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Fury ©1995 Joseph A. Francis & Norma M. Jenckes
Full screenplay in pdf format here

Back in 1995 I was sitting in the courtyard of the Cat & Fiddle restaurant on a warm evening in Hollywood, immediately adjacent to my office at RGA/LA (now Imaginary Forces) thinking about the Umberto Eco book, The Name of the Rose. I was reflecting on how Eco had created a Medieval Sherlock Holmes, and I was wondering how the Sherlock Holmes story benefited from such a change of venue. As I let my mind wander I asked myself what other stories could be similarly transplanted. I wondered what it would be like if there were a Medieval... James Bond.

My mind started to race. I knew a fair amount about the history of technology from courses in college, and from an excellent series created by James Burke that I saw as a teenager back in '78 called Connections... What if I took James Bond and set him not in Medieval times, but in the Renaissance? Then I could make Leonardo da Vinci his 'Q' and supply him with all kinds of high tech 15th Century spy gear.

I couldn't believe it. It was so obvious, and yet no one had already done it.

We think of Bond as 'evergreen,' but he was languishing a bit then. Critics wondered if he had a future. I thought this might be a great way to re-imagine not the franchise, but the surrounding genre. There have been a lot of alternative spy stories since then, but in '95 they weren't so prevalent as they are today.

The 500th anniversary of Columbus's trip of 1492 had just past a few years back. The Renaissance was in the air. Women were wearing wrought iron cross jewelry. Bands like Enigma were paving the way to Clockpunk by combining medieval and Renaissance music with modern beats. The unofficial soundtrack in my mind to this film as I wrote it was the 1994 Vision: The Music of Hildegard von Bingen - particularly the song, Praise For The Mother (O Virga AC Diadema) In 1996 Renaissance Magazine was formed. A Renaissance-themed furniture store called Leonardo's opened on the 3rd Street promenade.

For me Steampunk, or more specifically in my case, Clockpunk, was a reaction to the 80's.

If you looked at the colors on the magazine covers on newsstands, they all seemed to warm up and lighten up almost simultaneously after 1989 ended. It was as if people we ready to let go of dark futures, and blues and blacks and silvers, and embrace sunny warm gold and brass and wood.

I thought selling this script would be a no brainer. But I never did sell it.

I had offers to sell the pitch, but I was holding out for a screenplay sale. I had a fair amount of access from my work in the visual effects industry, and the script got optioned here and there. One thing I did get from it was an offer to write and direct an animated CG feature based on a Sega Genesis videogame character called Vectorman. More on that here.

I have seen pop culture catch up to this story, and I don't see any reason to sit on it anymore. I discussed it a bit on the Da Vinci Automata web site, but with this post today I am making the script itself public.

At the head of this post is a link to a pdf. The screenplay at that link is the original version of Fury. The plot is as follows:

A Renaissance-era superspy, equipped with the latest 15th Century high tech espionage gear courtesy of a young Leonardo da Vinci, must stop a madman who has inadvertently stumbled across germ theory centuries early and realizes he can hold cities for ransom by threatening them with the return of the Plague.

Post 9/11 I felt the need to rewrite the script and tone down some of the Venetian / Ottoman, Christian / Muslim conflict.

In a later draft (not presented above), the villain, the first mafia don, is inventing the concept of organized crime when he discovers an ancient and highly destructive Chinese magnetically-powered rail gun called by various names throughout history, but most famously called 'The Horn of the Ram,' when it brought down the walls of Jericho. The Bible mistranslates it as Joshua blowing a ram's horn to bring down the walls.

I also added the military group The 10 of War, headed by Machiavelli. (In addition to Machiavelli's own writing, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene was a great resource.) The villain's 'woman' in the revised screenplay is Lucrezia Borgia.

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Fury ©1995 Joseph A. Francis & Norma M. Jenckes
Full screenplay in pdf format here

SEGA'S "VECTORMAN" SET TO MORPH ONTO THE SILVER SCREEN

VECTORMAN (1997) showbizdata.com

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In 1996 I was commissioned to write a screenplay for a CG animated feature film starring a Sega Genesis videogame character called Vectorman. I tried to be faithful to the game's material, but at the same time treat it in a fairly serious way - finding plausible explanations for some of the more fanciful aspects of the game, like winged fire extinguishers. It actually had a little bit of a WALL-E thing going on.

I was also attached to direct the film. Had it gone into production I believe it would have been the world's second CG film - after Toy Story.

How did I get a gig like that? Partially because of my work on ID4. But largely because of my first screenplay, a 1995 work that independently invented Clockpunk, and, I guess, Plaguepunk, too.

I mainly posting about Vectorman now as a way of segueing into my next post, which will address the Clockpunk thing in some detail.

In the meantime... ; )

Destructoid - Daily irrelevance: VectorMan was going to be a movie once

Vectorman fans: Did you know there was a movie in the works?

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SEGA'S "VECTORMAN" SET TO MORPH ONTO THE SILVER SCREEN

Sega of America is the arm of Tokyo, Japan-based Sega Enterprises Ltd. responsible for the development, marketing and distribution of Sega videogame systems and videogames in the Americas. Sega Enterprises Ltd. is a nearly $3.6 billion company known as the industry leader in interactive digital entertainment media, and is the only company that offers entertainment experiences both inside and outside the home. Sega of America's World Wide Web site is located at (http://www.sega.com).

For Disney's 'The Living Seas' (1985) at Epcot Center we needed to matchmove a computer animated undersea city to a live action sea floor. (Everybody loved the green, glowing wireframe back then)

In the days before programs like Boujou, much effort was put into using CG data to drive motion control systems, and vice versa. (Another notable example of this technique, also from 1985, can be seen in the video to the Mick Jagger song, Hard Woman.

More portfolio material (this was my first big job) after the jump...

I notice The advertising industry's Clio Awards are turning 50 this year. Time flies.

I was a Clio Awards judge back in my 20's. At that time The Clio Awards were, shall we say... not uneventful

Nice to see they bounced back. :D

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UPDATE 4/24/2009

follow me on twitter :D

In 1994, Duke Magazine did a series of profiles of five Duke alumni working in the Hollywood film industry. It's interesting for me to look at this snapshot of how I saw things then:

On an Autumn morning in my freshman year I walked into the Art Department at Duke University determined to combine Art and Computer Science into a program that would prepare me for a career in the emerging field of Computer Graphics. There I met a professor named Frank Smullin who had a great influence on me from then until his untimely death in 1983, just two short years later.

On October 16, 1989, Bernice Kanner wrote in her regular New York Magazine column, On Madison Avenue, about how Nike and Reebok were duking it out for market share.

The real story, I think, is that for the first time a professional broadcast television commercial was about to be produced solely on consumer level computer hardware and software.

In April 1993 I designed a cover for American Cinematographer magazine. The idea behind the image was to create a metaphor for digital filmmaking by using technology to blur the boundaries between the sound stage and exterior location photography. The cover story it illustrated was one of the first articles to introduce producers, directors and cinematographers to the then new concept of digital postproduction itself.

You might find it interesting to note the use of the term "digital domain" on the cover. That turn of phrase was in everyday use at that time in post production as a way of explaining new movie technology to clients. "Once we get your film into the digital domain..." was a common way to begin a sentence in the industry. When James Cameron (cleverly) named his company Digital Domain later in '93, everyone else by my recollection made a conscious effort to stop using the phrase for fear of giving free advertising to the competition. Now you never hear it except in reference to the actual company.

When this April 1993 issue of American Cinematographer hit the stands, Francis Ford Coppola called me to find out more about the creation of this image.

UPDATE 7/30/05
I feel as though I have just come from a real life version of this stage I envisioned back in 1993.

I attended the Directors Guild of America's DGA DIGITAL DAY 2005 today, a great program which culminated in a wrap party on the new "Smartstage" at Occidental Studios in Hollywood. A high-definition camera on a motion-captured boom arm photographs foreground figures on a 90' x 60' wraparound bluescreen stage. Fast computers generate match-moved 3D backgrounds and composite the two in real time.

Pretty nifty.

UPDATE 8/3/05
Some coverage of the DGA Digital Day event:

Here's something I'm pleased to have been a part of. I computer-generated the egg. (Hey, maybe it's just an egg, but it's an egg on the cover of Newsweek.)

This May 31, 1993 Newsweek cover story is one of the articles that introduced the general public to the concept of the internet itself. They hadn't even settled on a common term for it yet, instead putting it under the general rubric "interactive."

Kind of a cool bit of internet history, don't you think?

We made a variation for stock. You can see it in use here - trying to get the goose to lay more golden eggs?

Here's a cover I designed and art directed for the August 1993 issue of How Magazine. Concept, design and art direction by Joseph Francis. Producer Jimm Burris. Photography by Dan Wilby. Compositing by Robert Bowen at RGA/Print.

An article by writer Onno de Jong describing the creation of the image can be found here.

UPDATE 4/27/2009

This was my first time working with a model. I remember as Art Director I gave her a long explanation about what I wanted the image to accomplish. She looked at me and then turned to the photographer with an expression of slight panic. He told her, 'There's jewels in the box!' And with that she went to work.

We must have been using Photoshop 2.5 then.

My work on a 1992 Kodak television commercial led me to invent the idea of assembling meta images out of mosaics of smaller, often thematically related images - Photo Mosaics.

I see that Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the term fractal geometry, turns eighty next week.

I was lucky enough to be part of the group at R/Greenberg Associates in New York that helped bring one of Mandelbrot's and Dr. Richard Voss's famous fractal terrains to popular attention by animating a fly-through of it in a 1987 IBM television commercial.
We didn't have a sky, but to keep everything 'fractal,' we interpreted the terrain height field mesh as an image of blue and white color values.

The commercial was popular, and went on to win a number of awards, including a Gold Plaque, Computer Graphics, Chicago International Film Festival; a Gold Award, International Film & TV Festival; a Certificate of Merit, Institutional/Corporate ID, Chicago International Film Festival; and a Gold Award, Computer Graphics, Houston International Film Festival.

Happy Birthday Dr. Mandelbrot.

UPDATE 4/27/2009

Jonathon Coulton sings a nice song about the Mandelbrot Set. My daughter particularly enjoys this fractal zoom set to his music.

UPDATE 7/29/2009
I just came across this - Vol Libre by (Pixar's Chief Scientist) Loren Carpenter, who describes his work as follows:

"I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world's first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each."

very cool.

UPDATE 11/13/2009

3D Mandelbub: Some very interesting lit and shaded 3D versions

and 3D Mandelbrot thread at Fractal Forums