MIGS Day Two

Allright. Day two.

I had to opportunity to get familiar with the event yesterday, so there was no uncertainty as to what to expect on the second morning, apart from the contents in the conferences.

I got there a bit later than on the first day, but early enough to visit the expo room before the first keynote.

Video Game Symphony

Upon arriving on site I realized that there seemed to be an event going on in the main room. I was very surprised, because I made sure to double check the schedule before coming, and it clearly said that the first keynote was at 10:00 AM.

It turned out that there was some sort of video game symphony, where someone was playing a game with only sound effects on, while a live orchestra was playing music to fit the mood that was currently in the game. I think that it a really cool idea, and I am a bit sad that I missed it.

Expo Room

Even though I missed the video game symphony event, I still had time to go around the expo room to see if there were any new stands that I could visit. There were obviously none, so I headed to the main room to get a seat for the keynote.

I encountered a friend who wanted to visit video game studios and leave his references. I went with him, which was a very good idea because we were given a beanie hat from Gameloft and a t-shirt from Eidos.

I think that is a pretty awesome way to begin the day. :)

A Brief History of Indie
Ron Carmel, Co-founder, 2D BOY

The first keynote was supposed to be a brief history of indie, as the title implies, but it was more about the opposition between indie and mainstream, and creativity in general.

Ron Carmel started with a comparison between video games and TV series. According to him, we have only recently begun having masterpieces in TV series (The Wired, in his opinion) while video games are still not mature enough to have created anything that could be considered a masterpiece.

He thinks that in order to witness the first video game masterpiece, the video game industry still has a long way to go exploring creativity. While there have been some games, like Shadow of the Colossus, who tried to push creativity to a new point, he still feels that it is not enough.

It is often stated in popular belief that indie developers try to go towards creativity, while mainstream developers only wish to make money. Ron Carmel thinks that we should ideally have some sort of in between to get better creativity.

The problem is that mainstream studios will not try this option because it is too risky, and indie developers will not try this option because they will argue that it is not indie.

He also wanted to redefine the opposition that was illustrated between indie and mainstream. In his opinion, the "indie" label is really ambiguous. A lot of developers are considered indie while they are in fact, divisions of mainstream studios, small studios or any other similar example. A lot of different people have different opinions about the definition of indie.

It is however true that there are some differences between people that make game. In his opinion, this opposition can be translated into "Design Studios" vs "Commercial Studios". The goal of design studios would be to try new ideas and aim towards creativity, and the goal of commercial studios would be big productions generating a lot of money. I think this is actually closer to reality.

If we get back to trying to get in between, this would mean that he thinks we should be seeing more intermediate studios, trying to get more creative on big projects.

The question period was a bit controversial. Some people argued that the design vs commercial opposition was actually a developer vs publisher opposition. Others argued that none of the stated examples were indie. 

This confirms the fact that it is clearly difficult to define precisely what is indie,  that any game maker who considers himself indie should be indie, and that in the end the indie label does not really change anything. What is important is the intent that the game developer has.

Building a Global Technology Strategy When East Meets West
Julien Merceron,Worldwide Technology Director, Square Enix Group

I was looking forward to this conference. The first reason is that Square Enix is one of my favorite game developers. The second reason is that the recent acquisition of Eidos could be the first step towards increasing collaboration between the western and eastern video game industries, and I am actually very curious about how this could develop.

This presentation was divided into two parts. The first half tried to highlights the cultural differences between Japan and America when it comes to video game creation. The second half was about the current technological strategy Square Enix is trying to implant in order to increase collaboration between Square and Eidos.

I think that the first half of this presentation was the most interesting. In the past year I have seen a lot of conflict about the difference between Japanese and American games. I have read a lot of different comments about the Japanese industry being far behind in game making.

By defining clearly the cultural differences between Japan and America, Julien Merceron exposed something that should have been obvious : the fact that both industries simply approach game making in different ways and that they do not have the same goals. For this reason, the products are very different, and the technologies used are very different too.

In the western market, video games are about gameplay. Western companies try to make better human machine interactions, more subtle UIs, more realistic animations. They try to give excitement and emotion to the player through the actions he makes and the way he controls the games.

In Japan, video games are about storytelling. Japanese companies spend a lot of times creating characters and stories. They spend a lot of time trying to make realistic characters, but sometimes lack on the animation part, which is a risk towards the uncanny valley. Because storytelling is so important, Japanese companies have developed very advanced pipeline to create cinematics. For this reason, japanese games still use a lot of cinematics even though it could be possible to use only in game graphics because of the current generation of hardware. The main difference is that japanese developers do not try to give emotion through controlling the game, they are using the game as a medium to give emotion, so it does not matter to them if the player is not controlling anything while there is a dramatic cutscene.

I think that this is a very simple explanation about the cultural differences between Japan and America, and that when you think about it, it seems pretty normal that there are so many differences between those games, and it does not feel at all like one or the other is doing it wrong.

This gets intersting when we get a company like Square Enix, which has access to staff members all over the world. Those cultural differences also lead to differences in technology. This also means that it would be possible to share that expertise. 

Square Enix is slowly trying to merge some of those ideas. There are some people from Japan who are eager to work in Montreal. On the other hand, there are a lot of people from Montreal willing to learn Japanese and work in Tokyo. This could lead to great new ideas, and I am looking forward to it.

Pipeline Design: A Non-Intrusive Data Driven Architecture
François Paradis, Tools Technical Lead, Ubisoft Québec

Jonathan T-Delorme, Tools Programmer, Ubisoft Québec

This presentation was based on tool improvements that were used in making the Scott Pilgrim video game, so the visuals and examples featured Scott Pilgrim, which was very cool. :)

The presentation focused on tools developed to make a data driven architecture. Nowadays, data driven design is a very desirable thing in game development. Games use a lot of data, and the engine should not need to be modified because the data is different. 

While this has been achieved in several ways, Ubisoft Québec tried to push it to a higher level.

The first step was to clearly separate the tools from the engine. And when they mean separate, they do not only mean to encapsulate stuff in different projects or solutions. They mean to separate it entirely.

What this means is that their tools are using C# and XML data, while their engine are using C++ and binary data. This means that they have access to very different functionalities in their tools, and that the data is duplicated to work on the engine. The general concept is that the tools are easier and quicker to make, while the engine can still benefit from the execution speed coming from C++.

The consequence of this approach is that tools can make use of C# reflection to adapt to data. Data can change a lot during game development, and it can be a pain to modify the tools each time a new data type is added. With reflection, it is possible to look up the types at runtime, and use whatever is really there at the time. The main downside to reflection is that it is done at runtime, so it is slow. But it does not really matter because those are tools. They can still generate the data that will be used by the engine in the same way.

The second proposed solution introduces data inheritance. In the same way that classes can inherit properties,  data can inherit properties. This enables them to define some data, such as a character, then to define a character that is a specialization of the previous character, and use data inheritance to specify only the differences between the two. This recudes the need for copy-paste all over the place when needed to modify some data, and it also makes it easier to adapt the data to some varying situations, like applying the same game to different platforms.

The whole idea to this data driven approach is simple, but it is still a new approach, and I liked the way they implemented it.

Balancing Game Mechanics Using Game Theory: Modern Analytical Approaches to Achieving Desired Gameplay Dynamics
Christopher J. Hazard, President, Hazardous Software Inc.

The goal of this presentation is to use knowledge from scientific/mathematic background in game theory and to apply it to game design. This allows to predict gameplay dynamics, especially when it comes to game balance.

At first I had no idea what game theory was. And I was not sure what to expect from this conference. After listening to the whole stuff, I can say that this was in my opinion the best conference at MIGS 2010. The general idea was pretty complex, and I did not understand everything. But I am eager to look more into game theory, and I am really looking forward to a future where more companies will be using game theory in their game design.

The basic principle of game theory is to apply mathematics to games. It is possible to use game theory to predict what people are going to do, to quantify utility and risk, and to solve games.

Game theory can be used to oppose skill vs strategy when it comes to games. I had never thought about it, and I generally hear about skill and luck in games, but it is true that games are more skill and strategy than skill alone. 

Skill is the ability to do something efficiently, and is revolves around decision theory. Strategy is the approach to do something, and it revolves around game theory. As an example that was not in the presentation that comes from my own understanding, being able to dodge in a fighting game is skill, while staying away or rushing in is strategy.

I would not be able to explain clearly how game theory can be applied to game design, as I am not an expert. What I can do is talk about some of the things I understand can be done.

The thesis is that is possible to define gameplay mathematically. 

• It is possible to measure payoff and risk. 
• Problems such as rock-paper-scissors can be given a level of transitivity and have predetermined probabilities.
• Any game can be expressed by a currency, the most basic of which is player time to obtain an achievement.
• Feedback in a game can be positive (skill leads to rewards, like in Modern Warfare) or negative (skill leads to hindrance, like in Mario Kart).
• The effect of feedback can be measured.
• A good way to evaluate when balanced has been attained in a game is when players complain about every class or unit as being over powered. 
• There is a direct relation between the utility and cost of any item in a game.

The application of all theses principles is that it is possible to evaluate mathematically if a game is balanced. The general feeling that I get from games nowadays is that they try as best as they can to make the game balanced, and if they get the feeling that it isn't, they semi-randomly try to fix it. If we could balance games based on mathematics, this would be a huge progress in competitive gaming.

The whole idea does not simply apply to game balance. It is possible to predetermine gameplay mathematically and apply it to the game afterwards.

I think this is a very promising subject. As of today I do not understand it fully, but I really want to look more into it. And I hope to see this applied to games in the future.

The Narrative of Narrative
Rafael Chandler, Narrative Designer & Scriptwriter

Last choice of the day. At this point I was really not sure about choosing between a very advanced conference on body animation using hardware acceleration, a conference on tips to start your own gaming studio, or a conference on tips for narrative content in games.

Normally the default for me would be to choose the tech conference, since it is my domain of expertise. However, I had the feeling that this was going to be a very advanced conference on a field that I know nothing about. It was also getting late and I did not feel like listening to complex technicalities.

Starting your own game studio seemed like a good conference. However, while these could be very good tips, and I not planning on creating a studio in the near future. And if I really wanted to create a gaming studio, I would have to hire an attorney anyways in addition to listening to the conference.

The narrative content one was about game design. And I figured that out of the four other disciplines featured in the summit, design is probably the one thing that I could end up doing if I am not doing something that is tech. I pictured this as if my main class is software engineer, my secondary class could very well be game designer. 

(It could be argued that in fact business should be my secondary class, as engineers - especially software engineers - do a lot of project management and planning. However, the business part here felt more about law and finance that project management. On the other side, I am currently considering working on some video games projects demo/indie development/whatever. I know that I am not a jack of all trades and that if I do that I will need help from other people. But if I start creating games, I guess I should need game design. I realize that this is a very big parenthesis and that it has absolutely nothing to do with the MIGS.)

So I decided to go to the design conference. I honestly have mixed feelings about this one.

The conference was about narrative of narrative. My understanding is that the conference was about writing, more specifically about how you should try to make your writing tell what you really want it to tell.

While I am never planning to write stuff for video games, as I am not a good writer, and I think that I do not have imagination, I still learned interesting stuff about game writing. 

I seems that it is actually harder than one might think for game writing to project the good message. I also learned that game writing is actually technical writing. Game writing should not feature complex style. It should be straight to the point, and clear. The whole idea behind that is that you do not want the rest of the pipeline development wondering about the meaning of a word, or looking through your poetry when their goal is to find out which characters are present in a given scene. Game writing is different from writing in other media, mostly because it is interactive and not only narrative.

I also learned that every line of text in a video game should tell a story. While this is a very simple idea, I actually like it a lot. This is not necessarily intuitive, and I think that it is true.

Other than that, I did not learn that much from this conference. I guess this can be explained by the fact that I was simply not the target audience at all.

Maybe I should have gone to the business one about creating a game studio.

New Kids On the Block: Studio Heads Tell All
Ken Schachter, Founder, Trapdoor

Miguel Caron, CEO, Funcom

Yanick Roy, Studio Director, Bioware

Martin Carrier,Vice-President, Studio Head, WB Games Montreal

The final keynote was actually a sort of discussion panel featuring the heads of studios recently established in Montreal. 

I would say that it was entertaining overall, but not exactly instructive. I guess it was more for fun at the end of the event that as an academic event.

Next year

During the final keynote, the dates for next year's summit were confirmed. It was also stated that next year, the event will not only be Montreal's International Game Summit, but something bigger regrouping web, eLearning and games.

I am not sure what I think about this decision. This will definitely mean that the event will be bigger, and it would be good if a video game professional event in Montreal was bigger. On the other side, I fear that adding web stuff in there would reduce the amount of video game content and that the event would drift away from its original purpose.

I guess that as long as the MIGS inside the bigger event is at least as big as this year, I will be satisfied.

Closing comments

I think it is pretty obvious that I had a great time at the MIGS 2010. I learned a lot of cool stuff, I met people, and mostly, I am leaving the event with a very big boost in motivation.

I am looking forward to working in the video game industry, and I feel like I should start working harder. I have a lot of work to do on my grad school project, I need to read books to get new knowledge, and I should definitely start my own personal projects.

This would allow me to get some practice and something to show to companies in interviews. But this would also allow me to create stuff, which was something recurrent during the whole event. 

There are a lot of indie developers surfacing, it is now easier to make video games on your own, and you do not necessarily need a lot of money to create games. Most people in the industry agree that more creativity is always good, and they are waiting for us to create the new stuff. So I guess I should participate and try to see what I can do.

I think that every one who has the opportunity should attend, and I am looking forward to next year.

MIGS Day One

Today I experienced Montreal's International Game Summit for the first time. The overall experience had my brain working a lot, which had the effect to make me want to share thoughts. This whole process led me to my not active enough blog.

This post will follow this very basic structure. I will start with a small outline about the MIGS. I will then procede to relate the different events I attended during the day. Finally, I will give a general appreciation for day one of the event.

So what is the MIGS exactly?

The acronym MIGS stands for Montreal International Game Summit which is a direct translation from Sommet International du Jeu de Montréal. My guess is that the event's official name is probably the french one, as Montreal is a french-speaking crowd in majority. The event itself is obviously held in English to allow a maximum number of participants.

The MIGS is basically what its name tells us, an international game summit. It is an event where different people from the gaming industry can meet to make contacts, share ideas and attend professional conferences or other social events. The event is open to students and people working in the gaming industry.

The event is being held at the Hilton Bonaventure hotel in Montreal. Conferences are divided into five main categories, being Arts and VFX, Business, Design, Production and Technology. There is always one conference of each category during the same time period, so I was obviously not able to attend everything. As a software engineering student I tend to favor technology conferences, but I did not limit myself to only those.

More information can be found on the event's official website:
http://www.sijm.ca/2010/?language=fr

General environment

I arrived at the summit at around 9:30. This gave me enough time to get my registration, leave my stuff at the coat check, and briefly look around the waiting room hosting stands from various companies, schools etc.

Afterwards I met with other people from Polytechnique and we headed to the main room for the opening conference.

Beauty, constraint and the Atari 2600
Ed Fries, Former vice-president, Microsoft Game Studios

Alright so Ed Fries is the big guest for Monday and he's going to talk to us about the Atari 2600. Because this is the opening conference, there is no other conference at the same time. This means that everybody does not really have a choice and is going to attend this one. I have to say that at first I was not very excited with the idea of a conference on the Atari 2600. I am not really an old machine lover, nor a low-level code lover.

I have to say that I was really wrong, and that this was actually a very good keynote. The talk was divided into three main features, being old Greek vases, the making of Halo 2600 and beauty in games. (Halo 2600 is a Halo like game running on the Atari 2600 and made by Ed Fries.)

The general idea of this keynote was that humans need to give themselves constraints in art. It has been witnessed in almost any art form that at first there are some constraints, for example ink colors or memory quantity. Humans then had the tendency to try to develop new technology to be free of those constraints to be able to make what they want.

However, constraints have the effect of making people want to achieve more, and this is what can be shown with the Atari 2600. The system had so much limited hardware that programmers had to create really intense optimizations to create their games, which resulted in a form of artistic code and impressive result.

This lead Ed Fries to the hypothesis that constraints actually give more power to art. This can be easily illustrated with the fact that people are usually more impressed by an art product developed under some constraints, like a sonnet or an origami figure made from a single sheet of paper.

The gaming industry had a very impressive evolution over the past years, and we could say that it is now free from most constraints. This leads us to several game projects putting themselves under constrained development, like creating a game with only three colors.

I think this was a very interesting hypothesis, and I have to admit that it seems true. People need some constraints as a motivator to create better products. Now that the game industry is mature enough, it is able to choose its own constraints.

Collective Artificial Intelligence for Next Generation Gameplay

Jeff Orkin, PhD Candidate, MIT Media Lab
Artificial intelligence being my field of study as a grad school student, I felt this conference was mandatory for me.

The conference was based on ideas very similar to my research project. In the past decades, video games were the subject of very impressive growth when it came to graphics and visuals, but progress with artificial intelligence were very limited. The goal of this conference was to propose a structure for AI progress in video games.

In graphics, the basic elements that make up what we see on the screen are triangles and textures. Over the years, better hardware and software led to better computation power, which led to better graphics. 

But what is the basic element in artificial intelligence?

The problem with artificial intelligence is not about more power in the CPU or GPU, it's about content. Artificial intelligence systems need to know what the human mind knows, what we use to decide what we are going to do.

The structure proposed in this conference was a collective AI framework, where data was accumulated from users interacting in a given environment (in this case a restaurant). The goal was then to structure all this data to be able to infer intelligent agent action.

I realize that the whole idea in this conference can be summed up quite easily. This does not make it that simple though. The solution itself is a lot of work, and for this structure to actually make its way to video game production, companies would need to share a lot more than they are currently doing, which I am not sure will happen in the near future.

The Art of the Sell : Pitching Your Ideas
Chris Ferriera, Creative Director, Artificial Mind & Movement
Based on the title, this conference seems to be about marketing. That is not exactly the case. This conference was about selling your ideas to other people in your team or your video game studio, in the context of game design. A topic that could be very useful for me in the future.

It turned out that this conference was a bit disappointing. The ideas that were covered were good and made a lot of sense, but the conference was over after about 30 minutes. This felt as though the topic lacked content, for a talk that was supposed to go on for an hour.

Overall, the basic idea is to take the time to think about your idea and share it with friends before trying to convince people that it is a good idea. You should never oppose people directly, and try to make other people make the idea their own, by allowing them to add their ideas to your idea instead of forcing your way of thinking into them.

Leaderboards Can Suck It: 7 Better Ideas for Visualizing Player Data for Fun and Profit

Todd Northcutt, General Manager, GameSpy Technology
This was one of the conferences that I really wanted to attend. The title is bold and does not fear to expose leaderboards as what they really are. I mean, anyone who played a game with a leaderboard can relate to this. You get to see the overall ranking of people, and notice that you are waaaaaay down the ranks.

The basic idea of this conference is that if you want to gather data on your players, you should put some real effort into it, instead of just taking a global score, generating a sorted list and putting it under a "Leaderboard" menu in your game. It then proceeds to give general guidelines about what to do with leaderboards.

The first problem is that most of the time, you cannot even see your ranking in the leaderboard. The list only covers the top players, and most people are not top players. This means that most players do not know their ranking, and that's not fun. It is also better if you can get data about more that a global score. People like to see what they are good at. 

Another problem is that with leaderboards, you get compared with every single person that played the game. But most people do not care that the best player is someone they will never meet in their whole life. People like competition, and they will try to compete with their friends. Thus, it is better to show only the leaderboard rankings of the each player's friends.

Finally, the general objective of leaderboards is to make people want to play the game more in order to get better at it. And people don't like to be told that they suck. Nobody gets motivated knowing that their rank is 3938199 in the leaderboard. However, they like to be told that they are above average. The player's rank is the same, but in one case, the game is actually telling the player that he's doing well.

There are probably a lot of other good ways to improve leaderboards that are still not explored and will be discovered in the future. This conference still pointed a lot of errors that I know I have seen in recent games. 

This was a very interesting conference, and I am happy that Gamespy is trying to push game developers to host better leaderboard structures.

Designing a Future-Proof Multi-Core Games Engine

Andrew Richards, Founder and CEO, Codeplay Software

This was the very technical conference of the day for me. How should we make a video game engine that can easily adapt to parallelism and future development?

The first half of the conference was actually not about multi cores and parallelism at all. Well, it was about multi cores, but not in the way that you would normally expect. It was about the memory limitations that come with using several cores. 

Using several cores intuitively seems like a very good idea to get better results. You use more that one core, so you can do more stuff at the same time, and you get your game to run quicker.

Simple? Actually, it isn't.

Video games, and in fact any computer program is not solely about the processing unit executing instructions. It's also about data, which is stored in memory. And what happens when several cores try to access the memory at the same time is that "the memory controller dies". 

The most used solution is to use caches with each core in addition to the main memory module. While this allows to limit the memory access, it can lead to very serious synchronization problems when several cores need to access the same data, as they do not use the same cache.

Codeplay proposed what seemed like a very good programming solution to this problem using C++ template meta-programming. While I was able to follow the basic ideas during the conference, I honestly don't remember enough to explain here. But it seemed like a very good solution.

Apart from resolving the memory sharing problem, the conference approached several problems that could occur when using several cores, and ways to optimize speed and parallelism using SIMD instructions.

A very technical conference, but a very interesting one for technical people. And the guy from Codeplay Software seemed to really know what he was talking about.

The Technical Challenges of Developing MMOGs

Rui Manuel Casais, Chief Technological Officer, Funcom

Finally, the last conference of the day was hosted by Funcom, and was about the technical challenges with Massively Multiplayer Games.

MMOGs deal with very particular problems because of the very large number of people that these games need to host. Funcom thinks that in the future, all games will be massively online, and that the industry needs to be ready for it.

The conference went thought a list of challenges that occur most of the time when dealing with MMOG, and proposed several tips to try to counter them. These were divided into social, security and fun categories.

The most important idea about social is that you should provide the best platform possible in order to allow people to play with their friends. Even if the game is not the best game that was ever done, people will continue to play it if they can play with their friends. However, as soon as some people stop playing, others will follow because they cannot play with their friends anymore.

Ubiquity means that the game should be everywhere. You should be able to play from any device, be it PC, console, phone, web browser. Security means that the game server should always be on, and that people should not get any of their data stolen through the game.

Fun basically means that people should have fun. This is a very simple concept, but it is probably the hardest to achieve.

I think that the problems that were featured in this presentation were quite real and accurate, and that the tips provided were actually pretty good. I unfortunately could not memorize them all, but this conference was actually better than I expected.

General Appreciation

Apart from the conferences, I had time to go around the waiting room and talk to several game studios. I discovered new game studios and I talked a bit with people that I already knew. This is not really new for me but it is always good to know people in the gaming industry.

We had a free lunch around noon. It was a basic lunch with a sandwich, a bit of vegetables, a dessert and apple juice. This was good, but I was disappointed by having to eat on the floor in some random hallway in the hotel. There were a lot of attendees, and it was really chaotic to have all of these people eating all over the place.

There were coffee breaks during the conferences and I had a coffee before the Codeplay conference. I am not sure what happened to the coffee during the day but it felt as though it had been mixed with water. That's not the best coffee I had in my life. :\

Closing Comments

Overall, I can say that I had a very great day at MIGS 2010. The conferences were really interesting, I learned a lot a new stuff, and it always feels good to have direct contacts with people from the gaming industry. 

The organization was pretty good, apart from the lunch lacking tables for people to eat, and the bad tasting coffee.
I left this first day with a lot of motivation. I feel like I should go on with my research and get good results. I also feel like I should go forward with my idea of making an Xbox Live Indie game. I also feel like I should spend more time reading software engineering books. I should be getting on with this by the end of the week.

I think this is a great event. I should have gone last year, and I would really like to attend each year from now on.

Closing comments on Fantasia 2010

Alright, at first I thought that writing an individual review for all of my chosen movies at Fantasia 2010 would be a good idea. I ended up creating longer posts than I thought for the reviews that I made, and I ended up being quite busier than I thought I would be.

So there we are. It's been a long time already since Fantasia, and I think it would take a long time to cover all movies so I will not be doing a review for all of them.

However, I feel bad for dropping the idea, so I am at least going to give my overall thoughts about the 2010 edition of the festival.

I have to say that for me, Fantasia has always been a good opportunity to discover pretty good movies that I would not have known about otherwise. As I said in an earlier post, I saw 12 movies this year and this should have been enough to find out good stuff.

I actually think that Fantasia 2010 was a bit of a disappointment for me. Out of 12 movies, none of them were actually bad, but there was not any that could really qualify as outstanding. I will still talk about my favorite stuff.

First of all, Japanese animation did a pretty good job at entertaining me. I saw both Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror and Summer Wars. The first one was actually 3D animation and the second one your usual 2D animation. Oblivion Island had really beautiful graphics, and the story was really cute. On the other hand, Summer Wars featured a pretty original setting, and the plot development was quite interesting.

Korea did a good job this year too. I liked Blades of Blood and Woochi. Blades of Blood was set in Korea at a time where soldiers used sword while guns were beginning to be used. It was a good blend of action, humor and ethical reflection. On the other hand, Woochi was half in the past, half in the present. Even though Woochi seemed a bit less original at first, I think it was a better movie than Blades of Blood.

(I would like to say on a side note that old men with beards from Korea all look alike, and I was confused in both movies because I could not make the difference between several characters.)

Bodyguards and Assassins might be my favorite movie of Fantasia 2010. It is about a revolution in China at the beginning of the 20th century. The first half of the movie is pretty calm, being mostly discussions and planning the revolution. The second half of the movie features a good share of action, while they try to make the plan work. The biggest flaw in this movie would be the title, since I do not think it expresses clearly what the movie is about. I think most of the crowd thought they would be seeing a lot of fighting with assassins.

Finally, 2010 was my first experience at one of DJ XL5's performances, as I went to the Bollywood Zappin' Party. I don't think this man is the best crowd speaker there ever was, but his choice of scenes and match up is extremely funny. At first I was not sure if I would be enjoying myself for this one, but it turned out that I laughed a lot the whole evening and I had a good experience.

That's it for Fantasia 2010. If I ever feel the need to make reviews next year I will try to make them immediately after each movie. Doing everything afterwards is clearly too much work.

2010/07/13 - Tears For Sale (Director's Cut)

Serbian movies were one of the themes for Fantasia 2010. Since I usually try to select my movies from different countries, I figured I should at least buy tickets for one from Serbia.

From the Serbian movie lineup, Tears For Sale seemed to be the one with the highest level of sanity. As far as I remember, I also think it was the only one which was set in the past. If we add to this the fact that it is about a village populated solely by women, I think Tears For Sale was a good pick.

The movie is taking place in a small Serbian village during the first world war. At that time, all the men were gone to war, so very few of them were left in the village. As only one old man is left in the village, we are explained the cause of death for the last two men. It is important to note that one of them died transforming the village vineyard into a mine yard.

The two main characters are sisters. Their job is to cry at other people's funeral. Because of the vineyard being turned into a mine yard, there is a new dead girl every week (or whatever the regular interval is). Every young girl's life in this village is a tragedy, as each and every one of them is bound to die a virgin. That is the consequence of the village being only women.

For this reason, the only old man left in the village is very valuable, no matter how old and ugly he is. However, both sisters end up killing him by accident. They end up on a quest to bring more male to the village, haunted by their grandmother's ghost.

Each of them actually succeeds in finding a suitable groom. They are now faced with the possibility of never going back to their village and keep the men for themselves, or going back and complete their mission to the village.

They eventually go back to the village. Obviously, this causes a lot of drama, as the situation makes it hard for both men to be faithful to their new girlfriend.

My intention here is not to spoil the movie, so I will not say more.

I actually think that the setting was very original. I also think that by the end of the movie, each sister had her share of decisions to make, and we are able to see the consequences of the choices they made. A lot of things happen once they get back home, and it is very easy for the public to consider what could have happened if some little details had been a bit different.

The movie itself lasts 100 minutes, but it actually felt really short. Maybe this feeling was a consequence of the general setting in the village being a longer video sequence than the happenings once they get back with their husbands. By the end of the movie, I felt as though the ending had been a bit rushed.

I am left with one big question mark about this village. Why do they keep going in the mine yard? Every week they pick the shortest straw to decide who will be the one to die? That's plainly stupid. They could simply avoid drinking wine. Or start a new vine yard at some other place. This was a key element of the plot, but it was simply not logical...

For a first contact with Serbian cinema, Tears For Sale was not so bad. I could not say it was one of my best movies from Fantasia 2010, and I think I was expecting a little more from the movie, but I still enjoyed myself pretty much.

2010/07/13 - First Squad: The Moment of Truth

First Squad. A Russian movie with Japanese animation, featuring zombies during World War II. I usually like Russian attitude and ways of thinking, and Japanese are usually unmatched when it comes to 2D animation. This should be good.

Tuesday, 13 PM, small theater. I figured not many people would come for this one. It turns out that I ended up meeting 5 different people I knew there. On the other hand, they thought it would be sold out. None of us were right, the theater was almost full.

So the movie starts, we see Nadya, a kid doing some sort of divination tricks with army soldiers. Suddenly they get attacked, we see German (or maybe Russians, depending on where she was at that moment) dropping bombs on the army. Chaos and panic. People try to survive, and then...

OMFG. What is that?

The movie now features a real life human historian, on a black background, filling us in on the situation during this part of the war between Russians and Germans. Okay... this was surprising. I am not saying it is bad, at first I simply thought it would only be an animated movie.

The movie goes on, constantly switching between the main animated story, and testimonies from historians or war veterans. Nadya eventually gets back to her headquarters as an elite kid soldier. From there on, she tries to bring back her former squad partners from the dead in order to fight dead knights the German army are planning to bring to war. By the end of the movie, she succeeds in her task, and the evil dead knight seems vanquished.

During human interviews, we learn how both Russia and Germany tries to research ways to revive the dead as soldiers during the war. As this seems quite possible, it also seems as though they are trying to tell us that what we are seeing in the movie, with zombies and everything, is actually what really happened during WWII.

All this knowledge about what happened during the war was actually interesting. However, by the end of the movie, it acted more as a mood-killer than as a way to help us understand what was happening. I have the feeling that it would have been best to feature all those interviews as bonus feature on a DVD. That way, it would have been possible to view this, without breaking the general flow of the story.

Now let us go back to the real story, as in what is happened to Nadya and her friends. If we forget about the real humans, First Squad is actually a good movie. The animation was good, the plot was good, and it was refreshing to see a retelling of WWII that was completely different from what we are used to see. No god sent American soldiers that came to save the day. This time, it's about Russia struggling to get their elite kid to defeat a horde of evil undead soldiers.

Apart from the interviews, the movie still had its share of down sides. Overall, the movie was actually quite short. If we take out the interviews, I think the movie would be less than an hour. This feels more like an episode than a movie. If we consider the fact that at the end, the war does not seem to be over, maybe we will get more episodes of this.

Another consequence of the movie being too short was something I perceived as a lack of challenge. At first she's lost. Then she finds her way home. She gets a new missions. She goes to get her friends from the dead. They fight. They win. At no point in the movie Nadya ends up facing serious difficulties, she never really needs to come up with new solutions. I think this is something that could have been better, and more challenge would have given us a more lengthy movie.

If we pack all this together, First Squad was actually a movie I enjoyed seeing. The characters were cool, the animation was good. The setting felt like something new and refreshing, even thought it was World War II. The interviews disrupted the general flow of the story, but they still brought us some information, and helped to understand what was happening in relation to the real WWII.

2010/07/08 - The Sorcerer's Apprentice

I usually try not to miss the opening movie of Fantasia Festival, simply because it feels like a big event. Since it's the first event of the year for the festival, the featured movie is generally expected to be a big hit, and important guests are here to present it to the public.

The opening movie for 2010 was The Sorcerer's Apprentice, as a Canadian premiere. At first I was not sure if I wanted to go. Was it a good idea to use one of my ten movie slots for a movie that would be in regular theaters several weeks later? I could instead choose a movie that I would not necessarily be able to watch afterwards.

However, I figured that most of my friends were going to the premiere, so if I went in regular theaters afterwards, I would probably end up going alone. I also figured that it was in fact cheaper at Fantasia than in theaters, and the main actor is not there to answer questions from the public in theaters.

So here I am, in my seat, ready to watch The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Before the movie starts, an invisible voice tells us that Jay Baruchel is here as a guest for the movie, and that he will tell us a few words before the movie starts.

At first I did not know who Jay Baruchel was, and I did not know that he had been a voice actor for How To Train Your Dragon. I was actually quite surprised to notice how his voice and speech pattern were almost identical to Hiccup's in the movie. I understand why the character felt that much realistic.

After a few people speaking, it was time to actually watch the movie. Overall, I cannot say I was impressed by the main plot of the movie. Basically the guy discovers he is a sorcerer, learns about the existence of bad guys, trains and eventually defeats them. In parallel, there is also this girl that he likes, and your usual romantic part in an action driven movie.

However, The Sorcerer's Apprentice does not try to impress us with a new pattern for action movies. The elements that make the film remarkable are the characters and the multitude of jokes. The duo formed by Jay Baruchel and Nicolas Cage was simply brilliant. They really felt like an actual sorcerer and his apprentice. It also really felt as though they were simply being themselves. It did not surprise me that several jokes in the movie were actually not on script and created on the spot by the actors during the production.

On the other side, the evil sorcerer's and his apprentice were far from boring. The sorcerer using his small powers in the present as an illusionist, therefore being overly popular and narcissist, felt as a sort of cameo towards Criss Angel.

To keep it simple, The Sorcerer's Apprentice was a great movie. Although the plot was very basic, the actors were very good, and there were enough jokes to keep the viewers laughing a lot during the movie. I would recommend it for anyone who missed it at Fantasia.

Hyouzan's Fantasia 2010 impressions

I first figured I would write here at least once a week. I guess I am not as disciplined as I thought I would be. :\

As I said during my introduction, I had been thinking about creating a personal blog for a while before actually doing it. However, what really gave me motivation to start a blog was the 2010 edition of Fantasia Festival. After each movie, I felt the need to share my impressions, and I figured a blog was the best medium to do so.

I guess this is enough of an introduction. Let's get to the main event and see what were my impressions for each movie. I will actually create a separate post for each movie, so that it is easier to spot each movie individually.