NameWiz

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NameWiz is a freeware file-renaming tool for Windows, especially useful for renaming massive image sequences for animation.

Harry Harrison on Soylent Green

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Harry Harrison’s own thoughts on how they mangled his book, “Make Room, Make Room!”, to make Soylent Green. It turns out that major plot points like the cannibal-crackers and furniture-girls weren’t even in the original story, and Charlton Heston himself thought that “the whole payoff on the cannibalism element lacked impact.”

It was almost naively anticlimactic, how they built the whole thing up to “Soylent Green is people,” as though this discovery could be the ultimate, outrageous revelation of an already-overpopulated world. In truth, the cannibalism element would have had more shock value as a cynical subplot. But then, that element of camp and naivete was exactly what made this movie a cult classic. (That, and Edward G. Robinson’s final performance. To know that he performed his character’s death scene so well, while he himself was dying of cancer, is an intense, powerful thing.)

With that, I think it can be said that “Soylent Green is people,” in more ways than one. Off to work on that title sequence.

(Links, by the way, via writer Michael Carroll.)

Make Room!

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As I mobile blogged earlier, one of our projects in Multimedia Typography class is to re-execute the opening sequence of a movie using principles of modern motion typography.

I chose Soylent Green, that famous sci-fi B-flick directed by Richard Fleischer, starring Charlton Heston and an old, post-McCarthyist, terminally ill Edward G. Robinson. I felt at first that the movie’s original title sequence, a series of quick-cutting stock-stills showing mankind’s progression from simplistic idyll to technological overload to post-apocalyptic decay, failed to capture or foreshadow in any way the supposed horror that “Soylent Green is People!”

And so, all weekend, I’ve been watching Soylent Green over and over and over — especially that title sequence. It’s actually quite powerful, and when I discovered that the original book on which the movie was based — Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room! — was more about overpopulation than Soylent cannibalism, I realized that the original content of the story was expressed quite well through that chaotic collage of images.

Not to say that I won’t lean more towards the sensationalized Soylent Green part of it. I’ve already made an animated background in AfterEffects, showing a huge grid of green wafers. Mmm. People Biscuits, anyone?

I’ll have more commentary on the movie tomorrow. Must sleep now.