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From: hrlaser@crash.cts.com (Harv Laser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.graphics
Subject: Todd Rundgren at Siggraph/JPL 3/12/91
Message-ID: <7989@crash.cts.com>
Date: 14 Mar 91 06:55:14 GMT
Organization: Crash TimeSharing, El Cajon, CA
Lines: 77

This seems like as good a group as any to post this :-)

Todd Rundgren gave a two hour speech/presentation at the monthly 
meeting of the So. Calif. chapter of SIGGRAPH on 3/12/91.  The meeting
was held in an approx 300 seat auditorium at the Jet Propulsion Lab
in Pasadena, CA. (SIGGRAPH has nothing to do with JPL other than a
member works there and through this connection the hall was booked for
this evening's meeting). 

The entire presntation given by Todd was taped and if and when an edit
of the taping is made available publically I shall post relevant information
on how to get it, however I was not involved in taping it and I have no
information on getting a tape right now. 

Rundgren first had his "Change Myself" 4 minute music video shown on
a large projection screen with a good sound system to rousing applause.
(If you haven't seen it, it has been accepted by and is playing occasionally
on the national "adult rock" cable TV music network "VH-1")

He then went on for about 90 minutes to describe in great detail the
process of creating the video, using ten Video Toaster equipped 
Amiga 2500/30s (and MANy large hard drives) over the course of five
weeks. 

Todd Rundgren is a self-professed computer literate programmer and
hacker and music writer and producer.  However he ran into inumerable
problems during the production of his LightWave 3D frames (over 7200
in all) for Change Myself and had some very unkind words to say about
the Amiga, its operating system, hard drive support, networking
(specifically lack of, according to him) and support he directly didn't
get from Commodore. 

It was my impression that he had perhaps bit off more than he could
chew by himself and that iif he had known or had hired some Amiga-
literate professionals who knew about such things, his networking and
hard drive problems would hvae been less of a burden to him. He 
did work directly with Allen Hastings many times to de-bug the
Lightwave 3D software and have modifications made to it since no one
had quite put it through this extensive a "test" before.

He claimed to have tried every existing and available 3D object
modeller on the Amiga and some random comments I remember from him
went something along the lines of "Caligari - great interface, very
professional, useless output"... "Forms in flight - horrible interface
and hard to convert its object output but liked the way it used 
splines instead of triangles"... "Imagine - many of the objects in
the video were made with its modeller"... "other objects were custom
made by [forgot the guy's name] I hired and still others were 
purchased."  

(Parenthetically, if you have seen "Change Myself", check out the scene
near the end with the rotating Aladdin's Lamp. That lamp was modelled
about a year ago by Louis Markoya and was sold along with other
Markoya objects on the "Woodland" objects disk for Turbo Silver, via
Impulse, and later, in a separate package under Antic's label.)

All in all it was an interesting evening despite Todd's apparent and
verbose dislike of Amigas.  Maybe he'll change his mind someday.  
By the way, "Change Myself" was produced at a cost of around $100,000.
He originally wanted an animated-only video but Warner Bros., his record
label, insisted that he appear in it, singing the song. Guess record
companies insist on this factor in order to promote an artist with a
video. So he took an S-VHS camera and himself into a dark room at his
house and photographed himself eight times singing the song. The 
frames from the camera were then digitized and mapped, in LightWave,
onto the tumbling,rotating, and morphing 3D objects.  If you watch the
video VERY closely you'll notice that the animation is moving at 30fps
while the singing Todd face is doubled up from 15fps, achieving the
kind of effect that a lot of tv and video producers are after these
days. 

Still in all, when, after his presentation, he was asked by a member
of the audience something to the effect of "If the Amiga was so
difficult to use, why didn't you use some other platform" his answer
was something to the effect that this same production could not have
been created on any other platform for less than ten times what it
cost to do it on Amigas with Toasters.