If you came in late, you’ll want to read Making
Movies I, Making
Movies II, and Making
Movies III.

Today being Saturday, it was time for David and I to do some more
shooting on our movie. I do try to learn from my mistakes, and so
things went much better this week right from the start. It was
cooler, for one thing; we started at 9:30 in the morning instead of
1:30 in the afternoon, and the light was better in the parts of the
yard I wanted to use.

I reshot one scene from last week, the one with Yellow the Snake
coming down and around the corner as the sun-shade terminator moves
noticeably; that spot is in complete (though not dim) shade during
the morning, so I was able to get the shot without trouble. In fact,
I ran through it twice, and not only did both versions come out well,
they also dovetail perfectly. It looks like there are two snakes
coming round the corner, one after the other. There are
possibilities there I’ll have to explore.

Next, I tried an experiment. I wanted a shot with a snake’s-eye-view
of the world. Trying to carry the camera smoothly at that level
clearly wasn’t going to work, not without a Steadicam, so that meant
I needed to be creative. Enter the tricycle.

My kids’ tricycle is colorful and made of an equal proportion of plastic and
metal, but otherwise it’s a lot like the one I had as a kid. In
particular, there’s a kind of plastic step that covers the axel
between the rear wheels. The Sony TRV-22 fits onto that step quite
nicely. Voila–I’ve got a mobile platform that’s close to the
ground. The camera points out the back of the tricycle, of course,
so to move the camera forwards one just rolls the tricycle backwards.

Now, the section of ground where I wanted to shoot this is paved with
bricks, and it’s rather bumpy. I thought that shooting continuously
while rolling the tricycle probably wasn’t going to work very well,
so I animated it, taking a few frames, moving the trike a few inches,
taking a few more frames, and so on. I might as well not have wasted
my time; the result was incredibly ugly.

Next I decide to try just shooting it live. I repositioned the
tricycle, turned the camera on, and set it on the little shelf at the
back, and just rolled the trike slowly along my desired path. The
result was rather bumpy, more so than seemed natural, but much better
than the animated version.

As I was setting up the next shot, I realized that I’d been shooting
with the camera zoomed in a bit–no wonder the result was bumpier than
I’d though it should be. The zoom was magnifying every motion of the
camera. Consequently, I went back and did that shot three more times
shooting full wide (twice rolling the camera forwards and once rolling
it backwards–I can reverse the clip direction in iMovie), and had no
trouble except that toward the end of the backwards shot the camera
fell off of its shelf. It kept recording, though, video and
audio, and I think it’s a tribute to my years as a father that all I
said was “Whoops!”

Ironically, the backwards shot is probably the smoothest, best looking
shot, once I reversed it and cut out the bit where the camera fell
down. Naturally, it’s also the shortest. Go figure. But anyway, now I
have four to choose from.

After that we went back to doing the stop action thing. We got a
great shot of Yellow crawling out of the umbrella hole in the middle
of our picnic table, and then I reshot Yellow going down the steps and
around the corner as I described earlier. And it was about that time
that David said, “Can Megatron be in the movie?” My first thought was
to say, “No, this is a movie about snakes, not about robots”–but I
reconsidered, and I’m glad I did. The song Attacked By Snakes
is fully five minutes long, and scenes of Yellow crawling around the
yard by himself are going to be diverting for maybe half that time.
Clearly I needed some additional elements, and Megatron was a perfect
choice.

For those of you not blessed with young boys, Megatron is a
Transformer from the Transformers Armada TV show. He’s a robot that
transforms into a battle tank. I saw definite possibilities–and was
not slow to give them a try. The results are truly delightful.

All in all, I got about 40 to 45 seconds of good animated video; I’ve
posted about 30 seconds worth as a highly compressed Quicktime
movie–it’s about 368K bytes in size. If you downloaded last
week’s clip, be sure not to miss this week’s; it’s a lot more fun.

Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren

I first read this book as a kid–I inherited it from one or another of my
siblings–and it was with fond memories that I bought a new copy some
while back to read to my oldest boy. Fond but faded memories; all I
could really remember about Pippi was that she lives all by herself, and
is extremely unconventional, and her father is a sea-captain, and that
in Pippi in the South Seas she and her friends Tommy and Annika go
to visit her father on the tropical island where he’s now a cannibal
king. In short, most of my memories were from the other two Pippi
books.

So given that, and given my recent unhappy experience with
James and the Giant Peach, I opened this particular volume
with some sense of trepidation. Having now re-read it, my feelings are
mixed.

Pippi is undeniably a fun character, and her tall tales are easily the
high point of the book:

Once my grandmother had a servant named Malin. She had chilblains on her
feet, but otherwise there was nothing wrong with her. The only annoying
thing was that as soon as company came she would rush at them and bite
their legs. And bark! Oh, how she would bark! You could hear it all
through the neighborhood, but it was only because she was playful. Only,
of course, strangers didn’t always understand that. The dean’s wife, an
elderly woman, came to see Grandmother once soon after Malin first came,
and when Malin came dashing at her and bit her in the ankle, the dean’s
wife screamed so loudly that it scared Malin, so that her teeth clamped
together and she couldn’t get them apart. There she sat, stuck to the
dean’s wife’s ankle until Friday. And Grandmother had to peel the
potatoes herself. But at least it was well done. She peeled so well
that when she was done there were no potatoes left–only peelings. But
after that Friday the dean’s wife never came to call on Grandmother
again. She just never could take a joke.

Pippi’s also outrageously strong, and in between her tall tales, Pippi
occasionally gets to do something fun–like carry the policemen who’ve
come to take her to an orphanage out of the house when she’s tired of
making them run after her. Apart from Pippi’s stories, the humor is
almost entirely slapstick.

So, yeah, there’s some genuinely funny stuff here. David enjoyed it
thoroughly, especially the bits I thought were a bit too silly.

But on the other hand, nothing much happens. It’s not so
much a story about Pippi as it is a collection of sketches in which she
gets to perform, always in contrast to next-door neighbors Tommy and Annika,
who are as colorless a pair of goody-two-shoes as you’d ever want to meet.

Since David enjoyed this one I’ll no doubt be looking for the other two
Pippi books–but I’m no longer so thrilled about the whole thing.

The ever informative Cecil Adams reveals that the familiar cliche, “The Butler Did It!”, is in fact a vile canard. So far as Cecil’s been able to determine, the Butler has only done it in earnest (as opposed to in satire) just once, in the 1930 novel The Door, by Mary Roberts Rinehart.

What, you say? You’ve never heard of Mary Roberts Rinehart? Sure you have–she’s the Rinehart (well, one of them) in Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

(No, I hadn’t heard of her either.)

Deb’s review of the Robert Fagles translation of The Iliad reminded me of a different translation I bought some years ago after hearing the translator interviewed on NPR. The fellow’s name is Stanley Lombardo. He read selections from his translation on the air, and I was immediately hooked. His version was immediate, down to earth, and accessible, and seemed to me to capture the grumbling nature of a camp of war better than the more high-falutin translation I’d read in college (that would be the Lattimore translation, of course).

In my quest to find a copy I first bought the Fagles translation thinking it was what I had heard (I’d forgotten the translator’s name), and then later the Lombardo translation, and consequently I now have them both to hand. I thought it would be interesting to post a few lines from each, just as a comparison.

Fagles begins:

Rage–Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

Lombardo begins:

Rage:
    Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon–
The Greek warlord–and godlike Achilles

Try reading both of them aloud. Compare in particular this:

…hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, /
great fighters’ souls…

with this:

…pitched countless souls /
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,…

and this:

…made their bodies carrion, /
feasts for the dogs and birds…

with this:

And left their bodies to rot as feasts /
For dogs and birds

Now, you tell me–which one is more vivid? Which one gets the point across more clearly?

Fagles was handicapped, of course–he was aiming for something midway between the Greek text and the expectations of today’s audience: “For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the too, a modern English Homer.”

Lombardo, on the other hand, had a different goal: a performable Homer: “…what we love is the poet’s voice, and finding its tone, rhythym, and power is the heart of Homeric translation.” “This requires loyalty to the essential qualities of Homeric poetry–its directness, immediacy, and effortless musicality…”

I tried reading both aloud to Jane. Fagles’ version limped along, and I could tell Jane wasn’t following all of it. Lombardo’s version flowed effortlessly from my tongue, and though I had intended to read but a few lines (those quoted above) the story held both of us for several more pages before I reluctantly put it down.

It seems to me that the modern analog to The Illiad is the Western movie. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; The Magnificent Seven and The Seven Samurai; and war movies as well, like The Great Escape. I can just see a crowd of rowdy Greeks sitting around the fire listening to the Illiad, quaffing some fermented fluids, and nodding to each other after some particularly heroic feat, “He’s one mean dude.” “Yup. He bad.” (Quaff.)

Lombardo has that kind of immediacy. Fagles tries, but he doesn’t quite make it.

My brother gave me this book for my birthday. Subtitled “Evil Laughs,
Secret Lairs, Master Plans, and More!!!”, it’s a complete guide to how to
be a villain. Topics range from “Getting Started With The Forces Of
Mayhem” to “Thwarting The Forces Of Good” to “Making An Evil Plan”. It
leads you through an aptitude test to help you decide what kind of
villain you wish to be, whether criminal mastermind, necromancer,
corporate bastard, mad scientist, black knight, horror-movie villain,
demonic avatar, or marketing executive.

I passed a mildly amusing hour with this book; but I suspect that the
Evil Overlord list is better value for the money. (Take a look, if you haven’t seen it.)

Steven Den Beste has marvelous post on the Galileo spacecraft which ended its mission at Jupiter last Sunday. He also has some nice things to say about NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which built and operated Galileo. I’m a JPLer myself, and I’d like to add my applause to his. It takes a huge team with diverse to make something like the Galileo happen mission happen, and all the folks involved need to be topnotch. My hat’s off to them.

It has been my custom to try to learn something new every fall. One year I
took a drawing class. Another year I learned to spin wool. This year for no
particular reason except curiosity I decided to read Homer. I went out and
got copies of the Robert Fagles translation of The Iliad and
The Odyssey
and just for good measure tossed a copy of the Richard Lattimore edition of
The Odyssey and a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the pile. I
faintly remember reading excerpt of the last one in a college Classical
Mythology course many, many years ago. My battered copy of Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology has a nice little plot precis of both of Homer’s stories so I
read that first as a way of prepping myself. And then I started in.

First, I have to say, I don’t usually read poetry. I like action and plot
and characters in my reading and while poetry can be fascinating, it doesn’t
normally fulfill my desires for reading. However, if you completely forget
that Homer or whoever the storyteller was that put together this story was
doing it in meter and feet, it reads pretty much like an action novel.
Actually, it reads like a really bloody action novel. There’s a lot of hack
and slash in this book. Eyes falling out, blood dripping down, brains
splashing out the back of helmets etc etc. Not for the faint hearted. I
skipped my way thru the long lists of guys being cut down in battle when one
of the hero’s went on a rampage after figuring out that most of those named
don’t play much of a part in the action except to die in some gruesome
manner involving spears or swords.

What intrigued me were the similes included. Homer describes something that’s
happening on the battle field or over the campfire, and then, for the
audience’s visual sense, gives them a homey picture that looks something
like it. So the Achaeans leaving the ships are likened to bees swarming out
of hives and a hero slashing his way thru a line of men are likened to the
reaper scything a field of grain only in much more detail and vivid
language. He does this over and over in the text and the only reason I could
come up with was to create a visual for his audience who may not have seen
anything like it.

The second thing that intrigued me are the Homeric epithets. Not so much
which ones but how they were used. This I got from reading Bernard Fox intro
to this edition. There are usually several epithets assigned to each
character or place. The ships of Troy are black, hollow, beaked etc. Hector
is the breaker of horses, the great runner etc. And apparently this is so
the storyteller has several choices of descriptive words that will scan into
the line depending on where they are placed. And entire sections are
repeated word for word, especially if a message is sent and given to
someone. Apparently that was to give the storyteller mental time to think
about what comes next. Fascinating.

I found I didn’t much like Achilles. He was much too full of himself sitting
there pouting because Agamemnon took away his girl. I thought Hector was
the real hero of the story especially since he’s out there sweating away in
battle while Paris the wimp who started this all is hanging around inside
the walls of Troy. And the parting scene between Andromache and Hector where
he is going off and she stands there holding her infant son knowing Hector
will never come back was incredibly moving. I did come away from it a little
confused about the role of divine intervention vs. free will in the fate of
men. It seemed like men had free will and then something would happen and
the gods would come down and intervene, changing the course of events. I
have to think about that a little more. I am curious to see if it comes thru
again in The Odyssey.

Here’s yet another delightful period piece from Ngaio Marsh.
It’s the height of the social season, and all London is awhirl with
debutantes and their chaperones, Inspector Alleyn’s niece among them.
But all is not well under the surface: society matrons are being
blackmailed, and “Bunchy” Gospell a well-beloved man-about-town and a
personal friend of Alleyn’s, has been making inquiries for him. Gospell is murdered.
If Alleyn can find his murderer, he’ll also find the blackmailer–if only
he can persuade the society matrons to help him.

It’s rare to read a mystery novel and genuinely feel sad when the victim
is murdered, but in this case I’m really very sorry that “Bunchy” Gospell
won’t be showing up in the later books. He’s a finely drawn character,
and has that rare quality (rare both in books and real life) of being
not only intelligent and observant but also thoroughly amiable, decent,
and sympathetic. It’s a pity.

I find it useful to take an occasional peek into the books my kids are
reading. I gave up trying to keep up one-for-one with them, especially
during the summer months when they are knocking off 5 and 6 books a week.
However, books make good lead-ins to chats in the car or over dinner and
it’s amazing how much you can pry out of a normally reticent teenager, or
worse, preteenager, by asking them about what they are reading.

So, in the interests of good parenting and mutual discussion, I read this
one. My daughter is on a Spinelli kick lately and he gets a fair amount of
good press from those “in the know” about what kids are reading. However, so
do the Lemony Snicket books and I have yet to come up with any meaningful
dialogue based on them. I read one and it bored me to tears. The nice thing
about Spinelli books is that with adequate reading skills, you can read and
digest one in about 2 hours. And this one, at least, gave me some fodder for
discussion.

First of all, Maniac, the main character, is a homeless kid. His parents are
dead and he’s run away from his horrid Aunt and Uncle. Second, the themes in
the book like bullying, racism, homelessness and the meaning of community
are treated lightly enough to be manageable for children and completely
enough to raise some thought provoking questions. I mentally made a list of
all the ways things in the book are divided into pairs or separated and that
alone could keep me chatting for quite awhile.

Is it deathless prose? No. But it is a pretty good read and it has a happy
ending. That’s always nice.

Scott Chaffin most courteously expressed an interest in seeing some of the bad footage I took of Yellow, my boy’s stuffed snake–and he repeated it, so I know he’s not just being polite. (You can go look, if you don’t believe me.) “Me? Polite?” I can hear him say.

So I’ve exported a quick Quicktime movie of two of the bad scenes–the first one, where everything went wrong, and the one where the shadow is perceptibly moving. The quality is lousy, because it’s compressed out the wazoo, but I think the problems are pretty obvious. You can even see the cars going by in the background. The file is about 350K in size.

So here ya go, Scott. Eat some brisket for me, will ya?