Konzortium Kollective

After the success of the Potato Fool's Day ARG for Portal 2, one of the players decided that he would start his own alternate reality game. I had subscribed to his mailing list for further updates on his progress, and today I finally got a chance to go on the wiki. Starting today, I'm going to start following ARG Across the Internet, and I think anyone else who reads my blog should do it, too. It's always good to get into an ARG right at or near the start. Seems like it could be a whole lot of fun.

Portal: A Look Into Gaming As Art

Wow, it's been a while since my last post! I've been very busy with graduation, animating, and job hunting that I haven't really had time to write anything that would be worthwhile (at least, worthwhile to me). Here're some fun new things to celebrate my coming back to this blog. 1) My blog posts should now get linked to my Tumblr. This still is kind of a personal blog for me in the sense that I'm still just really accruing/dissecting interesting things for my own benefit, but people who read or stumble upon my Tumblr might find these sorts of things interesting. So I'll be friendly and share. Ha ha. 2) I'll try to post more often. I've got a lot of things that I should be sharing here. Seriously. A lot. No exaggeration. You should see my desktop— actually, wait, you shouldn't. Anyone who looks at it is amazed at all of the things that I accrue on there. But it's all just things I collect to inspire my art and just to inspire me in general. And I'd like to write more posts explaining why I enjoy what I snag off the internet.

Alright. Let's end this long period of silence with something that I really should have been talking about four years ago (and something that I've been blabbing about more than usual on Tumblr since March): gaming, narrative, and character— specifically in my favorite video game, Portal.

I've never really thought of myself as a gamer. I mean, I've played video games for my entire life, but I was playing games like Berserk on my dad's Atari 2600. I was trying to catch Carmen Sandiego on our Tandy. I'd trade Pokémon with the kids in my fifth grade class during recess on my Game Boy. I never thought of myself as someone who could ever get really invested in video games, or see them as anything that could ever provoke deep meaning.

I knew about Portal through a friend who had gotten the newly released Orange Box and had watched her play it, but it was such a short playthrough that we didn't have any time to view anything other than a part of a puzzle she was still working on. It wasn't until I stumbled upon this video that I really became intrigued. The quips were hilarious, but I wanted to know: who the hell was this character? Cue me getting an XBox after watching a full playthrough of the game for the sole purpose of playing through it for myself.

It got me thinking about other games that I hadn't played. I wasn't going to let my XBox go to waste, so I started buying other titles: Fallout 3, Halo Reach, Mirror's Edge, the list goes on And, honestly, all of these first person shooters and other puzzle games don't hold a candle to the overall feeling of Portal. Boiled down to it's essence, a video game is a series of puzzles you are rewarded later on for. For example, in FPS games, you have to figure out how to strategize and find your opponents, then take them down with whatever weapon you think will get the job done so you can rack up points and win the game. Same thing with platformers and RPGs (and the whole idea of item collecting and achievement hoarding). In the beginning of Portal, it's clearly established that you will be going through a series of tests and will be rewarded at completion of the course. The fact that this is a game is not hidden, but it's still disconcerting. At least in other games, you know that there're going to be villains you have to fight along the way. In Portal, the only character you know through the entire game is an AI voice guiding you through a tutorial on how to use a Portal gun. There are no other human characters other than the player. And yet, as you continue through these seemingly pointless tests, the turrets that try to kill you and the Weighted Companion Cube that you are forced to carry around with you feel more human and alive than some other video game NPCs.

And then comes the surprising plot twist to the game (note: SPOILERS for anyone who still hasn't played this game): the realization that, all along, this AI that has been guiding you through the tests isn't just spouting off pre-recorded messages. After almost getting killed, you have to use everything you've been taught in the previous test chambers to escape from being roasted in a fire. That's the amazing thing about Portal: clearly, the first half of the game is a tutorial, but it doesn't feel like it at all. Once you've flung yourself into the inner workings of Aperture Science, you really feel as though you're violating someone's privacy, going into a part of the game that neither your omniscient tester nor the game developer wanted you to go into. The best part is the feeling of satisfaction when you've realized how you can use portals to traverse through such clandestine areas. There's a particular room that, when I first played, took me about an hour to figure out how to get out of. I was kicking myself when I figured out that the solution was extremely easy (two portals, no complicated flinging involved: color me embarrassed).

Rarely is a pathway obvious to the player (except, of course, the directions you get from the Rat Man, but that's all a consequence of the story) as there are multiple solutions to avoid each obstacle. I don't want to talk about Portal 2 too much (I'll leave it for a future post), but I think the main difference between the sequel and the original was that, in the second game, the player's hand was held way too much. There was usually just one way to solve a particular puzzle, and while it helped with the pacing of the story, it felt artificial at times. Places to put portals were clearly marked with lined boundaries (it was one step behind placing large, neon "PUT PORTAL HERE" signs everywhere). In the first Portal, I think there was only a few times where places to put portals were marked with multicolored tiles, but that was it. And with that lack of information of where to go, a player felt a lot more rebellious while running away from the disembodied voice of their captor.

And speaking of that mysterious woman, let's talk a bit about GLaDOS.

To me, GLaDOS is like a mixture of Josef Mengele and Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development. She's sort of a sultry robotic scientist who has really no regard for human life and only for her own (and the life of science, at least). While on one hand I like how her history was revealed in the sequel, from a story standpoint it really wasn't necessary. More of a welcomed bonus. The allure of GLaDOS is exactly that you don't know who she is. You don't understand why you are where you are, or why you're being tested. You don't get why she's so murderous, if it's just a result of faulty Aperture programming or if AI in the future not only can become sentient, but passive aggressive as well. But in the end, there are no loose ends. There's really no resolution to the story. And, if you ignore the events of Portal 2, it seems that GLaDOS lives on to continue science for mysterious purposes.

I always say that a movie is successful if you can have an in-depth conversation about it once you've finished watching it. Portal is the art house movie about two women trapped in a mad house of science that was made in video game form. It's the first video game that ever blew my mind, and the only video game that I still go back to time and time again to appreciate for its story along with its fantastic gameplay.

As an extra bonus, here are some links that I've gathered over the past year about why Portal is such an amazing game and general info about females and female characters in gaming. Most of these can describe why I think Portal is great a lot better and more in depth, and why it was a call to video game artists to focus on story and character (and the role of the female in games).

ARTICLES ON FEMINISM AND VIDEO GAMES

• http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=1816
• http://www.infinitelives.net/2010/01/16/video-game-feminist-of-the-decade-or-when-you-is-a-girl/
• http://www.acidforblood.net/2009/02/comparing-female-protagonists-portal-and-mirrors-edge.html (which is about Portal and Mirror's Edge)
• http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Gaming
• http://www.alternet.org/sex/145843/enlightened_sexism:_%22women's_success%22_means_it's_fine_to_resurrect_--_even_celebrate_--_sexist_stereotypes
• http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/06/12/5056/
• http://www.justinecassell.com/publications/gg_introduction.pdf
• http://gomakemeasandwich.wordpress.com/ (Just… this entire blog is an amazing resource as to how women are portrayed in the industry. Progress is happening but things still need to be changed.)

THINGS ABOUT PORTAL

• http://bakka111.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/some-thoughts-portal-2/
• http://www.gamesradar.com/xbox360/f/portal-is-the-most-subversive-game-ever/a-20071207115329881080/g-2006071916221774024
• http://www.gamesradar.com/f/portal-is-the-most-subversive-game-ever/a-20071207115329881080

ARGs and Me: An Awfully Written Intro

I've realized that, if I were to ever get into the gaming industry, that story would be the thing I would most be interested in crafting rather than the actual mechanics. This is why I've recently been researching ARGs: alternate reality games, where one of the most important factors of the game is to make it seem as realistic as possible... mostly without the aid of a console or a computer. This means MUCH less time spent on mechanics and a whole lot more time spent on creating an interesting narrative.

I'm sure if you're a regular user of the Internet, you've stumbled upon one of these before. I've been somewhat involved in two past games (for Cloverfield and Portal 2) and have come across remnants of others, my favorites so far being the Aperture Science website for Portal (seriously, the employee application is one of the funniest things I've read, and if you want to read it as well, go to the website and type in "login", username: cjohnson, password: tier3, then enter "ls", then "apply") and the seven deadly sins packages/websites for Dante's Inferno (which were less narrative based but definitely raised some general questions about morality). Most recently, I've signed up to finish the end of the Tron Legacy ARG, Flynn Lives, and have started participating in some of the more recent events.

And so far, from what I've seen, ARGs have been closely tied with advertisements for products. Off the top of my head, lonelygirl15 is a sort-of ARG— not a game because this was only comprised of videos —that was able to successfully trick an audience into thinking it was real while at the same time being incredibly engaging. What I really want to do is see how an ARG that isn't based off of some pre-existing product/story could be engaging, fun, and most importantly successful. I don't know if there are already some out there, but I bet that if there aren't, it could be done somehow.

All of that said, here's the first stepping stone in my quest to either search for or make an original ARG from ARGN.com.

Three Movies and Many Caps

I didn't really want to make a huge post about all of these films, so here're a couple of screencaps I've taken from some recent films I've watched with some interesting compositional stuff that's probably not actually super interesting but hey I think they're interesting and look at that I'm making a run-on sentence so without further ado, I'll just get my creepy nerdiness out of the way and start with these:

Pokémon is one of those shows that… well, you either hate it because you feel that it's all a huge marketing ploy or you love it immensely because of the escapist story of being able to go off into the world to capture crazy animals and have amazing adventures. I've fallen into the trap of loving them for the animation and the stories, specifically for the third Pokémon movie, Kesshou Tou no Teiou Entei, which I think translates into something like "The Badass Lion Pokémon Entei and his Magic Adventures". The movies are honestly a lot better than the TV show just for overall quality (except the best thing about the whole series, Team Rocket, hardly ever makes an appearance in the films, but that's something to discuss another day). Anyway, in the movie, this little girl Molly loses her parents, finds a whole bunch of magical Pokémon called the Unown, and uses them to create her own scary dream world and conjures up her "Papa", the legendary Pokémon Entei. Through a series of events that would take a while to explain, Entei kidnaps Ash's mother because Molly wants to pretend that she's her real mother... so Ash and friends must go and infiltrate the girl's dream world to get his mom back.

Every time I watch Pokémon nowadays I always think of the three kids as the band of wandering, adventurous detectives. I think it stems from Harry Potter being enhanced for me by Brad Neely's Wizard People, Dear Reader where he kept calling the trio of friends "junior Sherlock Holmes'." So yeah. Here are the four detectives, Misty, Brock, the rat, and Ash. And this is just a really nice cap of all four of them together in a lovely meadow before Brock has to kick the crap out of Molly in a Pokémon battle.

...I guess I won't explain every scene cap, but this next one makes more sense with at least a sentence of explanation below it...

Here Molly finds out that her dad has just disappeared while on an expedition. Small Molly, spaced far away from everyone else, meaning Molly feels small, and she feels like she's so far away from anyone's help. Very obvious composition, yes, but I don't know. I liked it for some reason.

This one is just so awkward and hilarious, and Ash looks like a big dork as always. "YEAH TOTODILE LET'S DO OUR VICTORY JUMP." I want to know how someone can jump that high. I don't want to try it for myself, though. It looks too dangerous. I'll leave that kind of move to the real Pokémon trainers.

I didn't really take too many good screencaps, because when I was watching this movie the other day I only got through half of it. The second half is a whole lot cooler and has so many better opportunities for caps (note to self: do a scene study of this movie!), but... I took this one because it was just so awkward. I don't know if it's just because things are chopped off in this version of the movie (is this not as wide as the original?) but Molly's just placed strangely in the frame. Maybe it's just me. Either way, sometimes you just gotta look at the frames you hate, too.

PIKACHU. WEARING A HAT. I AM LAUGHING LIKE A LUNATIC. The framing here is obvious and excellent. Also, that cake in the back looks delicious. I really want some.

Anyway, next movie. Wristcutters. It's a good film with Gogol Bordello music about where you go when you commit suicide. Again, not many caps (just this one), but I did watch through the whole movie, and what I really liked about it wasn't the compositions (which were good) but the color. Everything is so washed out and depressing, because... well, Suicide World is a depressing place where you can't smile and bad things happen to you all of the time. But it was gorgeous and never distracting.

Now Kabei: Our Mother. Also a really good film that almost made me cry. And I say almost because I thought the ending was so incredibly corny. Otherwise, yes, it was a really nice film, and interesting to see both WWII from a Japanese perspective and see the universality of family and loss. And to see Tadanobu Asano. Oh yes. That man is amazing.

But I really liked all of the scenes that happened inside of houses, which was more or less half of the movie. On one hand is was voyeuristic, and on the other... it made you feel like you were also a part of the family. Which made each loss and gain within the household a lot more emotional.

This is obviously the truest cap in the entire film. And the last one from this set.

Great Scott! Babbling About BTTF

For some reason I feel as if I've been writing these blog posts as if they've been assignments for school. A few of them seem really dry and stale to me, and I'm sure that I could explain myself better if I just kind of... well, relax. I shouldn't be focusing on whether or not the writing's good. I mean, this blog is supposed to be for myself (but then again I'm my own worst critic).

That said, I just found out that Telltale is making a new Back To The Future video game, and I must let out my emotions in my own special way:

OH MY GOD ARE YOU FOR REALS YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS THIS IS GOING TO BE SO SUPER KILLER AWESOME AND CHRISTOPHER LLOYD IS IN IT AND SOME OTHER DUDE IS IN IT PRETENDING TO BE MARTY AND HE ACTUALLY SOUNDS LIKE MARTY AND OH GOD WE'RE GOING TO GO BACK IN TIME AND BACK TO THE FUTURE SIX MONTHS AFTER THE THIRD MOVIE I MEAN I JUST I HOPE THAT CLARA IS NOT IN IT SHE ANNOYS ME TO NO END BUT ANYWAY BACK TO THE FUTURE GAME ARRRRRRGH THIS IS GREAT I AM ECSTATIC!!!

Ahem.

As if you couldn't tell, Back To The Future is one of my all-time favorite movies. It completely encapsulates the feelings I get when I think about my childhood, particularly the scene in the first movie where Marty and Doc first test out the time travel DeLorean at Twin Pines/Lone Pine Mall (minus the whole Doc getting chased and gunned down by terrorists bit). Although, and I don't know if I'm the only one who thinks this way, out of all three of the BTTF movies, my favorite is the second. I love seeing how the future and the past are changed throughout the first film (and how, every time I see the movie, I find a tiny detail about these changes that I missed the first time around) but the second one is just filled with so many more. And I'm kicking myself now because I completely forgot to bring the movie with me to Chicago (but I have the first and third ones, what's up with that?!) and I wanted to make some screencaps and list some of the things that I absolutely love about the film.

Luckily, this is the Internet. And on the Internet, you can get anything.

Well, the first thing that I can say is that... oh Lord, I actually used to hate this movie with a passion. I hated it just as much as I did the third movie. But the thing was, I had never seen it in it's entirety: I had just seen the first half hour or so when Doc, Marty, and Jennifer go into the future. After seeing the film entirely, the segment is still pretty corny what with all of it's wild assumptions about what 2015 will be like (example: I cried pained tears when the 3D Jaws tried to eat Marty and he flipped out... how could that look real to anyone with working vision?) and Michael J. Fox playing fifty billion copies of himself (one in drag, even, pahahaha) but it has to be there because 1) it was already set up at the end of the first movie, and 2) it sets up the rest of the awesome, awesome plot...

MARTY'S HORRIFYING ALTERNATE UNIVERSE!

"Bikers everywhere, Strickland has a gun, and I don't have a room anymore?! AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"

Personally, I would think that ruining the possibility of my existence would be less scary than actually having to exist in a horrifying world where my mother is married to Biff Tannen. Even worse would be finding out that Biff murdered my dad and that my best friend was committed to a mental institution and that I had just left my sleeping girlfriend on some stranger's porch in a dangerous neighborhood (but I always find it hilarious that this is actually one of the least of Marty's worries... oh that McFly). When Marty gets hit with the realization that his future is all screwed up (not knowing how it could have happened), it's the darkest part of the entire trilogy and leads up to one of my favorite scenes.

Everything's bleak, everything's dreary... from what I remember, it's raining outside, and Doc and Marty (and Einstein if he can even comprehend what's going on) are the only two people in this specific timeline— the entire world —to realize that things are not going as they should be. The worst part is that they don't even know why it's happening. Well, Marty doesn't understand why, at least. It's a hopeless situation where your throat just plummets into your stomach and any way to resolve what has happened is just thrown out the window. This isn't a matter of getting your parents back together by having them kiss at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance... this is a matter of having to go back through the entire fabric of time and figure out just what the hell happened.

But luckily, Doc is not only a scientist, but a master detective, and is gonna learn ol' Marty a thing or two.

Doc explains everything that's going on to Marty... summarized, Marty messed everything up and has to fix it. Future Biff took Marty's sports almanac, stole the DeLorean, gave it to his younger self in the past, and used it to win millions, which led to everyone Marty loves in 1985 suddenly leading terrible existences and/or being dead. Marty's got to go have a showdown with Biff and find out if he still has it so he and Doc can go back AGAIN in time and stop Biff from giving Biff's almanac to Biff.

It makes total sense.

So our hero confronts the villain cowboy-style (both a symbol of his perceived advantage over Biff and foreshadowing to what will happen in BTTF III see this is why this trilogy is great so much foreshadowing and clues hey I'm starting to nerd out here ehehehehehe) . Marty is obviously pretty cocky on arrival, but of course, once he's alone with Biff in his office...

Meep.

Oh, how the tables have turned! Marty's bigger-than-the-entire-frame stance is now substituted for a now tiny, tiny presence. McFly obviously does not know how he's going to get out of this one.

Eventually Biff flips out, having revealed the secret of his riches, and tries to kill Marty the same way he killed Crispi— I mean, George. There's a short chase up to the rooftop where they finally have a short altercation before Marty fakes Biff out and jumps off of his stepdad's casino...

...only to appear a short time later on the DeLorean, once again looming triumphant above Biff. He smashes Biff's face in with the DeLorean door for good measure, and proceeds to zip off with Doc to 1955.

After that, it's fun and laughs in the 50s, revisiting the dance and snagging the almanac back from Biff. But, honestly, it should have ended right then and there. What's so good about the second movie is that, instead of constructing an entirely new setting/time period for Doc and Marty to travel to, as an audience we get to relive our favorite parts from the first movie and revisit all of the characters. In the third movie, we have all sorts of new characters thrown at us and, while they are descendants of Marty and Biff... honestly, why should we as an audience care about them? There's already a pre-constructed universe that our heroes live in, and if you've already spent the second movie building upon the first, why would you just ditch that and go into a completely alien world with people that the audience doesn't relate to (example: Doc was never described/hinted to being lonely or wanting to fall in love, nor do I think anyone cared to explore that, so what in the world was the purpose of Clara?)? I'm not completely knocking the film, because there are some really good parts (a time-traveling train isn't nearly as cool as a DeLorean, but it still works out fine) but BTTF II, as a sequel, worked a whole lot better.

And after typing ALL of that out and nerding out to the point where now I'm kind of embarrassed to post this, I can say that... this is exactly why I'm so excited about the video game. Hopefully it isn't exactly like the third movie where new worlds are completely created that we can't become familiar with. If the entire plot is expertly wound together where everything can be linked together in a way where a player can actually feel the character's fear/excitement/despair/whatever... it should definitely be successful. And I'll be so super stoked.

Staging and Poses - A Real World Example

I was doing a couple of animations this weekend, and one became a great example of how not to do staging/poses and how to do them right. In this one scene that I'm working on, I have my baby raptor, Roscoe Jr., running away and trying to hide from his ultimate enemy. Of course, he runs towards a ridiculous hiding spot: a huge, looming tree. In the beginning of the scene he slides in, does an anticipation, and then... GASP! Roscoe sees the tree in his path and is simultaneously in awe and panic.

First offense: he's off-model. Of course you don't know what the model sheets are, but I do, and Roscoe looks emaciated and... well, just plain ugly. Legs are spread too far apart, his tail is a bit too wide, crazy arm and eyebrow things going on: he looks like a mess. Second: both the tree and Roscoe are leaning in the same direction. It's a little more harmonic than I would have liked in a scene that's supposed to be really stressful. Roscoe should be staring up at the tree, not cowering before it. Here he looks like he'd be apologizing to the tree, not realizing that the tree is something that is pretty dang tall AND something that is not good to be faced with in his particular situation.

MUCH better! Roscoe's cute little body is on-model, and he's now looking up at the tree. Before this, Roscoe skids to a stop in front of the tree, and this pose is more like what would result from him bending forward and then bouncing back to a stop. His head is bent further up, creating a clear line from the top of his head up to the top of the tree. Beautiful! Glorious! This pose is a keeper. Applause all around!

Clerks: The Animated Series - Design and Style

I really wish that Clerks: The Animated Series had run a lot longer. Seriously, it had so much awesome potential, and I would have loved to see the expanded universe of Leonardo, New Jersey. Plus, well... Clerks is an amazing movie to begin with that had relatable and interesting characters. And I would have loved to have watched more Randal snarkiness. Heh.

But wait, this post isn't supposed to be about me pining for more episodes of a great TV show. I found two really great videos about character design and style that are pretty interesting on their own. I think it's so interesting that they had the hardest time trying to design Jay's character. It seems that a character that's so culturally recognizable and ready to be caricatured alongside his "hetero life mate" would have been easy to design, but apparently that wasn't the case according to these videos.