100% real talk 50% of the time.
- Frame Broiled
All images: ©Disney/PixarThe cover story of the June issue of Wired is about the Pixar creative process and the making of Toy Story 3. I encourage you to check it out. Here’s one particularly amazing fact:
The average frame (a movie has 24 frames per second) takes about seven hours to render, although some can take nearly 39 hours of computing time. The Pixar building houses two massive render farms, each of which contains hundreds of servers running 24 hours a day.
7 hours for 1/24th of a second of a 90+ minute movie. And that doesn’t include all the drafts required to get to the final rendering stage:
COLOR SCRIPTS It took art director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi one week to create this impressionistic digital version of the scene. The goal is to begin to define the style and lighting scheme of the frame. Concept art from past movies is on display in the Pixar art gallery.
PROPS Toys are positioned in the 3-D “dressed set.” The TS3 team wanted the nursery to be alive with movement, so hundreds of characters are placed on the shelves. Now the director can fine-tune the camera’s movement to best capture the action.
LAST DETAILS The amount of labor spent on each character depends on its prominence in the final shot. Background toys are given simple textures and basic movements, while Lotso and Woody—the stars of the scene—are lavished with attention.
(CLICK TO ENLARGE)FINALE Surfaces—walls, clothing, faces—are fed through rendering software that simulates light and shadow. It also adds texture to Lotso’s fur, Barbie’s leggings, and the carpet. An average frame takes more than seven hours of computing time to render. A more complex frame like this one required eleven hours.
Read the whole thing here.
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- The beauty of data visualization: David McCandless
I’m gonna be giving a TEDx talk in a few weeks so I’ve been searching the amazing TED site for inspiration. The video speaks for itself. I’m feeling it.
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- 7 Things my friend Josh showed me
Just back from US where I had a lot of fun. Many highlights, some of which I will hopefully be somehow documenting on here in the coming days. For now though I want to show some love and gratitude to my dear friend Josh who put me up for several nights and supplied me with a constant supply of awesome media things. In the interest of karma, I’m gonna tell you like he told me:
1. Louie
Louie is the new show by the comedian Louis CK and it is very good. Sort of like a dirtier, less Jewish Seinfeld. In the US you can watch it on Hulu, otherwise you can probably download it legally or otherwise. Here’s a preview:
And as a bonus, here’s a rant from Louis CK that I totally forgot about but was one of my favorite things ever a couple years ago:
2. http://beatelectric.blogspot.com
So much amazing shit on here it’s crazy. Check it out for yourself. Here’s one classic that I downloaded and then rinsed out at my friend’s wedding to mixed reactions.
Gwen Guthrie - Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent (Larry Levan Club Mix)
DOWNLOAD
right-click + save target as (windows) / save link as (mac)3. Fact: Dr Dre is currently working on an instrumental album dedicated to outer space.
According to Spinner.com:
Dr Dre has revealed one reason for the delay on long awaited album ‘Detox’ — he’s working on an instrumental album.
In an idea somewhat reminiscent of Holst’s orchestral suite ‘The Planets’ (it even shares the title), each song will be based around the nine planets of the solar system.
Speaking to Vibe magazine (via Gigwise), Dre said, “Oh yeah, that’s in the works. An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it ‘The Planets.’
“I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but f— it. It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround-sound. It’ll have to be in surround-sound for Saturn to work.”
4. Kanye Kartoons
The musical comedy team Paul and Storm had a very bright idea to combine Kanye West’s weird/boring-ass Twitter feed with cartoons from the New Yorker. Some of them are great. Example:
5. Kanye A kapella
This I guess has been going around for a few days, but in case you missed it, Kanye performing a song off his new album, a capella, in very clean suit, while standing on a table in the Facebook headquarters. Sounds corny but it’s not.
6. How to make your own pirate vinyl
It’s not simple, but it is doable and not that expensive. Full lowdown here.
7 (but definitely not least). NEW ANDRE!
Andre 3000 - I do
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- Double Rainbow: So Bright, So Vivid
I’m back in the Land of the Free, Home of the Whopper and all everybody I know seems to be talking about is weddings, hospitalizations, and this clip. If you’re up on Internet crazes, then you know I’m late as hell, but this thing is VERY FEEL to the max. The clip pretty much speaks for itself, only thing I would say is that the narrator is a man called Hungry Bear who became a cage fighter to prevent himself from dying of obesity. It’s true. Look it up.
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- People Republic of Cross-dressing
One of the nicest things about being in Beijing at this point in history is watching the ways that the city processes the huge amounts of new cultural info that enter it each day. On its surface, Beijing’s cultural identity seems pretty fixed. It’s the PRC’s symbolic center, and it needs to look the part. But if you look below the surface, you can see a city passionately seeking out and soaking in new forms of living. A couple years ago I did a series of conversations with people who I thought were at the front of this process. (Here’s one with the owner of Beijing’s first reggae bar (since destroyed) and one with the director of China’s first non-profit art space (since resigned)).
The wonderful web TV series Sexy Beijing has just posted a couple of new episodes examining transgendered life in the capital. They feature Mei Mei, the queen of Beijing`s cross-dressing scene, and a few of her acolytes. Check it out.
Part 1:
Part 2:
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- The Ghost of Christmas Future
A few years ago I saw a little feature on something called “Age me“, an online application that will digitally age your photo to show how would look after, say, 40 years of smoking or eating fast food, anorexia, excessive exposure to sun, things of that nature. The show presented it as a kind of scared straight program for reckless twenty-somethings, and as I was twenty-something at the time, I sat up and took notice. Since that day, I’ve always been curious to give Age Me a whirl, probably because I am currently maintaining several long-term bad habits for which I expect to pay dearly in my later years. Never did though, and today I realized that I don’t have to, because I’m pretty sure this is what it’s gonna look like:
Real shit. Plus that David Guetta and Kudi song was my guilty pleasure jam of 2009. No joke. Uncanny likeness…
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- 7月4日
Happy Independence Day from Boogie Down Beijing where pro-Americans pop up in unexpected places…. Already had a hot dog and two burgers. Hope you get yours…
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- James Westcott Writes, Marina Abramovic Dies
I just realized today that I never made a post recognizing my homey James and his great new bio of Marina Abramovic. That is maybe because he has been rocking the house so thoroughly lately, receiving love from The New Yorker , The Guardian, and even Bjork herself, who called the book magnificent and “an invaluable document in the hard-to-document world of performance art.” Salute. But also BUY - out now from MIT Press, available at all bookstores that know what’s good for them.
Here’s one really nice piece from the book release media blitz that I want to put up because it features both James and another friend Shumon. It’s from Tank Magazine and it goes like this:
Performance art is not for the fainthearted. James Westcott explains to Shumon Basar how it all started with starving saints and may well end in our age of obsessive re-enactments.
It has often been art’s unique privilege to sanction those eccentric behaviours that would in any other circumstance call for police action or the intervention of a local asylum. Performance art is especially notorious. Its protagonists famously use their bodies and increasingly, the bodies of others to shock, stimulate, sicken and show off bits the rest of us keep behind locked doors. James Westcott is the author of the new biography When Marina Abramovic Dies. It’s a frank appraisal of an artist who has referred to herself as “the grandmother of performance art” and has been called its “empress” by others a status acknowledged by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which this year awarded her a major retrospective, the first they have given to any performance artist. Abramovic, like her contemporaries Vito Acconci and Carolee Schneemann, pioneered a tradition of performance in the 1960s and 1970s that foregrounded endurance, suffering and personal peril: a reminder that regardless of wealth or poverty, fame or wretched fate, we all begin and end with our bodies. Basar asked Westcott to outline performance peaks in the 20th century and to bring us up to the present moment where, to paraphrase Don DeLillo, the suicide bomber’s deadly performance eclipses the so-called radicality of today’s most shocking artists.
Shumon Basar faces a mirror and begins to walk back and forth along its length mumbling to himself. He stops and takes a seat next to James Westcott.
Shumon Basar: James, can you recall the first performance piece you saw and the effect it had on you?
James Westcott: It was Marina Abramovic’s 2002 performance The House with the Ocean View, for which she lived in a gallery for 12 days without eating or speaking. Her only nourishment came through sustained eye contact with the audience, and I returned to the gallery every day in the hope of repeating the amazing eye contact we’d had on my first visit. It was also like keeping a vigil for the dead or the dying I saw the fluctuations in Marina’s strength as she starved, how her skin changed colour. Like watching a captivity-weary animal in a zoo: the slightest variations in her obsessively repetitive behaviour became disproportionately fascinating.
Was there a religious provenance to these kinds of minutely repetitive gestures?
She was inspired by the Hindu vipassana meditation technique of repeating the most fundamental human physical actions sitting, walking, lying with extreme slowness and a kind of blank concentration. She was both robotic and somehow excruciatingly human.
And this “vigil” was how your interest in the medium began?
I had only discovered the existence of performance art a week earlier, reading about Marina’s 1988 performance The Lovers.
What did it entail?
She started walking at the eastern end of the Great Wall of China, and Ulay, her lover and performance partner since 1976, began walking at the western end, in the Gobi Desert, at the same moment. They simply walked towards each other along the Wall until they met in the middle 90 days later.
They had an infamously fractious and volatile relationship, didn’t they?
When they conceived the performance, in 1981, they thought that they would get married when they met in the middle. But by the time they managed to actually do it, their relationship had disintegrated and their meeting ended up as a kind of divorce ceremony, marking the end of their love and work together.
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- World Cup Throw Back
The World Cup is on and Soccer Fever is back in effect. I realized yesterday, while watching R Kelly perform at the opening ceremony in a golden chain mail coif, that I started this blog exactly four years ago during the last World Cup. Nobody really checked VERY FEEL back in those days, so in all likelihood you missed all the posts I made about that tournament, including my series of haiku dedicated to Japan’s ill-fated run. Anyway, here’s one of the posts for that time where I try to explain my late enrollment in the community of WC maniacs.
Originally posted on June 11 2006:
Blog Bonito
I’m in Beijing now on various UNIT-related missions, but once I arrived I was knocked over by the enthusiasm for the World Cup here. China’s not in, of course, and maybe it’s considered a kind of warm-up for the Olympics, but damn this city is bang into some football right now. So, I’m gonna go with the flow… UNIT updates coming soon….
In honor of the 06 World Cup Finals, I offer my testament - Confessions of a Football Convert:
“Can I kick it?” - A Tribe Called QuestHaving been raised in the the US - the often-cited isolationist exception to football’s global conquest - I didn’t play or care much for the game growing up. I was a city kid and so played basketball. Soccer, as we call it, was a light-weight, slightly effeminate game played by spoiled, white suburbanites and immigrants (two groups that rarely break bread together - a crystal clear demonstration of football’s unifying qualities that went completely over my head…) During high school, every so often there’d be a few weeks of physical education dedicated to soccer, and we’d be brought outside to play. The teacher wouldn’t provide any advice on technique or even basic rules, we’d just be divided up and let loose. The result was always the same: a handful of kids from Central America or East Europe and maybe one or two from my hometown’s affluent East Side would dominate, carrying on as if they were in a pick-up match in an obstacle course. Those who generally didn’t enjoy sports would endure the 50-minute class with the same level of unobstructive disinterest that they brought to all other games. The rest, those who otherwise considered themselves athletes, would pre-empt their certain humiliation by aggressively underperforming until eventually the game deteriorated into a farcical exhibition of who could play the worst.
This is often the American way: if you aren’t good at something, belittle it. No doubt if Team USA disappoints this year, as I expect them to, you will see this reflexive disinterest acted out in pubs and on public squares across the world: over-loud discussions of more familiar USports interrupted occasionally by drunken croaks of “I don’t even really care about soccer anyway.” And I admit, I’ve been contributor to this ritual for most of my life.
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- Big Boi is no stranger to that internet, baby. (So you already know what time it is.)
Outkast is my favorite group ever and it’s been too long since they made an album together. Also been too long since either of its members, Big Boi and Andre, has released a solo album. BUT that situation is due to change soon enough when Big Boi AKA Daddy Fat Stacks AKA Sir Luscious Leftfoot AKA Billy Ocean Cuervo AKA Hot Tub Tony AKA Francis the Savannah Chitlin’ Pimp releases his much-delayed, no-longer-so-new album ‘The Son of Chico Dusty’. A few tracks have been floating around the internets for a while, but I only felt compelled to post after reading this interview by Will Welch for GQ. It provides your daily dose of rapper quotables and explains, among other things, the tragic absence of Andre from the album:
This morning, the tracklist for the final version of Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty hit the internet, and none of the songs you’ve recorded with Dré are on there. No “Royal Flush,” and no “Lookin For Ya.” What gives?
Well, basically it boils down to Jive Records. That’s how they do it. Jive Records told me my album is a piece of art, and they didn’t know what to do with it. So I moved it over to Def Jam. And now Jive is trying to block Dré from being on my record. We can’t be on songs together now.
So because OutKast as a group is signed to Jive, they’re able to legally block the two of you from working together?
Au contraire! They cannot block it. Au contraire. Either they’re going to do it the right way, or they’re going to do it my way. How you wanna do it? The fans thirst will be quenched. You know, I’m no stranger to that internet, baby. So you already know what time it is. The thirst of the fans will be quenched.
“Royal Flush” with Dré and Raekwon has been out since 2008, but you’re saying we will be hearing “Lookin For Ya” [with André] even though it’s not on the album?
I guarantee it.
Can you speak a little bit about your frustration here? What you’re saying is that you and your friend from high school can’t rap on the same song and have it get an official release.
It’s plain stupidity. It’s stupid business and it’s stupid politics. I mean, Jive Records had [Big Boi's current Def Jam single] “Shutterbug” for three years. And [new Sir Luscious leak] “General Patton” for three years. You see what I’m saying? They told me to go in and make my version of Lil’ Wayne’s “Lollipop”! I love that song. That was my favorite song when it came out. But how you gonna tell me to go bite another MCs style? How are you even going to open your mouth up to tell me to go and do that? That’s the highest form of disrespect ever. So that’s when I wanted to get off Jive. And the only honorable thing they’ve done is allow me to do that. So I’ve had nothing to do with them. Dré tried to have a talk with Jive and they said, “No, we can’t. That’s gonna make us look bad.”
Let’s talk about how the records you made with André for Sir Luscious came together.
We’re gonna keep one of them for the next OutKast record. “Royal Flush” was supposed to be on the album. That was a leak that got nominated for a Grammy. The other track we did, “Lookin For Ya” was produced by Boi Wonda and it’s me, Dré, and Sleepy Brown—the Dream Team going back to “Playa’s Ball” and “I Can’t Wait.” They want to keep that from the fans, man, and I can’t have it. I won’t stand for that shit.
How’d “Lookin For Ya” happen?
I was outside the studio just chillin’ and Erik Sermon from EPMD rolled by the studio and said, “Yo, I got some music for ya.” I was like, “Word.” So he came in and played a beat, and then he played the Boi Wonda beat. I was like, “What’s that?!” So he was like, “We’ll let you get that one, then.”
The whole time I was working, Dré would come in and out of the studio. Like, he heard “Royal Flush” and said, “I wanna get on that.” And he heard, “Lookin For Ya” and said, “I wanna get on that.” The following day, he jumped on it. Two verses apiece, just raw lyricism. OutKast to the fullest. It was slated for the album. We tried to get everything solidified but Jive said, “Naw. Y’all can’t rap together.” Then I was going to take Dré off and make my own version, but then I thought, “No. Fuck that. If he can’t be on it, then I’m not using it.”
Did Dré do his verses at Stankonia or at a home studio?
Stankonia. Came right back the very next day and killed that shit. Matter fact, he put both his verses on there before I even had a chance to put anything on there.
Last time I interviewed Dré, he made it clear that sometimes he feels like he’s got something to say, and sometimes he doesn’t.
Right.How does that affect you?
When he says he wants to get on something, you better go ‘head and let him get on it. That’s how we do it. Whenever he says, “Hey man, I wanna get on that,” he can do it. That’s my partner. He can get on whatever the fuck he wants to get on. He could’ve got on every song on the album if he wanted to. So they can’t stop us, man. I been knowing Dré half my life. And for these people that we don’t even know—that haven’t even had a hand in our career at all—that’s fucking blasphemy. So stay tuned.
OK, so here are the songs that Big Boi mentions. All I can say is that they’re good and I’m proud to play a small part in making sure that ‘the thirst of the fans will be quenched.’
Outkast w/ Raekwon - Royal Flush
DOWNLOADOutkast w/ Sleepy Brown - Lookin 4 Ya
DOWNLOADBUY the album. June 6 2010!
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- Listen up: Romen Rok
My friend Ollie AKA Romen Rok just released his new album. It’s called Absolutely! and you should absolutely get it. Here’s the lead single:
Romen Rok w/ Gavin Castleton - Laughter (Produced by Joe Beats and Romen Rok)
Laughter by romenrokHe also has a bunch of cool videos making beats live on the MPC2000XL. Here is one of my favorites, sort of sounds like the Ren & Stimpy theme song if it would’ve been done by the Incredible Bongo Band.
Ren and Stimpy XL-erated from Romen Rok on Vimeo.
Check him out and BUY HIS ALBUM here.
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- My HK Neighbors
I’ve been living in Central Hong Kong for most of the last two months. An amazing place, but probably the most thoroughly photographed on earth. Here’s my little contribution to that immense body of work - an inventory of the faces I encounter on my way into work everyday.
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- Domus 02.04: HoloDuke
Image: Duke EngineeringThese days I’m doing an interview series for Domus China on the future of the city and the connection between virtual and real. (I posted an interview from early in the series here a couple months ago.) One of the people I’ve talked to is Tony O’Driscoll, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the executive director of its Center for IT and Media. It was a long, winding conversation, but he did mention one thing that sort of blew me away and I want to share…
Apparently the university has something called the Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE), which is a 6-sided virtual reality theater that functions basically as a holodeck:
But apparently, here’s lot of non-jazzy applications for the non-Trek version, like treating phobias and figuring out where to drill for oil. Here’s some specifics from the DiVE site:
The DiVE is a 3m x 3m x 3m stereoscopic rear projected room with head and hand tracking and real time computer graphics. All six surfaces – the four walls, the ceiling and the floor – are used as screens onto which computer graphics are displayed. For virtual worlds designed for this system, it is a fully immersive room in which the individual (researcher, educator, etc) literally walks into the world, is surrounded by the display and is capable of interacting with virtual objects in the world. Stereo glasses provide depth perception, and a handheld “wand” controls navigation and input to into the world for manipulating virtual objects.
And here’s an except from the interview where Tony talks about the applications…
TO: [...] Across the Duke community, virtual contexts are being used quite heavily in the medical field, for training purposes and teaching doctors about emergency room etiquette, dealing with critical incidents, and so on. At the nursing school, they’re using virtual environments for nursing education. Duke is also looking at the use of virtual context to help people deal with phobias or deal with stress disorders. If you’re scared of snakes, you can get thrown into a virtual context where it looks a little bit like [the film] Raiders of the Lost Arc, where Harrison Ford is surrounded by hundreds of snakes.
BM: How does that work?
TO: It’s called the Duke immersive Virtual Environment [DiVE]. It is a six sided CAVE like virtual reality theater that can simulate an experience . In the case of the snakes, your mind knows its fake, but at the same time it’s having that ‘fight or flight’ response and you’re physically experiencing the stress associated with your phobia. It’s actually helpful to be able to work through phobias in a context like that as it helps you parse out your cognitive processing of the experience.
BM: I’ve never heard of this. Could you tell me more…
TO: There is lots you can do in DiVE. You can create your own rollercoaster. You’re given a hand device and you create points in the space. Then you lay down and you feel kind of like you’re in [the film] Tron, riding the light cycle, and you’re essentially flying through the space, as if you’re riding on a rollercoaster of your own creation. You can be taken through a narrative where you meet all sorts of characters like a three-headed dog or you could get thrown into a snake pit as I mentioned earlier. There’s all kinds of uses, but the idea is that it is an immersive context. It’s a place where you are put either to see representations of data… Oil companies, for instance, like to use these 3D visualizations of data to try to figure out what the soil consistency might be and where they might find more oil. There’s lots of uses for it, but essentially it’s another context; it’s a virtual context where you array information to either elicit insight or emotion or help groups of people make informed decisions.
Beam me up.
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- In Memory Of…
I’ve been crazy busy for the past month and have missed lots of appointments, correspondence, and sleep. Also been neglecting VERY FEEL, which is a shame because there’s a bunch of things that I wanted to pass on. First and foremost, this, DJ Premier’s 2 hour tribute to his partner in Gang Starr and one of my favorite MCs ever, Guru, who passed away a few weeks ago.
Gang Starr was my favorite group in junior high school. Their album Step in the Arena was the first cassette that I ever played so much that the tape broke. If circumstances were different I’d love to make a tribute of my own. But obviously Premier’s is even better:
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- NY Attacks
http://www.dailymotion.com/videoxcv6dv
Audio visual treats inspired by the city that never sleeps. Above by Patrick Jean. Below by Gil Scott-Heron.
Gil Scott Heron w/ Nas - New York is killing me (remix)
DOWNLOADThanks JHE & JDS!
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