Love, Death & Robots: major SF authors in a new anthology Netflix series

[Iskaral Pust]

I really enjoyed Vol. 3.  Very creative, great animation, a mix of humor, mood/tone, storytelling and aesthetic across the individual episodes, and just something very different to almost anything else on TV.  And it recaptured some flair that had ebbed in Vol. 2.  My only criticism would be the repetitive themes over the three volumes — it would be nice for them to branch out into greater variety in the next volumes.

I think LDR is superior to Black Mirror, and is something you can easily dip into every once in a while for a rewatch.  I hope they keep producing more.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

https://screenrant.com/love-death-robots-vol-3-alberto-mielgo/

[Ran]

43 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

 My only criticism would be the repetitive themes over the three volumes — it would be nice for them to branch out into greater variety in the next volumes.

In the NYT, Fincher was interviewed and said the story curation is pretty much all Miller, who apparently has a list of something like 350 genre short stories he’d love to see adapted. So some of these themes repeating are very much because that’s what Miller loves.

I really wonder if Miller has read any if George’s short fiction. The Pear-shaped Man, The Stone City, The Meathouse Man, And Seven Times Never Kill Man, A Song for Lya… they’d all fit quite well.

43 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I think LDR is superior to Black Mirror, and is something you can easily dip into every once in a while for a rewatch.  I hope they keep producing more.

I would not go so far,  myself, but certainly the bit-sized approach to an anthology has its virtues. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

I'd really like to see a BTS film about the making of Jibaro. I can't believe that thing is 100% computer animated. I can see how they might get some of those camera effects (shake, motion blur, shallow depth of field, bokeh) virtually. But they must have had footage of the Amazon at a bare minimum. The actors look more like real people who've been touched up digitally than purely CGI creations. 

 

[Ran]

45 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

I can't believe that thing is 100% computer animated.

Some of the environments are 2D backgrounds.

45 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

I can see how they might get some of those camera effects (shake, motion blur, shallow depth of field, bokeh) virtually.

For sure, that's done in the renderer and with the camera setup rather than the animation.

45 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

But they must have had footage of the Amazon at a bare minimum.

For "The Witness", Mielgo took countless pictures around the Kowloon area of Hong Kong and used those as references for background paintings. I expect he got a lot of reference photos for the environments here as well.

45 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

The actors look more like real people who've been touched up digitally than purely CGI creations. 

People said the same thing about "The Witness". It's an incredible effect. Like, the characters moved with more of a sense of weight and reality than the mocapped characters from Blur's and Axis's efforts, IMO.

[Ran]

David Fincher, Tim Miller, and Alberto Mielgo will be participating in a Clubhouse moderated watch-along at 12 Pacific today.  I'm definitely tuning in.

 

 

[Ran]

Here's Hideo Kojima flipping out over "Jibaro":

(Think he did the same over "The Witness".)

[Lord Varys]

While I admit that the animotion of 'Jibaro' is great, I would have preferred it if I understood what the story was about. Yes, the woman was a kind of siren/demon, but who were the guys and what did they want and what did the siren want of them?

'Swarm' was pretty great, too, although I missed a final scene at the end, showing the high-jacked humans returning to Earth to fulfill their new roles. Could have been a nice mirror to the opening scene.

23 hours ago, Ran said:

I really wonder if Miller has read any if George’s short fiction. The Pear-shaped Man, The Stone City, The Meathouse Man, And Seven Times Never Kill Man, A Song for Lya… they’d all fit quite well.

I think only 'The Stone City' and 'And Seven Times Never Kill Man' would be fitting pieces for that setting. Better would be some of the shorter SF stories - 'The Second Kind of Loneliness' and its successor 'Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring' spring to mind, also 'Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels', 'Slide Show', 'Fast-Friend', 'Starlady', and 'Weekend in a War Zone' might fit better into the tightness of the format.

'The Pear-shaped Man' seems to me too much psychological horror for a SF/Horror show.

[Corvinus85]

3 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

While I admit that the animotion of 'Jibaro' is great, I would have preferred it if I understood what the story was about. Yes, the woman was a kind of siren/demon, but who were the guys and what did they want and what did the siren want of them?

The guys were Spanish conquistadors though I admit that the late 15th century plate armor can be confusing as to who they were. Though the guy in the golden armor should have given you the clue.

Looking online, the word jibaro refers to the land cultivated by farmers in Puerto Rico. It is a story of greed and passion blinding one to the toxicity of a relationship.

[Ran]

Someone linked Agora Studios's LinkedIn and they confirmed, yet again, that "Jibaro" used no mocap at all. In fact, they were hitting a deadline and in desperation tried to mocap some of the dance performances to save time (I guess Mielgo must have allowed it)... and it didn't look right, too "perfect", so they stuck to the purely hand-done keyframe animation with video reference. I'm guessing their team pulled a lot of late crunch hours to make the deadline. They also have another post talking about the difficulty of rigging the armor and the fact that the deadline meant they couldn't clean up certain imperfections, sharing a picture of where a couple of meshes intersected improperly.

The Clubhouse chat is happening in about 25 minutes, BTW, for those who want to hear Miller, Fincher, and Mielgo during the watchalong.

 

[Ran]

The Clubhouse was pretty cool. David Fincher was quite exacting in his requirements! He gave Tim Miller and Blur some headaches (Tim joked that David and Alberto did not care about the health, work hours, or safety of their animators, to which David replied 'Getting them to the promised land is not always easy.')

Alberto Mielgo talked about spending a couple of weeks in the forest collecting photo references for the locations in Jibaro, and also going to some place called "Ohigh"  Ojai near LA (lots of horse ranches and riding trails) to film horse footage for reference. The opening forest shot had David Fincher impishly ask if those were photographs, just so he could hear Mielgo protest, "No, they are paintings!"  The view of the forest around the lake is basically a single large painted texture wrapped around the forest, but they would also project more detailed paintings onto 3D objects for scenes where they needed more dimensionality. Sara Silkin, the choreographer and lead dancer of the golden woman, actually wept when she performed the last scene, and apparently cried again when she watched the finished product for the first time when they did a screening at the Alamo Draft House. The golden woman's screams are heavily filtered recordings from her performance.

And the I managed to get a question to Tim Miller, asking if there were any SF authors he'd like to adapt the work of on LDR, and he said "All of them", but then did single out a short story from Dan Simmons that he's been trying to get since the 1st season. He's tried to get in touch with him, even called his house where his wife answered the phone, said she'd get Dan, then she came back and asked again who he was and who he was connected with, she went away, came back, and said Dan was indisposed... Heh. (Similar story with Sterling's "The Swarm": emailed him repeatedly, never got a response, finally asked mutual friend William Gibson to talk to Sterling and that got the ball rolling.)

ETA: David Fincher offered to call Dan Simmons, hoping he'd still talk with him, and I thought it was a joke ... but then I Googled and discovered that at one point Fincher had been attached to bring The Terror to the screen (long before the TV series).

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Bad Travelling was fantastic. I need to go back and revisit this series from the start.

[IFR]

I enjoyed this season much more than the previous season. Jibaro and Bad Traveling were my favorites. Night of the Mini Dead was fun, and being a Joe Abercrombie fan, I was pleased to see that Mason's Jar was entertaining too.

The rest were...fine. I didn't think any of them were outright bad (which I found to be the case in season 2).

I'm glad shows like this exist. I do hope someday they will adapt Martin's Sandkings. The story is not about robots, but it's in a technologically developed society and so robots can be present. The story itself would work really well with the format.

[Ran]

@IFR

As of last year, Gore Verbinski was to direct a feature-length Sandkings for Netflix. Not sure the status of it.

[Ran]

A discussion on Twitch with two of the Agora Animation animators who helped make "Jibaro", who have worked with Mielgo on other projects (The Windshield Wiper, "The Witness"). One of them noted that he got hired to work on Arcane specifically because of his work on "The Witness".

Apparently his "storyboards" rea a multi-layered animatic with camera motion and all. Downside of working with a guy with such a complete vision? He was the sole person who really understood the whole vision, which slowed down approvals as everything had to go through him.

Also, re: the question of how they achieved the motion, they provided more detail on the reference footage. Basically he had cameras set up at different angles at a distance, so they captured the whole space as the dancers performed things, so basically there is a filmed version of the "action"... but it was then used as reference for the animators. Literally eyeing it and looking at it and adjusting animations based on the reference, rather than rotoscoping.

Facial animations were done at the last 2 weeks of the production... and then they got 2-3 weeks more to redo them because they weren't working. And apparently Jibaro and the siren were completely redesigned late in the production, which required tweaking animations to deal with changes in proportions.

[Heartofice]

I can confirm that Jibaro, is the most hypnotically disturbing thing I’ve seen.. maybe ever. What an amazing piece of animation. 

[Kalbear]

Man, I've wanted an adaptation of swarm for so long. One of my favorite short stories. I wish it had been longer.

[Ran]

A follow-up Twitch video from Agora, talking to all three animation supervisors about working on "Jibaro" and with Alberto Mielgo. At 1:08:00 they explain why they didn't rotoscope, and at 1:15 or so they discussed why they didn't mocap, for those wondering.

[Werthead]

Caught up on Volumes 2 and 3. Not a patch on the first volume, but some of the episodes were amusing (Mason's Rats and Night of the Mini Dead). Probably Swarm was the best out of the stories. There were a few too many "people fight monster which kills most/all of them" narratives, which Bad Travelling made work and Kill Team Kill and In Vaulted Halls Entombed did not. Jibaro of course has an amazing art style but like The Witness was the very definition of style over substance. Exit Strategies was fun but a bit obvious.

I was interested that they haven't tapped Peter F. Hamilton and Al Reynolds for more stories, given theirs were the best-received of Volume 1 and they both have plenty of stuff that would fit (I'd really like to see them give A Second Chance at Eden a go, but most of the stories in the same collection - including the already-filmed Sonnie's Edge - would be suitable).

[Ran]

An interview with Emily Dean, director of "The Very Pulse of the Machine". Interesting reading. It was originally planned for the second volume, but the pandemic and its complexity pushed it over to volume 3.