The Baader Meinhof Complex

Sunday, February 3rd, 2013

I recently watched The Baader Meinhof Complex, about the Red Army Faction, Germany’s most famous left-wing terrorist organization.

It shared many qualities in common with Carlos:

  • Again, every time anyone handles a gun, they casually muzzle-sweep their friends, with their finger on the trigger. There’s even a negligent discharge. Handling guns, to these so-called revolutionaries, seems to revolve around breaking the taboo around them.
  • The movie has a lot of gratuitous nudity — more of it female than in Carlos. More of it involving children, too. The whole movie made me feel terribly bourgeois.
  • Being an effective terrorist is largely a matter of willingness to do terrible things, not competence at doing those terrible things. “If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offence. If one sets hundreds of cars on fire, that is political action.”
  • Angry youths are useful idiots. West Germany seems to have been especially useful to the Soviets. Stefan Aust, author of the book, had this to say:

    World War II was only twenty years earlier. Those in charge of the police, the schools, the government — they were the same people who’d been in charge under Nazism. The chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been a Nazi. People started discussing this only in the 60′s. We were the first generation since the war, and we were asking our parents questions. Due to the Nazi past, everything bad was compared to the Third Reich. If you heard about police brutality, that was said to be just like the SS. The moment you see your own country as the continuation of a fascist state, you give yourself permission to do almost anything against it. You see your action as the resistance that your parents did not put up.

    The movie makes no mention of Soviet or East-German support.

  • Palestinian “liberation” is a Marxist movement in the 1970s. The Baader-Meinhof gang goes to the Middle East for training — where they seem perplexed that their local hosts don’t approve of their Bohemian lifestyle. Or the young Germans are just being rude and provocative on purpose. That seems to be the point of most of their actions.
  • The terrorists of the 1970s seem like wannabe rock-stars.
  • I found the terrorists utterly unsympathetic, but young Germans at the time supported them:

    The Baader-Meinhof Gang drew a measure of support that violent leftists in the United States, like the Weather Underground, never enjoyed. A poll at the time showed that a quarter of West Germans under forty felt sympathy for the gang and one-tenth said they would hide a gang member from the police. Prominent intellectuals spoke up for the gang’s righteousness (as) Germany even into the 1970s was still a guilt-ridden society. When the gang started robbing banks, newscasts compared its members to Bonnie and Clyde. (Andreas) Baader, a charismatic, spoiled psychopath, indulged in the imagery, telling people that his favourite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and The Battle of Algiers. The pop poster of Che Guevara hung on his wall, (while) he paid a designer to make a Red Army Faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against a red star.

  • As in Carlos, an airliner hijacking goes awry — but it seems like they could have continued a campaign of bombings and assassinations with impunity.

Posted in Crime, Media, Policy, War | 5 Comments »

How Digital Filmmakers Produced a Gorgeous Sci-Fi Movie on a Kickstarter Budget

Saturday, February 2nd, 2013

Tim Daly speaks with Derek Van Gorder and Otto Stockmeier about how the digital filmmakers produced a gorgeous sci-fi movie on a Kickstarter budget:

The project has three main shooting environments. First, there was the live-action interior of the ship. Second, the exterior of the ship in flight. Third, a live-action retro-science documentary.

The interior of the ship was a set built largely from particleboard and pegboards with clever lighting and projectors to create the environment. The space sequences were filmed as stop-motion sequences with a model. By taking advantage of the camera’s ability to shoot in low light, the team was able to create a spectacular setting using cheap, readily available lights like LEDs and Christmas tree bulbs that would have been too dim at the height of Hollywood’s use of in-camera special effects.

By contrast, the “science documentary” sequences were filmed on location with 16mm cameras. Because they were filmed in broad daylight, the lighting situation was much simpler.

Otto Stockmeier: All of our miniature photography was done using the 2 meter DitoGear motion-control Omnislider, which is often used for time-lapse photography and stop animation. The repeatable motion allowed us to get multiple passes for each shot, meaning we could expose for different elements separately and turn the different passes on and off in the edit to create various effects. Also the continuous motion setting let us shoot high resolution stills for each frame while maintaining the correct motion blur. By shooting stills instead of live video we were able to use low light and keep deep focus by lengthening exposure times (meaning a 10 second shot could take half an hour to film, and when you add multiple passes to that it was slow going).

We found a lot of use for projectors both on set and during miniature photography. On set they served for background screens and combined with pegboard to create textured moving walls. Our designer Thomas Kronbichler would create a still version of the graphic for us and then Derek would animate it in Final Cut Pro. At one point for the bridge scenes we had 4-5 projectors going all playing looped videos. For the planet shots we ended up projecting a video of Jupiter behind the ship that moved in sync with the camera to make it look like only the ship is moving. This created an interesting additional effect, since the texture of the screen still moved with the ship it gave a sort of haze to the planet which we liked.

Otherwise, everything is lights, flares, split screen and other tricks. We got a lot of mileage out of some simple home-depot LED lights in creating all of the different explosion and firing flares.

[...]

We picked up some cheap party police lights (which we dubbed “spinners”), that we used for alarm lights. We taped them onto c-stands for flexibility and used them to break up the space and keep everything moving. Our sets were OK, but you need a lot of distractions going on or viewers might start noticing the cardboard and staples.

Likewise, aside from our small kitchen fluorescents (“c-lights”) that we used everywhere, we got some longer ceiling lights (“gate lights”) that we combined with wax paper and gels and put behind the cut outs next to the gates.

My personal favorite had to have been this little round LED under-counter kitchen light we found (“flare light”). For some reason the reflective housing surrounding the LED source on that fixture made the coolest flares and we used it for all of the gun effects as well as all of the spaceship firing effects. In fact for the ship effects we used a lot of long exposures and wiggling lights around to get beams of lights, or flickering blasts (I would tilt the flare light in a different direction between each frame).

[...]

A big part of what sells this film is keeping things tight and fast, and we found that showing a lot of user interface screens to be a very effective way to quickly explain things without us having to build more sets or models. From the beginning we planned to take advantage of this, and as it progressed we found ourselves generating more and more graphics because it was so helpful.

As I briefly explained with the projectors, all of the graphics were designed by Thomas Kronbichler. He would send us illustrator files with everything laid out and a rough plan of how to animate it. Derek would then take all the elements into Final Cut and animate them frame-by-frame. We would then either project them into the sets, or film them off of an iPad. When filming the iPad we used filters, multiple passes, and soft focus to really extenuate the feeling that you are looking at a screen in a room and not a completely digitally generated image.

[...]

Here is the journey of the model. Originally we raided a Toys ‘R Us for cool parts and bashed together a small 2ft model. When we started the Kickstarter, however, we knew we wanted something better and more iconic to help sell the project, so we called in my father, Wolfgang Stockmeier. He is an architect and is the one responsible for all of the set designs and the re-imagining of the ship. Using pictures of the original model he took the basic shape we had and “re-built” it in SketchUp. We used this much more exciting incarnation to generate a lot of cool concept art for the Kickstarter campaign.

When Charles Adams came on board to actually build the ship, he used my father’s 3D model to re-build it once again in Rhino, adding a lot more amazing details, but more importantly this allowed him to produce accurate shapes for laser printing. Basically, with the Rhino 3D model Charles was able to generate a base kit of laser cut parts, much like a model kit you might get in a store. He then kit bashed all the amazing intricate details onto this base.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Carlos the Jackal

Saturday, February 2nd, 2013

I recently watched Carlos, about Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the left-wing terrorist most infamous for storming OPEC headquarters in Vienna in 1975.

Some thoughts:

  • Every time anyone handles a gun in this movie, they casually muzzle-sweep their friends, with their finger on the trigger. This actually strikes me as authentic.
  • The movie has a lot of gratuitous nudity — some of it female.
  • Being an effective terrorist is largely a matter of willingness to do terrible things, not competence at doing those terrible things.
  • Angry youths are useful idiots. West Germany seems to have been especially useful to the Soviets.
  • Palestinian “liberation” is a Marxist movement in the 1970s.
  • The terrorists of the 1970s seem like wannabe rock-stars.
  • The real-life Sanchez is alive and living in a French prison. He objected to the OPEC scenes, which depicted his men as hysterically waving submachine-guns around.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much

Friday, February 1st, 2013

Gérard de Villiers is the spy novelist who knows too much — because everyone talks to him:

Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, “Les Fous de Benghazi,” came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.”

Though he is almost unknown in the United States, de Villiers’s publishers estimate that the S.A.S. series has sold about 100 million copies worldwide, which would make it one of the top-selling series in history, on a par with Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. S.A.S. may be the longest-running fiction series ever written by a single author. The first book, “S.A.S. in Istanbul,” appeared in March 1965; de Villiers is now working on No. 197.

[...]

De Villiers created Malko, his hero, in 1964 by merging three real-life acquaintances: a high-ranking French intelligence official named Yvan de Lignières; an Austrian arms dealer; and a German baron named Dieter von Malsen-Ponickau. As is so often the case, though, his fiction proved prophetic. Five years after he began writing the series, de Villiers met Alexandre de Marenches, a man of immense charisma who led the French foreign-intelligence service for more than a decade and was a legend of cold-war spy craft. De Marenches was very rich and came from one of France’s oldest families; he fought heroically in World War II, and he later built his own castle on the Riviera. He also helped create a shadowy international network of intelligence operatives known as the Safari Club, which waged clandestine battles against Soviet operatives in Africa and the Middle East. “He was doing intelligence for fun,” de Villiers told me. “Sometimes he didn’t even pick up the phone when Giscard called him.” In short, de Marenches was very close to being the aristocratic master spy de Villiers had imagined, and as their friendship deepened in the 1970s, de Villiers’s relationship with French intelligence also deepened and lasts to this day.

[...]

When I asked whether it bothered him that no one took his books seriously, he did not seem at all defensive. “I don’t consider myself a literary man,” he said. “I’m a storyteller. I write fairy tales for adults. And I try to put some substance into it.”

I had no idea what kind of “substance” until a friend urged me to look at “La Liste Hariri,” one of de Villiers’s many books set in and around Lebanon. The book, published in early 2010, concerns the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister. I spent years looking into and writing about Hariri’s death, and I was curious to know what de Villiers made of it. I found the descriptions of Beirut and Damascus to be impressively accurate, as were the names of restaurants, the atmosphere of the neighborhoods and the descriptions of some of the security chiefs that I knew from my tenure as The Times’ Beirut bureau chief. But the real surprise came later. “La Liste Hariri” provides detailed information about the elaborate plot, ordered by Syria and carried out by Hezbollah, to kill Hariri. This plot is one of the great mysteries of the Middle East, and I found specific information that no journalists, to my knowledge, knew at the time of the book’s publication, including a complete list of the members of the assassination team and a description of the systematic elimination of potential witnesses by Hezbollah and its Syrian allies. I was even more impressed when I spoke to a former member of the U.N.-backed international tribunal, based in the Netherlands, that investigated Hariri’s death. “When ‘La Liste Hariri’ came out, everyone on the commission was amazed,” the former staff member said. “They were all literally wondering who on the team could have sold de Villiers this information — because it was very clear that someone had showed him the commission’s reports or the original Lebanese intelligence reports.”

When I put the question to de Villiers, a smile of discreet triumph flashed on his face. It turns out that he has been friends for years with one of Lebanon’s top intelligence officers, an austere-looking man who probably knows more about Lebanon’s unsolved murders than anyone else. It was he who handed de Villiers the list of Hariri’s killers. “He worked hard to get it, and he wanted people to know,” de Villiers said. “But he couldn’t trust journalists.” I was one of those he didn’t trust. I have interviewed the same intelligence chief multiple times on the subject of the Hariri killing, but he never told me about the list. De Villiers had also spoken with high-ranking Hezbollah officials, in meetings that he said were brokered by French intelligence. One assumes these men had not read his fiction.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Media, Policy, War | No Comments »

Paperman

Friday, February 1st, 2013

Disney’s Paperman animated short merges computer-generated and hand-drawn animation:

Posted in Media | No Comments »

The New Script for Teaching Handwriting Is No Script at All

Friday, February 1st, 2013

The new script for teaching handwriting is no script at all:

The common core state standards, a set of math and English goals agreed upon by 45 states and now being implemented, sends cursive the way of the quill pen, while requiring instead that students be proficient in keyboarding by fourth grade.

Not writing beautifully is one thing. Not writing legibly is another. Not being able to read cursive, though? That may be over-economizing:

“We’re trying to be realistic about skills that kids are going to need,” says Jill Camnitz, a longtime school board member in Greenville, N.C. “You can’t do everything. Something’s got to go.”

No matter that children will no longer be able to read the Declaration of Independence or birthday cards from their grandparents.

Posted in Education | No Comments »

The Blade Runner Pistol

Friday, February 1st, 2013

One of Adam Savage’s favorite movie props — and that’s saying a lot — is Deckard’s pistol from Blade Runner:

Unfortunately, only one hero prop was ever made for the film, so Adam has spent much of his life building the perfect replica. And so have many other fans.

As the Internet Movie Firearm Database further explains, the prop was constructed from parts of a Steyr-Mannlicher Model SL rifle and a Charter Arms Bulldog revolver.

Bladerunner Pistol

Posted in Media, Weapons | No Comments »

Newer Entries »