Heavy Rain

Jason!  Jason!.... Jason?

Heavy rain is one of the few games recently that hits every mark.  Not just every mark for a gamer, but even if your not a gamer, it will hit a mark of somesort, pro or con.

First, from a gamer perspective, Heavy rain does a LOT of things differently.  The game starts out in a suesy homemaker home.  Before the game even gets rolling you have to get out of bed, take a shower ( with a full naked ass shot, but thats nothing ) get dressed and head on down stairs.  While your in route, you can feed the bird as well as relieve yourself if your feeling a little "heavy" on the rain.  Your wife comes home and your instructed to help set the table, play outside with your two boys and have a nice dialogue about how other people are stupid in mundane life.  Additionally Heavy rain boosts a unique control system that requires specific rotations of the thumb pads in correlation to the activity your currently acting upon.  Sounds like another remake of the SIMs?  Well not quiet.

From here, still within a locked in narrative, your wifey and the two tots go to a store where one son, buys a balloon.  A red one to be exact... and then suddenly vanishes...   Chasing the red orb, you call out for your boy and almost catch him when *WAM* hes hit by a car as you try and pull him out of the way.

Finally roll the intro credits to Heavy Rain...  Your wife has left you, You've lost your son, and your remaining child is completely distant and could careless if he is in a foster care or your rundown house, as long as theres a TV to occupy his time.... and NOW its time to play...

Heavy Rain explores the narrative of a serial killer called the Oragami killer.  He prays on children, leaving them to drown, hence the title "heavy rain".   Its a good thing you still have one child right?  Well when ol dad takes little timmy down to the park, suddenly HE VANISHES TOO!  You sure are turning out to be dad of the year and lucky your wife doesn't circumcise you for killing TWO of her babies...  Atleast theres a consolation prize, and thats your new found buddy, the Origami killer..  who could infact be you...

One of the biggest and dicies parts of heavy rain is the fact that the father whom would do anything to save his remaining son, actually must, do anything to save his son.  This includes, cut off his own finger, drive 5 miles into oncoming traffic in the rain and a multitude of other feats.

BUT WAIT THERES MORE!  Not only do you get to play this insane father who thinks hes actually the killer, but also a overweight PI and a Special Fed who is addicted to super drugs that allow him to access a nano-type crime fighting interface that makes you think of Time Cop.  Pretty damn cool...

So what makes this not only a twister of mind and dexterity?  Well Heavy Rain works akin to a choose your own adventure book.  If you botch a particular part of th game, the story completely changes...  I experienced this first hand when I picked up my fiance's game ( because who really has time to play games when your a game major..   its much easier to watch your girl play while you coach her through eh hard parts..)  I really hadn't had the time to get use to the controls and was deep into a mission when i started to play and instead of escaping as she did, I was apprehended by the police....  My game instantly took a different narrative then I had watched and I had no idea that this game held so much depth.   And thats my point.  Games have come to hte point where they are the ultimate narrative entity.   I mean why watch a movie or re-read a book if you know the ending?  Well i can tell you for certain if the ending changed each time based on the choices you made, you would certainly give it a GO on round 2.  As we delve into media that has the ability to change as the reader/viewer/player chances, so do their experiences...

Still feel like watering your duck on the farm?

Asterious Polyp

First off id like to say, im not very into graphic novels.  Although I find it extremely pretty, i find that my most enjoyable consumption of media to be either through audio or visual ( video ).  Thats not to say that i dont like to read, quiet the contrary.  But when you have two kids, a fiance, work a job and am in the guinnepig game art major, and have never practiced art till 5 years ago, its safe to say that some sacrifices have to be made to just "keep up".  I did enjoy Mazzuchelli's play at both saturation and negitive and positive space within the piece.  I felt that each character and situation was a world to its own due to how it was portrayed on the page.  The greek influence within the novel is very prevent.  Instead of a standard hero's journey archtype, line, weight and color influence your opinion of the characters and dictate the emotional and situation.   Although the reading was rushed and skimmed towards the end, I did enjoy it.

Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition by Gibson is a modernest look into our interest into trends.  The story follows Cayce Pollard the "cool hunter" as she investigates the trends in a series of internet videos and tries to find out who created them ( or a way for her boss to capitalize on the  mass market )   This book is very different from Neuromancer which I read by Gibson a long time ago.  Although I find the plot interesting,  the fact that all these modern idols are so commonplace today, it leaves the imagination a bit dry.  Neuromancer in the 80s was completely revolutionary in its predictions of the future.  Pattern Recognition on the other hand feels less molded in the what could be, commenting on the what already is post 9-11.  With all the travel, it has a touch of James Bond-esc feel as Cayce travels  and the Scifi-esc inserts from the EVP kept me interested through the story.  However Gibsons use of language creates a bit of a blockage, requiring constant internet searches or dictionary lookups to understand his context.  Unusual as it is, this book questions more to how we look cynically at our past, where as Gibson is best known as the creator of "cyberspace" and predicting the future.

As far as "blogs" the influence my daily life, I frequent www.polycount.com  Digital artists however usually dont spend as much time in blogs as they do in Forums where a plethora of users post and discuss.  This can be akin to Cayce's use of chatrooms or the mass exchange of information in the late 90s during the big boom of chat.  Nowadays people tend to meet and exchange through social media sites such as facebook, however in the late 90s, pre-myspace, the experience of the chat soley based on who was online.  I feel that we are moving today into a archived world where the moment isn't exactly necessary and conversations, information and exchange happen not only at a pace that doesn't have to live in the instantaneousness, but will be displayed for all others to read long after the conversation has closed.

McLuhan's Media Theory

Boogie Nights - Screenplay

For this assignment I read the screenplay of Boogie Nights by Tomas Anderson.   I hadn't seen this movie since the late 90s so even though I had a familiar memory of the movie.  While reading the script the first thing that came to mind was how much depth was to each character.  Each character has a social taboo that both strengthens and limits their lives and lifestyles.   The mother who looses her child, Frank the porno director who acts as a threshold guardian for both his family and peers, or works in porno, yet is obsessed with the fact that his wife is acting.

Each character has the goal of obtaining something, whether drugs, sex or even their own identity.   We take this and identify with each character in a deep sense, which is something you dont generally connect to in a movie about porn and drugs.

Frank feels like a father figure to his porno family and is the threshold guardian to Dirk.   Its an interesting concept to think of a porno director whose main focus is to put story ( something completely not required for the completion of the final product)  to porno.  He films his family in intercourse, which of course would be taboo, but leads Dirk whom left a shattered family to join frank, is actually a boon to growth.

As far as changing the screenplay, honestly I feel it was a masterpiece of written drama and comedy.  I completely related to all the characters and feel that their development was exotically executed .

Educational Projection

For my community projection I am going to showcase sculpting in Zbrush.  I can use their input to sculpt either a character or environment and show them the wonders of 3d.  The Zbrush interface is a bit overwhelming, even for us that use it.  I'll be looking to just let them explore and maybe build some shapes or color an existing model

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Update:   Well besides this project putting a huge crux on my GM submission, I did enjoy my time with the kids. Only a few of them wanted to actually play with the software, but those who did I think had a great time.  Lu and I partnered together for the assignment.  He brought his laptop, which the kids would use, and then I would demo how to create some shapes on me.  For the first two kids, I tried to actually have them build and create something, such as a human face.  This didn't turn out so well.  Zbrush is just too much for someone to just pick up and use.  After the first few kids, Lu and I took a different perspective.  Instead of just having them start out in 3d, we would have them start out with a 2d sketch program inside of zbrush.   This allowed them to get use to the wacom pen and a bit of the navigation.  A few of the students didn't want to take it much further then that, but a few did.  Lu and I then loaded a premade humanoid model and allowed them to color it with Zbrush's painting tools.  David's son was the only one who wanted to take it further then this.  We then loaded a few custom sculpting brushes and he sculpted on a dog model and a rhino.

Overall i thought it was a really fun experience.  Unfortunately due to the how Zbrush works, when a student would "blow up" the model, which is really the only way i can describe what happens when someone uses zbrush that isn't intimately familiar with how it works, we would have the clear the canvas ( basically start over ) for them to keep going.  This didn't allow me to take any screenshots for me to upload to this post.  I hope a few of the students may take up 3d work on their own and progress it to a future career.

Frances Coppola

I chose Frances Ford Coppola for my Auteur due to his interesting journey and exposition in film making and to the media as a whole.   Coppola was gifted with the genes of entertainment being that his father was a composer and mother was a successful actress.   His interest in film originally came from photography where he forged his creativity, recovering from his Polio affliction.   Going to school at UCLA, he made became friends with Spielberg and Lucas and went on to film some of the acclaimed movies of all time, The Godfather Series, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now.

Now speaking from the box-office point of Hollywood, a great director creates a critically acclaimed movie that brings in substantial return for the studio.   Being an auteur on the other hand, implies a innovative precision to both work and ideal when creating films.  Coppola’s film history would make him critically acclaimed, however his “next life” of film pales in comparison.

First, since the assignment requires it, I’ll mention some themes of his “old career”.  Coppola use of light and shadow can easily be seen in the God Father Series and Apocalypse Now.  In a dissention into madness, his characters traverse their inner demons to the brink of humanity.   As his characters emerge from the darkness, we as the audience thrillingly go along for the ride.  Or as in the case of the Conversation, as he plays his Saxophone amongst his ruined house, the audience too is stricken by sadness.

During the latter part of Coppola’s career, he seemed to have fallen off the film radar.  His Bram stokers Dracula was heralded as a masterpiece of horror cinema.  He created a few pop movies in the 80s as well, however due to some financial pitfalls, it seemed that Coppola’s time had come to an end.

Away from the assembly line of Hollywood, Coppola branded his “new life” in film cinema. All of Coppola’s movies deal with family structure and social relationships; themes have been grounded in his own upbringing.  Coppola wanted to ground his film career in the same fashion, creating movies for him and not the masses.     Veering from Hollywood’s focus on gross profit, Coppola has separated himself from the modern film industry by financing his own films and producing them in different countries.   He his quest of being a next generation film maker, he only works in digital film and hires 100% of his work-force from the country he films in.  

Coppola explains this difference in an interview with The Film Talk group. “Through digital photography we now have the ability to compose a film in the same manner that a soundtrack is scored.  You don’t cut the film in a sense, you compose the film.  With this you have total freedom over the images and thus how those images relate to one another.  The cinema process is more of a composition process then a cutting process. ”   

Coppola has filmed two movies currently in his “new life”: Youth without Youth and Tetro.  When watching these films you get a distinctive difference the rehashed Hollywood scripts.  The delicate battle of cinema and soul witnessed within Tetro it hard to describe.  Not only is the production and mis en sang revolutionary, but you realize that these aren’t hardened actors, but everyday people like you or me.