American Graffiti intro side notes

Its May 5th that means it's Revenge of the Fifth and revenge of the Graffiti in our case. Yep its time for more info on the intro to American Graffiti that I promised yesterday, because there are a lot more intresting facts that involve the intro and what we see. 

the first is what we actually see during the opening credits, the drive in restaurant, Mel's. 

Mel's Drive-In 

The restaurant wasn't just a location made up for the film, Mel's was actually a real drive in. It was founded in 1947 by Mel Weiss and Harold Dobbs in San Francisco. It was the first drive-in restaurant in San Francisco. At the time drive in restaurants were extremely popular in the days before fast food. The first drive ins dated back to the early 20s, but had peaked in popularity during the 50s. They worked very differently than the fast food drive THRU restaurants of today. Rather than go through a window to order and receive your food, you would drive into a parking section and order hence its name. Your order would have be taken by a waiter or waitress referred to as a carhop (sometimes depicted wearing roller skates but usually most of the time in real life they're on foot) who would also deliver the food to you in your car. By the 1960's drive ins were staring to be replaced with fast food restaurants and drive thrus. But some still survive and of course there's also the Sonic burger chain that revolves around drive in service.

the second fact is when Charles Martin Smith's character, Terry "The Toad" Fields, pulls up on the Vespa in the beginning, his crash into the building was actually unscripted. He actually did lost control of the bike and went straight into the front of the trashcan, and Lucas kept the cameras rolling. Luckily, Smith managed to keep in character and the accident managed to fit into the film quite well. in fact when the film made its first initial public premiere it got a good laugh out of the audience.

The third fact is that Harrison Ford wasn't the only actor to get his first big break from this film, there are also two other very familiar faces in this intro. Well, as long as you're either old enough or are familiar with hit movies and tv shows of the 70's and 80's that is. The character Steve Bolander, who we see leaning on a quite nice looking 1958 chevy impala is played by Ron Howard who's probably better known for his role as Richie Cunningham in the 1974 to 1984 tv sitcom, Happy Days. Howard chose the role as a way to break out of the mold of his previous career as a child actor, previously being known for his role as Opie Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show.

The other actor is Richard Dreyfuss as Curt Henderson who we see pulling up in a 67' Citroen DS. At the time, he was 25 years old and had only had a few roles in various tv shows and commercials, but this was his first major film debut. he eventually went on to star in various films most notably Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

the fourth and final i'll give is that three characters are actually based on different stages from Lucas's younger life. Curt is modeled after Lucas's personality during USC, John Milner (played by Paul Le Mat) is based on Lucas's teenaged street-racing and junior-college years, and Terry represents Lucas's nerd years as a freshman in high school, specifically his "bad luck" with dating.

left to right: Richard Dreyfuss, Charles Martin Smith, and Ron Howard.

So there you have it, some facts about the opening of American Graffiti, Happy Revenge of the Fifth!

How American Graffiti paved the way for the galaxy far far away

Well, its Star Wars day in'it? The day we celebrate everything Star Wars, the iconic film franchised that been in pop culture for over close to 45 years now. But as you can probably tell from this title, We're not talking specifically about Star Wars. 

You may be aware earlier today we went over our rough cuts for Moving Image Fundamentals and my film choice, of course as you're aware, is American Graffiti. A film that while may not be familiar to most of you, the people behind it certainly are. let's get the intro back in here and take a closer look:

 LucasFilm Ltd you say? That means...

Yes Indeed! 

That's right, this film was directed by none other than Star Wars director, George Lucas!

George Lucas during the filming of American Graffiti (1972)

In fact, this was actually his second theatrical film, and it partially came about after the failure of his first theatrical film.

To tell this tale we need to rewind to 1971, when Lucas released his first theatrical film, THX 1138.

The poster for THX 1138 

(and in case you're wondering, Yes, this is partially where the THX sound system got its name from. but that's another story.)

The plot goes that in the distant future, love and free will are outlawed by means of mandatory medication that controls human emotion. The film follows THX 1138 (Played by Robert Duvall) and LUH 3417 (Played by Maggie McOmie) who stop taking their medication and discover the bleak reality of their own existence and fall in love with each other in the process, leading them to become outlaws on the run from the army of android police. 

The film was based on Lucas's student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which he made back in 1967 while attending the USC. The film was released in theaters on March 11, 1971, but while it did impress some critics, it ultimately bombed at the box office, only earning $945,000 in rentals.

However all hope was not lost. While THX 1138 was in production, producer Francis Ford Coppola challenged Lucas to write a script that would appeal to mainstream audiences. In a tale somewhat similar to that of the creation of Atari's pong, Lucas realized that the reason why THX probably failed was because it was a little too depressing for the average movie gower of the era. So, his idea was to make a more realistic, uplifting film. Inspired by his experiences as a teenager cruising in Modesto, California in the early 1960s, he ultimately came up with the plot of 3 friends trying to make the most of their last summer night together by meeting girls, cruising in cars, and just having a good time before ultimately leaving for college.

After another year of filming, American Graffiti was released in theaters August 11, 1973, and was an immediate smash hit critically and commercially. The financial success of American Graffiti gave Lucas the cash and opportunities to establish more elaborate development for Lucasfilm, Skywalker Sound, and Industrial Light & Magic, and another film that Lucas was writing around the same time as Graffiti. It was an unnamed space opera that was inspired by the classic Flash Gordon serials, which would eventually become Star Wars.

In fact, there are a lot of similarities to both films. Both are both are coming of age films and involve leaving home, both have there own mysterious woman in white, (In American Graffiti, its an unnamed woman in a Ford Thunderbird and in Star Wars of course it's Princess Leia.) both films are known for their soundtracks, both have vehicles involved with key scenes, and probably one of the most notable similarities is the acting choice of Harrison Ford. This film was Ford's breakthrough role before he got to play as Han Solo in Star Wars. Not only that but one of the casting choices happened to be future Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill.

So as you can see, a lot of the basic elements of Star Wars can be traced right back to American Graffiti and it makes you wonder how things would have turned out if things in this film had changed because without them, perhaps Star Wars might have turned out very differently.

Tune in tomorrow and i'll discuss the intro to American Graffiti, and some interesting facts i found out about it.

The story of Shatter

The year was 1984, but while not everybody was interested in any George Orwell novels, Apple Computer Inc of Cupertino California sure was because it was used as the setting of a super bowl commercial for their newest computer system they released that January, The Macintosh.

The Original Apple Macintosh 

Released on January 24 1984, The Macintosh is the first successful mass-market desktop computer to have a GUI interface and mouse. it was revolutionary at the time because up until that point most computers used command based interfaces that were controlled via keyboard. it took inspiration from the Xerox Alto, a computer system designed at Xerox PARC in 1973 which was the first computer to have a mouse. Apple Co founder Steve Jobs had received an invitation to visit Xerox PARC back in 1979 and got a demonstration of the Altos interface.

The Xerox Alto

Apple's first attempt at a GUI computer was the Apple Lisa released in 1983, but the problem with the Lisa was that it was big, slow, and expensive costing $9,995.

The Apple Lisa

This lead to the development of the Macintosh with the goal of taking the GUI interface of the Lisa and making it into a smaller and more

convenient package for the average person.

Initially the Mac wasn't as successful as Apple thought it would be. This mostly because they marketed it as a business machine to compete against IBM, But by the mid 80s it had got a hold of a market that it could really succeed in, Desktop Publishing. and one of the first works of Desktop Publishing on the Mac would be revolutionary.

 Shatter Special Issue #1, June 1985

It was a comic book called Shatter. First published by First Comics in June of 1985, it was the first significant comic book to use computer drawn art. The plot is set in a future where all jobs are temporary and a media conglomerate called Simon Shuster Jovanovich who have been performing experiments transferring skill sets between people using RNA. It follows a police officer named Sadr al-Din Morales, aka Shatter, capable of absorbing the talents and abilities of others–permanently, on his mission to stop the board members of the company and save the day.

The comic was created by writer Peter B. Gillis and artist Mike Saenz. Gillis came up with the concept, and Saenz drew the artwork using the then new Apple Macintosh with MacPaint. Up til that point the main method of creating art for a comic book involved a writer producing a story and script which would go to the ‘penciller,’ who would create the basic layout of the comic on an overused paperboard, determining what the design of the pages and then creating the art to accompany the script. That would go to be traced with ink, colored, have the text placed in the respective spots, and finally photographed and reduced to the the correct size.

The process of Shatter on the other hand started with rough pencil sketches of each page and then Saenz drew everything from scratch in MacPaint, printed the art on an ImageWriter dot-matrix printer, colorized, and then photographed.

Although this method worked, there were limitations due to the Mac's hardware. As you've probably noticed from the image of the first Mac at the beginning of this blog, The first Mac looked nothing like the Macs we use today. For one thing, the monitor was black and white much like the Xerox Alto was. Apple didn't add color displays to the Macintosh line until 1987 with the introduction of the Macintosh II. Although this wasn't a problem for Shatter since it was colorized traditionally anyway. Another problem the built in screen was small, at 9 inches, so creating artwork for something like the page of a comic was tedious and difficult indeed. in fact, that was the biggest challenge according to later Shatter artist Charlie Athanas. And the final problem was memory. The original Macintosh came with only 128 kilobytes of RAM and later there was a version 512 kilobytes of RAM. The only way to load and save data was to use the built in floppy drive, which used the then new 3.5 inch floppy disks from Sony. It was a big improvement over the Lisa's Twiggy drives, but the Mac only had 1 built in and could only store 400k per disk so if you had a program that couldn't fit in 400k or you needed to load extra files you would need to swap disks constantly. 

Luckily, Saenz's Mac was upgraded to have 1 Megabyte of RAM and he also had an external floppy drive which made things much easier.

Even then this original method was only used for two issues. Saenz left the project and First Comics hired 3 new artists to create art for the comic Steve Erwin (not to be confused with Steve Irwin), Bob Dienethal, and Rick Oliver. They used a different method, by creating the art in the traditional way, and then using a scanner to scan it into the Mac. After issue 7, Charlie Athanas took over the art duties, returning to creating the art directly on the MacPlus, first using the mouse and eventually using a tablet and stylus much like graphic artists would do today. He also upgraded from MacPaint to another drawing program called Fullpaint. He remained with Shatter until 1988 with the release of issue 14, when the comic was finally cancelled.

So what happened to everybody involved? First Comics continued publishing comics until it shut down in 1992. In 2011, founder Ken F. Levin announced at Comic-Con that the First Comics name would be revived and in 2014 they resumed publishing then merged Devil's Due Publishing to become Devil's Due/1First Comics LLC in June 2015, who continue to publish comics today. Saenz went on to create ComicWorks for the Mac in 1986, He created Iron Man: Crash, the first computer-created graphic novel from a major comics publisher in 1987, and Donna Matrix, a graphic novel using 3D graphics in 1993. What he and the rest of the artist's behind Shatter have done since then remains unknown.

ComicWorks, 1986

Iron Man: Crash, 1987

Donna Matrix, Issue #1 1993

                                                                        

The use of computers to make comics still continues today in the 21st century. Although today art is created on traditional comic boards, then scanned into the computer for coloring with most lettering done by various computer programs. In a lot of ways it showed what kind of artwork could be done on a Mac back in 1985 and even today the art that they pulled off is pretty impressive considering it was done on a system that would seem that limited compared to modern computers and more over Macs. If anything it was one of the earliest uses of the Mac doing Desktop Publishing and proved that the Mac had a spot on the desks of artists and designers everywhere.

The Short Film Story

In April of 2018, 15 year old Ryan Michael Devan filmed him and his parents on their moving trip from Del Rio, Texas to Newport, Vermont.

4 years later his footage was used for a Moving Image Fundamentals assignment.

 

Ok, enough of the Blair Witch references. Anyway, Hello its time for another blog and this time  I'm going to talk about my short film project sharing the story behind it, all of the films in an uncut film, and why I chose this for the assignment. 

So in order to understand my moving story we need to take a look at my background. I was born on July 26, 2002 in a little town in New York called Plattsburgh.

          

for 6 years, me, my brother, and my parents lived in this small humble town. In 2008 my dad got a new job as a border patrol agent in the city of Del Rio, Texas.

So, we packed up and headed to Texas. we actually split into two for the move, My brother and father drove there in a moving van (similar to the move to Vermont), and me and my mother flew by plane. Originally we were supposed to stay there for 5 years, but we ultimately spent 10 years there.

But before we began the journey, I had the idea to record the entire journey and the stops along the way. The end result of this was ultimately 17 videos and 23 pictures which at the time I called it a moving vlog. 

Now, since the project I dragged this clips out of my phone for is long since ended, I thought I would compile all these clips together and produce the full unedited video. Keep in mind that a lot of the footage was shot handheld so if your easily motion sick I apologize. 

Also originally I wanted to have commentary over this video, but this blogpost took way longer than expected to be published and I need to get this out to be consistent on doing these monthly. I might revisit this in the future with a commentary, but for now i'm just going to get the raw footage posted. 

 So, without further ado let's see the full unedited journey shall we?

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ues_KgtoFjrezGpOZtD3bFMmdYS9zFcP/view?usp=sharing

Taco Bell and the Dx7: an Unlikely Legacy

Last week, I was in my gaming club late at night. we hold the club in a computer lab where i often use one of the computers as well as play on the xbox one system that the club leader, David, brings. On that computer i was on this website, www.webaudiomodules.org, which holds a online synth module called DEXED which emulates the iconic Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. 

Now keep in mind: I have no musical talent. i only know how to play two musical tunes: part of the opening to Sierra's Space Quest 3 and part of the Jaws theme (The latter is important to this story). So that night one of the patches i was playing was the Tubular Bell, arguably the most iconic sound from the DX, and one of the tunes i was playing was the Jaws theme. but when i was playing it, i noticed one of the notes, the E note sounds like this:

Does that sound familiar? 

Yes its the same sound as the famous Taco Bell gong! While i was aware that Taco Bell used the DX7 for there gongs in the past, i wasn't aware the modern one still is a DX7. But when digging a bit deeper I realized that The Taco Bell gong came a long way to sound how it does.

In order to understand this we need to go back the beginning, Back to 1948 in the city of  San Bernardino, California. Taco Bell founder Glen Bell got his start in the restaurant business by opening up a small  hot dog stand called Bell's Drive-In. The stand sold hot dogs and hamburgers for just 15 cents and 20 cents respectively

The original Bell's Drive-In

There was just one problem, The stand wasn't doing very well. That was because just across the street, there was a Mexican restaurant called the Mitla Cafe, and residents were more interested in its hard-shelled tacos than hamburgers and hot dogs. 

In the 1950’s Mexican restaurants were common in California, but not really anywhere else. Glen Bell, who grew up on Mexican food, saw an opportunity with the idea to open a taco stand. He started by attempting to reverse engineer Matila’s tacos and later got permission from Matila’s to see how they make the tacos themselves.

11 years later, in 1962, the first Taco Bell opened in the city of Downey and one an immediate success. The crunchy taco was something most people had never seen before and was seen as a unique alternative to a regular hamburger. By 1967 they opened up they’re 100th location in Anaheim, California.

Taco Bell founder Glen Bell (center) at the grand opening of the 100th Taco Bell

1967

Meanwhile, 384 miles away at Stanford University, John Chowning a professor of music, is about to introduce a revolution of a different kind, FM synthesis. In 1971, Chowning demonstrated his invention by using it to emulate acoustic sounds such as organs and brass. impressed, Stanford patented the technology and hoped to license it, but the problem was they couldn't find a company interested in the technology. However all that changed when FM Synthesis caught the attention of Japanese instrument maker Yamaha. At the time, Yamaha was the largest manufacturer of musical instruments in the world, but they didn't have much market share in the United States. Interested in the technology, One of their chief engineers visited Stanford and was impressed enough to license the Technology in 1973. After another 7 years of developments, In 1980, Yamaha introduced the worlds  first commercial FM synthesizer, The Yamaha GS1.

The Yamaha GS1

At the same time, Yamaha was developing the means to manufacture very-large-scale integration chips that allowed a Synthesizer to use only two chips, compared to the GS1's 50. Yamaha also altered the implementation of the FM algorithms making it faster, more efficient, and able to produce a sampling rate higher than Stanford's synthesizers. The end result was the DX7, launched in 1983 at a retail price of $1,995. 

The Yamaha DX7

It was an immediate success, selling 150,000 units within just 1 year, making it the first commercially successful digital synthesizer and still one of the bestselling synthesizers in history. Due to complex submenus displayed on an LCD and no knobs and sliders to adjust the sound, many found the DX7 difficult to program, so most users used the presets, which became widely used in 1980s pop music. The DX7 was used by many famous musicians such as A-ha, Kenny Loggins, Laura Branigan, Whitney Houston, Chicago, Phil Collins, Luther Vandross, Billy Ocean, and Cyndi Lauper just to name a few.

So when did Taco Bell ads start using the DX7? Well, from at least 1968 to 1989, the Taco Bell gong was created with actual bells. here's a selection of a few of these commercials:

Taco Bell's first radio commercial 1968

Taco Bell Christmas commercial 1977

Taco Bell commercial 1981

In 1988, Taco Bell had introduced a series of commercials with the a new slogan: "Make A Run for the Border." These commercials people wanting something to eat and suddenly they imagine traveling across a desert to get to a Taco Bell. 

The first commercials didn't feature the bell at the end but in 1990, the commercials stated to feature the DX7's Tubular Bell sound. Though there wasn't a set note standard gong there were multiple different notes that they used for the gong. here some examples:

It wasn't until 2001 when the bell became the standard E note that will still hear at the end of Taco Bell commercials today 21 years later.

It's crazy to think that one of the DX7 most long lasting impacts was made not in the music world but in the fast food advertising world! though the DX7 legacy isn't limited to this however.

It was the first digital synthesizer for many musicians, Yamaha had paved the way for low cost FM synthesis chips throughout the 80s, released several follow-ups including the TX81Z, DX1, DX11, and DX21, and continued to make FM synthesis chips based on the DX7 which found notable success in many arcade machines, video game consoles, and home computers. these chips include The Yamaha YM2151, also known as OPM, used in Atari's Marble Madness, The Yamaha YM2612 or the OPN used in the Sega Genesis, and the YM3812 or the OPL2 used in IBM PC sound cards such as the AdLib and Sound Blaster cards.

So the next time you hear that gong, think about the synth that made it and how it helped create on of the many sound common in pop culture.

My First Blog Post

 Hello, My name is Ryan Devan, I'm a college freshman and aspiring game designer. i started this blog to show off work i've done,  as well as just random stuff i go through in my life i find interesting. I hope you will enjoy my adventures through blogging, see you soon!