Latest news with #Splinters
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Boys' VFX supervisor Stephan Fleet explains why a one-minute shot ‘took about 17 hours' to make
'We don't want the simple way,' proclaims The Boys visual effects supervisor Stephan Fleet, who joined Gold Derby's "Meet the Experts" VFX panel. 'We don't want the obvious magic trick that everyone's seen before. So even something you read on the page that you think could be the most simple thing, like a split screen of someone, can be a very complicated thing to do.' Watch the full interview above. The Prime Video series was adapted from the comic book series of the same name by Eric Kripke. It focuses on a group of vigilantes trying to take down corrupt superheroes. 'The original pitch to me, before I signed on, was that this isn't a superhero show. This is a show about the intersection of celebrity and politics, told if celebrities were superheroes," Fleet says. "I love superhero shows. I watch them. I've worked on ones myself. But in this case, I'm looking at it as a satire on celebrity and politics first. So you're always trying to find, no matter how absurd, a foundation of something real to base everything off of. We're always trying to find that basis in reality on the show, and then just crank it up to 11 if we have to.' More from GoldDerby 'Gypsy' and 'Just in Time' producer Tom Kirdahy on serving a 'social and cultural need' through creative work TV Visual Effects supervisor roundtable: 'Black Mirror,' 'The Boys,' 'The Wheel of Time' 'The Wheel of Time' VFX supervisor Andy Scrase: 'I always think of visual effects as the magic of filmmaking' SEEEric Kripke, Antony Starr interview: 'The Boys' Fleet acknowledges that 'every season our wonderful team of writers led by Eric Kripke are gonna try and raise the stakes in some way.' And the recent fourth season is no exception. A new character, called Splinter, was able to clone himself multiple times, which led to the visual effects team needing to work on a scene with multiple Splinters performing sexual acts. He explains, 'Fully nude clones means a lot of matching. Their whole bodies have to look identical. So there's a lot of replacement and prosthetics too, if you can read between the lines.' The trickiest scene was when seven Splinters were all in one shot. Fleet says, 'It's about a minute long motion control shot. There's no face replacement; it's all the actor playing himself. It took about 17 hours total to rehearse and film this one shot. Anyone who's done visual effects knows motion control can be a very slow and complicated process.' 'On The Boys, we found our tone and we do it in our way," Fleet continues. "I just wanna keep honoring everything in the show with visual effects and never make it about the visual effects. But I want to also acknowledge that visual effects are an important component of the storytelling.' This article and video are presented by Prime Video. Best of GoldDerby 'Étoile' creators on writing a show for 'genius' Luke Kirby How 'The Handmaid's Tale' series finale sets up 'The Testaments' TV Visual Effects supervisor roundtable: 'Black Mirror,' 'The Boys,' 'The Wheel of Time' Click here to read the full article.
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Divorce Memoir With No Lessons
Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf understood that we cannot depict life on the page precisely the way we experience it; she experimented with chronology and language to capture the subjectivity of human existence. Some writers might meet this challenge by rethinking conventional narrative altogether. In her debut memoir, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, Haley Mlotek shows how this central incompatibility yields a useful provocation: There are hazards in relying on stories as the prevailing metaphor for one's romantic experiences, and even one's life in total. 'The terror of wondering what story my life would be was a perfect distraction from wondering why my life needed to be a story,' she writes in a concluding chapter. This is all to say that No Fault is not a love story, or even a life story, because it refuses to tell a story in the first place. It is neither chronicle, nor testimony, nor confession; rather, it is a personal and cultural inquiry into the significance of divorce, and by extension marriage, that emphatically rejects resolution. Compared with other recent works branded as 'divorce memoirs,' such as Leslie Jamison's Splinters and Lyz Lenz's This American Ex-Wife, Mlotek's book reveals few details about her marriage or its dissolution. She seems conscious of the possibility that some readers might be frustrated with her obliqueness, or find her evasive. 'Because I don't tell stories,' she explains, 'everyone thinks I have secrets.' Her friends seek reasons for her divorce; she offers none. 'As a result, my friends and I are alike in that none of us had any idea why my marriage ended,' she writes, before adding a parenthetical caveat: 'We are different in that they think they can find the answer, and I know I never will.' No Fault's pointed ambivalence demands that readers recalibrate their expectations for a memoir written by a woman who chose divorce over a man. Those searching for catharsis or an applicable remedy to their own heartaches and existential muddles will find only one definitive answer—that no person can ever fully know her own mind. This, Mlotek claims, is the memoirist's true work: to articulate the extent to which we are obscure to ourselves. [Read: A grim view of marriage—and an exhortation to leave it] If No Fault's ambiguity holds readers at arm's length, it supplies us with sufficient biographical detail to understand its context. Mlotek is 10 years old when she begins advising her mother, a divorce mediator, to leave her father. Nevertheless, her parents remain in their quarrelsome union until she is 19. In the intervening years, Mlotek works in her mother's basement office and becomes a peripheral witness to one broken marriage after the next. 'I began to think of our home as the place where other families fell apart,' she writes. Eventually, it seems as if Mlotek's 'entire world was divorce.' 'All the adults I knew were getting divorced,' she explains, 'or should have been.' Perhaps naturally, Mlotek develops some suspicion of marriage, an institution, as she sees it, that sets the terms for millions of lives—imposes its template—only to prove itself an ill-fitting arrangement time and time again. Nonetheless, Mlotek is in high school when she falls in love with the man she will later marry. As their friends glide in and out of liaisons, Mlotek and her boyfriend build a life together, their commitment mostly steadfast over the course of 12 years. They eventually marry because doing so enables them to relocate from Canada to New York. After one painful, fractious year as husband and wife, they separate and then divorce. In the disorienting period that follows, Mlotek is not merely a participant in divorce, but also a theorist of it; grief inspires a wide-ranging query into its cultural significance and reverberations. She watches films, both recent and decades-old, that focus on divorced or divorcing women, including An Unmarried Woman and Marriage Story. She interrogates the remarriage plots of films such as The Philadelphia Story and Ticket to Paradise, in which couples divorce and then return to each other. She reads novels about marriages in crisis: Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, Jamaica Kincaid's See Now Then. She repeatedly returns to Phyllis Rose's 1983 critical study, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, which posits a motivation for readers of memoir. 'We are desperate for information about how other people live,' Rose writes, 'because we want to know how to live ourselves.' And yet, the cumulative effect of this literary and cultural exploration is anything but prescriptive (whatever the messages of some of the films themselves). On the contrary, these works form a trail of historical and imagined personalities, full of desires and disinclinations that misalign. Most of the people and characters Mlotek encounters are married (or tried to be), and many of them are unhappy in that commitment. In several of these cases, marriage might well be an expression of what the critic Lauren Berlant called 'cruel optimism,' in which a person desires what stymies them, or as Mlotek puts it, chooses 'what hurts.' These readings register not as a collective indictment of conventional marriage—not exactly; instead they illuminate, often queasily, our misplaced confidence in one institution's capacity to facilitate the happiness of the masses. Of course, couples have long sought to customize, even revolutionize, the marital bond. Mlotek examines Audre Lorde's attempt to redefine matrimony and family when she married her friend Edwin Rollins in 1962. Lorde had been living openly as a lesbian, Rollins was a gay man, and they were determined to shape their relationship according to their ideals. The experiment was relatively short-lived (they divorced in 1970). In microcosmic terms, Lorde and Rollins enact what Mlotek describes as the 'ambiguity' of the 'decisions and relationships and writings' of people who tried to 'build something more than what was already familiar.' Their failed attempt might seem to suggest that such endeavors are fruitless. But I suspect that this institution can only truly transform through the persistence of people like Lorde and Rollins, until different ways of being happily married evolve from anomalies to real possibilities. [Read: A marriage that changed literary history] Divorce, too, has changed over the years. Early in her memoir, Mlotek introduces its titular term, no fault, which refers to a divorce obtained without the designation of blame. California was the first state to legalize no-fault divorce in 1969; New York was the last, in 2010. As Mlotek suggests, the legal designation bestows a crucial liberty upon couples, particularly women: It means that leaving one's spouse 'does not require a reason'—abuse, for example, or infidelity—'beyond choice.' But with freedom can come ambivalence. To end a marriage, a person must weigh competing desires—and determine what they are willing to tolerate, and what they can bear to grieve. No fault is a provocative term, one that serves as a loose, yet useful, organizing metaphor for a memoir that rigorously resists the clear delineations inherent to apportioned blame. Story plots so often cohere around fault; without it, readers are abandoned to shades of gray. At times I wished the book paid more attention to this term, for Mlotek to more fully consider its potential resonances in the archives she has studied. But perhaps I was simply responding to my own deep-seated predilections, in text and in life, for a logical narrative thread. The title No Fault still sets the tone for Mlotek's tender exploration into the obscurities of human intimacy. That is enough. Having admitted my own predispositions, I will lay my cards on the table. I have been guilty of treating love stories as prescriptions, certain that a marriage plot of my own would steady my emotional unruliness. In 2010, this tendency propelled me to marry my college boyfriend; barely two months later, I fell in love with a classmate and realized that I had made a terrible mistake. My own no-fault divorce was finalized in the fall of 2011. Nearly three years later, I married my classmate; our son was born in 2021. I suppose you could call this another love story, but I prefer the formulation Mlotek offers in her conclusion: It's merely 'what happened after' I shifted the course of my life, by acknowledging a feeling I couldn't ignore and making a different choice. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
A Divorce Memoir With No Lessons
Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf understood that we cannot depict life on the page precisely the way we experience it; she experimented with chronology and language to capture the subjectivity of human existence. Some writers might meet this challenge by rethinking conventional narrative altogether. In her debut memoir, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, Haley Mlotek shows how this central incompatibility yields a useful provocation: There are hazards in relying on stories as the prevailing metaphor for one's romantic experiences, and even one's life in total. 'The terror of wondering what story my life would be was a perfect distraction from wondering why my life needed to be a story,' she writes in a concluding chapter. This is all to say that No Fault is not a love story, or even a life story, because it refuses to tell a story in the first place. It is neither chronicle, nor testimony, nor confession; rather, it is a personal and cultural inquiry into the significance of divorce, and by extension marriage, that emphatically rejects resolution. Compared with other recent works branded as 'divorce memoirs,' such as Leslie Jamison's Splinters and Lyz Lenz's This American Ex-Wife, Mlotek's book reveals few details about her marriage or its dissolution. She seems conscious of the possibility that some readers might be frustrated with her obliqueness, or find her evasive. 'Because I don't tell stories,' she explains, 'everyone thinks I have secrets.' Her friends seek reasons for her divorce; she offers none. 'As a result, my friends and I are alike in that none of us had any idea why my marriage ended,' she writes, before adding a parenthetical caveat: 'We are different in that they think they can find the answer, and I know I never will.' No Fault 's pointed ambivalence demands that readers recalibrate their expectations for a memoir written by a woman who chose divorce over a man. Those searching for catharsis or an applicable remedy to their own heartaches and existential muddles will find only one definitive answer—that no person can ever fully know her own mind. This, Mlotek claims, is the memoirist's true work: to articulate the extent to which we are obscure to ourselves. If No Fault 's ambiguity holds readers at arm's length, it supplies us with sufficient biographical detail to understand its context. Mlotek is 10 years old when she begins advising her mother, a divorce mediator, to leave her father. Nevertheless, her parents remain in their quarrelsome union until she is 19. In the intervening years, Mlotek works in her mother's basement office and becomes a peripheral witness to one broken marriage after the next. 'I began to think of our home as the place where other families fell apart,' she writes. Eventually, it seems as if Mlotek's 'entire world was divorce.' 'All the adults I knew were getting divorced,' she explains, 'or should have been.' Perhaps naturally, Mlotek develops some suspicion of marriage, an institution, as she sees it, that sets the terms for millions of lives—imposes its template—only to prove itself an ill-fitting arrangement time and time again. Nonetheless, Mlotek is in high school when she falls in love with the man she will later marry. As their friends glide in and out of liaisons, Mlotek and her boyfriend build a life together, their commitment mostly steadfast over the course of 12 years. They eventually marry because doing so enables them to relocate from Canada to New York. After one painful, fractious year as husband and wife, they separate and then divorce. In the disorienting period that follows, Mlotek is not merely a participant in divorce, but also a theorist of it; grief inspires a wide-ranging query into its cultural significance and reverberations. She watches films, both recent and decades-old, that focus on divorced or divorcing women, including An Unmarried Woman and Marriage Story. She interrogates the remarriage plots of films such as The Philadelphia Story and Ticket to Paradise, in which couples divorce and then return to each other. She reads novels about marriages in crisis: Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, Jamaica Kincaid's See Now Then. She repeatedly returns to Phyllis Rose's 1983 critical study, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, which posits a motivation for readers of memoir. 'We are desperate for information about how other people live,' Rose writes, 'because we want to know how to live ourselves.' And yet, the cumulative effect of this literary and cultural exploration is anything but prescriptive (whatever the messages of some of the films themselves). On the contrary, these works form a trail of historical and imagined personalities, full of desires and disinclinations that misalign. Most of the people and characters Mlotek encounters are married (or tried to be), and many of them are unhappy in that commitment. In several of these cases, marriage might well be an expression of what the critic Lauren Berlant called 'cruel optimism,' in which a person desires what stymies them, or as Mlotek puts it, chooses 'what hurts.' These readings register not as a collective indictment of conventional marriage—not exactly; instead they illuminate, often queasily, our misplaced confidence in one institution's capacity to facilitate the happiness of the masses. Of course, couples have long sought to customize, even revolutionize, the marital bond. Mlotek examines Audre Lorde's attempt to redefine matrimony and family when she married her friend Edwin Rollins in 1962. Lorde had been living openly as a lesbian, Rollins was a gay man, and they were determined to shape their relationship according to their ideals. The experiment was relatively short-lived (they divorced in 1970). In microcosmic terms, Lorde and Rollins enact what Mlotek describes as the 'ambiguity' of the 'decisions and relationships and writings' of people who tried to 'build something more than what was already familiar.' Their failed attempt might seem to suggest that such endeavors are fruitless. But I suspect that this institution can only truly transform through the persistence of people like Lorde and Rollins, until different ways of being happily married evolve from anomalies to real possibilities. Divorce, too, has changed over the years. Early in her memoir, Mlotek introduces its titular term, no fault, which refers to a divorce obtained without the designation of blame. California was the first state to legalize no-fault divorce in 1969; New York was the last, in 2010. As Mlotek suggests, the legal designation bestows a crucial liberty upon couples, particularly women: It means that leaving one's spouse 'does not require a reason'—abuse, for example, or infidelity—'beyond choice.' But with freedom can come ambivalence. To end a marriage, a person must weigh competing desires—and determine what they are willing to tolerate, and what they can bear to grieve. No fault is a provocative term, one that serves as a loose, yet useful, organizing metaphor for a memoir that rigorously resists the clear delineations inherent to apportioned blame. Story plots so often cohere around fault; without it, readers are abandoned to shades of gray. At times I wished the book paid more attention to this term, for Mlotek to more fully consider its potential resonances in the archives she has studied. But perhaps I was simply responding to my own deep-seated predilections, in text and in life, for a logical narrative thread. The title No Fault still sets the tone for Mlotek's tender exploration into the obscurities of human intimacy. That is enough. Having admitted my own predispositions, I will lay my cards on the table. I have been guilty of treating love stories as prescriptions, certain that a marriage plot of my own would steady my emotional unruliness. In 2010, this tendency propelled me to marry my college boyfriend; barely two months later, I fell in love with a classmate and realized that I had made a terrible mistake. My own no-fault divorce was finalized in the fall of 2011. Nearly three years later, I married my classmate; our son was born in 2021. I suppose you could call this another love story, but I prefer the formulation Mlotek offers in her conclusion: It's merely 'what happened after' I shifted the course of my life, by acknowledging a feeling I couldn't ignore and making a different choice.
CBC
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How a Halifax theatre mainstay turned her deepest secret into her boldest play yet
It's hours before curtain on the sold-out opening night of Halifax theatremaker Lee-Anne Poole's new play, Talk Sexxxy. Her nerves are palpable, and she admits that she'll be "deep breathing" until performance time. Considering the show has been over 15 years in the making and that it's Poole's first time debuting a new work since she stepped down as executive director of the Halifax Fringe Festival in 2022 — to "refocus on her own creative pursuits," as she put in a release at the time, — her anxiety is understandable. Then, there's the issue of the subject matter. Talk Sexxxy is a candid look at the life of a phone sex operator, inspired by Poole's own experiences. Poole still remembers a workshop production from 10 years ago, when she had cast longtime collaborator and multi-time winner of the Robert Merritt Awards (the biggest prize for theatre in the province) Stephanie MacDonald in the show's only role. (In the finalized version of the production, MacDonald is directing and Poole is acting.) "For those workshop nights … I remember feeling like I stood in the lobby, and as [the] audience left the room, I felt like a lot of people couldn't look me in the eye — or maybe I couldn't look them in the eye," she says. "But the other thing is, in the play, then and still now — and I say very explicitly now at the start of the play — I do not say anything near the worst parts. And I'm desperately trying to make you laugh." Now, as she awaits the sound of audiences doing just that, Poole tells CBC Arts about the road to bringing Talk Sexxxy to life. CBC Arts: In a 2010 story from The Coast about your play Splinters, you said: "The actual events of the play are not autobiographical. Besides the fact that, you know, I have experienced some of them." Since Talk Sexxxy bills itself as semi-autobiographical, how much of that applies here? Poole: I think you can use that quote for everything I have written or will write. I mean, I actually did phone sex. I actually was going through a very depressive time, and was pretty agoraphobic and didn't leave my apartment, except for an hour once a week to go to the grocery store in the middle of the night. And I did that for about six months. A lot of the calls are pretty directly based off of my calls. You say this play was over 15 years in the making, and you attempted to tell the story in other formats along the way. Why did it take so long, and what made you settle on theatre as the medium for this piece? I originally was writing while I was doing phone sex. I was working on a blog that was anonymous — and at one point, someone reblogged it, and it had, like, 10,000 views in a day, and I freaked out and took it offline because suddenly I was really ashamed … I tried to write it as a screenplay once. I tried to write it as fiction once. I was doing poems and drawings and stuff like that. Part of the answer is also part of why it's me performing it and not an actor performing it. For me, part of the interesting thing has been my circling the drain with it: my fear around it, my shame around it and my continuous attempts to figure it out. I think that's something that people can relate to, regardless of if they make art or not: I think there's those moments in our lives that either maybe you regret — or you don't regret, but you don't want people to know about. Or you reconsider. Or you wonder why you did it, and you think, 'But that's not me.' But it is me, because it obviously was me. The description also mentions "this is the play and the making of the play." What does that look like, practically? This is the way I would describe it, and I hate it. I hate it because I think it sounds really bad. But, you know when you go to a fancy, very overpriced restaurant and you order a caesar salad, and a deconstructed caesar salad comes back to you? It is kind of like a deconstructed play. The set's over there. The script is there. You can look at it whenever you want. I'm saying it, memorized, but you can look at it. You can skip pages ahead. So like, all of the pieces of theatre are there, but we've pulled them apart. While this is a fictional work, as we've said, it is informed by lived experience. What was it like to be a phone sex operator? Oftentimes, you'd look at the math and you'd go, "Oh my gosh, two dollars a minute? How long did you talk to him? He spent so much money that he could have hired a sex worker. Why would he call to talk to someone instead of hiring a sex worker?" The answer is usually [that] whatever they want to talk about is something that is satiated only in fantasy. I talked to one guy who wanted to pretend he was Dracula, and he did the voice. One guy, we never even had phone sex. He just wanted to talk about: "I would give you a rose and let's go for a walk on a beach." Literally, just the sweetest little conversation. One man, at one point, said to me, "I want to bend you over in front of everyone at Walmart." There is definitely, like, a "whoa, what's gonna happen now?" And I will say, the rule of phone sex is the same thing with improv: It's "yes and." [The job] was surprising. It was not what I thought, and it was often entertaining and funny — and often numbing and difficult. And I think the thing that I got the most from it that I wasn't expecting was the camaraderie between myself and the other phone sex operators.
