By the way, nobody's ever walked off that court alive. Two points for a basket, no three-point bullshit. Shot clock buzzer goes off before you shoot, you get shot. And you're about to find out that this fucking city can kill anybody! Game time!! Basketball. I give you, the death of SNAKE PLISSKEN!!! Some people think you're already dead, Snake. I also promised you one last great spectacle of death in this historic arena. I promised you tonight was gonna be special. And you're about to find out that this fucking city can kill anybody! You ready? [throws can up, draws, kills all four before it lands[ Draw.Ĭuervo Jones You may have survived Cleveland. What do you say we play a little Bangkok rules? Nobody draws until this hits the ground. The persistence of vision is a remarkable phenomenon.Snake Plissken I'm gonna give you assholes a chance. After all, motion pictures, in of themselves, are a complete illusion, creating motion from a series of still images. I don’t think of my work, especially in this instance, as “fooling” any viewer. It was really quite gratifying to know that my work had convinced at least one person. John Wash: I do remember of someone, I can’t remember who, writing about the “Escape from New York” in an internet article, and critiquing my sequence as computer-generated animation. Armed with good knowledge from our analysis of this small model, I engaged Mark to build the full model of Manhattan, as well as larger models of Park Avenue, and the World Trade Towers for the second half of the sequence.ī&a: When the film came out, do you remember anyone asking you or talking about whether maybe those POV wireframe shots *were* done in the computer? Any hesitations about revealing how they were done? It was fortunate we did this, since the black blocks clearly won out as the most photogenic for my purposes. The mock-up was mostly white buildings, but we did include a few black buildings off to one side. Mark built up a small section of the Manhattan model, and his wife Leslie, who worked as a photographer, shot stills of it. The reverse was used for the white blocks. Mark then used a small router to cut tiny channels in the edges of each block, revealing the white plastic below the black surface. In the case of the black buildings, the block was white, and coated with black paint. Should we build white buildings with black edges, or black buildings with white edges? To build our test model, Mark came up with an ingenious construction technique-each “building” was a small block of plexiglas (i.e. Would reflected light from one solid to another be a problem? Also, the question of image polarity was an unknown. Another test was needed, since I was not certain if a model containing more than a thousand such rectangular solids would give me the photographic result I was after. The results were encouraging, and I began working with Mark Stetson on a second test. I started out with a simple test, shooting a move on a white cube with black edges on hicon film under an animation camera. I reasoned that if I could build a similar model of Manhattan out of high contrast black and white solids, I could achieve a convincing mimicry of a computer -generated wireframe. When flatly lit and photographed using high contrast black and white film, the globe retained its characteristic shape, but was given a level of abstraction, as if it had been generated by a computer. It was a sphere, actually a classroom globe of the earth, that was painted white, and illustrated with contour lines and other techno-gibberish. Jay Teitzell and I made use of a prop which was designed as a technical model of the fourth moon of Yavin, home to the rebel base. My inspiration for the technique I used again came from working on “Star Wars”. There the pilots are shown where to drop proton torpedoes that would destroy the Death Star. In the film, the animated sequence is shown on a large display in the rebel base briefing room. I had done similar animation on “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope”, completing the final shot in a sequence that Larry Cuba had animated on a computer. This began with work I did on “Dark Star”, the first film in which I collaborated with John Carpenter. The techniques I mastered allowed me to generate sophisticated animation, even beyond the capabilities of the computers at the time. John Wash: My background was in graphic animation, and I had used back-lit artwork manipulated under an animation camera to create imagery that looked like it was computer generated. (Image courtesy Mark Stetson)ī&a: Do you remember your thought process for thinking about how this approach to the wireframe view would work? How confident were you it could work? How did the test help you prove it could be done?
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