so for the past 2 weeks i have been grueling over my demo reel and thesis paper! and i am very elated to report that i have finished both! my demo reel can be found
here and with out further adue, i give you my thesis for review and enjoyment! (sorry about the formatting in advance ^^;; it look so much better in word!)
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Ah the movies! Nowadays, many of us take for granted what and how the modern movie made it to where it is today. However, most don’t fathom that the “acting” part is second to the environment. Yet if you take out a movie’s environment, a great deal is lost in the feeling and meaning of the movie. 3D has allowed artists and set designers to create entire worlds that come straight from imagination on a tremendous detailed and large scale. It is these 3D environments that inspire people all around the world. “But why should I appreciate environments more than the acting” you might ask. It is in the history of the environments that we must look to, to appreciate how environments became what they are today.
To understand the evolution of the 3D environment we must first look at its roots. Theatre was first conceived in ancient Greece. Large gatherings of people sat around an amphitheater or natural outcropping, and watched the actors put on plays that often lasted the entire day. At this time, theatre was so different from the grandiose scenes that you see today in movies, that you might find it hard to believe that what you might be watching even was a play. For starters, plays were written in a different manner, one main point being that all plays had a chorus, or narrator throughout the whole play. Another major difference was that they had hardly any props apart from a few, very limited masks. The only stage machinery that they had was a very crude and simple one that would allow actors to be hoisted in the air often to represent the gods, hence the term "deus ex machina". They had no backdrop other then the buildings, or natural scenery behind them. This mattered greatly to the play because this is the vary reason why plays didn’t have scene changes back then, mainly for the fact that such a notion wouldn’t be conceived till much later, and they had to work with what they had.
Theatre environments changed very little until around the Renaissance. Plays until then were often of religious nature, and often simple retellings of stories from the bible that would take up to three days to put on. Since they were on moving carts until the time of the renaissance, they had very little use for many props and other things. However, because of the “rebirth” of ideas, technology, and art, theatre was no different. People started using elaborately painted backdrops that were meant to stay that way through out the whole play. Because plays were now held indoors, the stage machinery also became more elaborate, thus allowing quite a bit more than the simple machines that the Greeks used in their plays. The plays were also much shorter and started to take on aspects that are much more recognizable to today’s plays and movies.
The fun and excitement of the environment really didn’t get started till the Elizabethan ages. It was then that a man named Inigo Jones was born and changed environments forever. Indigo Jones was born in 1573 in London. Like many people of the renaissance, he was classically trained in Italy before he went to work in Denmark. He eventually returned to England on the recommendation of King Fredrick IV of Denmark. It was in England where he made his mark on theatre that would change it forever. In England he brought first and foremost the proscenium arch. The function of the proscenium arch was to further set the actors apart from the audience, and to make the play seem more like a fantasy rather than reality. Another thing that he's famous for is all the work that he did with the plays's background. One of the first things that he brought with him from his early studies in Italy was the idea of moving backgrounds. It consisted of a painted piece of cloth that could move by way of the turning of two poles that it was attached to. This might seem like a basic idea, but before Indigo, the environments of plays were very stationary, and were limited to one place! However thanks to Indigo, plays began to become even more diverse and alive thanks to his ingenuity of, none other than, the scene change. Before him, no one really thought about changing a scene before, or if they did, it wasn't really widely thought of as an important thing. However, now that play writers could change scenes, plays began to become even more diverse and had an added sense of three dimensionally. The birth of environment as we know it today had happened!
Theatre prospered in the Elizabethan age, but because of Oliver Cromwell, all the advances that happened to all of theatre almost died. For almost an entire generation theatre was banned. When plays were again allowed, many of the great actors weren't around anymore. That is, if it weren't for the illegal play houses that put on plays where eve they could. It was in this period of theatrical darkness that the theaters began to adapt to the square configuration that we know today. However, the major thing to have an impact on environments in this period was the invention of artificial lighting.
"In the new theaters, candles and, later, oil lamps were used for illumination, even though windows were often built above the stage and audience; candelabra were hung or supported above, at the side, and within the scenery. The footlight became a prominent source of available light, coming, as it did, from so close to the performers. The stage area was now backed and framed with scenery and structure, the acting area itself thrusting forward to the audience from within this frame" (Fraser, 100-101)
Now that the stage was now truly separated form the audience fully thrusting the actors into a level of fantasy and fame. The modern actor was born! It was also at this time, when entire generations of actors were lost that the demand outgrew the supply of actors. Thus, for the first time, women were now allowed to act.
With this rebirth of the theatre after the rule of Cromwell, playhouses were so packed that they had to start building viewing boxes behind the proscenium arch. This put the acting even closer to the patron, which were usually of the wealthy variety. It was also at this time that the lighting further set the audience apart form the acting on the stage. The dimming of the house lights began as purely a coincidence. As the play drew on, the once bright candle lit stages began to dim. This, however, seemed to stick, and once the late 1800s came around, having the house lights dimmed was a staple of theatre. For the play houses that were blessed with a wealthy benefactor, such as the infamous Queen Victoria herself, the stage machinery that environments relied upon were very elaborate, even allowing for an aquatic scene with real water!
By the late 1800s, the modern age of theater began to emerge. Plays started taking on more of a realistic stance. No more were the days of Shakespeare's great fantasy worlds of fairies and shape-shifting beings. Now people preferred to see plays imitating real life. Because people started wanting to see plays that imitated real life more than fiction, environments became more elaborate and got a huge boost that really made the art of making environments an art in and of it's self. The biggest boost in the field of environments was the usage of props and the fact that environments were no longer just a cloth backdrop! Now entire sets were in three dimensions! No longer were they flat and lifeless. Now they were made of plastic and the actors could really interact with the environments for the first time. Although it wasn't just the sets that got more complicated. The plays became increasingly elaborate. So much so that this is the first time that the role of the director was first used. However, the man that gave environments the boost they needed was Edward Gordon Craig.
Edward's set designs and theories were some of the greatest to boost environments to what we know of them today. Edward was born in 1872, and from a very early age he was introduced to theatre and acting where it soon became his passion. It was in his 30's that his theories and set designs began to really influence theatre. While most of his set designs were too abstract to ever have been realized, his theories were the most influential. For one, his thoughts that the environments are important, if not even more so than the actors themselves, was the thought that gave environments more of an active role in the plays and later movies. It is because of this theory that some plays began to use marionettes instead of real actors. Although, later in his life he recanted the statement saying that he never meant that actors were useless as a whole. This thought of the importance stayed with theatre and only grew. Thus the environments that you see today are mainly thanks to Edward Gordon Craig. He died in 1966 at the age of 94, but his theories about acting and sets will be imprinted on theatre forever.
The single most influential person that allowed 3D to later even become a thought was none other that the great inventor, Thomas Alva Edison. His idea of motion pictures was made possible by a previous invention called Phenakistoscope, which later gave way to the toy named zoetrope in the mid 1800s. He first entered the scene after the infamous series of events that all stemmed from a bet between Edward Muybridge and Senator Leland Stanford in which debated if a horse left the ground entirely when trotting and galloping. The problem with the “art” of making movies at the time was finding the right way of taking the successive pictures that was the right weight and form, and a camera to take these pictures. Thanks to Edison and his invention of the phonograph and his “nothing is impossible until proven impossible” mentality, he combined the camera with the idea of the phonograph to make a sort of camera that rotated on a wheel. This allowed for the film plates to be properly exposed in sequence in an automated fashion at a high rate. However, the film plates had to be small in order for this camera to work. If the plates were any larger, the weight of the plates would have made the mechanism defunct. It wasn’t until the late 1890s that the Kodak Company developed the right coating that would allow for Edison’s proposed 40 frames per second with the right clarity in the picture. Edison succeeded in creating the first movie camera that was capable of doing 40 frames per second in one-tenth of the time required for exposure (Dyer and Martin). Since then, motion pictures have been growing and flourishing.
Since the days of Edison, the motion picture industry has come a long way and is making leaps and bounds almost every second. Especially that of 3D. 3D has come a long way since the days of TRON. When 3D first started, it took hours and hours to create a single object and hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It was so basic that in TRON they couldn’t do live action shots and CG in the same shot (www.imdb.com). Today, thanks to the ingenuity of James Cameron and the people at Weta and ILM, 3D has advanced to bright futures of facial expression, entire worlds, and the invention of the Simulcam.
The first thing that James Cameron innovated was a completely new way of simulating facial expressions. When capturing the motion for Avatar, James rigged a little camera to the helmets of the actors with a wide angled lens so that he could capture the actor’s emotions while they were preforming the roles. Before Avatar, the actors would go in later to capture their facial expressions in an entire set up where the actor just spoke his lines head-on into a bunch of cameras. Now, thanks to a gentle but firm hand of James, we can now watch actual performances rather then simulated acting. This makes the characters even more believable then their predecessors.
The other ingenuity that would make Edison proud, is the invention of the Simulcam. While producing Avatar, James wanted a way to see what he was filming. He didn’t want to wait to see his vision. It was because of this need that the Simulcam was introduced. The Simulcam is a hand held screen that is marked and connected to a virtual camera in the 3D scene. James could then move this camera around and the screen would show him what was in his 3D world of the movie. For the first time the director could see his finished product instead of waiting to see what came out the other end once the 3D animators are finished with it. The director can now have the freedom to interact with his envisioned environment.
However, today there are more environments that are even more influential then the environments that you see on the screen. Environments that are even more spiracular then the environment of Avatar. These environments are found in video games. When one thinks of video games, images of PACMAN or Mario Brothers might enter your mind. However, the modern video game’s environment has evolved to much more than it once was. No more are the environments that are mere backgrounds. Like a mirror of the environment in theatre, no longer are the days in which the backgrounds are two dimensional. Now the game’s environments are intractable and fully dynamic.
One of the most influential environments to this date is Silent Hill 2. Silent Hill 2 was one of the first games to have the environment be central to the players involvement. The “enemy” in the game wasn’t some eight foot monster with drool hanging out it’s mouth, or flailing arms, but a town itself! A town that has known nothing but evil for all of its existence. Built on an Indian burial ground, the sleepy town of Silent Hill has seen epidemics, prison camps and colonies, mysterious devastating fires, mass mysterious disappearances, and mass mysterious deaths in it’s over four centuries of existence. Not to mention the dark occults that preformed their rituals there. All of this negativity has been built into every fiber of this town. So when the game’s protagonist, James Sunderland, arrives at the request of his dead wife, the town begins conjuring up these abominations that stem purely form James’ own mind. The town is out to get him. So out of this, the necessity of James’ environment, the town, needed to be just as important of an actor as James himself.
To set the stage, the people at Konami made the town very ominous to begin with. The town is constantly shrouded in thick rolling fog, giving the player a feeling of separation from the “real” world right from the start. The second thing that sets Silent Hill 2’s environment apart from any thing else is the fact that when the town shift to it’s “dark” self, the environment changes to a completely deeper and darker scene. The walls become something akin to skin, and covered in rust stains...or is that blood? The creatures manifested are from an even deeper and darker portion of James’ mind, lending their own level of meaning to the environment as a whole. It is because of this level of intimacy that has set Silent Hill 2’s environment apart from every other environment to date. It is environments like Silent Hill 2 that make a 3D environment modeler proud to make the things they do.
Looking back, the history of the modern 3D environment is an intriguing journey. To think that once sets and environments were nothing then mere masks in the times of the Greeks is awesome. The thought that, at one time, environments were static, flat, and thought of as less than important than the acting? The thought is appalling and disgusting! Yet all of this was so in it’s history. As one ponders on the future of environments, especially when pertaining to 3D, the only limit is one’s imagination and heart. In the great words of one of the founding fathers of the modern cinema, “Discontent is the first necessity of progress.” As long as we are discontented with our work as 3D environmental modelers, we will always succeed.
Works CitedBrainyQuote. BrainyMedia.com. Web. April, 17,2010
Book of Lost Memories: Silent Hill Chronicles. Trans. Wallofdeath. Japan; Konami Computer Entertainment, 2003. Print.
Duncan, Jody. “The Seduction of Reality”. Cinefex January 2010 issue 120: 68-146. Print.
Dyer, Frank Lewis, and Thomas Commerford Martin. Edison His Life and Inventions. 2006. Ebook.
Fraser, Neil. Theatre History Explained. Great Britain: The Crowood Press Ltd. , 2004. Print.
Internet Movie Database. IMDB.com, inc. 1990. Web. April, 16, 2010.
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If you have any suggestions about my reel or thesis, please let me know right away as they are both due on the 20th of april! but i hope you had atleast some fun reading and watching :)
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