TBF, Mags, you have been doing a lot of the heavylifting for the quest, so this will be in good hands.
To be clear to everyone, this is just me burning out on imagination of the quest, since my muse has been hitting me over the head a lot with so many different ideas that I just can't find myself too interested in this.
I'll still hang out here, though, since this still does have a sepcial place in my heart.
I'd like to thank you all for making this a wonderful experience while it lasted.
I'd also like to thank @Magoose, @Fluffy_serpent, and @Martin Noctis for doing so much to help prepare and write this quest. I couldn't have done it without you all.
Also as Overmind said, the window to closing Marvel might be fast so with our huge AF money, it might be beneficial to do it now irregardless of price range, though at the same time with the massive boosts Duke William has been giving them, that ship might have sailed. Some clarification would be welcome @Magoose . Also which scripts were made in July?
...I suddenly feel like Bruce after it was revealed that Some Nights was going to be the highest grossing movie of that time, and I don't know how to feel about it.
[X] Plan Build Up and Catch-Up with Carrie
On the topic of my episode pitches, however, what does everyone think about them so far?
To understand why Industrial Light and Magic and their advances were considered so impressive and the other studios were so wary, it is crucial to consider the history of movie Special Effects.
At its most basic, a single movie frame is a photograph treated so that light shone through the back produces a magnified image on a wall, increasing its size and making any imperfection more obvious. The photo is created by light carefully directed with a camera lens to a unique mix of chemicals applied as a "film" to the structure of support material, hence the product's name. To prevent further light from changing the image, the still photoreactive material must be placed in a specific chemical bath to change and, therefore, "develop" the film. The resultant picture is then transformed into something you can run through a projector to show against a wall. If enough of these images are similar, arranged in the correct order and swapped out fast enough, the illusion of motion can be created. Hence Movies.
The issue with creative storytelling is that the camera lens takes the light in front of it and focuses it on the film, creating a seemingly objective view of reality. While that objectivity can be used to create a story or transmit a stage play, there will always be artists who want to show the impossible and have it look good. Initial attempts drew inspiration from the stage magician and used forced perspective mirrors and other practical illusions to create a fantasy. Soon, however, storytellers wanted more to be able to manipulate the image directly on the film itself.
The first attempts to make an impossible picture simply took a piece of card to block the light and only exposed half of the film to light, hence the term blocking, and then re-ran the film through the camera with the blocking device on the other side. Mistakes and imperfections were common. Overexposure of film occurred when the blocking device did not work or line up correctly, the colour was off as the sun had moved, or lighting conditions had changed. The camera shook in slightly different directions when the captures were taking place due to unintended mechanical or human interference.
Further techniques were developed to counter these, and machinery improved, but limitations still existed. Shaking was reduced by employing improved quality motor-driven cameras. Keeping the camera locked in place removed the difficulty of repeating the same camera pass, making some scenes filmable, albeit with a loss of dynamic action. Nevertheless, success had been achieved, and objective reality had been fooled.
Blocking techniques were likewise improved. Complex and expensive machines with specific prisms allowed certain frequencies of light to be split off from an image and hyper-exposed, forming a blocking device. Recombining with the original film allowed the removal of frame-specific irregular shapes like a solid colour background that an actor moved in front of. Then, a recorded scene or still image could be combined with the new footage, forcing the Actor and his performance to other locations that would be otherwise impossible or impractical due to difficulty safety or cost and, when combined with other image generation methods, made the Actor appear to be in a cartoon or fight against a stop motion created Creature.
Blue was the most common colour chosen, but almost any other solid colour could and did work. The only limitation was the need for the actor and costume department to avoid something the same colour as the background. An incautiously worn blue shirt might result in an unintentional floating head as the photographic technique removed the actors' shirt as well as the background. Something that might not be noticed until the film was expensively and time consumingly composited over the intended environment and sometimes printed several days later. This resulted in a preferential shift to Green backgrounds for its use in TV production and the Term Greenscreen, as Blue clothing is far more common than green. Overall, this kind of image manipulation was slow, cumbersome, limited and expensive and, therefore, not that popular with studios despite the impressive results it made possible.
The norm before Industrial Light and Magic and George Lucas was that special effects were created more often by individuals and small teams of professionals supported by whoever was available. Individuals are thrown together ad hoc for a specific movie, given limited budgets and means and told to do their best. The results were impressive for their resources and knowledge but ultimately, their ability to innovate was severely limited by the transitory nature of most work. It is hard to innovate when you are told to do something quickly on a limited budget and the people you work with will split up and go on to different projects within the year.
Then came Star Wars. George Lucas was a visionary who thought things could be better, and Bruce O'Brian believed in him to the tune of multiple millions of dollars. They did awe-inspiring things and threw money at the department, allowing ideas that had not had the resources to attempt before to be tried. It all could have ended there with a small bump in the special effects community of Hollywood,
George decided to spin the department off into a Subunit of Lucasfilm Unlimited. The idea was that instead of having to Spin up a special effects department for every film, Lucasfilm would have a department for Special effects that a movie they wanted to make could use. From a financial perspective, it was sensible. Teams would already be assembled and used to working with each other; expensive equipment would already be purchased and made. Between movies, they could sell their services to other movie producers. This allowed for stability of working conditions and institutional knowledge to be pooled and risks to be taken. The resulting Group was named Industrial Light and Magic.
It would be wrong to say that no one dealt with direct film-based manipulation of reality until ILM made it famous. Still, it was more common that special effects were practical, Literally, smoke and Mirrors or forced perspectives, not film Manipulation. It would also be very wrong to say that ILM and Lucasfilm used only expensive high-end techniques in post-production as they rather famously used mirrors and Vaseline on the lens of a camera to erase Luke Skywalker's Land speeders wheels in the original Star Wars Movie.
The actual Power of ILM was that it collected a deep pool of Special effect talent, gave them vast resources and kept them together after the movie was finished, allowing them to learn from each other and build costly, very specialized pieces of equipment to solve specific problems. Economies of scale make expensive things very cheap, and a machine that fixes an issue that comes up once in the production of a movie but costs half of the movie's budget is not a good investment when cheaper alternatives are available. But if you have a hundred movies? ILM made Moves better, looking faster and more affordable than the competition and only continued to improve.
ILM has solved Multiple long-standing issues with advancing technology and innovative ideas. Consider physically manipulating film to block of images. Can a robot arm if a human cannot hold a camera steady enough? Can a machine be set up to repeat the last motion multiple times? The answer to both was Yes, and motion control filming was born when a custom hand-built analog computer and equipment bundle that became known as the "Dystraflex" went into operation, allowing for never-before-possible camera shots that so wowed audiences in Star Wars.
The Dystraflex allowed the same dynamic Camera pass to be made time and time again with outstanding repeatability. This allowed a model to be moved across and filmed again with some careful blocking, creating the illusion there was both more than one model and the model was moving relative to itself. More careful blocking allowed for more models and other elements in the shot. Two models became four. A camera ran across a set of models, creating a moving, dynamic background aligned with the composite image and selling the idea you were looking out a window of a spaceship mid-battle. Some of the Many limitations in camera filmmaking had been defeated. If they had stopped there, they would have created something that would have revolutionized Hollywood and remained relevant and usable for at least 30 years.
This is not that universe. In this universe ILM goes Further Faster. George had spun up several departments under the Lucasfilm Banner using Bruce O'Brains money. And those departments talked to each other. The animation department was Half-staffed by Japanese Animators with links back to Fujufilm, who were developing a digital camera. In this universe, the increased efforts on Star Wars had Begun to reignite the Space race and certain people at NASA, definitely, NASA, who were working with developing orbital telescopes to look at stars, not at the ground in far-off places like the USSR, felt that Lucas might be a helpful filmmaker to reach out to and ask for help to develop a digital camera. In this universe, a veteran had gotten the support he needed and had encouraged a daughter to follow her dreams as he could find work in ILM and didn't need her to drop out of school herself and help support a family. She used her new free time to help a Vietnamese refugee who would have died in a camp teach them to read English using a 1975 issue of Popular Mechanics, which contained a description of a Digital Camera. It was a development that George Lucas loved as he hated the limitations that Chemical film imposed on his vision. Lucasfilm gained a basic digital camera and the first steps on another upgrade to the Dystraflex.
While incapable of recording film-grade imagery and would not be for many years or even decades, digitally recorded pictures provided one distinct advantage over traditional cameras. You did not have to wait for the film to develop to see your results. Digital cameras copy the data to a magnetic tape or send it directly to a TV. This allowed instant review of the material shot on a monitor next to the increasingly complex controls of the Dystraflex. When taken over to the compositing room, a similar arrangement to that used to combine physical film was assembled using tv's tape readers, prisms and mirrors to create a low-quality, if complex, image to evaluate what the finished film version would look like.
This approach saved significant time and money as the physical film took at least a day to be developed and viewed to see if the image captured was what the director hoped. Now, practically instant adjustments could be made, and the digital camera could be swapped out for a Film one for the movie quality shots.
Further adjustments and upgrades were made. The Dystraflex was a complex beast to drive and set up. Using Magnetic tape meant that each adjustment to the Dystraflex in the camera path could be recorded along with visuals, making recreating the scene as simple as playing the tape back into the Dystraflex to load the settings and retrieving the appropriate models from storage. This allowed for models to be set up and shot in and out of sequence and other scenes to be shot in the downtime when a director was deciding which version of a location to use or If to add or subtract or modify specific details. If a model was broken and unavailable, there was no need to keep the Dystraflex in the same configuration as the magnetic tape meant it could be set back in place when the model was ready. A director decides that a specific model was wrong in one scene they shot months ago? It's no harder to remake the shot than it would have been a day later.
Then came small further details inspired by questions from parts of the company. The animation department asked if you had to combine only two pictures at a time couldn't you combine three or more four elements at once and save some money and time like they did at Disney when they animated a picture. It turned out that with a bit of help from microcomputers and custom electronics. The answer was yes, and a four-way machines where built for digital and film inputs.
Lucasfilm and ILM made some of the most visually impressive films ever and cornered the market while setting the standard. Now, if a movie wanted to compete visually, they needed to either spend tens of millions of dollars to equip and outfit a temporary team consisting of the staff ILM hadn't scooped up for one reason or another and somehow get them to work together. Or you could hire ILM and have them do the visual effects for you. One by one, the big studios begrudgingly created their own usually lesser equivalents and hired ILM for the awe-inspiring work. Hollywood had changed forever yet again by George Lucas and ILM.
Then George Lucas bought a computer.
AN
ILM omake to boost its roll… which has already happened. Oh well, ILM Omake.
My take on ILM plus encouragement Plus Cash Plus Butterflies.
Sorry for all the technical details and the history lesson. I wanted to Get across Why ILM was such a big deal.
I like Wikipedia for a starting point for research.
The Spider-Man Noir episodes are good. Apart from the first, which felt like it was trying to do too much, the rest have had a good three-act structure suited for TV or an ongoing series. Was the first meant to be a TV movie? The latest continued to subvert my expectations. The instant I saw Curt I was expecting a Lizard episode not Spider-man, getting his noir look completed and the reason Curt will be vulnerable to the formulae. I like seeing characters develop episode to episode and have the consequences of previous episodes develop and drive forward the plot.
Overall it's a Different take on Spider-Man and would probably stand up as its own thread if you want to do that.
James Bourne a reference to Jason Bourne for a disposable Asset? Do we need to watch out for brainwashing and MK ultra?
Actually, James Bourne/Solo is an actual Comic character, though he's a bit different compared to how I wrote him here. He was written after the Jason Bourne book was released, so it could be a reference.
Speaking of James Bourne, any spy thrillers we want to obtain? Off the top of my mind, Jack Ryan and Jack Reacher come to mind.
AHHH... You know what I love about the whole thing... it's still Canon to OTL. George spent millions and potentially billions of dollars to push film technology forward that we kinda take it for granted.
I know there are others in other industries that helped, but really think about it, George has done a lot more than the other people have.
[]The Ideas that George spent on is pretty much (Add a +100 to George's D1000)
[]ILM decides to do something funny (ILM does a little bit more insanity, and they want a challenge. Oh dear)
[]Oh and here are all that stuff. (ILM has increased the quality of Conan, just by doing some great effects.)
@Magoose How much will cost to buy Hana Barbera? I mean in OTL they would be about to enter a really rough patch in the late 70s- early 80s and we could use their library of series and their expertise in TV Animation for out TV channels (since we didn´t get the loony Tunes).
@Magoose. They all look great and I can't decide.
George always pulls some very good stuff out of a hat. Letting ILM run free Always produces good stuff and I originally wanted to boost Conan.
Watto We'll let fate decide Roleplaying Dice Roller · Rolz 1d3 1
Look like George Lucas is getting a boost.
@Magoose How much will cost to buy Hana Barbera? I mean in OTL they would be about to enter a really rough patch in the late 70s- early 80s and we could use their library of series and their expertise in TV Animation for out TV channels (since we didn´t get the loony Tunes).
If we do get them I would interested in changing one of heir charters backstory slightly.
Shaggy the Veteran dog handler with PTSD?
Add a bit of depth to the character, and bring a bit more focus on veterans and the personal costs of war.
Inspiration https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2861969/1/Vietnam
If we do get them I would interested in changing one of heir charters backstory slightly.
Shaggy the Veteran dog handler with PTSD?
Add a bit of depth to the character, and bring a bit more focus on veterans and the personal costs of war.
Inspiration https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2861969/1/Vietnam
from chapter 1 to current chap. we really went from 'zero to hero' with being from nothing in the eyes of Hollywood to a multimillionaire with a Billion dollar Movie to our name.
from chapter 1 to current chap. we really went from 'zero to hero' with being from nothing in the eyes of Hollywood to a multimillionaire with a Billion dollar Movie to our name.
