Steven Spielberg Promotes Sharing

  Blender Dumbass
January 06, 2023

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When you make a film, you tent to seek inspiration and advice from those who make good films. Before September my main activities were my job and the articles I write. I did some programming on the side. Like the infamous FastLBRY LBRY client. But that was it.

Since I bought the new computer and now have a capacity to get real work done, I continue my movie project that I started back in the beginning of 2020. So I make a film. Daily. And therefor I seek inspiration and advice from those who make good films.

It should not be a surprise that I clicked on an hour long interview between James Cameron, J.J.Abrams and Steven Spielberg. What was a surprise though, was what they said. I bookmarked the section in my browser, here is the link.

Here is a transcript:

Steven Spielberg:


James Cameron:


Steven Spielberg:


James Cameron:


Steven Spielberg:


James Cameron:


Yes. James Cameron used "Open Source" instead of "Libre" or "Free". And it kind of tickles some language breaking nerves. I bet Richard Stallman would have written a whole essay on this use of "Open Source". But I also bet if he would hear how terribly they talk, he would get just angry. It feels like they both need speech coaches. Or they might even have ADHD. Both of them. Which is kind of a good thing. You know, I found out recently that it's far more entertaining to listen to a talk of a person that has ADHD, compared to a person that is focused. But all of that is besides the point.

Probably two of the biggest film directors of the last 40 or so years, kind of agree with freedom in a way. Probably they just care about the tools that they use to do their job. Similar to how I might feel about Blender or various Blender-Organizers that I wrote. Or if we are talking about this article, how I might feel about Emacs. And if you come to James or Steven and ask them to put a Creative Commons license on the final film, they might swear at you. But maybe not. And they truly care about freedom. And that's the studios that force stupid restrictions to be present on the customers of the films.

Anyway. What an unexpected place to find something to do with Free Software, isn't it? Let's talk about film-making, Libre Culture and how they are connected, or could be connected.

But first... on a totally related ( film-making note )...

I hate her bicep in this image. Though I already fixed it for the movie itself.

This was a very good week for the Moria's Race project. I've advanced from talkie walkie scenes to action. I mean, there will be action is just about a few shots from now, from when I'm typing. Expect the next live-stream to contain some already. If not the next one, than the next after the next one. I don't think you need to wait until the next after the next after the next one.

Here is, by the way, a short summary of what's done during the last week ( And yes I'm aware about the length of the video. It took me two days to compress a week of footage into an hour. So it is a "short summary"... shut up!):

lbry://@blenderdumbass#f/mr-ph-w3#e

( Please comment something on it. I need to know if I'm doing well or not. )

On the other note I'm very worried for the Odysee corporation. See, every live-stream that I make generates about 5 GB ( 4 hours ) of video recording. And then I publish them to LBRY. Which means that those videos get uploaded to the Odysee's servers as well. Just to keep them around in case nobody else wants to host them. That would not be a big problem, but the full live-stream recordings are not watched by people. The first one got about 10 view total. And the other ones are at 0 each.

Maybe we can all just take a bit less than 72 hours of our lives and watch the full recordings, so they get above 0. But ultimately the choice is yours. Hope you'll waste your time with me.

They are available on: lbry://@MoriasRace:3

What would be the film industry if film directors didn't talk to each other?

If we go backwards versus forwards... I want to do it, so not to spoil the result ahead of the time ...we can imagine a further set of events:

Ready Player One or Tintin would not be made. Since James Cameron would not provide Steven Spielberg with the necessary knowledge of "How to shoot Avatar?". It could seems like a trivial task. It took James Cameron only about 14 years to make the Avatar 2 trailer. Let's see how long it's gonna take till the release itself. But it's still just 14 years. I'm older than that. I'm as old as two Avatar movie productions. So it's rather trivial, isn't it.

Well, the production of both TinTin and Ready Player One ( not even talking about the not-marvelous boring marvel universe of tele-shows ) are highly dependent on the same kinds of technologies that were used on the first Avatar. Things like virtual cameras and face capturing rigs were developments of various technical teams under the supervision of James Cameron the king the first.

Of course if directors would not talk to each other, Avatar itself would not be made. See, motion capture was not a development for Avatar. Films like Peter Jackson's King Kong and scary "uncanny valley" cartoons of *Bobert Zemeckis, like the infamous Christmas film where all of the characters are played by Tom Hanks used motion capture. Gollumn from a movie that some people use as a marriage ring could be considered a motion capture creature. Even though it was much more manual. Hell, Titanic has motion capture. Terminator 2 has a form of motion capture. And it was made in 1992.

But what about simple things? Suspense, for example was made popular by Alfred Hitchcock. Having "cock" in your name is probably profound. I could not even imagine how much terror and suspense there might be with a cock that is hitchhiking. Maybe because of these fact he could have figured out suspense on his own. But he didn't invent it. He, as everybody else, learned it from somebody else.

If you take everything in life. If people do not communicate, there is no progress. If people did not develop speech. We would have forgotten long time ago about the invention of fire. And then wheel. Imagine the fire being proprietary. And only one person can know how to make one. Imagine lighting another fire from a fire and then getting a copyright violation notice.

Of course everything could be reverse engineered. Perhaps fire was reverse engineered. Perhaps a lightning storm caused a branch to light up. Or too much sun caused a bush to light up. And a primitive person saw the fire and though that it's warm and useful for some things. And tried to replicate it. Maybe... Also it could be an accidental discovery. The thing is. This person shared his knowledge with others. And therefor started the human race.

Before there was fire, there was no cooked food. Before there was cooked food, people had to chew all day long to get some nutrition. Try eating meat raw. It's very hard to chew. And then it's very badly digesting. Therefor to have energy from food, you have to eat a lot of it and therefor eat all the time. But as soon as you cook the meat it chews nicely and digests quickly. Not even talking about that it's more tasty when cooked. So if fire was not developed, people would not have time to do anything else. They would just eat all the time.

But now that there is fire, there is a lot of free time. And therefor a lot of possibility to get curious. To learn, to share knowledge. To progress as species. My big brain, so big that Marvin the Paranoid Android would definitely be sad about it, is a consequence of the person who invented sharing his knowledge with other people. Perhaps by the standards of IQ tests and alike that person was a complete dumbass. But yet, he is a genius, compared to some people in our lifetimes. I'm looking at you, the entirety of Apple Corporation.

Free Software and the Film Industry

It's rather strange to think that film industry would use Free Software. After all, they have the money to purchase software that is proprietary. And that's true. And they do use a bunch of Autodesk Mayas and Adobe Photoshops. But guess what else the film industry uses...

Blender, for example, the program that started the whole "Blender Dumbass" joke to begin with... The program I use to animate Moria's Race... One of the most complex and huge Free Software projects, probably behind only GNU, Emacs and a very small thing called the Linux Kernel... This program is starting to slowly show up in the film industry.

The first time Blender was used in a Major Motion Picture was in 2004. And in non other than Spiderman 2 directed by Sam Raimi. I would not be surprised if the idea to use Blender was Raimi's brain-child. He is enough of a giggly dude to do that kind of thing. Mind you - it was before Elephant Dreams. This nightmare came out only in 2006. And only with Elephant Dreams we can say that Blender finally had it's true potential unlocked.

In 2004 during the production of Spiderman 2 Raimi wanted to use a technique he learned from different directors. Instead of drawing storyboards on paper, you could make them move by doing them in a computer, using a 3D animation program. The problem was, anything that's the CGI department uses was a bit too costly. And it was something he probably only experimented with. So I believe he just typed in "Free 3D Editor" and got Blender.

Today a lot of films use Blender in the production of the final shots. I know that I will mention a film outside of Hollywood. But they did provide a useful article about how they used Blender. So here we go. The Biggest Film in India - "RRR" directed by Kaduri Srisaila Sri Rajamouli has a lot of shots rendered inside Blender with Cycles ( Blender's path-tracing rendering engine ).




But this is not the only place Blender is used in films. If you scroll though the articles on Blender.org you can find many examples of various studios, both in VFX and animation, that use Blender for a lot of things, if not for the entirety of production. For example Next Gen was produced entirely with Blender by an Unfortunately Dissolved Canadian Studio.

Blender artists sneak even into places like Pixar. Colin Levy, for example, worked at Pixar for a few years. He is also known as the director of perhaps the best movie made by Blender Foundation ( before it was called "Blender Studio" and before they released Spring ) - Sintel. Spring rivals Sintel quite well. But not on a story level. Colin is a master at story. By the way, he quit Pixar to make a small short film which took him years to make called Skywatch. By the way, he managed to get Jude Law involved. I would not be able to do that. I don't have the money to travel to London. And also, by the way, the VFX for this film were also done with Blender.

But how about something other than Blender? Well related to Blender there is the existence of such formats like OpenEXR developed by Industrial Light and Magic, a company started by George Lucas and a company responsible for Jar Jar Binks. They did not try to make the format proprietary like some kind of Autodesk would. There is also the Open Shading Language which sounds like something related to OpenGL, but no... It's a something that helps somehow with rendering pretty images. And it was developed strangely by the godfather of bad companies, Sony. And then released as Free Software, because Film Industry is all about collaboration, I suppose. According to the Wikipedia page, it first appeared in the 2012 Men In Black film. And the interview from the beginning of this article is from the August of 2011. Maybe one thing has something to do with another. Steven Spielberg, mind you, was one of the producers on the Men In Black film.

Also there is Cine Paint - a fork of GIMP developed by Hollywood, for Hollywood. They do have the money to use Photoshop. But apparently sometimes they need to make a few modifications to the software that they are using. ( Free Software is about Freedom, not price ) For example, by the name of their fork we could assume, that they needed a better, more realistic, paint tool. And they made it using the source code of GIMP.

Hollywood loves Free Software and the free culture. There are just two problems:

- They have the money to buy proprietary software, so they don't think twice.
- Their main-people are usually copyright-minded imbeciles.

Conclusion

We sometimes get this feeling of elevated self-worth when imagining ourselves doing something most people don't. When we imagine ourselves in the center of the attention. I was guilty of it myself. And might still sometimes be guilty of it. When I was 14 I remember thinking that I am such a genius that if I write texts with mistakes in them and then digitize them by typing the words into a computer, I have to keep all of the mistakes, since they are all parts of my immense genius. You would not want to be my friend when I was 14. I would think you are simply one of my fans. While I literally had only filmed just this crap by then.

When you get this feeling you don't want things to be easy for other people. And therefor you kind of don't want things to be easy at all. You want all to struggle and just your immense genius will somehow magically get though all of it. Back then I heard Steven Spielberg talk about the new cellphones and cheap digital cameras. And how it's easy to make a film these days. And with something like Blender being good and becoming more and more popular I felt that something about this seems not right. Too much competition.

Today I grew to appreciate competition. I know that I will not make the best movie ever, probably ever. There is a chance. But I don't even have a smallest chance of knowing how small the chance is. I know, though, that I can learn on my previous attempts to make my next attempts closer to the best movie ever. I'm Not Even Human was wooden and badly animated. Moria's Race is far more alive and I take far more care with animation on it. But it's still has it's challenges, that I had not though about, could exist. For example, even though the hand rigs of Moria's Race's characters are endlessly more usable than the crap I had to use in I'm Not Even Human, the hand rigs in Moria's Race are shit regardless. If I Alt-R and then Alt-G on them, it gives me a weirdly too open of a palm. Which makes shaping the bloody thing very annoying. Also they don't have fingernails. Perhaps on next film.

Competition and collaboration, but more importantly when you can do friendly, collaborative competition - it's the way we, humans, move towards the future. The funny thing is we never get there. Since as soon as we get there it's no longer future, but instead the present. And then quickly it becomes the past. But we should not stop because of this peculiar way the words work. We should aim forward, instead of inside. By "inside" I mean - like when you are not collaborating... Like a secret thingy... Anyway I'm too tried to make sense at this point.


Happy Hacking!!!

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