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A Scanner Darkly Sneak-Peek
An anonymous reader writes "Some images for the upcoming film 'A Scanner Darkly' have been posted on aintitcool.com. Looks like it's going to look alot like one of Richard Linklater's previous films, Waking Life."
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Philip K. Dick is a rather famous sci-fi author responsible for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, upon which the film Bladerunner was based.
While the plots in some of his books don't really come together neatly in the end, he does quite well at creating vivid imagery, fascinating characters, and imagination-sparking ideas.
A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electrip Sheep? are two of his more famous, and some of his best, published works.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
You do realise "this more 'realistic' style" is just advanced rotoscoping? They film it like a normal movie then just animate on top of that. That is why it looks like there is great depth, because there actually is depth.
While the erosion of the mind is a main theme in A Scanner Darkly, it is not the only theme presented. In fact, the psychological split between addict and police officer is arguably more important to the book.
Dick has stated that in A Scanner Darkly, he wanted to investigate the mind of an undercover agent - one who works toward one set of goals in one persona, then works to undermine those goals as another persona. While Substance D (the drug in the book, for those who don't know) exacerbates the problem and creates two independent entities from one mind, it is arguable that anyone trying to work undercover must segregate their mind in the same fashion. While the theme of descent into madness is certainly a large part of A Scanner Darkly, as well as many of Dick's other works, it is not the only theme.
I would imagine that it would be extremely difficult to adapt the theme of a split personality to film. While the artists could certainly provide differing character traits to each half of the split personality, it seems that it would be difficult to maintain the cognitive dissonance presented towards the end of the book, in which the two halves seem like completely different characters. It would seem that some innovative cinematography would have to come into play here; it would take a truly talented team of artists to accomplish this. I can only hope that they're up to the task.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
During the talk, people asked when he was going to release the program. He basic answer was he didn't want to become involed in anything that would take him away from programming -- starting a business, licensing, etc. I asked him about releasing it open source, and he said something to the effect of "I know it works, I'm just not sure how".
In any case, I just checked on the studio's website, and it appears that the program will be released in June, 2006. You can put yourself on an email list to be notified of its release.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Scanner Darkly isn't "animation" at all. Its a misnomer. Scanner Darkly is rotoscoped -- meaning that the scenes *are* actually filmed with a traditional camera. Then in post production, the individual frames are traced (or image-filtered) in order make the film look like hand-drawn animation.
Rotoscoping used to be very time consuming, but now most of the rotoscoping is achieved through PC based image filters (like photoshop filters). (Here's the wiki for more info on Rotoscoping.)
For you to compare "This style", ie: ("Rotoscoping") with the unbelievable amount of work that goes in to frame by frame hand drawn cel animation is like comparing a photocopy to a mosaic. One takes almost no work, and the other takes an enormous amount.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )