Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story

Hyperrealism

Early 21 st century Hyperrealismwas founded on the aesthetic principles of Photorealism. American painter Denis Peterson, whose pioneering works are universally viewed as an offshoot of Photo realism, first used "Hyperrealism" to apply to the new movement and its splinter group of artists. Graham Thompson wrote "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs.

However, Hyperrealism is contrasted with the literal approach found in traditional photorealist paintings of the late 20th century. Hyperrealist painters and sculptors use photographic images as a reference source from which to create a more definitive and detailed rendering, one that often, unlike Photorealism, is narrative and emotive in its depictions. Strict Photorealist painters tended to imitate photographic images, omitting or abstracting certain finite detail to maintain a consistent over-all pictorial design. They often omitted human emotion, political value, and narrative elements. Since it evolved from Pop Art, the photorealistic style of painting was uniquely tight, precise, and sharply mechanical with an emphasis on mundane, everyday imagery.

Hyperrealism, although photographic in essence, often entails a softer, much more complex focus on the subject depicted, presenting it as a living, tangible object. These objects and scenes in Hypenealism paintings and sculptures are meticulously detailed to create the illusion of a reality not seen in the original photo. That is not to say they're surreal, as the illusion is a convincing depiction of (simulated) reality. Textures, surfaces, lighting effects, and shadows appear clearer and more distinct than the reference photo or even the actual subject itself.

Hyperrealism has its roots in the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, "the simulation of something which never really existed." As such, Hyperrealists create a false reality, a convincing illusion based on a simulation of reality, the digital photograph. Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are an outgrowth of extremely high-resolution images produced by digital cameras and displayed on computers. As Photorealism emulated analog photography, Hyperrealism uses digital imagery and expands on it to create a new sense of reality. Hyperrealistic paintings and sculptures confront the viewer with the illusion of manipulated high-resolution images, though more meticulous.

Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet

The television industry, bottom-line, seeks to please its viewers. What I have discussed in this book is a shift occurring within the industry and within viewers' lives that appears to be influencing what television viewers are coming to expect from the industry in terms of what pleases them. It is my contention that the rise of the Internet (and particularly broadband connections) has stimulated a likely already-present desire among viewers to participate to a larger degree in the experience of storytelling - whether by influencing narrative decisions, or by understanding the process of creation more fully, or by sharing thoughts and feelings with both creative professionals and fellow TV viewers. A cursory glance at one's daily newspaper, magazine, TV show, or child sitting at the computer reveals that the Internet is involved directly with how an increasing number of us are "playing with" TVincluding how those in the industry are playing. Networks are pulling clips from YouTube because of copyright protection issues - and setting up their own sites for viewers to visit for clips and promos and special webisodes. Some networks are even creating their own Web Channels, where original programming can be found; some of these shows are being shifted to TV, while others await the mainstreaming of a devi~e than can beam computer content to the viewer's TV set. Sports fans are watching March Madness games at CBSsportsline.com, "paying" with their demographic information. Advertising companies and networks are working together to set up social networking capabilities for their viewers, beyond the domain of teen audiences. Fans of new shows are setting up websites that will be ready to kick into high gear the moment their show becomes threatened with cancellation. Writers, directors, and producers seeking to break into the industry are bypassing television momentarily, using the Internet to promote their own work - and some of them are landing paid work in the industry. TV-oriented websites are even popping up unexpectedly, as when Conan O'Brien made a joke on his late night comedy show about a fictional website called hornymanatee.com; NBC legal experts advised that the show's producers create the website rather than risk a lawsuit for naming a domain that did not exist (and that a fan might buy and put unsuitable content on). Growing research on online fandom in the arena of marketing is confirming what fans and some scholars have long known: fans' activities online culminate in making the text their own through shared endeavors of saving, rereading, redistributing, discussing, and recreating (Koerner 2005). The Internet is not a precondition to this arena of activity, with fandom stretching far back into the history of media. So what, really, has changed because of the Internet in terms of teleparticipation? What drives people to use the Internet to participate with TV, and what happens when viewers' desires meet up with those of creative professionals and also those of industry professionals? I believe that what I have described in this book is a fundamental shift in how viewers, industry professionals, and creative professionals are coming to understand TV in the age of the Internet. While this shift is by no means completed, the increasing pervasiveness of the Internet in everyday life, and the opportunities it has created for viewers in particular, indicate that what the reader has seen in these pages is hardly a fluke. Key among these changes is the development of an aesthetics of multiplicity. Shows that have marked tele-participation feature narratives with multiple points of view, typically through the use of ensemble casts, and often, but not always, through complex narrative structures. These programs also often focus on incomplete stories, typically by relying on seriality and interruption.

№ 6. Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0 (from TED conference talk)

One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don't -- into the religious and the atheists. And for the last decade or so, it's been quite clear what being an atheist means. There have been some very vocal atheists who've pointed out, not just that religion is wrong, but that it's ridiculous. These people, many of whom have lived in North Oxford, have argued -- they've argued that believing in God is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game.

I'm interested in the kind of constituency that thinks something along these lines: that thinks, "I can't believe in any of this stuff. I can't believe in the doctrines. I don't think these doctrines are right. But," a very important but, "I love Christmas carols. I really like the art of Mantegna. I really like looking at old churches. I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament." Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about -- people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine. Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice. It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

In the early 19th century, church attendance in Western Europe started sliding down very, very sharply, and people panicked. They asked themselves the following question. They said, where are people going to find the morality, where are they going to find guidance, and where are they going to find sources of consolation? And influential voices came up with one answer. They said culture. It's to culture that we should look for guidance, for consolation, for morality. Let's look to the plays of Shakespeare, the dialogues of Plato, the novels of Jane Austen. In there, we'll find a lot of the truths that we might previously have found in the Gospel of Saint John. Now I think that's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea. They wanted to replace scripture with culture. And that's a very plausible idea. It's also an idea that we have forgotten.

If you went to a top university -- let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge -- and you said, "I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live," they would show you the way to the insane asylum. This is simply not what our grandest and best institutes of higher learning are in the business of. Why? They don't think we need it. They don't think we are in an urgent need of assistance. They see us as adults, rational adults. What we need is information. We need data, we don't need help.

Now religions start from a very different place indeed. All religions, all major religions, at various points call us children. And like children, they believe that we are in severe need of assistance. We're only just holding it together. Perhaps this is just me, maybe you. But anyway, we're only just holding it together. And we need help. Of course, we need help. And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning.

Now we've given up with the idea of sermons. If you said to a modern liberal individualist, "Hey, how about a sermon?" they'd go, "No, no. I don't need one of those. I'm an independent, individual person." What's the difference between a sermon and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture? Well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition. The tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable, because we are in need of guidance, morality and consolation -- and religions know that.

Another point about education: we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. Sit them in a classroom, tell them about Plato at the age of 20, send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years, and that lesson will stick with them. Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it." That's what all religions tell us: "Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." Otherwise our minds are like sieves.

So religions are cultures of repetition. They circle the great truths again and again and again. We associate repetition with boredom. "Give us the new," we're always saying. "The new is better than the old." If I said to you, "Okay, we're not going to have new TED. We're just going to run through all the old ones and watch them five times because they're so true. We're going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times because what she says is so clever," you'd feel cheated. Not so if you're adopting a religious mindset.

The other things that religions do is to arrange time. All the major religions give us calendars. What is a calendar? A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas. In the Catholic chronology, Catholic calendar, at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor. You won't do that by accident; you will do that because you are guided to do that. Now we don't think that way. In the secular world we think, "If an idea is important, I'll bump into it. I'll just come across it." Nonsense, says the religious world view. Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time, we need to synchronize encounters. This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings.

Take the Moon. It's really important to look at the Moon. You know, when you look at the Moon, you think, "I'm really small. What are my problems?" It sets things into perspective, etc., etc. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often. We don't. Why don't we? Well there's nothing to tell us, "Look at the Moon." But if you're a Zen Buddhist in the middle of September, you will be ordered out of your home, made to stand on a canonical platform and made to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi, where you will be given poems to read in honor of the Moon and the passage of time and the frailty of life that it should remind us of. You'll be handed rice cakes. And the Moon and the reflection on the Moon will have a secure place in your heart. That's very good.

The other thing that religions are really aware of is: speak well -- I'm not doing a very good job of this here -- but oratory, oratory is absolutely key to religions. In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career. But the religious world doesn't think that way. What you're saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it.

So if you go to an African American Pentecostalist church in the American South and you listen to how they talk, my goodness, they talk well. After every convincing point, people will go, "Amen, amen, amen." At the end of a really rousing paragraph, they'll all stand up, and they'll go, "Thank you Jesus, thank you Christ, thank you Savior." If we were doing it like they do it -- let's not do it, but if we were to do it -- I would tell you something like, "Culture should replace scripture." And you would go, "Amen, amen, amen." And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up and you would go, "Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen." And we'd know that we had a real rhythm going. All right, all right. We're getting there. We're getting there.

The other thing that religions know is we're not just brains, we are also bodies. And when they teach us a lesson, they do it via the body. So for example, take the Jewish idea of forgiveness. Jews are very interested in forgiveness and how we should start anew and start afresh. They don't just deliver us sermons on this. They don't just give us books or words about this. They tell us to have a bath. So in Orthodox Jewish communities, every Friday you go to a Mikveh. You immerse yourself in the water, and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea. We don't tend to do that. Our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another. Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two.

№ 7. In the End, there is no end (from The Story of Greek cinema)

The story of Greek cinema is one of complex diversity and chaotic pluralism. It's main virtue has been the irresistible capacity to regenerate itself under all and any circumstances; it's main impediment, a strange reluctance to reach out and share it's achievements. Despite the fact that not all genres were developed by the film industry, the film culture was always open, receptive, and sensitive to new ideas, practices and suggestions. Like Greek society, Greek cinema has always been a space of contrasts and juxtapositions, indeed, a space where contested truths coexisted in an uneasy and sometimes paradoxical interdependence.

Also, just as with the country's political life, the Greek film industry was always inward-looking, withdrawn and lonesome, locked into a series of dilemmas that led to a hermeneutics of doubt directed towards its own self. But it was introverted without being introspective; it avoided making comparisons and analogies, thus remaining unable to locate it's position within European and global cinemas. It also avoided establishing a theoretical critical discourse on it's own principles and values, staying firmly within the realm of symptomatic criticism, ad hoc reviewing, and circumstantial self-loathing or childish self-depreciation.

In reality, many good films were produced in the country and some of them could be safely and comfortably labelled as «great films» in the European or even global canon. What has always been noticeably absent from their promotion and, consequently, reception is the appropriate and commensurate contextualization. On most occasions, Greek films were framed and interpreted either through the nefarious quest for an elusive «Greekness» or through the perspective of national political instability — the social, formal, and, one might say, anthropological claims that were articulated in Greek movies were overlooked and lost. The truth is that very few Greek directors dealt explicitly with the quest for «Greekness», and then only in periods of crisis or self-indulgence.

The historical narrative presented here suggests that cinema in Greece has been one of the most prolific, successful, and creative appropriations of the central medium of modernity by a traditional, logocentric, and non-perspectival culture. There were so many «cinematic» events which occurred in the country over a short period of time and which have escaped the attention and care of most scholars.

Early Greek film-makers taught the public another way of seeing by establishing a new visual language based on different visual perception: they had to re-thematize reality according to a distinct and novel form of pictorial schematization. Such re-thematization managed to construct it's grammar of tropes and syntax of configurations only after the 1950's when modernity as cultural experience and historical reality had reshaped Greek society. The transition had to sever visual representation from the traditional, pre-modern, non-perspectival visual principles derived from Byzantine and post-Byzantine pictorial space. Through the cinematic medium, Greek culture confronted the Renaissance perspective and the invention of photography simultaneously. As an achievement in reinventing visual perception, Greek cinema is of major cultural significance.

Important directors, producers, actors, and cinephiles transformed social limitations and political restrictions, and established a thriving film culture, which deserves more recognition and credit. The visual language of the Greek national cinema was constituted though the efforts of many locals and outsiders who worked with great dedication and persistence. Alongside Dimitris Gaziadis, Michael Cacoyannis and Nikos Koundouros one must place Josef Hepp, Walter Lassally and Giovanni Varriano in order to understand the full extent of the transnational character of the film industry. Furthermore, Greek cinema has always been a space of convergence of different cinematic styles, diverse modes of expression, and conflicting visual strategies. It has also always been a locus where all of these facets fused in order to facilitate a dynamic and inquisitive exploration of new codes of representation for an unstable social reality that defined itself in the cinematic eye in terms of trauma, loss, and absence. It is certainly true that, with very few exceptions, no risks were ever taken with the medium. It is also true that the technological infrastructure of the country did not foster the production of radical reinventions of formal representation, or even a critical reflection on it's potential and limitations.

№ 8. Ed Ulbrich: How Benjamin Button got his face (from TED conference talk)

I'm here today representing a team of artists and technologists and film makers that worked together on a remarkable film project for the last four years. And along the way they created a breakthrough in computer visualization. So I'd like to start with a little bit of history on the project. This is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. It's about a man who's born old and lives his life in reverse. Now, this movie has floated around Hollywood for well over half a century, and we first got involved with the project in the early '90s, with Ron Howard as the director. We took a lot of meetings and we seriously considered it. But at the time we had to throw in the towel. It was deemed impossible. It was beyond the technology of the day to depict a man aging backwards. The human form, in particular the human head, has been considered the Holy Grail of our industry.

The project came back to us about a decade later, and this time with a director named David Fincher. Now, Fincher is an interesting guy. David is fearless of technology, and he is absolutely tenacious. And David won't take "no." And David believed, like we do in the visual effects industry, that anything is possible as long as you have enough time, resources and, of course, money. And so David had an interesting take on the film, and he threw a challenge at us. He wanted the main character of the film to be played from the cradle to the grave by one actor. It happened to be this guy. We went through a process of elimination and a process of discovery with David, and we ruled out, of course, swapping actors. That was one idea: that we would have different actors, and we would hand off from actor to actor. We even ruled out the idea of using makeup. We realized that prosthetic makeup just wouldn't hold up, particularly in close-up. And makeup is an additive process. You have to build the face up. And David wanted to carve deeply into Brad's face to bring the aging to this character. He needed to be a very sympathetic character. So we decided to cast a series of little people that would play the different bodies of Benjamin at the different increments of his life and that we would in fact create a computer-generated version of Brad's head, aged to appear as Benjamin, and attach that to the body of the real actor. Sounded great.

Of course, this was the Holy Grail of our industry, and the fact that this guy is a global icon didn't help either, because I'm sure if any of you ever stand in line at the grocery store, you know -- we see his face constantly. So there really was no tolerable margin of error. There were two studios involved: Warner Brothers and Paramount. And they both believed this would make an amazing film, of course, but it was a very high-risk proposition. There was lots of money and reputations at stake. But we believed that we had a very solid methodology that might work...

But despite our verbal assurances, they wanted some proof. And so, in 2004, they commissioned us to do a screen test of Benjamin. And we did it in about five weeks. But we used lots of cheats and shortcuts. We basically put something together to get through the meeting. I'll roll that for you now. This was the first test for Benjamin Button. And in here, you can see, that's a computer-generated head --pretty good -- attached to the body of an actor. And it worked. And it gave the studio great relief. After many years of starts and stops on this project, and making that tough decision, they finally decided to green light the movie. And I can remember, actually, when I got the phone call to congratulate us, to say the movie was a go, I actually threw up. You know, this is some tough stuff.

So we started to have early team meetings, and we got everybody together, and it was really more like therapy in the beginning, convincing each other and reassuring each other that we could actually undertake this. We had to hold up an hour of a movie with a character. And it's not a special effects film; it has to be a man. We really felt like we were in a -- kind of a 12-step program. And of course, the first step is: admit you've got a problem. So we had a big problem: we didn't know how we were going to do this. But we did know one thing. Being from the visual effects industry, we, with David, believed that we now had enough time, enough resources, and, God, we hoped we had enough money. And we had enough passion to will the processes and technology into existence.

Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story

(Filmmaker Andrew Stanton “Toy Story”, “WALL-E”, ”John Carter”)

Storytelling is joke telling. It's knowing your punch line, your ending, knowing that everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. We all love stories. We're born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.

The children's television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, "Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story." And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, which is "Make me care" --please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care. We all know what it's like to not care. You've gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one. It's already halfway over, but something's caught you and you're drawn in and you care. That's not by chance, that's by design.

And the most current story lesson that I've had was completing the film I've just done this year in 2012.The film is "John Carter." It's based on a book called "The Princess of Mars," which was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And Edgar Rice Burroughs actually put himself as a character inside this movie, and as the narrator. And he's summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter, to his mansion with a telegram saying, "See me at once." But once he gets there, he's found out that his uncle has mysteriously passed away and been entombed in a mausoleum on the property. What this scene is doing, and it did in the book, is it's fundamentally making a promise. It's making a promise to you that this story will lead somewhere that's worth your time. And that's what all good stories should do at the beginning, is they should give you a promise. You could do it an infinite amount of ways. Sometimes it's as simple as "Once upon a time... "These Carter books always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as a narrator in it. And I always thought it was such a fantastic device. It's like a guy inviting you around the campfire, or somebody in a bar saying, "Here, let me tell you a story. It didn't happen to me, it happened to somebody else, but it's going to be worth your time. "A well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot and propels you forward through the story to the end.

Storytelling without dialogue. It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling. It's the most inclusive approach you can take. It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don't want to know that they're doing that. That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal. We're born problem solvers. We're compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that's what we do in real life. It's this well-organized absence of information that draws us in. There's a reason that we're all attracted to an infant or a puppy. It's not just that they're damn cute; it's because they can't completely express what they're thinking and what their intentions are. And it's like a magnet. We can't stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in.

I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on "Finding Nemo." And we would call this the unifying theory of two plus two. Make the audience put things together. Don't give them four, give them two plus two. The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience. Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. It's the invisible application that holds our attention to story. I don't mean to make it sound like this is an actual exact science, it's not. That's what's so special about stories, they're not a widget, they aren't exact. Stories are inevitable, if they're good, but they're not predictable.

№ 10. Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story (Part 2)

(Filmmaker Andrew Stanton “Toy Story”, “WALL-E”, ”John Carter”)

In 1998, I had finished writing "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting. So I wanted to become much better at it and learn anything I could. So I researched everything I possibly could. And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: "Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty." It's an incredibly insightful definition.

When you're telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next? But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term? Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be? An example would be in "Finding Nemo," in the short tension, you were always worried, would Dory's short-term memory make her forget whatever she was being told by Marlin. But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge, vast ocean?

In our earliest days at Pixar, before we truly understood the invisible workings of story, we were simply a group of guys just going on our gut, going on our instincts. And it's interesting to see how that led us places that were actually pretty good. You've got to remember that in this time of year,1993, what was considered a successful animated picture was "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin," "Lion King. "So when we pitched "Toy Story" to Tom Hanks for the first time, he walked in and he said, "You don't want me to sing, do you?" And I thought that epitomized perfectly what everybody thought animation had to be at the time. But we really wanted to prove that you could tell stories completely different in animation.

We didn't have any influence then, so we had a little secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves. And they were: No songs, no "I want" moment, no happy village, no love story. And the irony is that, in the first year, our story was not working at all and Disney was panicking. So they privately got advice from a famous lyricist, who I won't name, and he faxed them some suggestions. And we got a hold of that fax. And the fax said, there should be songs, there should be an "I want" song, there should be a happy village song, there should be a love story and there should be a villain. And thank goodness we were just too young, rebellious and contrarian at the time. That just gave us more determination to prove that you could build a better story. And a year after that, we did conquer it. And it just went to prove that storytelling has guidelines, not hard, fast rules.

Another fundamental thing we learned was about liking your main character. And we had naively thought, well Woody in "Toy Story" has to become selfless at the end, so you've got to start from some place. So let's make him selfish. And this is what you get. So how do you make a selfish character likable? We realized, you can make him kind, generous, funny, considerate, as long as one condition is met for him, is that he stays the top toy. And that's what it really is, is that we all live life conditionally. We're all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met. After that, all bets are off. And before I'd even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about story.

In 1986, I truly understood the notion of story having a theme. And that was the year that they restored and re-released "Lawrence of Arabia." And I saw that thing seven times in one month. I couldn't get enough of it. I could just tell there was a grand design under it --in every shot, every scene, every line. Yet, on the surface it just seemed to be depicting his historical lineage of what went on. Yet, there was something more being said. What exactly was it? And it wasn't until, on one of my later viewings, that the veil was lifted and it was in a scene where he's walked across the Sinai Desert and he's reached the Suez Canal, and I suddenly got it.

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