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Firing From the Hip – Halo Legends

Halo Legends is a collection of seven animated short films set in the Halo science-fiction universe. Financed by Halo franchise overseer 343 Industries, the stories were created by five Japanese production houses. Shinji Aramaki serves as the project’s creative director.

Sublime animation; you must see it to believe it.

‘The Duel’ - the whole thing felt like an animated watercolor. Anyone who has used Photoshop will recognize some of the techniques used, but it’s still breathe-taking to watch in motion.

Loved the standoff scene – when the Arbiter goes into his combat stance,  I felt his war paint and body merged into one symbol of purpose.

‘Origins’ – felt like watching one of my favorite illustrated history books coming to life.  Similar to ‘The Duel’, it feels like watching a painting in motion.

Interesting revelations about the Halo universe here; according to Wikipedia this is official universe canon, and is fascinating. The overall message felt heavy handed, but due to the amazing visuals, I’ll let it slide.

‘The Package’ - Clearly the ‘eye candy’ of the group. The CG and animation in this clip is simply outstanding, clearly built on the same technology that made the ‘Appleseed’ movies visually excellent. Plotwise a little formulaic/shallow (but this is Halo, anyway) but provides the visual fan-service in leaps and bounds.

Escapes the uncanny valley by using ‘anime’ style characters instead of more human forms (less of a  problem with the covenant, since they are alien to begin with). Story nitpick – Catherine Halsey was the mastermind of the Spartan program, and should be an older lady (40-50s), not someone who looks barely out of high school. Best moment here was definitely the three Spartans emerging from an explosion in a bubble shield and wreaking total havoc.

The bubble shield seems to be one of the best cinematic devices invented by the Halo universe. Talk about the perfect vehicle for inserting a dramatic pause.

Blind Fire (Bonus Rambling)

‘Odd one out’ certainly feels like the odd one out, being the ‘for laffs’ episode inserted at the end. After so much heavy, heavy drama, it feels very odd by itself. My recommendation would be to see it first or to skip it all together.

Interesting interpretations on the strength of Spartans. Vary from god-like (In ‘The Package’, 3 spartans drop about 100 enemies in a couple minutes) to pretty human (One Brute takes down a Spartan in ‘The Babysitter’, one needler shot takes out a Spartan in ‘Homecoming’).

A couple shorts painted the elites in a very ‘eastern culture’ palette. Seemed like a good fit – wonder if Bungie had this in mind originally.

I must have watched a lot of stuff done by Studio Bones, because I start recognizing familiar sound effects (Electricty sound before something blows up, the crackle after an explosion, the anime ‘metal shine’ sound).

I didn’t notice any new scoring, but the music was very effective. This being said, I’m a totally biased observer, due to the ‘Pavlovs Dog’ effect that takes over whenever I hear the Halo themes. Would you kindly go and buy Halo ODST?

The directors did some great use of source material, I noticed little things from the games & novella all over.

Final Note - I jumped on the iTunes store to grab this and noticed several ‘one star’ reviews. Turned out to be Halo fanboys upset that this wasn’t the Halo movie. Gah. Nevermind the utter stupidity of the statement (the ignorance required to actually confuse this with a Halo movie would be legendary), anyone who watches this and then whines about it is just a Philistine. It bothered me the entire time I was watching. Thanks morons, for reminding me that I share a hobby with some of the most bigoted, close-minded, teenage idiots alive. Just keep buying Halo games so I can enjoy the hard-fought artistic benefits from your imbecile dollars.

2010 03 01 admin FiringFromTheHip Comments (0) Permalink

Self-Selecting for Failure

‘Culture of greatness’

Caught this portion of Jensen Huang’s (CEO NVidia) Standford E-Corner presentation, talking about motivating employees. To summarize – he believes NVidia’s engineering culture is excellent because they have their engineers ‘self-select’ high quality peers, using a ‘rigorous interview process’. He also compares their engineering team to an elite football squad.

This may be a standard ‘corporate policy’, but it doesn’t make sense to me.

Great engineers aren’t always good judges of character

The qualities that you look for in an engineer (innovation, attention to detail, technical savvy, etc.) are not exactly ‘people skills’ (as opposed to sales, where success in your position is almost directly related to people skills). I’ve seen bad engineers with good people skills emphatically convince the right people they are the right person for the job, and seen good engineers be turned down because of poor people skills (not saying people skills are not necessary for an engineer, but that’s for a different post).

When was the last time you heard about a football team selecting it’s own players? You have scouts and a GM for that. Players play football, scouts and coaches evaluate talent. Engineers should build and innovate; someone else should be evaluating your talent.

Counter-intuitive: A rigorous interview doesn’t select good employees.

Examine Gladwell’s article on ‘Most Likely to Succeed’. The NFL uses a series of extremely rigorous interviews (scouting, combine, etc.) with entire teams of people devoted to evaluating future player performance, yet there is almost no correlation between draft pick selection and future performance. Are tech companies all that much better at evaluating future engineering talent?

When you depend on rigorous interviews, you are putting the incentive and emphasis at being good at interviewing, not being good at your future job.

For the Indianapolis Colts, deciding between Ryan Leaf and Peyton Manning came down to one question.

The question was, ‘What would you do the first day you were signed?’ Manning said he would ask for the playbook; Leaf said he would celebrate in Vegas. In the end, it was something completely unrelated to football that would decide between a future hall of famer and epic draft bust. I don’t claim that I can tell you what’s the right way to select employees. What I do want to point out is: since you are making football analogies Mr. Huang, did you ever consider that your ‘rigorous self-selection process’ may not be the best way to find good employees?

Some football players who failed the NFL’s  ‘rigorous interview’:

Tom Brady: Round: 6 / Pick: 199 (3 time super bowl champion, 2 time super bowl MVP)

Kurt Warner: Undrafted (4x pro bowler, 2x NFL MVP, super bowl champion)

Tony Romo: Undrafted (3x pro bowler)

Wes Welker: Undrafted (2 time pro bowler, 2 time NFL leader for receptions)

Miles Austin: Undrafted (Cowboys franchise record 250 receiving yards in single game, 2009 Pro-Bowler)

2010 02 26 admin CounterIntuition Comments (0) Permalink

The ‘old’ ritual

As every iteration of the site has been released, another iteration of the ‘About’ page inevitably accompanies it. The new version is, as usual, idealistic, high-handed and grossly narcissistic. At least it’s more concise. I hope you have a minute to let me step on my soapbox, but if you don’t, I won’t take it personally.

At the bare minimum I’ve managed to add a couple more interesting quotes on the page; If I can’t be a brilliant writer, at least I can be a good thief. My sources of inspiration:

Malcolm Gladwell, ‘How David Beats Goliath’

37 Signals, ‘Getting Real’

Sid Meier, ‘Covert Action’ on Wikipedia

Not directly quoted, but an important part of the philosophy, Derek Sivers, ‘There’s no speed limit’

Jason Fried says your company should be about more than just making a product; I think the collection of messages in these articles sums up what I want to be doing here.

2010 02 22 admin Housekeeping Comments (0) Permalink