OK, so there's some positive action here....
Posted: Mon Apr 01, 2013 6:15 pm
Out of the blue today at work, I got an e-mail from Lynn Hendee, as sort of an introduction to Gavin Hood. I think, if not for Lynn's e-mail, I would have totally doubted the veracity of what happened next--namely, in the course of about an hour, I was on the phone with Gavin Hood.
Sometimes I hate being right, but as DD and the other effects companies were putting together their intermediate animations for the Battle School sequences--including to a great extent, the Battle Room sequences--they were running into some problems. The transparent walls of the Battle Room were NOT (as I feared) as disorienting as Gavin Hood had hoped. The visual "anchor" of the constantly-present earth, always "stole" the audience's attention. There was never a way to show the confusion of the students in the Battle Room (since no one who viewed the detailed visualizations EVER bought into it), and there was NEVER a way to separate one's perceptions from the "Earth-Down" orientation and re-map the Battle Room so that the Enemy's Gate was down. It just wasn't working.
The other problem was also one I had predicted--and I had been hoping to be totally wrong about this, but I was not. The corridor surrounding the Battle Room revolved at a speed fast enough to create an outward G-Force of about 90% G, but the pre-viz showed the gravity vector pointing along the axis of rotation, not perpendicular to it! It would be like standing ON the rings of Saturn. Hood was (to put it mildly) rather pissed that I had brought this concept up in a comment at EnderNews.com (if you look, they have taken down the comment). Basically, I think he felt like an idiot for listening to his "engineering advisers."
Luckily, I was able to set up a WEBEX at the office, and we sketched up a bunch of concepts. the footage he has already shot CAN be manipulated (sufficient tech, sufficient choices, sufficient time) to fit my original concept of the Battle School. Actually, he's a smart guy--he pointed out a few weaknesses in my design! Luckily, they were easily "repaired" (in ways that HIS concept, unfortunately, could not be).
As you can probably guess, I'm really not supposed to be posting ANY of this here, but I just can't resist. I'm going to leave this post here for a few hours, and then delete it. Hopefully, none of the Production's "spies" will notice it before it disappears.
I will now officially be sleeping out at the IMAX to be first in line to see the film.
(Oh--and they are going to be making it 3D, after all, using post-production compositing. It will be totally KICK-ASS!!!!)
Sometimes I hate being right, but as DD and the other effects companies were putting together their intermediate animations for the Battle School sequences--including to a great extent, the Battle Room sequences--they were running into some problems. The transparent walls of the Battle Room were NOT (as I feared) as disorienting as Gavin Hood had hoped. The visual "anchor" of the constantly-present earth, always "stole" the audience's attention. There was never a way to show the confusion of the students in the Battle Room (since no one who viewed the detailed visualizations EVER bought into it), and there was NEVER a way to separate one's perceptions from the "Earth-Down" orientation and re-map the Battle Room so that the Enemy's Gate was down. It just wasn't working.
The other problem was also one I had predicted--and I had been hoping to be totally wrong about this, but I was not. The corridor surrounding the Battle Room revolved at a speed fast enough to create an outward G-Force of about 90% G, but the pre-viz showed the gravity vector pointing along the axis of rotation, not perpendicular to it! It would be like standing ON the rings of Saturn. Hood was (to put it mildly) rather pissed that I had brought this concept up in a comment at EnderNews.com (if you look, they have taken down the comment). Basically, I think he felt like an idiot for listening to his "engineering advisers."
Luckily, I was able to set up a WEBEX at the office, and we sketched up a bunch of concepts. the footage he has already shot CAN be manipulated (sufficient tech, sufficient choices, sufficient time) to fit my original concept of the Battle School. Actually, he's a smart guy--he pointed out a few weaknesses in my design! Luckily, they were easily "repaired" (in ways that HIS concept, unfortunately, could not be).
As you can probably guess, I'm really not supposed to be posting ANY of this here, but I just can't resist. I'm going to leave this post here for a few hours, and then delete it. Hopefully, none of the Production's "spies" will notice it before it disappears.
I will now officially be sleeping out at the IMAX to be first in line to see the film.
(Oh--and they are going to be making it 3D, after all, using post-production compositing. It will be totally KICK-ASS!!!!)
