| How do you solve a problem like Beowulf? The first known work of literature in the English language has been brought to the big screen a number of times in recent years, never entirely satisfactorily. On Friday, Robert Zemeckis' attempt to adapt the epic poem hits cinemas, and this time the hulking Geat (read Swedish) warrior of the title is depicted in the director's trademark motion capture CGI. Now I should point out before we begin that I have major, major issues with digital effects. I had to go through several months of counselling after witnessing the sight of Jabba the Hut digitally recreated and superimposed onto a previously deleted scene in the "updated" version of the first Star Wars film (I refuse to refer to it as A New Hope). And I haven't yet seen Elizabeth: The Golden Age, but plan to keep things that way after viewing the trailer, which features a Spanish Armada rendered completely devoid of grandeur and menace through the use of CGI. Frankly, I would happily see a blanket ban on all digital effects in film, tomorrow. Imagine if science fiction movie makers had to use their ingenuity again when depicting spaceships and monsters (as in the original Alien). We might witness a return to the practice of using scale models, such as those in the original Star Wars films, which were 100 times more realistic than their CGI equivalents in George Lucas' rubbish triptych of prequels. So it was with some trepidation that I attended a screening of Beowulf, particularly after reading some of the reviews of Zemeckis' previous outing to use the motion capture technique, The Polar Express (one critic referred to it as the Zombie Express because, he said, the process of rendering the actors' performances into CGI caused its stony-eyed characters to resemble denizens of Hades.) Beowulf, you'll be pleased to hear, is a vast improvement, and the use of a technology which creates an altered version of reality seems somehow appropriate for a story so entirely routed in fantasy. On the other hand, for a movie which features what should be appalling scenes of men having their heads bitten off and gently crunched by Grendel, perhaps the most hideous creature ever to be shown on the big screen, not to mention Angelina Jolie starkers, it somehow fails to really get the blood pumping. And I can't help feeling that's down to the fact that the use of CGI is less affecting than live film. If it's not real, why should we react to it as though it were? The argument is, of course that monsters like Grendel, and the dragon which appears later in Beowulf, could never be properly realised without digital effects. My response would be that there are ways around these things: shooting with models, puppets; from angles which fail to show the entire creature: there are many possibilities. Without wishing to hark back to Star Wars yet again, the original Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi, which was just a gaping maw in the desert filled with horrible teeth, was far more terrifying than the dumb computer game monster which emerged from said orifice in the reworked version. What are your most hated CGI moments? And when do you think digital effects have been used successfully in film? |
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
Should CGI be Banned
Movies crossing into games
| The movie adaptation of 300, Frank Miller's gore-splattered graphic novel, hits UK cinemas tomorrow after crushing box office records in the US. Roger Ebert wrote that it looks like the most expensive videogame ever made, and other US reviewers have fashioned similar, usually disparaging, connections between the two entertainment forms. They're not just talking about the obvious visual similarities (300 makes extensive use of CGI environments and special effects); many have woefully put Zack Snyder's flick at the vanguard of a new cinema, aimed at a generation of attention-deficit gamers, where narrative drive is sacrificed at the altar of fetishised hyperviolence. They have a point. Abandoning the traditional three-act structure, 300 is built much more like a game, with its escalating series of setpiece battles interspersed with plot-driving sections and even several boss battles. It is linear and relentless; several times I expected to be handed control of the action. But where the critics are wrong is in believing this is an entirely new phenomenon. Videogame design has been influencing US TV and movies for several years. Lost is a key example - a popular interpretation of the series is that it's all actually a videogame, the characters merely pawns in some photo-realistic interactive entertainment. But even if that's inaccurate, the writers use dozens of devices taken from videogames: the locked hatch found in season one resembles a key game design technique in which the player finds a locked door but has no means to open it until later in the adventure. The employment of unexpected, out-of-place animals - ie, the polar bear - is basic videogame stuff, recalling the dinosaurs in Tomb Raider among many others. And now that DVD releases are more profitable than box-office takings, directors and studios have to think about providing 20 hours of entertainment rather than 90 minutes; this is much more in line with the videogame experience. It is fortunate that game designers are starting to meet narrative cinema halfway. I've just visited Ubisoft's Montreal studio where, according to Patrice Desilets, the creative director on hugely promising adventure Assassin's Creed, no game goes into production until the team has agreed on an underlying theme. There has to be a point to it all. In many ways, videogames are bigger than cinema now, and most young movie scriptwriters grew up playing games - the crossover of ideas is inevitable. It is to be hoped that something new and positive comes out of this, something beyond the invectives of old-skool film critics who recoil in shock at digital effects. |
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
HD succesor?
| http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/audio/2008/mar/11/super.hi.vision This audio talks about a potential succesor to high definition made in Japan |
listen now, pay never
From the newspaper on the train to the magazine thrust in your hand as you leave the station, from the targeted ads that accompany your browsing to the ad breaks that punctuate your TV viewing, advertising-supported content is nothing new. Ever since ITV's launch in September 1955, viewers have broadly accepted that in return for watching advertisements, they can view the programmes that follow for nothing.
Now enabled by technology that allows advertisers to target consumers more precisely and efficiently than ever, the concept is spreading. From free, legal music to free mobile phone calls and texts, from online games featuring targeted ads to free movie downloads, a glut of startup companies aim to apply the same principle that led to the ITV of old becoming a "licence to print money".
Shift change
When Google's top team embarked on a low-profile tour to launch its pay-per-click AdWords programme in the UK in 2002, it seemed unlikely that by 2008 it would be on the verge of making more money than ITV. It is a telling example of the shift that advertising experts believe will continue to see money flow from scattergun mass-market campaigns to highly-targeted, contextualised advertising.
That shift is one that Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of the magazine Wired, who in 2006 turned the concept of The Long Tail into the must-read tome for every harassed media executive, is tapping into with his next book, called simply Free. He argues that the power of "free" will spark an online and business revolution, as the costs of bandwidth and storage became negligible.
"Between digital economics and the wholesale embrace of King Gillette's experiment in price shifting [selling razors at less than cost, to make money on the disposable blades], we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly," he said in Wired (tinyurl.com/yntwek). "A generation raised on free is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want - and free, increasingly, is what you're going to get."
If that is a rallying cry to some, it's terrifying for others - specifically those, like record labels, that have relied on us paying for stuff. As Anderson identifies, the next stage is likely to be ad-funded delivery of goods and services. Shaun Gregory, the former director of new media at Telegraph Media Group who last October became UK chief executive of Blyk, a mobile phone network that offers free talktime and texts in return for serving its customers with ads, says it is inevitable.
Aimed at 16- to 24-year-olds, the deal is that in return for supplying extensive profile information and receiving an average of two to three targeted ads per day, users get 217 texts and 43 minutes of talktime a month. Recent trade speculation suggested takeup was disappointing, but Gregory maintains it is well on track to hit its target of 100,000 users by September.
He says media buyers need to change tack and focus on the quality of their interaction with young consumers rather than their traditional volume-based play. More than 100 advertisers have signed up including Adidas, Sony PlayStation, McDonalds and the COI.
Users are recruited by "street teams" that prowl city centres. Gregory says today's "savvy" youth market understands the implicit or explicit "deal" involved in getting something for nothing. Nor does he accept that those kids looking for free calls might not necessarily be those with the most disposable income. "The calls that come into our call centre are not to complain about the advertising, but to ask for more," he says.
Vodafone and Orange are believed to be looking at variations on the theme while Virgin, which has a US service called Sugar Mama that rewards completion of surveys or the rating of ads with free minutes, is said to be looking at bringing something similar to the UK. Gregory said Blyk was creating a new category. "For seven years, people scoffed at pay-per-click [where Google has made billions]. People said it was just a bunch of web geeks," he said.
A recent report from Generator Media highlighted relationships with ad agencies and the ability to deliver a premium audience as two of the six key requirements for ad-funded services. "Generic, untargeted ads that are slapped on top of a free content service are likely to produce poor results," it said. Gregory believes mobiles and music are the most obvious Trojan horses, because younger consumers believe they should cost nothing in any case.
Steve Purdham, chief executive of the Peter Gabriel-backed ad-funded music service We7, is troubled by the word free. "People will either pay for something with money or they will pay for something with their time. Music should never be free. There is too much value in its ability to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck," he said.
Earlier this week, We7 struck a deal with Sony BMG to launch a new streaming service, and is one of several companies developing various kinds of ad-funded models. The evolution of the internet has opened up a wealth of possibilities. Their development has accelerated in recent months as record labels have woken up to the need to speed the evolution of new business models.
"With CD sales falling at an alarming rate and digital sales failing miserably to offset the decline, they're having to look seriously at alternative revenue models," says Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan.
What track record?
The concept of ad-funded music downloads exploded into the mainstream in January when QTrax, a US service promising unfettered access to any song in return for displaying adverts while they downloaded, announced its launch at a music industry conference in Cannes. The executives behind the service claimed this was the way to capture a slice of the revenue that had been pouring out of the industry at an alarming rate. They would piggyback on an existing peer-to-peer service, but screen all files. Users would download a Qtrax media player that would store tracks and, in time, be able to transfer them to an iPod or other digital music player. More incredible still, they claimed to have agreed deals to license tracks from every major label. It all sounded too good to be true. And it was.
The major labels revealed that they hadn't yet reached deals with Qtrax, or that existing agreements had expired. Negotiations are ongoing; last week the company announced deals with EMI and Sony's publishing arms.
Chief executive Allan Klepfisz admitted that the fiasco, during which it burned hundreds of thousands on sponsorship, billboards and parties featuring the likes of James Blunt, had left it looking "pretty foolish". Klepfisz said he didn't believe advertising alone would be enough but reckoned on affiliate deals, the sale of concert tickets and merchandise to make up the difference.
While many remain sceptical about the prospect of QTrax ever launching on a meaningful scale and others suspect the plan is to agree as many licensing deals as possible before selling up, Klepfisz insisted he was in it "for the long-term". At the start of this week, it took a step forward by signing a deal with Beggars Group, the UK independent that has the White Stripes and Radiohead among its artists.
The problem for these new services, and the advertisers who have signed up to them, is that the most attractive audience are the ones who seem to have fewest qualms about downloading illegally. And even the prospect of listening to a 10-second advert, or having to re-dock their MP3 player to refresh the DRM on tracks they have downloaded, may be enough to keep them away.
Basket cases
According to Mulligan, the music industry is caught in a double bind. It has put all its eggs in the digital basket as the solution to collapsing CD sales, which prevents it experimenting with the same freedom as broadcasters. UK broadcasters have got together to work on Project Kangaroo, which will offer a mixture of pay-per-view and ad-supported content. ITV.com offers free catch-up TV, supported by adverts, as do US services like ABC's ad-funded streaming service and NBC and News Corp joint venture Hulu.com. "You can't expect consumers to understand why TV online is any different from music online. People don't differentiate," says Mulligan.
On one side, the optimistic Anderson worldview points to a cornucopia of free content and services paid for by better targeted, more intelligent adverts. On the other, the content and service industries that bring that advertising to consumers are still not convinced it can bring in enough money for them to survive. The tension won't hold forever, and there are bound to be big casualties along the way. According to Klepfisz, whose Qtrax most spectacularly encapsulates the dashed ambition and hitherto unfulfilled potential of the ad-funded world, the dream is still alive: "We want to prove that free is not a four-letter word. That giving music away doesn't mean giving profits away."
Now enabled by technology that allows advertisers to target consumers more precisely and efficiently than ever, the concept is spreading. From free, legal music to free mobile phone calls and texts, from online games featuring targeted ads to free movie downloads, a glut of startup companies aim to apply the same principle that led to the ITV of old becoming a "licence to print money".
Shift change
When Google's top team embarked on a low-profile tour to launch its pay-per-click AdWords programme in the UK in 2002, it seemed unlikely that by 2008 it would be on the verge of making more money than ITV. It is a telling example of the shift that advertising experts believe will continue to see money flow from scattergun mass-market campaigns to highly-targeted, contextualised advertising.
That shift is one that Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of the magazine Wired, who in 2006 turned the concept of The Long Tail into the must-read tome for every harassed media executive, is tapping into with his next book, called simply Free. He argues that the power of "free" will spark an online and business revolution, as the costs of bandwidth and storage became negligible.
"Between digital economics and the wholesale embrace of King Gillette's experiment in price shifting [selling razors at less than cost, to make money on the disposable blades], we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly," he said in Wired (tinyurl.com/yntwek). "A generation raised on free is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want - and free, increasingly, is what you're going to get."
If that is a rallying cry to some, it's terrifying for others - specifically those, like record labels, that have relied on us paying for stuff. As Anderson identifies, the next stage is likely to be ad-funded delivery of goods and services. Shaun Gregory, the former director of new media at Telegraph Media Group who last October became UK chief executive of Blyk, a mobile phone network that offers free talktime and texts in return for serving its customers with ads, says it is inevitable.
Aimed at 16- to 24-year-olds, the deal is that in return for supplying extensive profile information and receiving an average of two to three targeted ads per day, users get 217 texts and 43 minutes of talktime a month. Recent trade speculation suggested takeup was disappointing, but Gregory maintains it is well on track to hit its target of 100,000 users by September.
He says media buyers need to change tack and focus on the quality of their interaction with young consumers rather than their traditional volume-based play. More than 100 advertisers have signed up including Adidas, Sony PlayStation, McDonalds and the COI.
Users are recruited by "street teams" that prowl city centres. Gregory says today's "savvy" youth market understands the implicit or explicit "deal" involved in getting something for nothing. Nor does he accept that those kids looking for free calls might not necessarily be those with the most disposable income. "The calls that come into our call centre are not to complain about the advertising, but to ask for more," he says.
Vodafone and Orange are believed to be looking at variations on the theme while Virgin, which has a US service called Sugar Mama that rewards completion of surveys or the rating of ads with free minutes, is said to be looking at bringing something similar to the UK. Gregory said Blyk was creating a new category. "For seven years, people scoffed at pay-per-click [where Google has made billions]. People said it was just a bunch of web geeks," he said.
A recent report from Generator Media highlighted relationships with ad agencies and the ability to deliver a premium audience as two of the six key requirements for ad-funded services. "Generic, untargeted ads that are slapped on top of a free content service are likely to produce poor results," it said. Gregory believes mobiles and music are the most obvious Trojan horses, because younger consumers believe they should cost nothing in any case.
Steve Purdham, chief executive of the Peter Gabriel-backed ad-funded music service We7, is troubled by the word free. "People will either pay for something with money or they will pay for something with their time. Music should never be free. There is too much value in its ability to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck," he said.
Earlier this week, We7 struck a deal with Sony BMG to launch a new streaming service, and is one of several companies developing various kinds of ad-funded models. The evolution of the internet has opened up a wealth of possibilities. Their development has accelerated in recent months as record labels have woken up to the need to speed the evolution of new business models.
"With CD sales falling at an alarming rate and digital sales failing miserably to offset the decline, they're having to look seriously at alternative revenue models," says Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan.
What track record?
The concept of ad-funded music downloads exploded into the mainstream in January when QTrax, a US service promising unfettered access to any song in return for displaying adverts while they downloaded, announced its launch at a music industry conference in Cannes. The executives behind the service claimed this was the way to capture a slice of the revenue that had been pouring out of the industry at an alarming rate. They would piggyback on an existing peer-to-peer service, but screen all files. Users would download a Qtrax media player that would store tracks and, in time, be able to transfer them to an iPod or other digital music player. More incredible still, they claimed to have agreed deals to license tracks from every major label. It all sounded too good to be true. And it was.
The major labels revealed that they hadn't yet reached deals with Qtrax, or that existing agreements had expired. Negotiations are ongoing; last week the company announced deals with EMI and Sony's publishing arms.
Chief executive Allan Klepfisz admitted that the fiasco, during which it burned hundreds of thousands on sponsorship, billboards and parties featuring the likes of James Blunt, had left it looking "pretty foolish". Klepfisz said he didn't believe advertising alone would be enough but reckoned on affiliate deals, the sale of concert tickets and merchandise to make up the difference.
While many remain sceptical about the prospect of QTrax ever launching on a meaningful scale and others suspect the plan is to agree as many licensing deals as possible before selling up, Klepfisz insisted he was in it "for the long-term". At the start of this week, it took a step forward by signing a deal with Beggars Group, the UK independent that has the White Stripes and Radiohead among its artists.
The problem for these new services, and the advertisers who have signed up to them, is that the most attractive audience are the ones who seem to have fewest qualms about downloading illegally. And even the prospect of listening to a 10-second advert, or having to re-dock their MP3 player to refresh the DRM on tracks they have downloaded, may be enough to keep them away.
Basket cases
According to Mulligan, the music industry is caught in a double bind. It has put all its eggs in the digital basket as the solution to collapsing CD sales, which prevents it experimenting with the same freedom as broadcasters. UK broadcasters have got together to work on Project Kangaroo, which will offer a mixture of pay-per-view and ad-supported content. ITV.com offers free catch-up TV, supported by adverts, as do US services like ABC's ad-funded streaming service and NBC and News Corp joint venture Hulu.com. "You can't expect consumers to understand why TV online is any different from music online. People don't differentiate," says Mulligan.
On one side, the optimistic Anderson worldview points to a cornucopia of free content and services paid for by better targeted, more intelligent adverts. On the other, the content and service industries that bring that advertising to consumers are still not convinced it can bring in enough money for them to survive. The tension won't hold forever, and there are bound to be big casualties along the way. According to Klepfisz, whose Qtrax most spectacularly encapsulates the dashed ambition and hitherto unfulfilled potential of the ad-funded world, the dream is still alive: "We want to prove that free is not a four-letter word. That giving music away doesn't mean giving profits away."
Sunday, 9 March 2008
BBC iPlayer comes to the iPhone
| The iPhone's network is too slow for streaming videoThe BBC has launched a version of its iPlayer video on demand service for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. It is the first time the service has been available on portable devices. The iPhone and iPod touch are able to stream shows from the iPlayer website over wi-fi networks. The iPhone cannot stream BBC video over the cell network. A BBC developer said that the corporation was currently working on other versions of the iPlayer for "many more" devices. Anthony Rose, writing on the BBC internet blog, said: "We started with iPhone because it is the device most optimised for high quality video currently available. "It displays the BBCiPlayer site and BBC programmes nicely." The software currently comes in two versions - a program which allows users to download programmes to their Windows PC and a streaming version on the web available to all users. The version for iPhone and iPod touch users will allow streaming over a wi-fi connection. However, the EDGE mobile network used by the iPhone is too slow for streaming video. The corporation has agreed a deal with wi-fi firm The Cloud to provide all BBC online services for free at its 7,500 hotspots. A version of iPlayer for Virgin Media customers is expected later this month. |
Sunday, 24 February 2008
Blog now open!
| I've finally got round to doing this even though I've been forced to make this I will use this blog as a place to post my thoughts how ever random they maybe, and proberly won't have anything to do with the last post I may have sent. so umm thats it I guess until I have something else to say cya |
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