Ken’s Blog

When I am in a work crunch — which I am these days — one of the ways I deal with the pressure is to watch TV shows. Fortunately, Netflix makes this easy.

Since I don’t particularly care which show I am watching, as long as it has decent writing, and having exhausted, for the moment, Jennifer Jones and Stranger Things, I find myself randomly ping ponging between lots of offerings on tap, including Luke Cage, iZombie, Galavant, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Gotham, Grace and Frankie, Penny Dreadful and of course Buffy — always Buffy — among others.

When you are watching so many shows, you start to notice that each one is actually about a very well-defined reality. In a sense, that specific defining reality is the real point of the show. Each TV series possesses an exact mix of knowing humor, sardonic ruefulness, tragedy, romance, absurdity, kindness and cruelty, hopefulness and despair.

It’s almost as though there is a giant bank of sliders, labeled with every human emotional quality. I can picture the writers and show runners working through the exact settings of those sliders together, before a single script has been written.

Once the show if off and running, that particular setting of reality sliders becomes a sort of bible. If you write for the show, whatever you write needs to conform to that bible.

Of course there are exceptions. Just as The Beatles evolved from the Mersey Beat of their early days to something far more daring and interesting, some TV shows manage to break free of the shallow moorings of their first season and transition into a far deeper and more powerful reality.

Like, for instance, Buffy.

My blog post yesterday somewhat cryptically referred to Barranquilla. The exegesis of that post was a long and fascinating conversation I had with somebody who comes from that town in Colombia.

Barranquilla is on the northwest coast of the South American continent, and is known and celebrated for its elaborate and flamboyant Carnival. It was fascinating to meet somebody from this part of the world, and to compare and contrast our culture of New York with an equatorial culture.

I came away with a renewed appreciation for the wonderful diversity of this world of ours, and how much we can learn from the people we encounter. One thing I love about New York is the way you get to meet people from different parts of the world, and how thoroughly we all accept that we are all different yet all the same.

I sincerely hope that our country is not about to enter a dark time of xenophobia, the sort of fearfully cowering and angrily defensive distrust of the outside world that Donald Trump has been peddling.

We are better than that. We must be better than that.

today I learned of
barranquilla, and a door
suddenly opened

I gave a guest lecture for a class yesterday, during which I demonstrated interactions with some of my procedurally animated characters. Later in the day I received an email from a student saying that he had spent the next several hours pondering something I had said during that demo:

“It’s not enough that we are interested in them, they have to be interested in us.”

I think this is, in fact, the core essence of interactive animated characters. We are fascinated by them because they seem to be aware of us, and to respond back to us — they seem to recognize us.

In a way, we see such characters as a kind of mirror, and we experience a sort of blurring of identity. In some profound way, they become us, and we become them.

Newly emerging VR and AR technologies are allowing such characters to break free of the screen, and to inhabit the world around us. When they do, this feeling of shared identity will become even more powerful and profound.

Today I saw a pair of identical twins walking up Broadway. And in response to this sight I had the oddest thought.

Suppose I wanted to create a science fiction film featuring a race of identical looking people. It would be so much easier if my lead actor or actress was actually a pair of identical twins. That way, I would have no need of expensive high quality matte effects.

If I were careful about how I set up my shots, making sure that no more than two characters were overlapping on the screen at the same time — not a very challenging constraint — then all of the other compositing could be done on the cheap, since people would never be overlapping in the shot

Scenes that would otherwise be difficult or enormously complex to achieve would become relatively straightfoward to shoot and composite together. That would allow more focus on story, character development, all the good stuff.

The use of identical twins to portray a single character is far from a new concept. Among the more famous examples are the Olsen twins playing Michelle Tanner on Full House, and the occasional use of Nicholas Brendon’s identical twin brother Kelly Donovan in some scenes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet I’m not sure anybody has ever employed a pair of identical twins as a means to create the illusion of an entire race of identical people.

Or have they?

I originally posted something about the election today. But then I walked around Greenwich Village this evening, just wandering through the streets and seeing all the people in their crazy costumes.

A lot of the costumes were store bought, maybe something picked up before going to a Halloween party. But a lot of others were clearly custom made, crafted with love and care, and a charmingly fanatic devotion to the strange, the unexpected, the endearingly oddball.

It was to these costumes I was drawn, and what they said about their wearers.

For all the hype surrounding the parade itself, for me the real show every year is in the citizen-created street art. All of these people who will never be famous, and have no intention of ever becoming famous, just creating something wild and weird and beautiful for the sheer love of it.

This is what I love about our town: its underlying spirit of unchecked creativity and fearless individuality. On this magical night of the year you can walk the streets of New York City for hours on end, and everywhere you look you will see that spirit in all its crazy magnificence.

It is a beautiful sight.

Well, not a real robot. Just a 3D computer animated robot. I did it as part of our Future Reality research, and the robot will be part of a larger research agenda.

But there was something satisfying in the act of creation itself. The moment you start to create a new animated character it begins to take on its own personality — one that is always a little surprising, a little unexpected. And this was no exception.

You can see it come to life by clicking on the below image.

To change the camera view you can drag left or right with your mouse (or with your finger if you’re reading this from a phone).

If you are viewing from a phone, the robot will display as a stereo pair, suitable for VR viewing. To toggle stereo on or off, just swipe downward.

It feels good to release a new robot character into the world. They look so cute when they’re young, don’t they? I hope it doesn’t grow up to be Skynet.

Today, on a sunny afternoon in Greenwich Village, I was sharing a late brunch with a friend at the delightful Rockin’ Raw restaurant. For dessert we shared the Chocolate Ganache Pie, which is one of the great taste wonders of the world.

At some point, while we were happily chatting away over yummy pie and coffee, we both noticed that we were listening to a very familiar song. Except it was also unfamiliar.

We realized were were hearing an unfamiliar cover of the Rock and Roll classic “Lola”. But the tone was quite different — the beat was faster and more aggressive, and the lead singer was female.

My friend said she rather liked this version. “Maybe,” I suggested, “that’s because they got rid of the kinks.”

Every Friday a group of us meet for an experimental workshop where we try to bring elements of Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck into VR theater practice. At this week’s meeting, the subject came up of “flow”. That is, flow in the sense that is described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: a mental state of total immersion, where everyday cares and self-consciousness drop away.

A few hours later, after our research team had spent much of the evening working away on a demo, one of the students started noodling around on the piano, improvising a beautiful sequence of jazz riffs. At some point I wandered over and started improvising a melody on top of it. For the next twenty minutes, we just explored the musical space together, both of us rapturously immersed within the chromatically shifting chords and winding melodies, in a total state of flow.

Not a bad place to be.

I cannot help but disagree with those who repudiate disavowals that they wouldn’t be lying should they refuse not to deny that they would never refrain from being opposed to avoiding a ban on rejecting double negatives.