by Rudy Rucker
I was not actually an outcast in high school. I was a friend to the outcast but I was in pretty tight with the in-crowd. Did you ever see that movie Dazed and Confused? I could just as well say go see that movie, that was my high school years. As long as you were one of the dopers you were okay. I was like the class beat poet.
I'll tell you what, though. There's no question to me that if I had gotten laid a little earlier in life there wouldn't have been a Church of the SubGenius.
RR: How did you meet your wife?
Stang: I needed a girl to act in a 16 mm film I was doing and she was in the drama club at her school. She was an older woman; she was a senior and I was just a sophomore. We ended up going to the same college together, to University of Texas at Austin. I was only there a year, and then I went to SMU and flunked out because I was making World of the Future.
RR: That movie showed you dressed like a crazed crying clown and shooting up speed.
Stang: That was fake. If you look closely it was a big beer can with a spike that slid up inside it. I never did do that, shoot up hard drugs. Compared to my friends I was real straight. Most of my high school friends are dead from drug overdoses. It's a real shame. Only the hardy SubGeniuses survived.
RR: How often have you really seen "Bob"?
Stang: The only time I've ever seen him was when he got shot in San Francisco. I never get invited to those parties where people see him. Philo always says, well the guest list was full. "Bob" owes me quite a bit of money. This check's been in the mail for fifteen years now. If it's in his best interest to meet you then he'll meet you. But frankly, I'm scared shitless of the guy. What might be good for him may not be good for you.
RR: What are the Church's teachings in a nutshell?
Stang: Fuck the normals and get all the slack you can.
RR: How do you get away with being so weird all the time for so many years?
Stang: I have a wife and a color television and they both work.
Appeared in Frauenfelder, Sinclair, Branwyn, Eds.,
The Happy Mutant Handbook, Riverhead Books, 1995.
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Special Effects: Kit-Bashing the Cosmic Matte
What with Al Gore's data superhighway initiative, the Time magazine cover on cyberpunk, the new HDTV standard, the Wild Palms miniseries, and the computer-generated dinosaurs of Jurassic Park - well, it starts to feel like computer reality is finally here.
Why do so many of us care so much? What is the big attraction of things like networking, virtual worlds, artificial life and cyberspace? I think we want computer reality because we want to transcend the mundane.
City-dwellers tire of the panhandlers and the crowds. Country-dwellers tire of the rednecks and the isolation. Commuters have to commute. If only we could get out of our flesh and crawl inside the computers, maybe then we could have it all - we could be safe, in the thick of the action, and capable of travelling at the speed of light!
I remember in the early '60s reading a paperback science fiction book called The Joy Makers.61 It was about some futuristic humanoid hedonists who lived their whole lives in jellied capsules, intravenously fed, with their brains wired into pleasure-buzzers and communication networks. I remember the disgusting image of a burst-open pod with a twitching larval hedonist lying in a melting pool of slime.
In a '90s cyberpunk novel, a hedonist would not end up this way. He or she would long since have turned his or her twitching larval body into a computer program that could be uploaded to any suitable host machine. What is it that we want to transcend? The body, old sport; the flesh, old bean.
But for now, just about the only creatures who really do live as silicon-pure computer data bases are the dinosaurs of this summer's smash hit Jurassic Park. They inhabit computers at George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic in Marin County, California. And no, those nasty dinos are not idle, no indeed. They're busy evolving
61. See the quote and the reference in "Four Kinds of Cyberspace."
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themselves into new colors and shapes so that they can perform in another live action movie: The Flintstones.
Shortly before the release of Jurassic, I spent some time hanging around ILM, trying to get a feel for what's happening at the interface between the old analog world and the new digital realties.
The visual production unit of ILM is disguised as a series of nondescript garages and office buildings. The main entrance bears a misleadingly bland sign that says something like ''THE GLOVER COMPANY. OPTICAL RESEARCH LAB." When the Star Wars craze was at its peak, fans and nuts made nuisances of themselves trying to penetrate to the source of the world they'd fallen in love with. One demented seeker even got run over by a car. To this day, ILM is pulled-back and security conscious.
Inside ILM, things are busy and happy. Model makers, computer hackers, animators, and film technicians work in teams to provide the extra zing for many of Hollywood's biggest films.
In making any film, the producers try to shoot as much of it as possible with actors, sets, props, backdrops, and people in costumes. It's up to companies like ILM to enhance the master film by adding the missing pieces: the chrome robots, the spacewar dogfights, the cosmic backgrounds, the melting flesh.
The traditional method of doing this is to build scale models and paint mattes of the missing pieces - a matte being a large, detailed painting, often on glass with part of it left transparent so that a moving film image can be set into the gap. Films of the models and mattes are made, and these model films are then layered onto the master film by a process called optical compositing.
How does optical compositing work? If you're doing something like, say, adding spaceships to a sky background, you might film your model ships and project these model films onto a big screen that is showing a film of the actors beneath the sky. Then you film the combined images directly from the big screen.
If there are only one or two elements to add to a scene, optical compositing is quite cost-effective. But scenes like a space-battle or a dinosaur stampede can involve dozens of different models, each of which needs to have its image added as a separate step.
To get around the problems of optical compositing, ILM and
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Kodak jointly developed a machine which can turn a frame of film into about twenty megabytes of digital information. In a fine example of industrial altruism (or buck-passing), Kodak calls it the "ILM scanner," and ILM calls it the "Kodak scanner." It's a bulky device that looks like a workbench with lenses on top and computers underneath.
The point of scanning film images into digital form is that it then becomes much easier to cut and paste the images together. Each part of the process is perfectly reversible, and you can undo old things without harming newer additions. Optical compositing is giving way to digital compositing.
And once you have the ability to turn your movie film into digital images, the entire range of digital processes becomes accessible to you. It's easy to erase the guy-wires that are used to make a truck fall over in the right direction, for instance. And, most radically, you can add in computer-generated images that are not of any physical model at all. Let one byte of a computer into your tent, and it drags all of cyberspace in there with you.
Computer animation was used to a limited extent for the water snake alien of The Abyss and for the chrome-skinned robot of Terminator 2. When it carne time to create the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, the computer graphics faction at ILM decided it was time to go digital in a big way.
"We began planning for Jurassic in December, 1991," says Mark Dippé, an ILM Visual Effects Supervisor who is a strong advocate of computer animation. "There was a question of should we use computer animation or should we use latex puppets over metal armatures, along with men in rubber suits and some big hydraulically-driven arms. The problem is, you can only shoot a hydraulically-driven device from one angle. And a man in a suit moves wrong. And a puppet can't readily roll on its back if the armature is on its left hip.
There's limitations from the physical things. And when you want a herd of animals - are you going to build five hundred rubber models?"
Dippé and his group modeled their first virtual dinosaurs by measuring some dinosaur sculptures. The resulting numbers were used to create computer meshes: assemblages of mathematical triangles in three-dimensional virtual space. Next came the problem of writing programs to move the meshes around in a realistic way. "We
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had to communicate their massiveness," says Dippé. "What do they notice, what are they afraid of, are they wary? We shot photos of each other acting out the dinosaur roles. We played with little puppets. The others still weren't sure. But I knew this was the opportunity. And in spring of 1992 we had the deal. The computer animation team has about twelve people, and they're shifting us into every arena."
Adding computer animations to a movie involves four steps: modeling, animating, rendering, and compositing. A model is a three-dimensional static model of an object - like a wireframe dinosaur. In animation, you set some keyframe positions you want the thing to be in, and have the computer smoothly fill in the positions between. Rendering converts the computer's three-dimensional model of the camera, the lights, the objects and their surface textures into a two-dimensional image. Compositing is combining your rendered image with the film of the background, with the matte paintings, and with the film of the actors. A typical shot involves doing this for a couple of hundred frames.
The old "animatronix" approach to positioning a model was to have the model be a foam-and-latex creature built over a hinged metal armature with lots of little motors. A wire or a radio control would connect the motors to a puppeteer. But, points out ILM programmer Eric Enderton, "As soon as you have a data link like the radio control, you can replace either end by a computer." Using this insight, the computer animation group built a skeletal data-dino which they could move around to change the position of virtual dinosaur skeletons inside the computer. The data-dino acts like a mouse, or like a DataGlove. The skeleton on the screen emulates whatever pose the data-dino is in.
Once the virtual dinosaur skeletons could be positioned at will, there came the question of the dinosaurs' muscles. Mark Dippé says, "We attached models of muscles to the dinosaur bones, and then we assigned one guy to be the muscle expert for each dinosaur. The muscle expert had to program a complex procedural system of relationships between the muscles and the angles of the joints. The shoulder, for instance, affects a lot of the muscles. And if one of the muscles doesn't swell dramatically enough, we use a secondary set of muscle controls called bulgers."
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At the rendering stage, the material of the dinosaurs' skins was taken into account. What kind of colors and textures go into the tiny triangles of the moving wireframe computer meshes? "Part of the game is image complexity," says Enderton. "And on a computer you have to work for everything. One trick is to bring real world information into the computer. You can scan in actual skin textures. But we had to do more. The dinosaurs' skin was a big deal."
"We finally ended up building a three-dimensional paint system called Viewpaint," adds Mark Dippé. "You get a three-dimensional computer model, and spray some paint onto it. Then you turn the model and the paint turns with it, and then you paint some more." In addition to colors, the "paints" which Viewpaint can apply include such subtle things as shininess, dirtiness, bumpiness, and the patterns of a dinosaur's scaly skin. As a final touch, the skin textures were subtly roughened with computer-generated chaos to give them the indefinable level of detail that characterizes images of the real world.
This seems like an unbelievable amount of work for one movie but, as Dippé happily points out, "All the dinosaur technology can be used again for The Flintstones. The dinosaurs are vicious in Jurassic Park, they have to kill to exist. But in The Flintstones they're like people, they're pets, they complain, the escalator is a dinosaur in a hamster wheel, they're more anthropmorphized. But the techniques are the same. And it doesn't just have to be dinosaurs. We can do all forms of animals now. And superheroes are okay, too."
What next? Enderton says, "The holy grail is to do a believable human in clothes - a human with cloth and hair. This is hard because you know exactly how a human is supposed to move, reflect light, and behave. You're never seen a live dinosaur, which was an advantage for Jurassic."
The success of digital compositing and of the computer animations for Jurassic Park has set off a small upheaval within ILM. The tinkerers in the creature shop and the model shop feel threatened. "I liked working on a stage with lights, making something to look real," recalls Jeff Mann, former head of the model shop, and now Director of Production Operations, which creates digital mattes. "There's a camaraderie in the production aspect; you have a common goal to make it real. We worked for ten years to make the process flow smoothly, and
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it seems weird to suddenly do it all on one work station. The change to work stations is happening so fast - it's like the Richter scale. It's stressful for a fair number of the model builders. ILM is trying to retrain the optical compositors as digital compositors, and to teach some of the model builders to use the tools of the computer to build computer models. Some will be able to adapt, some will get to keep building models, and some will go do something else."
But models are not going to fade out overnight. Even in Jurassic Park, the old-style rubber models were used for many scenes - such as the one where the T. Rex attacks the car. For each shot, it's a question of which technique will get the job done for the least money in the fastest time. Despite ILM's recent alliance with the Silicon Graphics computer company to form a Joint Environment for Digital Imaging (JEDI!), convincingly realistic computer animations are still very expensive. As Dippé puts it, "A movie like Terminator 2 or Jurassic is like building the pyramids."
The model builders refer to their creations as "gags." They're like elaborate practical jokes, in a way, things that can fool your naked eye. They're fun to be around.
An example. As I was touring the creature shop with Mark Dippé and the ILM publicist Miles Perkins, Mark suddenly said, "Hey, Rudy, look at this!"
I walked over and Mark pulled back a sheet to reveal a tortured rubber man on an operating table. Leaning over him was a rubber alien wielding something that looked like dental apparatus. Suddenly the tortured man began to move and twitch. I screamed. The gag was a hidden cable leading to a control in Miles's hands. This was great. I thought about Jeff Mann's wondering if working on a work station could ever be as much fun as handling real models.
While I was in the creature shop, Miles mentioned to me that the main stash of old models and creatures is in the ILM archives, located at Skywalker Ranch, a half hour deeper into Marin County. I had an instant mental image of the great hall where the crated-up Ark of the Covenant gets stored at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I knew I had to go.
Several days later, I drive with ILM head publicist Lisa van Cleef up a misty winding valley towards the California coast. The Sky-
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walker Ranch includes George Lucas's offices, a sound studio, and guest quarters for visiting ILM customers - such as Steven Spielberg. Everything is California-perfect, like the best weekend retreat you can imagine. The sound studio has a small vineyard in its front yard, a gift to George Lucas from Francis Ford Coppola. There's even a small fire department and a small working ranch with a few dozen cows - these features were mandated by Marin County before they'd approve the construction of Skywalker Ranch. Since the cows aren't really there for ranching, I guess they're actors of a kind.
There are three or four men busy working on models in the archive building, and one of them, Don Bies, acts as my guide. "You've come at a really good time," he tells me. "We're just restoring the Star Wars models to send them on tour to some museums in Japan." Here in the archives the model builders are happy, and the work stations are far away.
The first gag that catches my ey
e is a baggy humanoid shape, orange with green spots, rubbery, with a hula skirt bedizened with electronic parts, and with a face sporting a three foot snout with red-lipsticked lips on the end. "That's Sy Snootles, the singer from the band that plays in Jabba the Hut's castle in The Return of the Jedi," Don tells me. I pick up a handgrip connected to a cable that leads into the figure's back. When I squeeze the grip, Sy's lips purse.
