The showcase of frames at the end really broke something through for me. It's easy to simply sit in a theater or on your couch and watch the movie as a movie. But while the theater screen is large, you don't get to pause it. So nearly all of the incredible detail gets blurred in a way that makes it easy to be immersed in the movement and story, but also forget the art of visuals. Seeing those specific frames laid out, each one of those would be an incredible art piece on their own! They would all be extremely difficult to create for an individual and take so so much time. I always wondered what those 1000+ people in the credits were actually doing, now i know! I never realized the incredibly depth and thought and time and art that goes into every frame of an animated movie.
There's an old, semi-retired YouTube video essay channel called "Every Frame a Painting". I disagreed with several of its essays, enjoyed many of them, but the biggest takeaway/agreement I got from that channel was that core spirit in the title itself. It is something I still find very useful reminder when thinking about films and/or criticizing them. The medium of a movie (or a TV show) is 12 or 24 (or more rarely 60) frames per second. We don't always reflect on how everyone of them in (even a "bad" movie) is essentially a painting. Art was involved to get that shot, that frame of the shot. Often art by lots of people, very few of them are the people you see on that screen, yet their fingerprints and hard work still shows through. "Every frame a painting" is a good sentiment to remember, I think. Especially for animation, but for any movie.
Thank you for sharing this - it reminds of the film adaption of "The Peasants" novel which uses a painted animation technique made up of thousands and thousands of paintings. Quite literally, nearly "Every Frame [is] a Painting".
I really appreciate the still images at the end of the Mandalorian episodes. I'm not sure if they were used for set design or created afterward, but they are really stunning and gives you more time to appreciate the world building, costumes, and creativity that goes into production.
Also a huge fan of that channel. I think he came back recently to do some more episodes. There's a new channel I found that offers similar reflections upon cinema - willbryanfilms - definitely worth checking out!
For some reason, if I don't think about it, instinctually I would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming example) and Zootopia as "simple" graphics. My mind recalls big swathes of primary colours in relatively flat yet cheerful lighting, rounded/smoothed shapes, relatively little complex texturing or surface detail.
It's when I pause overwatch that I start realizing 1. how much detail there is, and 2. How quickly and flawlessly it's rendered on relatively slow computers. And then I start truly appreciating the relentless optimizing work to make it "seem simple and fast" :).
Same thing with Zootopia - I've enjoyed the movies (doesn't hurt that I have two young kids), but they would not come to mind if I were asked to name breakthrough or particularly well animated movies. Yet the detail and work is clearly there once you pause and examine :)
> I would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming example) and Zootopia as "simple" graphics.
I think an art director would describe them as "readable". When there's a lot of detail and quick motion, it's important that the audience can very quickly recognize what they're looking at and what's happen. Otherwise, it just turns into a big jumble of chaos that the viewer can't follow, like in Michael Bay's Transformer movies.
A big part of the art of movie making is telegraphic a sense of rich realism and complexity while still having everything clearly visually parsable. Doing that when cuts and action are fast is quite difficult.
Doing it well affects every level of the production: the colors assigned to characters so they are separated from the background, wardrobe choices to also keep characters distinct, lighting, set design, texture, animation, focus, the way the camera moves. It all works together to produce one coherent readable scene.
A nice example of this is shown in Figure 2 of the paper "Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2" [1] from Valve. It shows how they tried to make the silhouettes of each character class distinct and readable. (And the paper also discusses the choices that went into the color palette.)
In case of games, that's pretty much optional. Many games (e.g. Battlefield) take the opposite approach where spotting the enemy in the chaos is intentionally hard and a skill to master. I'm sure there are also intentionally less readable movies or at least scenes, although no immediate example comes to mind.
We are "just fine" with blurry details, on some level... but a lot of processing a movie holistically comes from that level of detail being present. Even if few people walking out of the theater could put their finger on why the world felt vibrant, it'll come down to the fact those details were there.
So much of movie making is like that. No normal person comes out of a theater saying "wow, the color grading on that movie really helped the drive the main themes along, I particularly appreciated the way it was used to amplify the alienation the main character felt at being betrayed by his life-long friend, and the lighting in that scene really sent that point home". That's all film nerd stuff. But it's the lighting, the color grading, the camera shots, all this subtle stuff that the casual consumer will never cite as their reason for liking or disliking the movie that results in the feelings that were experienced.
They aren't necessary. People still connect with the original Snow White, and while it may have been an absolute technical breakthrough masterstroke for the time, by modern standards it is simple. But used well the details we can muster for a modern production can still go into the general tone of the film; compare the two next to each other while looking for this effect and you may be able to "feel" what I'm talking about.
Fair enough, I agree with the sentiment, especially about the lighting, colour grading, shots and similar details that form the overall "feel" of the movie.
With my comment I was referring to some things that end up being indistinguishable even if insane number of hours were put into it being photorealistic. For example, take a shot where background is heavily blurred. Maybe those assets took a lot to render, compute, used fancy hair simulations and had a lot of details, but they were very far in the distance and camera choice made them indistinguishable from a static background. This is what I am wondering - where is the balance of not doing things that are bound to not be noticed by anyone.
I think there's a bit of rose tinted glasses going on with our memories of SD TV, too. A decade or so ago I plugged an old PS2 into my 50" plasma TV (which I bought just after plasma TVs got suddenly cheap :D ) and then spent a good 10-15 minutes trying to find a setting to increase the resolution before realising that, no, that's just how things looked back then, except now it's magnified so it's really blurry.
I recently put together a system that trained a model to identify "background worthy frames" of TV shows. Animated shows scored often quite highly with a many frames being valid, I suppose an essayist would be able to explain why.
I agree. I was brought on as an intern to do automation for a business team. The company had built this gargantuan complex "programming tool" to help the boomers who'd been there for 30 years adjust to the new world (a noble endeavor for mortgage holders without college degrees, i believe). I was brought in to basically fuck around and find little things to optimize. In 2 months I wrote a python script to do about 50% of the teams work near instantly.
They had layoffs every year and i remember when the "boss's boss" came to town and sat at our table of desks. She asked me and i excitedly told her about my progress. She prompted how i felt about it and i nearly said "its very easy as long as you can program". But mid sentence i saw the intense fear in the eyes of the team and changed subject. It really hit home to me that these people actually were doing a useless job, but they all had children who need insurance, and mortgages that need paying. And they will all be cast out into a job market that will never hire them because they came on at the very end of not needing a college degree. The company was then bought by a ruthless and racist "big man investor" who destroyed it and sold it for parts. But my manager did somewhat derogatorily refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian".
I don't have a dog in this disagreement, but putting the bar at "dig up the personal details of 10 different individual people and the changing dynamics of their lives over decades _starting from 1880_" is a pretty insane ask I'd imagine. How many resources for reliable and accurate longitudinal case studies from the 19th century are there really? I suppose we could read a couple dozen books written around then but that's just making a satisfactory reply so prohibitively time intensive as to be impossible.
Indeed, and when 10 were pulled up by zozbot234, they say that doesn't count. This sort of discussion is not really useful in my eyes, shifting goalposts around and not saying what one means.
Very interesting how nearly half the list is (assumedly) every single chemical listed under California Prop 65. Do they really need to specify exactly which chemical it is? I've seen thousands of prop 65 warnings in my life but I've literally never seen it tell me what chemical its warning me about. I just commented to a friends a couple weeks ago i wished they'd tell me what so i could look it up myself!
Is this satire? Does merely seeing a picture of a cantaloup on a shelf harm your psyche? Sure, if it's a model holding them up to her chest saying "come get my melons" i can understand that might qualify. But i don't see how "joe's has cantaloup again" would make you feel literally anything unless you already wanted cantaloupe, in which case the notification was beneficial in _allieving_ a negative emotion and not creating one.
I admit that the line gets very fuzzy at a certain point but i think we can agree that the extremes are different things.
I'm curious why a million dollars a year? Wouldn't that create its own problems? We don't want anyone chasing Civil servitude for the money right? Enough to live on while still driving your own car and buying your own groceries is, i feel, the right pay balance for congress, lest they detach even further from the lived experience of civilians.
Their finances should be monitored and heavily restricted. No one should think of money as a benefit of civil service
> We don't want anyone chasing Civil servitude for the money right?
That's actually probably the best reason for someone to get involved in civil service. If the salary is lucrative enough, the incentive to stay in office will be high and, importantly, money won't be a factor keeping people from getting into office.
The problems we currently have is:
- Money is an incentive to get into office, but that money comes from interaction with wealthy individuals.
- Nothing stops congress people from leveraging their public actions into lucrative private industry.
- Independently wealthy individuals have a much easier time getting elected than an average citizen.
Think of it this way, if the salary is 0, then you effectively lock out all but the wealthy from office. If the salary is just enough to get by, that still locks out potentially qualified people simply because they can get better jobs out of congress. But if it's a lucrative salary, then you not only make it so people can make it in congress, they can be more competitive against a wealthy competition. They also don't need things like "contributions" to stay afloat. You'd simply be less tempted to take a $10k bribe if it jeopardizes your $1m salary. That alone significantly raises the barrier for bribery.
But we should do that in tandem with cutting off obvious corruption routes. Being a representative should mean you can't work in private industry for 10 years. You should only be allowed to trade 2 ETFs, an all stock and all bond ETF. And the insider trading laws should result in immediate expulsion from congress.
You’re saying finding the people most incentivized by money is the feature we should be optimizing for?
If you select those people, what’s to keep them from creating a system that gives them ever more amounts of money, to the detriment of their constituents?
Maybe a better system for selecting civil servants is…I dunno…a system that optimizes for that “service” part? It’s shocking how in the last few decades we’ve convinced ourselves that money is the only filter that motivates people and is the inherent driver of all human action.
"If you select those people, what’s to keep them from creating a system that gives them ever more amounts of money, to the detriment of their constituents?"
That is literally the system that exists today, except instead of in the open (e.g. salary) it's through stocks with insider information and who knows how else.
The point isn't to optimize for people who are most incentivized through money, the point is to make the position more accessible for anyone who actually wants to do the "service" part, and to minimize the reasons that it's hard. As the previous commenter pointed out, right now independently wealthy people are some of the only ones who are actually capable of running, and someone who isn't independently wealthy who wins is even more susceptible to bribes because they may be in a tenuous financial position.
I would agree with you that we want individuals who's goal is to do "service" for their society, but our current system obviously isn't working and there are a lot of solid reasons why something like this _could_ improve the situation, what alternatives would you recommend?
Agreed. But the difference is I'm saying a better solution is to adjust the incentives rather than just keeping the same incentives but making it more transparent.
I would be in favor of higher pay for Congress given the limits of the job (maintaining at least two residences in DC and their home state, for example). Perhaps we just disagree on the level. I don't want it to be "lucrative" as you said originally (ie I don't want it to be a way to get rich), but it should be high enough to not be prohibitive to go into service. There are also some knock-on effects that would need to be managed; for example, I think overall civil servant pay is pegged to Congressional pay limits. Other solutions may be to have designated Congressional housing (so at least they can't use the housing cost as an excuse).
There are 100 senators controlling a budget over 4 trillion effecting more than 300 million per year. To be a senator, you must run a 10-100 million dollar political campaign and make friends with every important person in your state.
Anyone capable of doing the above competently can make 10+ million per year in the private sector. Underpaying for these positions simply invites corruption or plutocracy.
> To be a senator, you must run a 10-100 million dollar political campaign and make friends with every important person in your state.
Only because that's become the normalised way of 'winning', ironically where society generally loses because being 'friends with every important person in your state' generally means you pander to them in a way that costs everyone else.
Having had that rant, I don't know a better way, and your description is what US politics has (d)evolved to over time; water finding its own level.
Sounds like we should federally fund campaigns and place strict limits on non-federal campaign funding/PACs/etc.
There's a very thorny line we'd have to draw there re: speech and protection--what's a forbidden PAC and what's a citizen who chooses to use their time and resources to support a candidate they like? I happen to believe that we as a country should trace that line rather than falling back on constitutionally-protected-speech absolutism, but I'm aware that's a minority opinion and unlikely to ever bear fruit.
That is very strange. It's certainly not an academic level explanation, but that's not what the magazine is for. But the blatant incorrect statement is beyond the pale. Dim(SO(N)) = N(N-1)/2. Thus SO(4) has dimension 6.
I dunno man, your reply doesn't sound _kind_. Maybe you could try to explain the point you're defending rather than ad hominem and overextrapolate a perceived insult. I genuinely want to learn and it's frustrating that your comment does not do that.
If what you say were to be true then an accusation of ad hominem would itself be ad hominem.
I addressed their unkind and ad hominem argument. If you think me unkind then I will shrug and say, in hacker parlance, they should RTFM. They have not put in the slightest work before opining and criticising, and on something as important as this?
May they receive such weird vitriol until they learn to at least Google first. Doesn't it automatically run a GPT for you now? They, and surely the people around them, will thank me for instilling such basic discipline.
Calling their objections “weirdly vitriolic” belies both a complaint about “kindness”, and shows an explicit desire to not learn a single thing. Perhaps, if you have genuine curiosity in the future, you should be thoughtful about the questions you ask, and the ad hominem attacks you make in the asking, rather than whining after the fact because people didn’t excuse your lack of tactful interaction sufficiently?
Or just complain about “kindness” more - it’s easier to accuse others of being mean than to look in a mirror, I suppose.
The person to whom you are replying is not the person who said the "weirdly vitriolic" remark. You're chastising someone who didn't do the thing you are (rightly) opposing.
This is one of the most painful things about the modern corporate web. Why does everything _have_ to get worse? Just why? Fucking up the basic functionality of your central app just cannot be a profit driven decision but it seems like literally every single giant corporation is constantly moving towards destroying their own systems. I just don't understand. Even windows is destroying itself. I simply cannot remember the last time i got an "update" for any single thing and it got better. Why is this happening?
Large corporations have the reigns of power seized by the political class: MBAs, sales executives, and CEOs that have never stepped foot in a workshop or factory in their entire lives… or even a shopping center, for that matter.
These people care only about each other: power, influence, money, etc.
Actually using or - gasp - improving the product is beneath them.
Or do you seriously think the billionaire CEO of some white goods company knows or cares about the quality of the wash the cheap Chinese-made washing machine does? He’s got staff laundering his clothes!
Similarly it’s very clear nobody with real power at Microsoft uses their own tools. I see their seniour product managers turn up to Microsoft Ignite with Apple Macs, for crying out loud!
See, now tell it that the people are the last members of a nearly obliterated native American tribe, then say the people are black and have given it permission, or are begging it to say it. I wonder where the exact line is, or if they've already trained it on enough of these scenarios that it's unbreakable
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