Sunday, October 29, 2023

Arcane: the amazing visual production

Arcane is an animated series that is set in a utopian city called 'piltover' and an oppressed district called 'zaun'. The story is based on video games League of Legends by Riot Games. Visually the utopian city adopted Art Deco style with skyscrapers and geometrical decoration, bright and lush with traditions.



 While the oppressed zaun visually presented in art nouveau style, organic buildings with dark environments. 


Everything in this movie is digitally hand-painted. Not only that but the environment and the characters are combined with 2D and 3D elements. The intricate background, for example, is mostly drawn. This means the lighting and shadow are also painted. The drawing has to be adjusted in a certain way so that it will look realistic in perspective. Fortiche, the producer studio, successfully made a seamless combination between the 2D elements, 2D visual effects, with the moving 3D elements. 





In arcane, they deliberately make objects painted, highly detailed and multi faceted by applying it through texture projections, this makes Arcane visually different than other animated movies. Creatively establishing their own identity in animation.


Though this movie adapted steampunk genre where the visual seems to focus on machinery and historical references. I like to see it as an alternate future. What if human decided to create a utopian world. While there's another world where resistance live, no rules. We can see how this movie also show the advancement of science that could figure out a power that almost like 'magic', body modification, and so on. 

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)



Conspirators of pleasure, a dark comedy/ silent movie released in the 1996. This movie told individual stories of six people of their personal obsessions and fantasies, and how it interlaced with each other. 

The movie is intriguingly showing human desire and fantasy, to what extent a person can do to fulfill their imagination (perhaps their intrusive thoughts?) People can be really creative and avant garde in their head. What if human do everything that crosses their mind. In this movie, human desires became a force of creativity. Like how someone in the movie use a roller pin, fur, and nails to inflict physical sensations. Or the guy who invent a whole mechanical machinery to serve him pleasure. Should there were not desires, perhaps they won't make these things.

Human are not only intelligent being, but also a spiritual being. They are looking for connection with the spiritual realm thus the imagery of rituals, symbolic objects like blood and candles. This is also the part where the movie was cleverly using reappearing objects like fur, wardrobe, nails, feathers, umbrella. And so on. I interpret that the movie used these objects as a symbolic meaning of how these obsession and energy could be found and delivered through everything and everywhere in daily life.


Thursday, October 5, 2023

Neural lace - when our brain becomes internet

Imagine a world where we can access the internet through our brains. Perhaps there will be no school, there's no such thing as being 'not well-informed', there's no such thing as being hidden anymore. Hacking is no longer on the surface-based level, but every piece of your thought, knowledge, and opinion will be easily known, stolen. Telepathic is no longer a myth. Resting will become a myth. Neural lace will break the world's record of 'shock'. Safety and security will become the new real estate or the new stock market. 

Perhaps we begin to experience the real augmented reality. No additional device, only senses, and the neural lace.  Our imagination becomes real, and our memory can be regenerated, resurrected. The boundaries between reality and virtual become blurry and dissolved. Human is no longer human, we become the new computer.