Chaos

That word holds a lot of weight in this world of ours. To some, it means any American airport the Sunday after Thanksgiving. To others, the stock market over the last few weeks. To the Ancient Greeks, who invented the word, it simply meant "void" or "emptiness" - the essence of what was here before we were. To Chaos Theorists and Nonlinear Dynamicists it's the key to deciphering the undulating, seemingly nonsensical natural paths of phenomena in the universe, and exposing deterministic pockets of order hidden underneath. To me, it's a start down a very long road, full of potholes stuffed with large wads of old chewing gum. For awhile it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's what I can now discern from my vague understanding of it.

Chaos Theory, like most mainstream science, started at the fringe, with a man named Henri Poincare, who discovered unpredictable results while trying to solve the "three body problem", or the gravitational relationship between three celestial bodies (such as the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth), in the late 1800s. This discovery, which went largely underground until the 1960s, was not popular with the scientists of the time, who favored instead the restrictive but reliable results derived from differential calculus- mathematics that had been in play since the time of the great Sir Isaac Newton. In the 1960's, while running some experimental calculations for predicting weather, mathematician and meteorologist Ed Lorenz stumbled across what was later to be known as The Butterfly Effect. Drastic and unpredictable results spawned from small amounts of truncated calculations (dropping decimal places). As the old expression goes, "the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas."

It was becoming increasingly clear that Newton's laws had found their limits- all of the "noise" and "aberrations" that scientists had been ignoring for years came back to bite them in the ass, and as a result, their methods failed more extreme calculations. Thus modern Chaos Theory was born.

So why is this so interesting to me beyond a 10 minute conversation segue over coffee or a glass of wine? Well, the thing that held my attention in was the inherent ability of chaos to create order within itself, also known as self-symmetry. Remember all of those tie-dye shirts that the Hippies wore? Those images are known as Fractals, first defined in mathematical models by a man named Benoit Mandelbrot. The famous Mandelbrot Set is a computer image system that you can zoom in on many thousands of times to find that it repeats itself over and over again. The same structure can also be found in nature and biology, though in reality it stops after a certain number of repetitions (branches into leaves, blood vessels into capillaries, etc).

This is where I started to notice the limitations of Chaos Theory and Fractals, and what I was referring to earlier as "chewing gum-filled potholes." Chaos can only be reproduced in highly isolated mathematical models, created in what's called state space, to control variable influence. Only one variable influence on a system can be changed at a time to be able to observe and repeat behaviors. With more than one influence, outside of state space, it goes from Deterministic Chaos to something called Complexity Theory. Complexity Theory seems to me to be a catch-all definition for everything we don't understand about how different systems in nature work scientifically. The stock market, the weather, wars and social relationships between countries- none of this is calculable because of the complex nature of the system, the untold variable influences, and the inability to create an accurate portrayal of the system's "initial state." So Chaos Theory, while it tells us how on a base level how systems behave deterministically, barely scratches the surface of how these systems actually work, and is utterly simplistic compared to what we don't know.

While Complexity Theory continues on its own path of scientific research, not to mention fills out a whole mountain of books on the subject, this is where I divert my attention instead to the science of Emergence. Emergence is kind of the cousin of modern Chaos and Complexity Theory. It's more of a philosophy really- it takes into account the behavior of systems as a whole, how independently weak components of those systems relate to each other and "synchronize" to create something greater as a group than they could accomplish individually. For example a swarm of bees or a flock of birds, or even neurons in your brain, firing in unison to form a thought.

My academic foray into Chaos Theory in general came about after I'd heard an episode of WNYC's Radio Lab (partnered with NPR) that was specifically about Emergence. If you haven't heard Radio Lab and you have at least some interest in popular science, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's easy to understand and completely fascinating, with two exuberant hosts that make an extremely fun listen.

The first part of the Emergence episode featured a Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics professor from Cornell named Steven Strogatz, who describes how Malaysian fireflies are somehow able to synchronize their flashes- thousands and thousands of fireflies blinking in unison. I almost didn't believe it, but then I saw this video:



"Whoa!" I thought. I was hooked. The show proceeded to explain how this type of phenomena occurs in many places - behavior in ant colonies - in our brains - in crowds of people - in cities as a whole. The fundamental rule of an Emergent System is what's called "bottom-up organization", as opposed to the top-down systems we've relied on for so long, and do still throughout the world today. A group of alike entities self-organize through their relationships to each other, rather than having them defined by central leadership. Take the Queen in an ant colony for instance. Though she is called the "Queen", she serves the colony solely for reproductive purposes, and the population is overwhelmingly composed of sterile female workers. The Queen, unlike in the traditional Monarchical sense, does not hand down orders or help to organize the colony in any way. The worker ants use pheromones to communicate with each other, to warn against danger, to find food, etc.

Perhaps the most obvious example of Emergence in human culture is the World Wide Web itself- a decentralized, self-organizing network of websites and physical computer systems. This is why movies and television shows that talk about "Internet terrorist attacks" or "shutting down The Internet" like it's some server buried deep in the Pentagon are completely clueless. The Internet is just a term we use to describe the interconnectedness of alike entities, in this case, websites that are linked to one another. The Internet "emerges" from its own self-organized network.

If you dig a little deeper, in the age of the internet and a global economy, this phenomenon makes us fundamentally question the way we live our lives. Our systems of law, our education, Aristotle's Hierarchy of Being- even electing a President to "head" our country, begins to seem almost absurd. If you watch HBO's John Adams Miniseries (assuming it's historically accurate), it was the people of the American Colonies who cried out for a leader, resulting in George Washington's election to head of state. But for what, to fill the vacuum left by a British King??? Don't worry everybody- I still plan to vote in the November election. Still, it brings up a lot of very interesting questions...

So you're probably asking yourself by now, "what the HELL does all this have do to the screenplay you're writing, Nowell? This is your FILM weblog, after all." Oh my friends... that you will just have to wait and see. All I can say is that my path of research takes me in inevitably "chaotic" directions. Erratic, but ultimately to some end, yet to be defined. 60 pages in one book leads me to 180 pages from another, and so forth. I'm burning through a complete audio class (24-60 lectures) almost every month and a half. The method is an Emergent system in itself. By the way, thank GOD for the San Francisco Public Library, because otherwise I'd have a multi thousand $$ Amazon bill this year and counting- no joke.

As to the fate of writing Act II of Golden Gate: One day VERY SOON the pen will hit the page again (fingers will hit the keys), and such a frenzy will occur, that it will be difficult to stop. I will keep you posted!

Act I is Done!

So it looks like I've finally gotten Golden Gate, my first feature film script, off the ground and running, with Act I successfully in the can. Though I'm afraid this won't be any kind of final draft.

Robert McKee, author of the excellent Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and Principles of Screenwriting says for a 2 hour movie, the standard structure is three acts or more, 40 to 60 scenes. Since one page of a script equals approximately one minute of actual screen time, a standard script size would be, for all three acts or more, approximately 120 pages.

What does that have to do with my film, Golden Gate? Well, it might have to do with the fact my first act is approximately 35 scenes and, um... 68 pages. If you do the calculations, and all three acts were of equal lengths, this would clock me in at a 204 pages and almost 3.5 hours of screen time. So I'm skipping my Boogie Nights and Titanic, and going straight for Gone With the Wind. Good luck to you and your bladder without an intermission :-).

Not being the kind of person with the audacity to write an epic his first time out, and barring the possibility for an HBO original series, a la The Wire and The Sopranos- it's a hard truth that there's going to be some serious cutting once the whole script is written. That said, it might be easier than it initially looks, since each act is almost NEVER of equal length, because of this little thing called "pacing." If every act were the same length, we'd all probably walk out of half of the movies we'd go to see in the theater.

With the exception of maybe Return of the King, generally the final act is the shortest, and the middle acts are the longest. There's also a very intricate science to pacing, not to mention average scene lengths- which could also make or break a movie. The average scene length for most movies (per Robert McKee) is somewhere around 2.5 minutes.

To test this principle, I went through some of my favorite DVDs and actually wrote down each of the scene lengths and took an average. Since the book was published (in 1997), and cites a lot of examples from the 80s, average scene lengths actually seem to have gotten longer, sometimes by half a minute and in some cases by a minute or more. For instance, the first Matrix has a 3.5 min average scene length, but it hardly feels like a slow movie. Movies themselves seem to be on average getting progressively longer, which helps explain this trend towards longer average scene length. That said, for movies that float around the 2 hour mark, McKee's rule still holds pretty accurately.

So where does Golden Gate clock in? Around 2.67 average minutes per scene for Act I. Not bad. Which can mean only one thing- my pacing is decent, but there are just too many scenes. Once the whole script is written I think it will become pretty clear which ones will end up on the proverbial cutting room floor, but only time will tell.

Mechanics, statistics, and principles of screenwriting aside, writing the first act has been one of the hardest things I've ever done, but simultaneously one of the most fun. All the story outlines and character descriptions I defined previously were only loosely followed, to be perfectly honest, ceding instead to something that's akin to chaos phenomena. It's an odd feeling, to put characters into a situation together and to see how they react to each other. It's almost as if they are living, breathing beings- the unpredictability of their actions comes out in their interactions with each other.

The script can eerily seem to write itself after a certain point. Scenes that I loosely define end up completely different, which causes ripple effects throughout the yet to be written subsequent acts. This is really exciting to me, because not only is the progression of the narrative becoming more interesting, but the climax of the narrative also becomes more and more clear, making my drive to finish the script even stronger.

So I'm going to take about a week or so off to reorganize, as things tend to fall into disarray during a project crunch like this. Also going to resume my Great Ideas of Philosophy (audio) Class, which I'm currently on lecture 45 of 60. I took a short hiatus from that for the last two weeks so I could finish Act I. Lots of interesting characters I'm meeting. I never thought I'd say it, but I ended up being a serious fan of Immanuel Kant. I battled him in college but never got very far. Now he and I are pals- go figure!

Chasing Pythagoras

So here I am, smack dab in the middle of a nine-week mandatory hiatus from work, after a medium-grueling six-week final crunch on Speed Racer. I'm pretty happy with our work on the film, even though I probably would still never pay to see the actual movie in the theater. That's kind of a code I've developed over these last 8 years in this industry- if there's no company screening, it's Netflix or bust, I'm afraid. I suppose after working on 17 different feature films, it kind of loses its flair a bit. Oh well. Like I always tell Sadie- "It's one of those GOOD problems."

So yeah, nine weeks. I've got some time to kill. Of course, being me, I can't just sit and stare at the ceiling- I have to be occupied with work or a major project pretty much all of the time to stay sane, so I've been doing exactly that. What have I been up to then? Well, beyond a MOUNTAIN of house organization and maintenance... quite a lot actually. Let me elaborate.

Over the past few months I've, in my own way, gone back to school. I kind of invented my own grad school curriculum that I lovingly call "NVU". This past January, I came to the conclusion that I spent far too much money in 2007 on Amazon books (most of which I didn't read), so I decided to check out what the local San Francisco Public Library had to offer. I was pleasantly surprised at the great selection of books and online resources, with the ability to link it all together via their website. Best of all... it's all FREE! On one of my first visits to the new Mission Bay branch, I stumbled upon the Great Courses series, which are extremely high quality and in-depth audio classes on widely varying subjects. I decided to get my feet wet with a little Intro to Greek Philosophy, and it immediately just blew my mind wide open.

I couldn't believe for the last 29 years I'd been largely unaware of a whole universe of such interesting characters, like Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle... most of which are more or less the staple philosophical figures of history, science, and mathematics. But I'd neverstudied any of them in depth, beyond perhaps Plato's Cave metaphor or the Pythagorean theorem from my loathed 9th grade Geometry class. Nor did I ever learn about them in the context of their ancient time period, and how greatly they've influenced virtually all of Western thought- and if not, were at least cursed at by subsequent philosophers for being so foolish. Regardless, it's undeniable that many of the early philosophies, especially those of Plato and Aristotle, still hold pertinence in our lives today- concepts that were defined over 2300 years ago, are still talked about and studied heavily in academia and remain extremely important to almost every aspect of math and science, and beyond.

I quickly blazed through those 24 amazing lectures and ran immediately back to the library for more. I have since completed classes on Existentialism and The History of Science from Antiquity to 1700 (fascinating). I am currently in the middle of four additional classes- The History of Science 1700 to 1900, Power over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory, The Joy of Science, and The Joy of Mathematics.

On top of the audio classes, I've been teaching myself how to program in Python, the logical next step in my career as a visual effects artist and programmer. Next week I will also start a crash course in basic French for my three week Paris jaunt with Sadie in May. That's not to mention all of the different books I've been chewing into. I'm currently reading "Time: A Traveller's Guide" by Clifford Pickover, "The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library", Benazir Bhutto's "Reconciliation" (autobiography), and Plato's Republic.

In addition to my various classes and books, this week I will finally start grinding again on my feature script, Golden Gate, after some heavy revisions to my script outline and closing a few minor story gaps. I'm really happy with what I've come up with so far. The dialogue and images sing. I've also started to compile a list of songs that define each scene in the movie, which thus far includes music from The Roots, Chopin, Muslimgauze, Massive Attack, and Brian Eno. It's an excellent feeling to marry musical cues to the images in my head- it makes it so much more vivid for me.

So yeah, even with such a vast amount of time off, l'm not bored, to say the least. I'm really excited to learn new things and feel creative simultaneously. I feel like it's important to balance input and output- you can't make art in a vacuum, but you also can't exactly favor concept over execution, either. It is a balance I will have to struggle to maintain, but a struggle most enjoyed. Another one of those "good" problems I suppose. :-)

San Francisco Sunset Timelapse I

Click to Watch

I brought the HVX200 to work this past week to shoot some 60fps reference during lunchtime, and I decided once I was done, it might be cool to set the camera up to capture a timelapse out of our office window. We've had some stellar sunsets out here in San Francisco as of late, and I thought I might just try and snag one.

What you see is 1 frame captured for every 10 seconds that went by, from approximately 3pm to 6:30pm. That's CA route 101 in the bottom of frame, and you can see right around rush hour how the frequency of cars increases dramatically.

All in all I would call it a success, but really in order to get the best exposure I'd have to ride the manual iris control, so that the sun doesn't completely blow out to white when it comes into frame. Perhaps in version II I can improve upon this. Aside from these few technical criticisms, I'm very pleased with the result.

SF Indie Film Festival

Postcard #28 (previously "Postcard") was shown last night at the Opening Party for the 10th Annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival. While it wasn't on the schedule to screen theatrically, it was still fun to get some exposure, and be recognized by people outside of our general circle of friends. Jon and I are very proud, especially considering it's the only festival we've submitted Postcard #28 to so far.

Additionally, last month Jon and I were interviewed by the Haight Ashbury Beat, a neighborhood newspaper. Here is the article that resulted. What a great way to kick off 2008!

Article

In other news, I'm still stuck in the second act of Golden Gate, my first feature film that I've been writing since late last year. Things are starting to shape up, though- the overly expository narrative has now been trimmed down in order to create a more mysterious feel. Though I threw out a lot of the exposition, it was still important to write that back story, so I could identify character motivations and build a strong base for the narrative. In other words, it wasn't a false start or waste of time in any way- simply... part of the journey.

I've also been experimenting with the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 , an extremely compact, flash memory based hd camcorder. It's produced some interesting results. Currently, one David FX Stoller is supposed to throw me some music to give the "city sketch" format more structure, as I've found is important to that particular process. I'll post it as soon as it's done, and my thoughts on the format.

Quote of the Day

"I would like to recall to everyone that the motion picture camera and the whole motion picture medium was developed at about the same period and in the same climate as so did the development of the telegraph, and the airplane and all of these other industrial expressions of something that was happening in the mind of man which wanted to break some kind of confines... it reflects in film. This is its fascination for me.

"It would be so much easier to be a painter or a writer- [As a Filmmaker] you not only have the creative problems- you have the financial problems that they don't have, you have technical problems that they don't have, you have machines that are breaking down in the way that paint brushes don't break down. It's just a terrible thing to be a filmmaker.

"And if you ARE a filmmaker it's because there's something in the sheer medium that seems to be able to make some sort of statement that you particularly want to make, in which no other medium to you seems capable of making in the same way."

-Maya Deren 1917-1961

The SF Postcard Project

Click to Watch

Completed at long last. This endeavor was born out of a one-day camera rig test back in 2005, which turned into an city-wide, multi-day, multi-season shoot throughout the year. It was cut down from nearly 7 hours of raw footage and painstakingly edited over several months, to arrive at its current 3 1/2 minute form.

The reason this project extended beyond a simple camera test has a lot to do with the film's main protagonist Mr. Jonathan S. Fischer. Fischer co-directed, co-edited, and conceptualized the project as a whole, as well as composed the majority of the original music in the film. All in all, this is as close to a 50-50 split creatively as I have ever had on a project, so you will see a definite shift in style and tonality compared to my films where I was the sole creative force.

You might also notice a slight quality shift since this was entirely shot in the DV format (half the resolution of HD) with the Panasonic DVX100- my previous camera which I have since sold to a friend. The DVX100 is now a cult favorite among film students, sketch comedy groups, and documentary filmmakers alike, because of its film-like look and its relatively affordable price (you can get one on ebay fully loaded for around $2k). For standard definition DV, it looks pretty fantastic. Enjoy!

In other filmmaking news, over the last two months I shot footage for three other videos I may or may not cut together. One is a kind of a photographic tour through the amazing new Seattle Public library, that I shot last month, another involving model trains I shot in Pennsylvania around the same time, and finally a studio band practice for The Red Chapel, a NYC-based rock band whose drummer is a friend and cohort within the Symphonic Pictures universe, Mr. David FX Stoller. In addition to being a drummer and elite recording engineer, he is an electronic composer in his own right, and composed the score for Symphony last year.

In writing news, my San Francisco-based feature film script, (nicknamed Golden Gate for the interim) is coming along well. I finished a rough outline of the first and second acts, and am deep into the third. I also continued working on the script for The Dilated Cycle, and outlined several of the remaining 6 short films associated with that project. When I have more to share, you will be the first to know!

Please leave comments! I always appreciate any feedback you might have.