San Francisco, CA. Marin County, CA. Williamstown, MA. Atlanta, GA. Welcome
to the production offices of (the largely fictional) Pyramid Productions,
LTD. Ralph has never met Mark or Noah. Mark and
José spent a total of 6 days together working on the initial script.
Noah and José spent 5 long days together working on The
Réal's programming structure. Otherwise, every element on the CD-ROM was pulled together via
e-mail. Tons of e-mail. Here are some gems from the The
Réal's first months in production.
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 95 07:54:48 -0700
From: no_way@servonet.com (Jose Marquez)
Apparently-To: Mark.C.Taylor@williams.edu>
[excerpt]....SO it is with most things American: something for nothing,
we'd like to believe.
Industrialism without pollution. Manhattan for $23 in trinkets, the NRA
without drive-by
shootings, breast enlargements without cancer, etc. Abundance based on
sheer, very shear
self-importance: covering one's own tracks, disguising the violence of our
past actions,
covering up (with layers of glimmer, colorful plastic beads, sequins) the
present's
inequities in order to assure all that (here), YOU CAN GET SOMETHING FOR NOTHING
That's our gamble. That's our bet. Our premise, our hypothesis, our
presumption, our
projection, our final destination.
[...] The Land of Opportunity.
The end of Dostoeyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
America: no outcome other than the plentiful, always generative cast of the die.
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Date: Fri, 25 Aug 95 11:50:54 -0700
From: no_way@servonet.com (Jose Marquez)
Apparently-To: Mark.C.Taylor@williams.edu>
[excerpt]....In a sense, Houses of Gambling are all about time and not
space: they stand upon
that hourglass sand of one second to the next, one hand to the next, one
roulette ball
flip/spin/landing to the next. Money changes hands only to mark the passage
of time.
Those red, blue, green chips [...] are what gamblers use to COUNT HOW MUCH
TIME THEY HAVE
LEFT (to gamble) rather than how much money they have left (money? what's
that?) [...]
In Las Vegas, on the NYSE, TIME IS MONEY, or vice versa. Vice Versa.
OK, I have to run.
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Date: Sun, 14 Apr 96 11:08:23 EDT
X-Sender: mtaylor@popserver.williams.edu
To: noway@slip.net
From: "Mark C. Taylor"
CC: Mark.C.Taylor@williams.edu
Content-Length: 983
OK, been doing my homework.
Re-viewed The Shining. Struck by the importance of the maze and the
juxtaposition of the
maze with patterns in carpet. We can use this.
Should use some empty picture frames.
Can we have some cards floating in the rooms?
Link rooms by sounds. Sounds repeat without obvious reason.
Sounds of slots -- of shuffling deck of cards
Viewed Prospero's Books -- visually quite extrarordinary. Outstanding
features?
use of books and drawings
use of layering -- very important
scenes that are imitations of paintings and paintings/books that come alive
richness of visuals
use of mirrors
Another character: fortune teller, tarot cards
palm-reading -- text as palimpsest
skin as text
peel away skin -- Prospero's books does it; Cindy Sherman does it
visible man/woman -- stuff on the Net
fortune, chance, skin -- the whole 9 yards
m
mct
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Date: Sun, 15 Apr 96 07:50:04 EDT
X-Sender: mtaylor@popserver.williams.edu
To: noway@slip.net
From: "Mark C. Taylor"
CC: Mark.C.Taylor@williams.edu
Content-Length: 95
No clocks in Vegas
Tick-tock no clocks
no clocks were allowed in Thomas More's Utopia
mct
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Date: Fri, 12 Apr 96 16:04:54 EDT
X-Sender: mtaylor@popserver.williams.edu
To: noway@slip.net
From: "Mark C. Taylor"
CC: Mark.C.Taylor@williams.edu
Content-Length: 297
Money flows like electricity
Electricity and Vegas:
Vegas not possible without the Hoover Dam.
Electricity always associated with occult forces.
Ghostly aspects of electricity
Figure of charging
charge cards
getting a charge
charge as rush
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Date: Sat, 6 Apr 1996 17:28:56 -0800 PST
From: noway
To: "Mark C. Taylor"
Subject: Re: your mail
Content-Length: 1208
The rooms we designed when you were in San Francisco were character studies.
Every room describes a person but we left the tension of the descriptions
TBA - for a later
date.
Now I am beginning to draw conclusions about these people - the content of
their character.
To keep people moving on one need only suggest the vague outlines of a
conspiracy: the kind of
quasi-narrative that permits a score of stories to feed off of it without
actually closing
down, in The End, on one moral: well, unless Nothing Lasts is a moral...
Rather than a superstructural construct, this "intervention" on your part
requires major
infrastructure. Details, anecdotal, hints. I think from THE USUAL SUSPECTS
you can get the
clearest sense of what you are talking about with "NOTHINGNESS LASTS" and
what I am
talking about in terms of ancillary and/or superfluous storyline. There is
also a comic book
that Noah can get you called "Velvet Glove Cast In Iron." Good luck with
that one.
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Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 09:54:02 -0800
From: "yes, way"
To: paynomind
Subject: vegas
FWD/excerpted ntoes - from message I sent to Mark a few seconds ago:
I would like to begin writing some of this story with you as soon as
possible. I would like to know how you are currently feeling, what
kind of work is on your table, etc.
I think we can probably focus our energies thusly:
We pick a room to walk into. You describe it. I describe it.
We get into detail about the particular parts or objects in that
room. We ask Noah to specify these objects, traces with library-found
materials. We can also put an asterisk on objects and make a plan
to aquire them, in 3-D, in Vegas.
We can build up our rooms in this way, through electronic correspondence.
Should I take out the loan and buy a fast Mac graphics workstation, I can
begin to send you descriptions of objects, walls, as images. At which time
we can get you up to speed on reading mail with images.
Does this sound like the plan?
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Date: Sat, 29 May 1996 12:45:20 -0500 (EST)
To: mtaylor@williams.edu
From: RafKelli@aol.com
Subject:
References: <960620151942_560482040@emout12.mail.aol.com>
Mark, thanks for keeping me posted on the resources, and being so frank
about the situation. I appreciate your concerns. I'm used to the kind of
pressure you describe as I'm often hired by independent ad agencies who
are in turn working with the public relations dept. of a corporation and
thus everyone's answerable to the C.E.O.. If I screw up, or that entity
changes its
mind about the value of the project, the whole pyramid colapses. Alternately,
sometimes projects go over deadline due to a client's slowness in providing
the items necessary to complete it. In the three years that I've been doing
graphic arts professionally, I haven't let anybody down. I realize the
complexity
of this project is greater than anything I've been involved with previously,
but the time and manpower seem ample.
On the money; anything I get is used as a way for me to provide additional
time by relieving the need to take on other projects that would compete for
my attention. Generally I take on as much work as I can handle at a time
because there could be dry spells later, (there are no paid vacations in the
freelance world). It's a bit quixotic of me to take on the Vegas project, but I
think it has merit and will broaden the range of my skills, which is
something that has always turned out to be profitable.
Meanwhile, I'll do my best to see that you don't lose face. Besides lack of
funds (time), I think the major potential pitfalls are the spatial distances
between all of our resources and the difficultly of administering/delegating
all the mirco-tasks to be done. The more Jose and I can really get the
specificity of what this thing is suppossed to actually look/feel like, plus
gather/sort the actual scrap material used into appropriate building blocks
the more confident I am that the rest of the construction can occur
smoothly and without wasteful confusion and overlap. Forthwith, Ralph K.
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Date: Wed, 06 June 1996 10:16:02 -0500 (PST)
To: "Yes, Way"
From: RafKelli@aol.com
Subject: intro
References: <960620151942_560482040@emout12.mail.aol.com>
That Yellow Sub thing was all postcards, They're an excellent
shorthand sign for a place. Although the double take would be nice,
I'm not so hot on having the card on the floor next to the interface.
The motion from intro to interface would then be more left/right or
up/down rather than in, in, in, peeling back multiple layers. But maybe
I'm not getting it.
Other stuff: does the screen burn White white, or maybe just to
the bleached bones of the scene. The unframed movie I pictured
would be connected stills that fade into each other via one element
in common eg. pissing/drink pouring/ocean raging etc (fluid motion
downward) In our scenario flashy colored lights provide the common
element for the shifts to go smoothly (as in not arbitrary). It will
take several versions to get this right, no? I might want to story
board it with photoshop layers and masks. Paralleling "Casino", and
postcard stereotypes is fine because those images are how most of
the world recognizes Vegas.
Does this help? Or should I be a good #3 cook and go focus on the
grocery list?
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Date: Wed, 13 June 1996 11:40:50 -0000 (PST)
To: "Yes, Way"
From: RafKelli@aol.com
Subject:
References: <960620151942_560482040@emout12.mail.aol.com>
Jose, I'm happy that you're pleased with what I'm doing. It helps
immensely. Today I put together some text templates in Illustrator
that are closely based on the typography of the national enquirer. If
we get the screen area finalized, and can agree on a sample page "look".
I can set up several generic layout variations that the vegas copy can
be poured into. Perhaps I can then send this to Noah et. al. and they can
pour type all day long for awhile, and I can move on to pictures and
rooms etc. The enquirer often does text wraps around people and
multiple headlines with pull quotes. We may use some of the snapy
copy to fit this look. This level of detailing may be excessive.
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From noway@slip.net Thu Jun 20 15:53:14 1996
Return-Path: noway@slip.net
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 12:51:47 +0000
From: "Yes, Way"
Reply-To: noway@slip.net
Organization: The Pamas and the Mapas
X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Macintosh; I; PPC)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: RafKelli@aol.com
Subject: Re: Exceedingly Fine
References: <960620151942_560482040@emout12.mail.aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
FUTURAS
are good
as well as any other fonts you think i need
really, i just need that grocery list
i know you know how the money thing works for all of us.
i, too, am in the middle of a blitzkrieg of an assignment. that's why
i thought i'd compensate your professional time with a third of my
paycheck.
i can't tell you how to run your business, which clients to take, etc.
that's your wissenshaft, your science. i'm sure you'll do the right
thing. just let me know how others can help you. i am, of course,
always at your service.
did the mask for the scrolling text. did the animation set-up for the
reels (believe it or not, it was finally done in Infini-D, not
AfterEffects). we do, as you noted, need at least 10 more sets of reel
icons. but that's to be discussed after the grocery lists.
there are only three things i want to emphasize on this project:
the man is the alien, the people are the robots and the key to a
better tomorrow is changing spending habits, learning to let go,
learning to live on less material goods and more spiritual gifts.
that's where the concerted or conspiratorial nature of the grocery
list comes in handy.
that's why I emphasized including elements of HOME AWAY FROM HOME
(the birth of car culture; motels were, after all, MOTOR HOTELS)
as a way of regurgitating the consumerist culture which is
now experiencing something of an aneurysm in Vegas & Wall St.
I also think that the overall "space/time" of this project is about
the computer screen: the terminal, the video game.
Refer to the LEARNING TO SAY NO TO YESCO story and the argument
therein between mechanical and digital modes of expression.
Ms. Pac Man, Pac Man are the founding texts of our generation, our
contribution to the dung pile of history. If we don't cite and exploit
the self-contained narratives embedded in video games like Pac Man,
(GHOSTS, FRUIT, FOOD PELLETS, DEATH, LIFE, TIME, FEAR,
CONSUMPTION, EXTRA POINTS, FREE LIVES) we'll be doing a
disservice to our own generation.
Imagine the 60's without the civil rights movement. Well, I hope
that's the rowdy vision-talk you'd expect from me -- a man with
the transformers tattoed on his arms.
enjoy the family, ensure the longevity of client relations, just
keep the dice rolling, the reels spinning, the chips in play...
take it easy,
jose
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 1997 18:08:01 -0500 (EST)
From: paynomind
To: NOWAY
Subject: Re: read this with EUDORA
just a thought after reading your liner notes
(which i enjoyed thoroughly by the way even despite
the numbness that accompanies my lingo induced coma)
our scheme for saving motel guests may need some tinkering
with or at least your text, as it stands, would if we don't
change our tactics. right now, one of the .dir files, not
the Real projector, is saved with the player's information.
this would entail having to move two files onto the user's
harddrive, the projector and the .dir file. what also might work
(and give us sufficient space to save a good number more visitors
for playback allowing lots of kids to play on one friend's machine
at the same time) is creating a castlib with the player's info
which would be brought on to the hard drive and saved each time
there's a new player added with the saveCastLib command. i'm a little
spooked about continually resaving the .dir files for fear that it might
somehow corrupt after multiple saves and fry the game to the point where
it would need to be reinstalled.
n.
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Date:
To: "Yes, Way" , mtaylor@williams.edu
From: RafKelli@aol.com
Subject: Real Time
Hello to Jose and Mark.
October 13 is Columbus Day (very inauspicious) is the 14th okay?
Standard turnaround time for the disk, liner notes, and jewel case
production is 10 days. The Holo-film sleeves will take from 2-3
weeks after which we get them together with their respective cases
for assembly and shrink wrap which will take (X)? number of days. I
need a few days after you get me all the final text to complete the
designs, get them reviewed, and get the film and/or iris proofs that
the production companies require. I recommend we finalize the outer
sleeve ASAP and get it to the printers a week ahead of the other disk
stuff as it takes longer. If you want me to get going on this I need to
get around a few bottlenecks:
1) final blurb about system requirements for the outer sleeve.
2) "Made with Macromedia" credit requirements, (does it have to appear
on the outer sleeve? or is inside okay?) I've been looking at CD-ROM
boxes and they all have Macromedia logo, QuickTime, Macintosh is a
registered trademark of blah blah blah type small print on them. I'd
prefer to put such stuff in the liner notes, but I want to know that
it is safe to do so before going ahead on a big $$$ job.
3) Payment arrangements, printers require a half up front deposit before
beginning work on these jobs. Can Williams can pay them directly and
quickly if needed? Or is there a long disbursement process which will
hold things up.
Other questions, I have our credits, and the Williams/MASS MOCA
legalese, for the liner notes ready to go. Will there also be instructions
for use? Windows/Mac legalese? anything else? I will need all of
this to do the layout, and to know how many pages we're up to, so
I can tell the printer what we're really doing, and they can do the
setup and price the initial deposit accordingly. The printing trade
is dominated by GERMANS, they don't take us seriously when we
say "whatever", "maybe", or "we don't know yet." We get nowhere
until I can send them the real specs.
What about the postcard? Does it take priority over the CD package?
I have it designed front and back. I may as well send you jpegs of
the front and FAXes of the back. Mark, what's your FAX number? If
you like the image on the front of the card, I'll adapt it for use on
the booklet cover. If not, I should know soon so plan B can get rolling.
Here's a budget update:
1500, disks, booklets (6 panels so far) and jewel cases $2,738
1500, Holographic Outer sleeves $2417
custom assembly, $-? (if worse comes to worse maybe we can do it by hand
ourselves)
500, 4 color postcards $99
or
1000, 4 color postcards $190
Thanks for the incoming $500 check, I appreciate the sentiment and
the offer to take the responsibility off my hands which is tempting,
but I've come this far and there would be so much confusion with the
printers it wouldn't be worth it. I have not been treating the Réal as a
normal assignment so the hours to dollars ratio of my fee is whatever
it is. If there's funds left over that can go towards recompense for
work done that's great. Mostly, right know, I would like my questions
answered and the information I need to continue supplied, so that I can
best attend to doing a good job on the visual aspects of the package,
without having the usual long and distracting
content/review/approval/communication
hold-ups so we can wrap this up soon. Sorry if this sounds cranky,
flat tires, jury duty notices, DMV mix-ups, income shortfalls, road
construction, chainsawing, and jackhammering are some of the things
that grace my current environment.
As for El Niño (alias Christ Child?) the ocean temp up here is at 66 degrees
(very odd), it's rather hot outside today and I'll bet it's going to be an
interesting winter. See you later, call as needed, R--
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