterworth responsible in the credits. There were many many other candidates, and google, god bless it, informed us that many of the most preposterous names you could imagine already belong to at least one actual person on the internet.

And so it does.

From here on in, I recklessly spoil the film where I need to. If you haven’t seen the film yet, and want to be surprised by it, then don’t read this.

That the film makes reference to the apartheid, or at least, draws on imagery and emotions associated with it is, well, what it is. What I fail to grasp, is why this association immediately adds value. Does the picture make a valuable commentary on the apartheid? I feel uncomfortable making too sweeping a comment here, because my knowledge of South Africa and its history is, alas, below the threshold of meaningful commentary. Maybe there are nuances that I am missing. The audience is certainly made to feel sympathetic for the alien cause, made to feel suspicious or outraged at the various actions of human characters. How this maps back, though, I’m not sure. The apartheid is, as far as I know (and gaps are filled by reasonable assumptions here), already viewed negatively by everyone I’ve ever met. If this film gives audiences the ah-ha! moment: “Oh my! The apartheid really was as bad as performing Nazi experiments on space aliens”… what value does this new perspective bring? Because… I don’t see it.

If the film were placed elsewhere: what would change? The story would remain more or less the same, with whatever value that has left intact, but it would lose the apartheid flavouring. Is it appropriate, then, to use apartheid as flavouring?

The second value of the film, brought up by the same people who use the first, is how totally awesome the extremely gory action sequences near the end are. Which is odd. The first premise is that the film’s value comes from bringing a message about the dangers of dehumanization. We’ve dehumanized people, and treated them abhorrently… the aliens stand in as even more easily dehumanized beings, but just as undeserving of it. Or something.

And then, gleefully, that’s exactly what they do. What exactly, on film, is more dehumanizing than inviting the audience to laugh and hoot and enter a state of general arousal, as human bodies are puffed up and exploded by space alien electro guns? The ridiculous Hollywood villain, a skin-headed nazi with exactly zero redeeming qualities, preposterously survives as all of his men are killed up until the very last moment of the story. And then he is torn to pieces by the aliens. Here, says the film. Relish in this.

So, on the one hand, the film says: look how horrible we humans can be. How casual with life and liberty and dignity. And then it says, “Don’t worry, it’s totally okay to get a boner when people are slaughtered.”

I enjoy extreme ultra-violence in films. But within the context this film creates, I really couldn’t take pleasure in it. And strangely, many of those who appeared to appreciate the apartheid imagery more than I did, seemed to find no conflict in also loving the final act gorefest.

The complete unsympathetic portrayal of the oppressors in the film has an unattractive side-effect as well. Average film-goers are going to feel they have exactly nothing in common with these awful bastards. Our moronic asshole of a protagonist, our final antagonist, the a psychotic Nazi: we are free to wash our hands of it, finding nothing of ourselves in those responsible for this terrible situation.

To take something the viewer is already familiar with, and simply dress it up in Science Fiction clothes isn’t inherently valuable. To be of value for the social reasons that the film’s cheerleaders imply, either, the science fiction perspective should bring greater awareness and knowledge where a simple production of facts would be ignored, or reframe the problem so that the audience’s presumptions are challenged. The science fiction perspective should be transformative. Does that really happen here? For most of the film’s viewers, the apartheid was a problem that occurred elsewhere, perpetuated by other people. Does this science fiction perspective really alter that position in the least? While the film certainly creates a visceral sense of this situation’s horribleness, are there really audience members who had fond memories of apartheid? Who have positive feelings about oppression and genocide? And after the film ends, I suspect that they will feel just as disconnected and without responsibility for these issues as before. But they’ll feel mighty clever at having figured it all out.

But there isn’t anything to figure out. The equation is made obvious from the start. From the start, then, it is clear who the good guys and the bad guys are. The viewer’s own positions and views are never challenged. The viewer is never seduced into sharing culpability with the villains. The viewer’s responsibility blinders are, if anything, reenforced.

I wouldn’t have written this post if people weren’t professing mad, slobbering love for this film, making declarations of its cinematic superiority. I liked it. I’m glad this film was made. I respect someone spending time and money and special effects talent to make something more intellectually ambitious than Transformers or GI Joe or Star Trek. I think Neill Blomkamp has proven here that he’s a hell of a director, but he hasn’t made the game-changer that people imagine exists here. Give him another shot at Halo, or better, a classic SF story or novel that was too technically impossible to film a decade or two ago, and he’ll have his game-changer yet.

For a speculative picture that tackles dehumanization using a similar visual grammar and pseudo-documentary structure that doesn’t in the same breath celebrate rampant ultra-violence, I would recommend Peter Watkins’ 1971 film Punishment Park.

It is important, here, to use the classic Nicholas Cage voice while playing out this dialogue in your head.

“There are, like, two different ways of viewing the universe, man, the theory of, like, determinism, and whoa, random chance. Determinism is, like everything happens for a reason, and random chance is all of this is the result of random chemical reactions and genetic mutations.”

He tosses around a ball that’s been painted to look like the sun while asking random facts about the sun. The kids in the class know how hot the sun is, and that it has a bunch of hydrogen in it. Whoa! Excellent work! Class dismissed!

Meanwhile, there’s a chalkboard behind him with some hardcore space Calculus that goes unmentioned (but the camera lingers on it for a moment… You see that there? That’s some fucking MATH right there. This guy is a fucking genius).

Dear Everyone Who Is Ever Going to Make a Movie,

DO NOT PUT A CLASSROOM SCENE IN YOUR FUCKING MOVIE UNLESS YOU HAVE ACTUALLY ATTENDED A COMPARABLE CLASS YOURSELF. THAT MEANS EVERYONE INVOLVED.

That means, go to a local University or Community Fucking College, and tell them you’re a fucking screenwriter or film director or actor, and ask to sit through one or five of their classes on X (here, Astrophysics… I think).

One. University level science lecture, even the most fun and entertaining ones, tend to be pretty information dense. The lecturer tends not to quiz his students on fucking random trivia, but rather, if he’s going to be asking questions at all, it’s going to be something the requires a proper understanding of the material, usually involving problem solving or mathematics.

Two. Gibberish. His entire “science” lecture comes across as pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo, even though it’s stated in the film that Nicholas Cage is an atheist (formerly a Catholic). He says, “Why, dude, is it, like, that our Earth is at the exact right position from the sun for life to survive… did this happen for a reason, or was it, like, you know, random chance?” His students, apparently all members of MIT’s Special Education Program (I didn’t know they had this) have no rebuttal. Lottery winners. Lottery winners must think, “Why me? How is it that I picked the exact right numbers… it must be magic, a miracle.” Whoever wins the lottery always reels at the specialness of their improbable victory, but SOMEONE ALWAYS WINS THE FUCKING LOTTERY. That is a statistical inevitability. With all of the galaxies and all of the stars and all of the planets (we suspect) in the universe (and that, only the universe that we can see), it seems pretty fucking likely that there are going to be some planets formed in the habitable zone with the right basic materials to get this life thing started. We won the lottery, so obviously we’re able to look at our improbable position and marvel at how unlikely it is that we’re all here… but it had to happen to someone, somewhere. He then tells the students that he thinks it’s all just random chance and coincidence. A scientist. A man who by all means, should believe in things only when there are sensible reasons and explanations, has made exactly zero arguments for how all of this can happen without a capital R reason behind it, but he believes it anyway.

His class is enraptured. His MIT class. His class that must have been top of the fucking pile at their respective high schools or colleges across America, now attending arguably the most prestigious science school in the world, are completely satisfied with this, the stupidest science lecture they have likely ever heard. And another scientist has walked into the room, partway through the lecture. He has heard this. He walks up to Nicholas Cage and he says, “That’s some heavy stuff, bro.”

Not, “That’s the stupidest fucking lecture I’ve ever heard, turn in your science gun and your science badge.”

At a point, later in the film, there’s this guy in the woods that’s creeping out Nicholas Cage and his kid, so Nicholas Cage heads out into the woods with a flashlight and bat, and he shouts, “You want some of this?” and then he hits an innocent bystanding Tree with the bat… implying that the “this” in his statement was, in fact, referring to getting hit with a bat. Judging by audience response, this was the funniest scene in the movie. It was clearly not meant to be.

I’m about to spoil some things.

It’s aliens. Aliens have known everything all along. The creepy whispering people that gave kids dates and times for disasters and eventually the end of the world: Aliens.

Here’s an interview with the Director, in which he talks about how Knowing is a Science Fiction movie… that it had started off as a supernatural story, but when he came aboard, he made it science fiction instead.

Here’s a fun fact: Taking a supernatural story and then using aliens to explain your mystical shit doesn’t make it Science Fiction. For fuck’s sake, were you raised by monkeys?

Plot summary: some kids have the ability to know of future dates when terrible distasters will occur, culminating with the end of the world. They know this because they’re being whispered to by creepy dudes. The creepy dudes turn out to be aliens. Turns out the sun is going to shit out a major solar flare that will destroy all life on Earth. Aliens save some children, and take them to outer space garden of Eden. Earth dies. The end.

These Aliens have starships cabable of fucking interstellar travel. These Aliens apparently have a computer which is so fucking huge and advanced that it was able to predict the behaviours of the Earth’s sun to the fucking day, at least five decades in advance. Behaviour that almost certainly depends on everything going on in Sol, right down to small scale quantum interactions.

As in, they have a super computer inconceivably powerful, they are capable of changing their form to appear humanoid, they are capable of communicating.

And.

And.

And they decide to be really creepy trenchcoat-wearing dudes who whisper confusing number information to children? With all of that power, they decide to be creepy and confusing? There is no way imaginable that they could be capable of the things shown in the film, and simply lack the necessary skills to speak directly, or you know, to a broader group than little children. So, essentially, we have beings that behave like otherworldly ghost beings, or incomprehensible angels. But it’s Science Fiction, because they’re aliens. Aliens who act like spooky horror movie characters for no fucking reason. Aliens who had absolutely all of the necessary capabilities to save the Earth, but did not, for no reason.

It’s not science fiction if you take your spooky otherworldly ghost or incomprehensible angels, and give them a fucking spaceship.

Also, none of what we’ve seen in the film matters.

None of it.

The world ends, Nicholas Cage dies. His kid and his kid’s new friend are taken away by the aliens. And it would have fucking happened anyway. It’s clearly shown that plenty of other kids are taken, so even if they had all died of spontaneous combustion halfway through the film, the whole Human Race Carries On thing still happens. The last scene with Nicholas Astrophysicist Cage is with his parents and sister, finally reconciled after years without communication. And even that, we can assume, might have happened anyway, you know, because he would have known about the world ending regardless (it’s announced on television near the end of the movie… turns out, those fucks at NASA knew all along), and his kid would have been kidnapped by Aliens anyway… same result.

Nothing that happened in this movie mattered, even within the context of the movie. And the movie itself is a huge piece of shit. Kind of a one-two punch.

It had some pretty decent special effect sequences, though.

And I think it’s the first summer event movie shot on the Red camera. It looked good, looked like film… which I guess is the whole point. I saw Pontypool, also shot on the Red camera, last week. It was better.