Hacker Cinema
Madagascar
2005 · Film · 86 min
Part of Madagascar Collection
Directed by Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath
AdventureAnimationComedyFamily
Four animal friends get a taste of the wild life when they break out of captivity at the Central Park Zoo and wash ashore on the island of Madagascar.
1 positive3 negative15 neutralfrom 19 commenters
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21 comments on Hacker News
I don't think it's only from a cynic point of view - the question "if meat is murder, am I a bad person if I literally can't survive without it?" is a fair and interesting one.
Of course that's not the point of the ad and I don't blame them for not making it a philosophical discussion, but it's the same approach that Madagascar uses (spoiler for a 20yo movie) to resolve their main conflict and both feel like cheating - if the penguins can think, I always thought, then so should the fishes.
I did something similar with all my kids movies. I just ripped their dvds because they were destroying them every few months and I probably bought Madagascar three times before ripping it.
The UX is better than any streaming service.
Fortunately I had a synology nas already as a backup server so I just installed Plex on it and it was so easy. This was probably 15 years ago and I still have all those video files and the dvds are in a box somewhere untouched.
Might I recommend Mort Theory by "The Theorizer"? It is 2+ hours and is about the idea that Mort from the movie Madagascar is evil. Enjoy. :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REymyiNElA8
My two cents: the techniques OP uses are absolutely valid, but I've found much more success "sampling" styles and poses from existing works.
Rather than trying to perfectly describe my image, I like to use references where the source material has what you want. With minimal direction these prompts get impressively close:
"larry bird as a llama, dramatic basketball dunk in a bright arena, low angle action shot, from the movie Madagascar (2005)" https://labs.openai.com/s/wxbIbXa0HRwwGUqQaKSLtzmR
"Michael Jordan as a llama dunking a basketball, Space Jam (1996)" https://labs.openai.com/s/mX4T5Iak8CMO1rPAmjRb7oyH
At this point I'd experiment with more stylized/recognizable references or add a couple "effects" to polish up the results.
I don’t believe the average is 24 hours of wall clock. I do think average render times have increased a bit over time, but FWIW, I think the average render time needs to be “overnight”. The shot just needs to rendered before dailies in the morning. If it takes longer than maybe 6-8 hours, it risks not being done by the next day, and that means each iteration with the director takes two days instead of one. There is significant pressure to avoid that, so when shots don’t finish overnight, people generally start optimizing.
When I was doing CG production shot work ~15 years ago, there were occasionally shots that ran 24 hours, but the average was more like 3 or 4 hours. The shots that took 24 hours or more usually caused people to investigate whether something was wrong.
I worked on one such shot that was taking more than 24 hours. A scene in the film Madagascar where the boat blows a horn and all the trees on the island blow over. The trees and plants were modeled for close-ups, including flowers with stamens and pistils, but the shot was a view of the whole island. One of my co-workers wrote a pre-render filter with only a few lines of code, to check if pieces of the geometry were smaller than a pixel, and if so just discard them. IIRC, render times immediately dropped from 24 hours to 8 hours.
> Jeff Katzenberg, the co-founder, has been 'making content and selling to kids' for 40 years to the tune of literally Billions. Star Trek films, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Shrek, How to Train your Dragon etc. etc. - just huge, monster titles.
My argument against this point is simple: few of those were original content conceived by Katzenberg/DreamWorks/Disney. They were existing stories (most already successful as books). The only things I can see in his filmography that are possibly original and hugely successful are Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Kung Fu Panda, and Madagascar, Road to El Dorado, and _maybe_ Chicken Run.
Location: San Francisco Remote: Sure Willing to relocate: Possibly, but not outside of the USA Technologies: Python, C++, Java, HTML/CSS/JavaScript/SQL Résumé/CV: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~kawal/code/deep.gif Email: see resume
I'm looking for my first job in software development after 10+ years in visual effects for films as a technical director. I worked at world class studios (Lucasfilm/ILM, Disney, and Dreamworks) on killer films (Avatar, King Kong, Madagascar, and the Matrix sequels).
I have a BA in Applied Math with a CS focus from UC Berkeley. I know my data structures and algorithms and have a strong record of shipping product for demanding clients on real deadlines.
DreamWorks Animation uses RHEL exclusively for production. That means all your favorite movies such as Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon were all made on Linux
Ninja edit to add high end software that runs on Linux that were used - Autodesk Maya, SideFX Houdini, Foundry {Mari,Nuke}, Pixologic ZBrush. This is in addition to the proprietary packages such as Premo (Animation) and Torch (Lighting)
Your description is accurate, but the most important part to know is that the random values on the lattice are used as the derivatives of the noise function. The noise function itself is then an itegral of those derivates. By putting the derivatives at the lattice points, the grid structure underneath becomes far less visible. If you used the random values directly, and just interpolated those using a spline, you get a 0-value derivative at exactly every lattice point, and you end up seeing the grid structure in the result, it becomes glaringly apparent. Using Perlin noise, the minima and maxima are offset randomly from the grid, making the overall function feel much more natural.
It's useful any time you need some natural looking randomness in a texture. Perlin noise is standard in pretty much all 3d rendering software for films, and it's becoming quite common for games.
The turbulence part of this is when you take a whole stack of Perlin noises at different frequencies, i.e., different grid sizes, and sum them. It's more expensive of course, but this is how to get extremely realistic feeling noise, it gives you medium and high frequencies. And it further hides any grid artifacts.
I used Perlin noise as a wind function to animate bushes & trees in the animated movie Madagascar. Perlin actually works really well for windy looking motion because of the way it's derviatives work. I tried a whole bunch of other noise functions, and Perlin was the only one that worked well.
Isolation. See The Galapagos + Darwin's studies on the birds there. Also: Madagascar (film + land mass)
Yes, there's quite a lot of it in fact. It's usually called "volumetric", as "voxel" tends to imply volumetric data that is represented by a regularly spaced 3D grid.
Volume rendering is an entire sub-field of computer graphics that deals with many representations of 3D data.
CG clouds are often volume rendered using continuous noise fields. CG haze and smoke are sometimes volume rendered using shape descriptions of the boundary, and 3D modulation functions.
Google "Volumetric siggraph" to find a ton of papers about other ways to do 3D volume rendering. Check the images tab for lots of examples of volume rendering.
*edit: btw I can tell you stories about volume rendering non-voxel data from CG production if you want. I used several non-voxel volumetric rendering techniques for fire, smoke and water on the Shrek and Madagascar movies.
A fun presentation I remember from siggraph was when Digital Domain presented their volume rendered they called "Voxel Bitch" and talked about rendering the avalanche sequence in the Vin Diesel "XXX" movie. IIRC, voxel bitch was a volume renderer, not limited to regular 3D voxel grids.
https://www.siggraph.org/conferences/reports/s2002/tech/filmprodtech.html
Haha, love it! There's definitely a space for forced animal anthromorphization humor. Smart, funny books! Like Madagascar, et al. but adults.
In this case, for example, the first 95% of the story would be from a touching documentary-type narrative, about how smart, thoughtful, loyal etc. penguins are. In the end, we find out Penguin newspapers all have headlines like "Penguin swims 5,00 miles for other personal reasons, calls in on man while he's there. Is treated as a goddam hero" etc.
> I am tired of this perception around the world that americans do not know geography.
A lot of people, all over the world, suck at geography, but the degree of suckiness itself does make a difference.
I took a similar test back in high school. It was as part of a set of workshops, organised on the occasion of my country of origin joining the EU. I think I saw close to a hundred maps of the world drawn in a similar manner, by young high school students, with a fairly diverse educational background (it was a public school, and there is no income differentiation between them -- schools were financed solely based on the number of pupils).
There was plenty of eurocentrism in them, but notably:
* NONE OF THEM MISSED FUCKING JAPAN. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU MISS JAPAN? Forget about Pearl Harbour and the bombs the US dropped there and all that -- but there's anime and tentacle porn and cyberpunk and Japanese cars.
* None of them missed Greenland. How the fuck do you miss Greenland? It's a huge fucking white spot straight near Canada, it's literally impossible to miss it. The only way you can miss Greenland is if you never fucking looked at a world map.
* None of them simply warped Asia and Africa. That's probably because of a peculiarity of language -- there is a strong distinction in my native tongue between the Asian continent and the peninsulae in the Middle East. Some students did miss one or two of the unspeakable number of seas in there, but the Arabian peninsula could clearly be seen as such, and it was distinct from the Indian subcontinent.
* None of them missed... Madagascar. How the fuck do you miss Madagascar? There's a movie with cute penguins made after it!
Notable omissions were the myriad of isles between Indonesia and Australia, the Behring strait was usually larger than it should have been (probably because it gets skewed in different manners under different map projections), the Carribean islands were all joined into a single, large Cuba and Kamchatka was absent in about a third of those maps. But honestly, none of them sucked that badly, those don't even look like Earth.
The counterargument is that, if you canvassed license fee payers, I bet more of them would care about seeing Madagascar without ads than about DRM issues. So should the BBC pursue what a small number of people loudly claim to be the 'public interest', or should they aim for what the public is interested in?
Thinking more strategically, the BBC needs some high profile popular things, including imported movies, to keep people on side. If they lose their popularity, it's only a matter of time before a politician wins votes by promising to slash the license fee.
It is not at all the case that every film they show that they do not make is on iplayer. Most films are not. Most the content they make is on iplayer, but not all content they don't make. Not all content is even available in the live streams, eg sport which has other rights.
I would be happy for only BBC-commissioned content to be available without DRM and the rest to be not available or use plugins. Or indeed I would be happy for the BBC to not broadcast the output of Hollywood etc which is easily available elsewhere commercially eg on Netflix or Sky. I do not think that showing "Madagascar" is really a public service...
My argument, and I sent this too them when they were doing a consultation a while ago, is that they shouldn't be buying content that they can't use for public service purposes. We have many good sources of movies in the UK, and many of them are "free" at the point of use (ie advert funded). Let them show Madagascar, and while they do that the BBC can run some other program. They should remove themselves from the content purchasing market if the terms are too restrictive to allow them to meet their public remit. We don't /need/ these films on the BBC. They could run some of the content they're currently relegating the digital ghettos of BBC3 and BBC4 instead.
First you have to understand that not all of the content broadcast on the BBC is created by the BBC. They carry programs made by independent, limited, for-profit studios. They also regularly carry movies. All of which they put up on their iPlayer service.
As an example, you can currently watch Madagascar, in full, for free on BBC iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00gd77z/Madagascar/).
While there is an argument that programs produced by the BBC should be DRM free, there is no way larger, and independent studios would allow their content uploaded DRM free.
Personally, I want the BBC (and other sites) to be able to use technology like HTML5 video, because I don't like flash, and it's unlikely the studios are going to suddenly decide their OK with DRM free video, I'm not necessarily /for/ DRM in HTML5, but I don't see any other way around it for now.
While you can argue all you want about how DRM is useless and easily broken, as yet no-one has managed to convince big TV and movie (and even game) studios of that. The BBC is just doing what it feels it needs to in order to be able to deliver video using the latest technology, while keeping it's partners happy.
All due to piracy? If you look at the 10 top grossing films of 2012, we have: 3 comic book movies (The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spiderman) where the characters have already had several movies, 3 movies that are either the 3rd or 4th in an original series (Madagascar, Ice Age, and MiB), and 4 based on books (Twilight, Skyfall, The Hobbit, and Hunger Games). Maybe people are tired of rehashes of the same IP over and over again, especially when they spread one story over several movies, just to get more money out of you? (I'm looking at you, The Hobbit)
I think about this all the time. 2 boys 3 and 6 yrs old. I cringed a bit when I saw the title because it made me think of the term 'alterna-dad' and of a style of parenting in which children become accessories and 'buddies' to their extended adolescent parents. Sport matching mohawks, etc, etc.
But the article was nothing like that. It is short but the feeling I got was of true exploration and of forging a real relationship. (Another HN post of the past few days talked about how you have +/- 10 yrs to connect with yr kid). It also reminded me (as other posters noted) of that SouthPark where they all play WOW and meet Randy in game. Or the classic 'Chinpokemon'. Two really well done episodes - in both cases parents wade through unfamiliar territory to meet their kids and understand them better. Not simply ban the game.
There is danger in letting your chidren do certain things. The impulse to bubblewrap them is strong. I catch my breath everytime they do things like walk with me out on our balcony (17th floor), ride the scooter in the skatepark, climb on the rocks in the park across from our apartment, etc. But I consciously hold myself back - watching them but not rushing in to stop them. This week end my 3 yr old got punched full in the face by a 5 yr old. I held back for a count of 10 to let him deal with it as he wanted to and then comforted him a bit and broght him back so he could feel safe playing around this kid.
The point is to show them experientially that you trust them - and that you are in the background to help them if things get scary. I felt that vibe from this writer and applaud that.
In truth I have no idea of what I am doing. I use my intuition as a guide and hope I am right. What he says about the ESRB is spot on. If - as a parent - you need a school, govt agency or rating agency to tell you what is safe for your kid - then you are screwed. You need to go through it with your child and see for yourself.
You can get good advice from individuals - teachers, other parents, certain writers - but not from agencies and bureacracies.
As a parent dealing with impact of media in general is a challenge. For the past 2 yrs we went off cable tv and started to rely completely on the internet/ public library/ netflix for movies etc. I have held off on getting Wii/ x-box, etc in favor of PC based games. They have both watched tons of anime and comics (particularly stuff like Miyazaki Hayako (sp?) and the Avatar series). They both love Futurama - which might be too adult at times for them. I will have to explain 'death by snoo-snoo' one of these days.
My older son has learned to really enjoy some of the games that an Ubuntu distribution has to offer - things like Wormux, OpenSonic, BattleTanks. He has looked over my sholder as I have played some of the Doom emulations on the android or the Quake-like games on Ubuntu.
From hacker news I found out about the Wolfire free bundle and he fell in love with the Samorost series. He cried when it was done and drew a big picture of what he thought the next episode should be.
More recently on my wife's computer (WinXP) I downloaded Steam and setup the free version of Portal and bought a Tower Defense game to play.
Every time we take the subway or wait somewhere my wife and/or I whip out the gPhone and let the two of them play android games.
We try to limit this to certain times of the week etc. because of the vague fear that media will completely saturate their lives.
It is not the violence alone that gives me pause. I knwo experientially how absorbing a good game is (thinking of days past playing Half-Life or Diablo, etc).
I want them both to enjoy good media and I am loosely overlapping anime, movies and games because I feel like there is power in the imagery of soemthing like Half-Life or Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" which affects you deeply.
What often pisses me off are crappy movies in which the point is simply to sell a lifestyle. I hate movies like "Shark Tales" or "Madagascar" and I cant say exactly why. There are funny bit parts but the whole thing feels like it is in the service of what the philosopher Adorno referred to as the "Culture Industry". I find those movies more disturbing than somethign with more overt violence.
In a very interesting way I think this goes back to Plato and his fear of 'poetry' by which he included dramatic arts. It was the fear of the power of images. We have reached the point where video games and anime have reached a complexity and depth of imagery that they have a life of their own.
I know myself that these things affect me differently. I am trying to see through my sons' eyes to see how they are affected. At times it feels dangerous - like letting them speed ahead on their little bikes on the city sidewalk - but what this guy is doing is right. Watch them in the background, ready to bolt after them - let them know that you trust them and that you are there to help deal with the scary parts - let them experience it and learn from them as they reflect their experience back to you.
Plato on images: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/
Culture Industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?
I still disagree with this :)
Well, I guess my argument is really based off watching all of the films from all studios with the directors commentaries turned on and taking notes of what they emphasise and then looking at all of the information in aggregate. There will always be cases where there are outliers.
I'm working on a version of a 3D animation startup of my own to apply with to YC later this year so I take notice of these kinds of things (and actually have many pages of handwritten notes when studying animation in detail as a hobby).
Anyway, that's neither here nor there
If you want to watch some good Dreamworks Animations, I would recommend the Madagascar's (very reminiscent of the traditional cartoon style, squash and stretch is prevalent in these films), Kung Fu Panda (visually stunning) and Monsters vs Aliens (just plain funny)