0MN1

Working on a scene, I realize I won’t be able to bring my vision to life: The “rock” or “sedimentary” or "planet” element for the ground won’t work because of the amount of details required to portray something realistic. I had up to 16K texture map loaded or 8 x 8K maps tile but even at that level of details I could see the polygons and the bump and displacement map wouldn’t produce all the subtle elements with the camera angle going from extremely wide to extremely close. Of course I could easily restrain myself and keep the whole thing at a medium shot but how would that be groundbreaking or challenging?

It made me think that sometimes you have to fail, and it’s usually for the best! I can’t have rocky mountains and lava fields, so what? Mechanical / Artificial structures works well even in large scene (I’ve beaten my personal record with this one, the previous was held by Inventing the Future from Isiah Medina where I had to design an array of Baby being made, the scene was made at scale in meters, I’ve never done anything that big before) plus the idea behind this scene is described as the following: The Forge, a place nowhere in the void that someone seek when one must attempt to engineer something. Usually nothings comes out of it as it is an empty shell but eventually... things happen ! As you can see, changing this place to a half blown rocky planet partly mechanical to a fully work in progress artificial planet “under construction” is even more appropriate.

Outer Space may mostly be made of void (like everything in the universe) but the little something there is, is worth infinity. Just experimenting with composition, colors, lighting and character.

Disney’s Star Wars Trilogy made me think a lot about Plato’s allegory:

In Star Wars I to VI, the narration and the world is the projection hiding the truth, which is outside where a revolution happens, changing cinema course forever reshaping its DNA to a digital frontier. George kindly invite you within the illusion to rethink friendship, love, politic, science, art, history, travels, energy and so on... At first, it’s a bit too much and you’re unsure of what you’re seeing but enough place is made for you to understand each painting and it’s never a question of reality or what is physically there because it’s obviously deceiving but rather what can we think of it once we transcend the illusion.

In Disney, it’s the idea that you got out of the cave but feels more comfortable at home, like Cypher in the Matrix, you want to be re-integrated to the framework and forget all you’ve seen. It’s striking in interviews where they declare the illusion by saying they shot it on film and used traditional special effects like costumes, props and miniatures. Yet, even if they can’t acknowledged on the frontline the industry has already transformed and these three sequel movies are the one with the highest amount of widely different digital camera (Alexa, Alexa65, Red, Sony F23...) mastered in a digital environment and the greatest number of VFX shots of all star wars ever. They were movies desperately trying to go back to the cave, not to help out the one that remained (even if they did as a side effect because their presence was already a disruption of the illusion) but to try to see if everything could be just as it was, within this illusion. And yes, everything was as it was... only there was no pictures in the cave anymore.

Today I watched a film I hadn’t seen for a very long time with my friend Alex: Star Wars The Phantom Menace. I did not remember the editing to be so tightly packed with things, it was like going into a roller coaster filled with multiple layers of Action, Fun, Science, Politic...

A lot of times I could hear myself says “I can do that now in CGI” which is a 50/50 mix of knowledge and technology that caught up. ILM work still holds super strong today.

I’m about to see Attack of the Clones right now. I guess the coming of the “last” film in the skywalker franchise had me nostalgic but also excited because this is the kind of movies that wanted me to make movies.

This picture of 0MN1 also tells me in a way that sometimes you have to put things aside, to rest a bit and calm your mind so you can focus back on what’s important.

LOG #002

I struggled a bit with some design. I wanted to make an “art” piece, that served no practical function in the room next to the bed. After looking at tons of industrial designs and mimicking plenty, I just realized it wouldn’t work so I gave up for a while.

That was until yesterday when I had a conversation on facetime with Jungeun and I recalled a discussion I previously had this weekend with Alexandre on the attempt to “finitize” infinity.

If By reducing infinity, at least one of its part is still equal to infinity, then it doesnt manage to create a lesser infinity, the infinity preserves its infinity even if divided. So i executed a design based on a map toying with Badiou’s / Canthor’s set theory.

LOG #001

Small Flat where Merithèque’s Derivative Intelligence (M’) will spend some time learning the entire knowledge of the Non-verse concentrated in the city neural core.

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When I was studying Visual Effects, I always wondered why artist would work on a shot basis and only make what’s important for the frame. Most notorious example was the use of Matte Painting where the artist would only draw the part of the mountain that needs to be within the frame. Everything surrounding it wouldn’t be drawn. I argued with my teachers that the future was to go full CGI and build sets before actually shooting anything, that way you have absolute freedom to navigate the camera and choose the axis you want. The problem at that time was the technology, rendering would take a huge amount of time and it was only logical to work only what’s within the frame even if that means re-doing all the work if the camera axis is shifted because this work time would still be less than the render time. It’s only recently that I think 0MN1 truly became possible (after 10 years of work) with the rise of GPU rendering (and further improved with OptiX) and denoising algorithm such as Intel Open AI Denoise.