Vol Libre

It’s an exciting time to be a Pixar/Lucasfilm nerd, to be sure. Michael Rubin let me know—and posted about—that Loren Carpenter, co-founder of Pixar, put a copy Vol Libre, his 1980 CG fractal mountain short, online for our viewing pleasure. And it’s quite something.

Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter on Vimeo

The audience erupted. The entire hall was off their feet and hollering. They wanted to see it again. “They had never seen anything like it,” recalled Ed Catmull. Loren was beaming.
“There was a strategy in this,” said Loren, “because I new Ed and Alvy were going to be in the front row of the room when I was giving the talk.” Everyone at Siggraph knew about Ed and Alvy and the aggregation at Lucasfilm. They were already rock stars Ed and Alvy walked up to Loren Carpenter after the film and asked if he could start in October.
- Page 77, Droidmaker.

Though it’s only related to Loren Carpenter and not so much Vol Libre, Chapter 2 of Out of Control by Kevin Kelly has a very interesting mass-experiment by Loren Carpenter which is worth reading as well. And incidentally, this coincides with the release of the, as usual, wonderful trailer for Toy Story 1 and 2 in 3D.

More Droidmaker

I know, I know, it’s starting to look more and more as if Binary Bonsai was reborn as a Star Wars and Droidmaker-reblog site after its hiatus, but if I merely updated the older entries with this information, it wouldn’t propagate, and dammit, when I have something to take credit for I’ll damn well use every excuse in the book to take it!

Then there happened to be an unusual series of events at the end of June, 2009, when a couple interesting Lucas stories were emerging. An old home movie from ILM in 1977. An older interview with young George Lucas from the BBC in 1972. My book gives some context to these items.

On June 30 I got a wild hare and generated a PDF of the entire book. I posted it on my blog and I made two public-ish announcements: I posted it on my Facebook page, and I emailed a note about it to a blogger in Europe who had just written something nice about Droidmaker a few days earlier. So I emailed “Binary Bonsai” – he posted it. And that was it.

The word spread globally in a few moments, and in 24 hours there were around 2,000 downloads of the book. A few weeks later there was another spike of interst, bringing the total downloads to about 13,000. In 14 days, more people have read my book than in the prior 4 years. And I finally feel like my work with this is done. #

Exciting for me, as I’ve been a fan of Droidmaker since it came out. I plowed through it in a few days, which is honestly rather rare for me. I hope to have the chance to meet Michael when we’re in California; a fitting encounter on a trip which is already taking us to see Pixar, Skywalker Ranch and a John Williams concert.

I honestly don’t know how all of this could get much better…

White Boba Fett on Video

White Boba Fett

No, this isn’t turning into a Star Wars blog, but there’s some sort of odd nexus going on right now, where unseen footage keeps popping up all over the place at such a rate that it’s hard to keep up.

StarWars.com has previously written about the all-white proto-fett, but today went ahead and posted parts of the 20-minute never-before-seen footage of Ben Burtt, Norman Reynolds and Duwayne Dunham showing off a prototype, all-white, Boba Fett costume. It’s awesome.

PS: Duwayne Dunham isn’t as well-known as Ben Burtt or Norman Reynolds, but it just so happens that I’ve been re-reading Droidmaker, as a sort of research for our roadtrip, and just yesterday, I came across Duwayne on page 82.

Download Droidmaker for Free!

Woke up to this scoop:

Hi Michael,
Thought you might want the first notice – because of your posting, i’ve received a fair amount of email, and i’ve decided to post my book for FREE on my blog...

Its more important to me that the story of Lucasfilm be shared and circulated than for me to profit directly. So if you wanted to add that to your blog – you’d be the first!

Thanks for your kind words and support.

Michael (Rubin)

I don’t know what you’re still doing here, when you should be over there, downloading the hell out of that thing! It’s gorgeous; the full 518-page book, complete with photosRare photos I might add, plugged in many cases straight out of the Lucasfilm vault or even personal collections from the people who were there., index and whatever else you’ll find in the printed version, covering everything from Lucas’ earliest years up through the creation of ILM and its struggle to put Star Wars up on the silver screen, down through Coppola’s experiements with mobile film making, the creation of Pixar, non-linear editing, digital sound editing, the creation of the Games Group and much much more. It is in actual fact, a book about the creation of modern filmmaking (and to some extent games even) as we know it. Don’t let the technical foundation scare you off though; it’s not only accessible, but centered on the people, not the tech. It was easily one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in years.

As he does, I obviously suggest you just go ahead and buy the real thing, should you like what you see.

PS: In case you missed it yesterday, Michael Rubin appeared on Pirillo back when he was promoting the book. There’s also an interview up over at Unidentified Sound Object.

Update: Downloads have passed 10.000, and Michael has posted a breakdown of where the traffic has come from so far. There’s also a FAQ.

The Making of A New Hope's CGI Effects

To see the making of these effects ‘in action’ is truly remarkable. Particularly remarkable is how the 3D ‘modeller’ is controlled, by dials. Pulling together various sources, most prominently from Droidmaker, here’s what I could find on Larry Cuba’s CGI effects for Star Wars.

In 1975, Larry Cuba, a computer graphics artist working out of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) (at the time known as the Circle Graphics Habitat) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, bid on the CGI effects needed for the first Star Wars film.

Visiting a still under construction Industrial Light and Magic in Van Nuys, LA, he showed the CG art film Arabesque to George Lucas, after which he got the job.

Doing the effects pushed the university computers so hard that they would crash continuously, and he constantly had to re-adjust the air conditioning in the already freezing offices.

After days of sleeping less than three hours each night, Cuba gave up. He turned off all the air conditioners and finally went to sleep. “When I woke up I realized the computer had run throughout the night, said Cuba. “I guess it was too cold.”

There was no local processing for the 35mm film Cuba needed for delivering the effects, so all his film was shipped to a lab in Los Angeles.

“That meant that ILM saw the effects before I did. If there was a glitch in the program, they got very confused. I’d get these calls, ‘Why is part of the trench upside down?’ On my screen I couldn’t see it the way they could. It was a very slow process.”

In the end, his final frames were combined with a few hand-drawn touches from ILM—the little triangular ship dropping the bomb on the vent, some flashing arrows. It was the first time 3-D computer graphics were presented in a major motion picture.

- Michael Rubin, Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, Triad Publishing Company, 2006, p. 72.

That book by the way, is a fantastic read.

PS: The other displays, like the targeting displays in the Falcon and the X-Wings, were all hand-animated.

The Making of Star Wars

I mentioned The Making of Star Wars book by J.W. Rinzler, who also did The Making of Episode III, yesterday. Well I dug up both an Interview with J.W. Rinzler as well as the making of The Making of Star Wars, from which I took this quote:

[...] Rinzler opens The Making of Star Wars in 1971 with the disastrous screening of THX 1138 for Warner Bros executives. According to the book, Warner executives essentially took the film away from Lucas after viewing the film’s first cut. “It starts there because, even though it could’ve been the end of Lucas’s career, it led to his meeting a series of people who helped get Star Wars made,” says Rinzler. “And in a circuitous route, the THX debacle forced Lucas’s friend Francis Ford Coppola to make The Godfather, which later enabled Lucas to make American Graffiti. George was also trying to get Apocalypse Now made during this time, and his failure to do so had a huge impact on Star Wars.”

That whole era of film making is my well of inspiration, which makes me even more giddy to get my hands on this book. In fact, I just finished reading The Apocalypse Now Book and went through all the extras on the Apocalypse Now Complete Dossier DVD (which isn’t quite as complete as it sounds, since Hearts of Darkness isn’t included, and that surely is an essential component in the Apocalypse Now puzzle!).

Anyway, with that, the upcoming Star Wars anniversary, the Ralph McQuarrie book on the cusp of release and me going to watch Apocalypse Now Redux in the cinema with my brother on thursday, my head is securely immersed in the 70’s era of film.

Be aware though, if you’re interested in picking up this little treasure trove, that there is a 50 page difference between the paperback and the hardcover editions!

“Thankfully, Del Rey allowed us to up the page count from around 250 to 324 pages. And the deluxe hard cover has 372 pages, featuring all the early storyboards — and George Lucas’s first recorded thoughts on the Expanded Universe. I didn’t know if he’d want us to print those, as they differ from what came after, but he said it was okay!”

PS: J.W. Rinzler by the way, has his own blog at StarWars.com.

PPS: And of course, if you’re interested in the history of Lucas, Star Wars and the technology that followed both, you simply have to check out the amazing Droidmaker. One of the best books I read last year.

Lucasarts, DroidMaker, Sam & Max

Michael Rubin has written, and is currently touring with, a book on George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, called DroidMaker. This is interesting enough for me as it is, but the great thing about it, is how you can download chapter 1 and 18 off of his blog. This is interesting because chapter 18 deals with the creation of the Games Group, later to become Lucasarts Entertainment.

And that is interesting because they remain, dispite many quite ‘bleh’ titles, one of the most significant game companies in the world.

And while you ponder that, you can check out some of this cool Sam & Max swag (I will kill for those two prints. Kill I tell you!).