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"Let me tell you about a dream I had," says a character played by Rick
Linklater in the new digital film Waking Life. But Linklater, who
also wrote and directed the film, does much more than share a single
dream. With Waking Life he has created perhaps the most vivid
dreamscape ever to reach movie screens.
In fact, Waking Life feels like
an entirely new kind of movie, thanks largely to its innovative hybrid of
live action and animation. The film opens in New York and Los Angeles this
weekend, expands to 12 other cities Oct. 26, and reaches theaters
nationwide in November.
Those who remember Linklater for his grungy independent films
Slacker and Dazed and Confused might be surprised by his
latest project. Shot with off-the-rack digital cameras and then fully
animated, Waking Life looks something like a photo-realistic comic
book, colorized with a Simpsons-like palette and brought to life.
"I see this as a realistic film about an unreality," Linklater says.
"The gestures, the sound, the human expressions all seem real, but this
reality is then re-interpreted artistically. It becomes a kind of moving
painting."
Waking Life's animation was overseen by Austin artist Bob
Sabiston, whose software allows animators to use video images as a kind of
sketchpad they can draw on. It's like a 21st-century update to rotoscoping
-- the animation technique used in films like Snow White.
Characters created with old-school rotoscoping moved rigidly and
mechanically. Sabiston's program allows for more fluid lines, making his
characters feel far more vital.
The program already is something of a phenomenon. Sabiston's short
videos Roadhead, Snack and Drink and Figures of Speech,
created with Tommy Pallotta, have won numerous awards, and Sabiston has
already seen his style replicated by advertising agencies (he considered
suing Earthlink for a series of copycat ads).
The typical Sabiston-Pallotta film is filled with experimentation --
characters' eyes bulge expressively; strands of hair snake around their
heads. Figures might pop up into the frame, offering a playful visual
counterpoint to their dialogue.
When Linklater saw the Sabiston-Pallotta films, he realized their style
of animation might help rescue a project he had nearly abandoned.
Linklater says he couldn't figure out a way to turn his script, a
collection of insights and musings inspired by his own dreams, into a
live-action film.
"I don't think films and dreams generally go together well -- they are
kind of redundant," he says. "Most people participate in their dreams the
same way they watch movies: uncritically, almost unconsciously, taking in
the information and imagery.
"And this film uses dreams as a kind of operating system for the
narrative, the hitch for most of the ideas. The realism of (live-action)
film would have canceled out the ideas.... This style of animation allows
you to see a different state of reality."
In creating Waking Life, Linklater shot the digital footage
quickly with handheld Sony cameras. That footage -- monologues and
conversations featuring artists, conspiracy theorists, academics and other
articulate types -- was uploaded onto Mac workstations, each equipped with
Sabiston's software and a Wacom tablet.
This animation "factory," as Linklater called it, hosted 30 animators
who drew on and colored the digitized images, frame by frame. Each
animator followed a character through the movie, giving that character his
or her own color scheme and traits.
One convict, filmed behind bars, burns red with anger. A film theorist
talks about "holy moments," as sparks shoot from his hands. Animated
characters played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke glow with the pastel
softness of a leisurely, thoughtful morning.
Though each minute of Waking Life's raw footage took up to 250
hours to animate, the project was a bargain by Hollywood standards (a
Pixar- or Disney-animated feature might cost 10 or 15 times as much). The
low cost meant Linklater could dare to do something the studios wouldn't:
use animation to explore adult subject matter.
"I'm not a technological fetishist," Linklater says. "I want to tell a
story in the right way. Technologies can help us in our human desire to
express ourselves, to communicate and share our experiences.
"I think that's why Waking Life is more than just an interesting
moment in the history of film technology. The technology has allowed this
particular story -- a story that probably wouldn't have worked in any
other form -- to be told."
From
www.wired.com
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