jumbotron etiquette

2 interesting things about the JUMBOTRON after seeing the Boss in concert last night.

It looked like they delay the image feed so that it perfectly matches the time the sound takes to echo throughout the stadium. Little Max Weinberg from a few thousand feet off consistently looked a half-beat off from the sound and his image up on the huge screen.

People behave completely differently when they know they’re on the jumbotron at arena shows than people at sporting events. At sporting events recognize themselves on the screen, scan the stadium for the camera, go nuts, wave signs. Last night at Bruce, people who happened to see themselves on screen (you could tell from the slight glance) would quickly snap their attention back on stage and act as if they didn’t know they were on camera, act as if they were in a famous live recording. Maybe this was something unique to this concert, or maybe the specific postures people take toward the insertion of a single video feed within a massive crowd says something about the different aesthetics of these events.

I’m sort of glad I was sitting in the back, because it seemed like I was the only one who didn’t know all the words to every single song.

iron man and digital cinema 1

I know, after The Dark Knight, Iron Man feels like it came out about five years ago. But for the sake of my absence from blogging and the backlog of ideas I’ve been meaning to put up here, let’s look back.

To create the effect of the marvelous iron armor, a variety of technologies were used. From this article from Last Broadcast on “Tony’s workshop:”

For Stan Winston’s Shane Mahan and his suit design team, this required making a suit that could be worn in sections over the visual effects suit Downey wore. ‘The big challenge was trying to find ways to blend, cross-cut and inter- cut combinations of practical and CGI shots,’ says Mahan. ‘It would be absolutely foolish for me to think that I could pull off every shot in the practical suit, so we created a combination for Robert consisting of the chest piece, helmet and arm sections combined with a full-body motion capture tracking marker suit underneath. It’s a great way to blend the practical with the computer-generated effects, enabling ILM to bridge any gaps between the physical pieces.’

In this interview, Faverau says that part of the realism of the movie hinged on being able to show various parts of the suit being gradually constructed, culminating in Iron Man’s iconic red and gold Mark III armor. This trope in almost every superhero movie of the suit gradually being constructed or put on shows the gradual transformation of the human body into an icon, that is to say, into something that can be transmitted, disseminated, or broadcast.

This may take a few posts, but I’d like to consider the digital rendering of the superhero as symbolic of the inner workings of digital cinema itself. Iron Man, made up of various levels of physical reality, motion capture data points, and digital video encoding, is representative of digital cinema’s transformation of physical reality into transmissibility as such (1′s and 0′s rather than chemical inscription on celluloid). More to follow…

SF in HD

Cory Doctorow has a recent article in Locus Magazine on why high definition is bad for science fiction films. Basically, the argument is: in the case of CGI special effects (SF films being the perfect genre for showcasing the next unimaginable spectacle), their quality–or at least definition–exponentially increases each year, as does the amount of money poured into such projects. While a film released five years ago might seem laughably outdated by today’s visual standards, a certain amount of longevity can be ensured by small-screen formats on which it may be harder to see the primitive blemishes of last year’s computer graphics. But with an attendant decline in the cost of bigger, high definition LCD screens, Doctorow says “Whatever longevity can be wrung from a movie by releasing it to smaller, more forgiving screens is cut short by the living-room behemoths that are being pushed on us today,” and the returns that can be anticipated by major studios for investing in $200 million SF blockbusters will be less and less. There is an inverse relationship between Moore’s law and the valuation of filmic SF spectacle.

But I think this argument might not consider the internal mechanics of SF’s reception and the increasingly small epicycles of nostalgia that we seem to be going through in popular culture, which becomes especially pronounced in the case of science fiction films. SF seems to have a different sort of half-life than other fictional modes, it ages much more quickly, in a way that I’m not sure how to talk about. Perhaps SF films draw off of a particular a mode of being in the world that is more easily forgotten, more fragile than the raw materials used in the construction of other types of (realistic) films? A mode of being with technologies that would otherwise be forgotten, but can only be recovered in any sense through some sort of patronizing nostalgia?

Super Heroes and The Phonograph

This passage from Adorno’s 1927 essay, “The Curves of the Needle”:

“With its movable horn and its solid spring housing, the gramophone’s social position is that of a border marker between two periods of musical practice. It is in front of the gramophone that two periods of musical lovers encounter each other. While the expert examines all the needles and chooses the best one, the consumer just drops in his dime—and the sound that responds to both may well be the same.”

Setting aside the sort of dated yet often repeated point that the audience member enjoys not the film or music she goes to see but the money she spent on it, I think the real brilliance of this passage lies in the conflation of the audition with the auditor, and the needle with the curves–no matter what is played, the sound remains the same to all. What is the selfsame sound that each type of musical lover hears? It is, of course, the sound of the dime dropped to purchase the needle. It is the sound of the music subsequently enjoyed in the privacy of the home. And it is the sound of the needle itself, that is to say, those crackles and shifts in pitch that reveal the actual machinery of reproduction. This triad of commerce/sound/technology will most likely structure any discussion on the semantics of listening in popular culture. Today, the latter two terms, sound and technology (along with the listener floating ambiguously somewhere in between), create the most productive and interesting tensions.

Adorno goes on to say of the apparent improvement in the quality of sound reproduction technologies that “The moment one attempts to improve these early technologies through an emphasis on concrete fidelity, the exactness one has ascribed to them is exposed as an illusion by the very technology itself.” The rhetoric of technological fidelity is a productive paradox. Constant improvements such as Hi-Fi or Dolby 5.1 are not necessarily steps forward in sound quality, but a shift towards a new style of hearing things. This point was made in Sound Theory Sound Practice, I believe it was. This is to say that the spectacular sounds that accompany the otherwise awful Spider Man 3 straddle many points of audition. The recent spate of super hero movies humping claims of realism (the “this could actually happen!” aesthetic) are not only rehashing/warping the Frank Miller led The Dark Knight Returns aesthetic of the 80s, but are constantly making an argument for the medium through which these mythologies are now pushed.

I met Jonathan Lethem (see his list of the five most depressed superheroes) at a book signing and nervously asked him something inane like, “what do you think about the new Superman movie?” In my defense, the teaser trailer was absolutely breathtaking—it looked like a scene right out of the 1940s animated serials, an aesthetic that would pull cgi and tights out of dimensions other than the ostensibly real. He said that he had learned not to stop getting his hopes up for comic book movies, as there is something in the medium that is inherently untranslatable.

But the superhero is not a medium, it is a perfectly translatable commodity–television, action figures, games, costumes, film, books, etc. The mythology of superheroes today is squeezed through the nascent field of digital cinema ever proclaiming its fidelity to the our world so that we can look up walking the streets of New York and half expect to see a red and blue blur sling overhead. Going into Spider Man 3, I expected the cgi to be significantly improved on the previous film, there having been years elapsed and most likely technological leaps made. Spider Man always looked a little awkward and unnatural in 1 and 2. It wasn’t until halfway through the movie that I realized not only have the graphics not really changed, but their verisimilitude is not what matters anymore. The sound of Spider Man 3 seems to take an unprecedented amount of control, to the degree that the most spectacular way possible to defeat Venom at the end of the film is, and I’m not making this up, with sound. Spider Man discovers the symbiot’s weakness to sound waves, and beats a series of metal pipes, driving the black goo away.

While the plasticity of the image has been made virtually infinite thanks to cgi and digital film, it is still strangely anchored in some rhetoric of ever greater fidelity to the real or photographic. Sound is employed to an ever greater degree in recent popular film as a sort of filler, enhancing these images through synergism and sync points and added dimensions that allow the spectator relief from the images that often fail, look flat, seem taken out of a video game. And this is why digital film today is such an exciting sound medium. While cgi is bogged down in claims to verisimilitude, sound is free to improvise in countless dimensions with breathtaking results, making up for the mistakes of the clumsy image. Seriously, go see Spider Man 3 and listen to the Dolby TrueHD.