Daydream Believer [Review: Inception]

Inception is good, hard speculative fiction in the sense of gedanken-experiment. It revolves around a single, simple concept - shared dreaming - and the plot of the film introduces and explores the practical, philosophical and moral questions thrown up by this concept.

While the idea is straightforward, the plot is not: as the climax approaches, the heist-movie team of nöonauts* are travelling through different dreams simultaneously while trying to pull off their audacious and precisely timed plan. Director Christopher Nolan and editor Lee Smith, who also worked together on The Prestige, have once again delivered a complex plot that remains easy to follow - a number of cinematic devices, including the different colour themes and styles for each layer of reality, help with this. However where The Prestige is perfectly edited, Inception is close to perfect but slightly too long, and as a result a few scenes gain a comic edge that may not have been intended.

Casting is great whether you are a fan of Mr. DiCaprio or not - like many heist movies this is very much an ensemble piece. I was particularly pleased to see Ellen Page, the star of Juno, in a major role - an arrogant and talented architecture student and far from your typical action heroine.

Previous films such as The Cell, The Matrix, eXistenZ have explored similar ideas to Inception - travelling either into the minds of other people or into cyberspace. A common idea is that when you die, or are killed in such a state, you also die in real life. There's no obvious reason for this so I was pleased to see that Inception takes a different and more intelligent tack. Here, if you die in your sleep, you just wake up - however it turns out there are other, more plausible ways for dreaming to be dangerous.

*The term nöonaut for a dream traveller is not used in Inception but in Black Brillion and Matt Hughes' other novels and short stories of The Times Before The End Times, in which characters explore the collective unconscious and do battle with archetypal foes.

Filmmaking In Three Acts: Act III [Review: In The Blink Of An Eye]

When it comes to editing, if you read only one book you should read Walter Murch’s book. You were going to read two books? Read it twice. As you would expect from the editor’s editor and Ridley Scott’s right hand man, it’s short, perfectly edited and easily readable on a train journey yet covers a lot of ground.

The book includes a surprisingly simple theory of editing (the title is a clue) the history of editing, a really balanced comparison of analogue and digital approaches, anecdotes from his work on some of the greatest films of all time, and many pearls of wisdom. I’m trying out some of these as I continue to work on Bast – I think he may be right about standing up to cut. Ultimately Murch’s description of editing is artistic without being mysterious or pretentious and he is not afraid to talk about “cutting out the bad bits.”

Walter Murch worked on this film which some people think is quite good.

Simples!

Or, look! no keys!

Blender can do chromakey - chain together as many chromakey or channel key nodes as you like, each one picking out a particular shade of green. The more nodes you can be bothered to put in and adjust, the less overspill you get.

I like noodles!

However, sorting all those nodes out can get quite fiddly - and you can get better results by avoiding the chromakey system altogether (if you know your format well enough). Here, I'm taking my original mini DV footage and subtracting the red from the green channels - leaving only the areas that are predominantly green. Once I've amplified these remainders with a colour ramp the output is more or less what I want. I've used an animated oval in the 3D scene to create a matte so I only process a small area of the image.

Whichever approach I use, I end up with very low resolution - that's because I'm using the colour channels, and mini DV encodes squares of four pixels all in one colour. Not to worry - I just multiply my output by the luminance channel, add a bit of blur, and full resolution is restored.

Right. Three more of these and you can have a trailer.

Eyes Wide Shut

Took a break from Blender to do some video editing:

(with thanks to Molly Brown for introducing me to this particular opiate of the masses...)