Clothworld Trailer 1

[Nate North]

This was a development subproject built to help me advance the save point pipeline from version 8.9 to 9.1.

It's a 90 minute feature film.

It's a non narrative art film.

It's a completely different movie every time you watch it.

The film intelligently rebuilds itself, Internally making choices about direction and editing, And features tens of thousands of shots.

If you watch this hour and a half film three different times, You might end up seeing a third of it at best.

I didn't spend 2 months improving the pipeline to make this film, I spent months making this film to improve the pipeline.

It worked.

The most significant improvements in technology aren't visible in this trailer. The big deal is that this film is directing itself on the fly.

 

[sfoster]

Looks great.

My only $0.02 - I'd like to see a bit more visual distinction between the bright sunny days and the overcast days (e.g. 0:50 -0:55 seconds)
I'm thinking it's color matching all the shots, regardless of weather, and the homogenization is draining away the vibrancy of the sunny days?

Either way it's very cool! Some of the water looks so realistic compared to what you'd get with CGI

 

[Nate North]

Thanks! Good eye on the color matching. I didn't intentionally homogenize it exactly, but I've been kind of leaning towards the Ron Fricke aesthetic through this one. Sometimes when you're trying to dial everything in too much it shows up in the long run as "too even". Most of his stuff is just textbook photography, color, lighting. It always looks amazing, but sometimes a bit unnatural in context as you pointed out. I looked carefully at the section you mentioned, and though I see what you mean, I don't think it looks too bad.

The water and cloth are starting to work a lot better now than they used too. I meant to finish this one before the month was out, and almost made it, but I'm going to build on one more tech section before I move on.

After this, is where it all gets interesting. The technical framework for scalable production has been completed, and it's time to tackle the final boss. If I can succeed at that this year, the results will be........ IDK, it's hard to understand what the impact will be. It's like working for a paycheck your whole life, then suddenly looking up at the sky and seeing 250 million tons of gold coins raining down and burying your entire city. I'm not 100% sure what's going to happen, even if I fully succeed. People will definitely want to just add an extra 3 seasons to their favorite old show, or play an infinite CYOA type movie, but sometimes I wonder how people will have time to watch all the great television that's coming. Netflix has gone a long way towards bringing the audience to a saturation point. Whether it's me or someone else, the clock is ticking down to the day there is suddenly 800x as much content within a few years.

I get a weird feeling sometimes when I see something like a new Scorsese movie coming out on Netflix, and there's so much out that it almost goes unnoticed. Like the greatest director in the world is still just a flash in the pan at this point, through no fault of their own, but just in the context of the meta saturation.

 

[sfoster]

As someone that owns a sewing machine I have one other suggestion/inquiry.

https://www.joann.com/c/fabric/

Observe the fabric. It's all patterened and colorful.
Hardly anyone ever buys fabric that is plain solid color, part of the fun of sewing is that you can use these fun patterns and colors.

e.g. I sewed an orange and black pillowcase with ghost and halloween decor that I use in october.

Is it possible to make your fabrics more interesting rather than just a solid color?
Would not some of these cities be flying their flag?

 

[Nate North]

I tried it, back when I was actually making the footage for this. It's no problem to make whatever texture or pattern I need, so I tried everything at first, every type of fabric, every type of pattern.

Just artistically, the patterns stole focus from the scenes, and made it a lot harder to get an artistic image. I actually cut out all the footage in the film with patterns because the look was stronger overall with solid colors. I tried canvas and silk and paisley and checkers, flags and murals and cloth with images on it, chiffon and wool, etc.

Overall, across this very long film, it's just way more coherent and less noisy with solid colors. I guess all art is subjective, but the short answer is it looked better to me this way in terms of frame composition and maintaining style across a long film.

I guess the other side is that the cloth is supposed to be an "alienating element" meaning that the core design of the film is to show an otherworldly alternate reality that doesn't look like anything you've seen before. I'm intentionally avoiding scenes that look "right" like an average sign or flag. It's supposed to be an "offset universe" where you're seeing things you've never seen before. If some scene looks like it could be real, I threw it out during the edit. Realistic portrayals of an offset universe. Like a dream. Images of another reality.

I think you'll see it more if you ever watch the film. It really works long term and produces a coherent flowing film. Anyway, it's already finished and I'm moving on to the next level for engine dev.