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."

Comments

a-ha!

[Scrameustache]

Taaaaaaake oooooon meeeeeee
Take! On! Me!

Taaaaaake meeeeeee ooooooon!

Great! I'm gonna have song in my head all day now!

I like it...!

[soliptic]

I had no idea this movie was taking this approach, I thought it was going to be standard live action.

I've got to say, I think this could really work. Being "non-realistic" in the first place adds scope for elegantly coping with the multiple (and extremely blurred) levels of reality in the book (which, btw, is my favourite from all the Dick I have read so far).

This style vs. Miyazaki

[Dancin_Santa]

I gotta tell you, this more "realistic" style of cartooning is much more interesting than the anime style of Miyazaki. For one, the 3 dimensional depth aspect is added through the use of very well thought out shading, so the characters seem more alive than most other cartoons.

With the exception of Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka), which succeeded because of the power of the story more than anything else, Miyazaki's work pales in comparison to the screenshots shown here.

Re:This style vs. Miyazaki

[popo]

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.

Re:wtf? why, what?

[orangesquid]

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.

I'd just like to say...

[los furtive]

I want to see a great movie, not a great special effect.

Re:wtf? why, what?

[orangesquid]

*shrug* It doesn't have to.

Most nerds like sci-fi... Most people don't complain when Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, and/or Arthur C. Clarke are mentioned in stories.

What the heck, I'll feed the trolls.....

[rsilvergun]

Either you lack imagination or you're just lazy. Not trolling btw, just stickin' up for Miyazaki and for unrealistic animation in general. I've never once understood why people would go to the movies to see reality, or why they'd complain when they don't. Then again, I'm a boy, and I watch my niece play pretend that she's a mom/teenager all day and I don't understand that.

Anyway, back on topic, what makes Miyazaki great is that it isn't real, it's better than real. When you're being real, you're limited by what's believable. When you don't bother with reality, you're only limited by consistency (i.e. stuff shouldn't come out of nowhere, and it doesn't in a Miyazaki film). It's easier, and more fun, to suspend disbelief when reality isn't smacking you in the face every couple of minutes....

Re:wtf? why, what?

[orangesquid]

The movies are pretty much all under the "Movies" category. If you have a useraccount, you can simply choose to filter these out of the frontpage.

You don't have to venture into any stories you don't want to read, either... that's the idea behind having the short little blurbs on the front page. If something doesn't interest you, just keep scrolling :)

I'm not trying to sound like a smart-aleck, but, I agree with the slashdot admins in that I think there should be a lot of different things here, not just science, math, and computer technology articles.

Re:Let the suck-fest begin.

[PurpleFloyd]

A note to those who haven't read the book: spoilers present.

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.

Rotoshop - June 2006

[lawpoop]

This snippets were rotoscoped in a program typically dupped Rotoshop ( a combination of rotoscope and photoshop ) by Bob Sabiston at Flat Black Films. You can find other examples of this type of animation. I had the pleasure of hearing him speak at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in 2001, IIRC. He's a programmer, and his preferred platform is the Mac.

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.

Read Charlie Kaufman's adaptation...

[mattyohe]

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/scanner.pdf

I would have prefered to see this one.

missing Dick's point about the drug war?

[willwarner]

The protagonist is a drug dealer and a narcotics agent. The IMDB summary implies this is only because he uses drugs that split his personality. The much more interesting truth, which shone through Dick's novel, is that people do switch sides all the time! Captured drug dealers really are offered immunity from punishment if they'll be DEA double-agents. And agents who realize the money to be made, and their privileged position, really do succumb to temptation and start dealing drugs. More generally, both cartels and the DEA work to preserve the current Drug War, rather than managed and taxed legalization as with alcohol since Prohibition. Hopefully the movie pushes this home, despite IMDB's summary.

Plus, he's played by Keanu Reeves. I mean, really.

On the plus side, if they left the EEG machine in the movie, this should spike interest in OpenEEG.

Apparently you can read the book online

[felix rayman]

It looks like the text of the original the novel is online.

The main thing to note here is that they will fuck up the movie. There is no way they can be honest to the spirit of the novel and get the movie distributed in the malls of America. Then again, the perversion of the novel will pay for a shopping trip to those malls for the heirs of PKD, who, I would assume, are happy to live in the world he predicted.

Anyways, my favorite part of the novel is this, where one of the characters has decided to commit suicide by overdose:

Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it, spent a few minutes contemplating his favorite page of _The Illustrated Picture Book of Sex_, which showed the girl on top, then placed the plastic bag of reds beside his bed, lay down with the Ayn Rand book and unfinished protest letter to Exxon, tried to think of something meaningful but could not, although he kept remembering the girl being on top, and then, with a glass of the Cabernet Sauvignon, gulped down all the reds at once. After that, the deed being done, he lay back, the Ayn Rand book and letter on his chest, and waited.
However, he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates, as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics, of a type he had never dropped before, probably a mixture, and new on the market. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. Well, he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off. He had to face the fact--considering how many of the capsules he had swallowed--that he was in for some trip.
The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly.
The creature had many eyes, all over it, ultra-modern expensive-looking clothing, and rose up eight feet high. Also, it carried an enormous scroll.
"You're going to read me my sins," Charles Freck said.
The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.
Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, "and it's going to take a hundred thousand hours."
Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, "We are no longer in the mundane universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as 'space' and 'time' no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end."
Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last half-hour of his life.
A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed with the Ayn Rand book and the letter to Exxon on his chest, listening to them read his sins to him. They had gotten up to the first grade, when he was six years old.
Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade.
The year he had discovered masturbation.

That, my friends, is some fine fucking literature.

Why this film actually has a snowball's chance

[Ohreally_factor]

#5 Irrelevant.

#4 I argue elsewhere that Ridley Scott stayed true to PKD*, despite, or even because of the way he transposed the emotional meaning of Decker/the androids. Pretty much all the others I've seen I'd agree with you. *(I'm refering to the director's cut. The studio version was an abortion.)

Furthermore, stripping elements is pretty much a given when adapting any novel to the screen. The key to a good adaptation seems to be knowing which elements are essential and which aren't. So, yes, there are huge amounts of material missing from Bladerunner, and I'm sure we all have our favorite bits that were left out (I especially missed the Penfield Mood Organ), but that's pretty much the way it goes, unless you're talking Elmore Leonard.

Anyway, by this criteria, all adaptions must fail it.

#3. This is a failing of your imagination, not mine.

#2. A big budget movie will suffer from exactly the problems that Paycheck, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc., etc. suffer from. A big budget scanner darkly will be burdened by flashy special effects and the twisted story itself will be jettisoned in favor of some formulaic doppelganger abortion because with so much money on the line, the studio will be nervous. In the big budget version, Bob Arctor kicks his substance D addiction by the end of second act, kills the Islamic terrorist drug manufacturers that killed his best friend Jerry with invisible bio-engineered aphids in the first act and finally marries Donna, and they all live happily ever after. The only chance this project stands of succeeding on our terms is if it's a low budget prestige project that stays mostly under the radar of the execs, lawyers, and bean counters.

#1. You've got me there. I'm pretty worried about this aspect. I can think of a hundred name actors they might have gotten. Why not Ed Norton? Why Keanu? As far as I am concerned, the three actors that would stand the best chance of totally wrecking this movie are Keanu, Matt Damon, and Ben Afleck. Shit! I think I'd rather see Jean Claude Van Damme in the role.

Still, the rest of the cast sounds incredibly impressive, so I still hope for the best.