When was waking life made

Maybe not. Maybe we only think they do. It's an extravagantly inventive film that begins with actual footage of real actors and then translates them into animated images; it's called motion-capture, and you can see it in " Beowulf " and "," but it was startling when Linklater made his film in , and showed it didn't need to cost millions.

A founding member of the Austin, Texas, filmmaking crowd, he collaborated with a software genius named Bob Sabiston, who did it all on Macs. It's visually bright and alive -- a joy to regard. Linklater likes to listen to people talk. His standard for what they say is very high. His early film " Slacker " followed one character around Austin until that character encountered another, and then followed the new character, and so on, while they were all the time acting out their everyday lives.

They turn up in "Waking Life" in an impossible scene, because it shows them together between the two movies; perhaps that's a clue this is Linklater's own dream. His characters seem engaged in all the conversations we ever had in school, or should have had. In "Waking Life," the hero never named, played by Wiley Wiggins does more listening than talking: In college lectures, bars, coffeehouses, on the sidewalk, to musicians, to philosophers, even -- in a quick jump in space -- to a guide on the Brooklyn Bridge.

That one's easy to explain; he must have seen "Cruise," the documentary about the self-appointed king of tourist guides, Speed Levitch, who of course appears as himself. That's how dreams work. There are also scenes with abrupt disconnects. An angry man with a red face prowls a jail cell issuing imprecations at the world.

An activist drives the streets shouting at people through the loudspeakers on top of his car, but there are no people on the streets and eventually he just stops. A man who despairs of life sets himself on fire, and the hero stares at him, and then his dream continues elsewhere. Dreams often cut out in midstream. There's a crucial scene where the hero is told a story involving synchronicity. A novelist meets a woman at a party who has the same name as a character in his novel, and her husband has the same name, and the man she's having an affair with has the same name, and so on and on.

That can happen in dreams. Strangely, I've been involved for a few weeks with ongoing discussions on my blog about free will, the afterlife, politics, existentialism, the theory of evolution and what it is to be alive. I sat watching the movie and realized the characters were discussing the same topics, sometimes in the same language.

Cue "Twilight Zone" music. We've been discussing man's place in the tree of life; a biologist argues that there is more of an intelligence gap between Plato and an ordinary human than between that human and an intelligent chimpanzee. I'm a subscriber to Darwin, but I wouldn't go that far. Still, it makes you think. Linklater has fun with the inevitable paradoxes of dreaming. The hero complains to a friend that he feels trapped in his dream, and keeps waking up into another dream.

They approached him and he agreed to take Linklater up for a day of shooting where he was able to capture the appropriate effect. Unlike typical films for which editing would not begin until the shooting is complete, Linklater and his editor Sandra Adair did much of the editing as they went.

Linklater found that the order of the scenes presented itself as he shot. He described editing as "waking up in the morning and thinking, 'OK, this scene should go before that one, and here's the new flow. It was necessary for the live action footage to be complete and edited before the animation began so that no wasted animation would be produced.

A double creative collaboration" that called for a full live-action feature and then a fully animated feature. Though Linklater is quick to point out, "I don't really divorce the processes. To me, there's this inherent overlap between the content of the film and the look of it. In one phase, you're collaborating with actors, the other with animators. Once the picture was locked, Sabiston and team stepped up to begin their animation wizardry.

Sabiston had long been perfecting his software for just such a project. He first used it for an MTV-sponsored animation contest that earned him a job creating a series of interstitials. And, in preparation for WAKING LIFE, Sabiston altered the software for big movie formats, added the option of using transparent shapes, and fine-tuned the line quality to create the most natural drawn line possible.

His criteria were simple: "good artists and good people. Each animator was assigned a character that they would work on solely. Linklater likened it to "actors picking what part they wanted to play based on what they were interested in. It was simultaneously artistic - because each artist creatively interpreted the scene in his or her own style, and tedious - because of the amount of time that went into this painting process.

It is estimated that each minute of footage required hours of animation. A point of interest during the animation is that Wiley Wiggins also worked as an animator. Wiggins was part of the original animation team that worked on the scene where he rides the subway, just prior to encountering Speed Levitch on the bridge. The scene was eventually altered - "because Wiley interpreted his character to look as though he were about 12 years old" - but the background that he animated still remains.

Both Bob Sabiston and his sister, Susan Sabiston, were also animators. It took approximately nine months to complete the graphics portion of the film, leading to a finish just under the wire for the Sundance Film Festival.

When it premiered at the festival, Pallotta says the filmmakers were seeing the final film for the first time right along with the audience.

Just the week prior, Sabiston and Pallotta were hurriedly shipping off disks and physical hard drives to Swiss Effects in Zurich trying to do the transfer. Pallotta remembers, "I was having conversations with Sundance two days before it showed saying, 'We may not be able to show this. It has its flaws, but only in retrospect or through the eyes of another will they be found--and then forgiven if you have even an ounce of heart or a particle of transcendence. It gets beneath one's radar and past one's filters.

Ultimately, this is not a movie, and it shouldn't be viewed as such; instead, one should approach it as therapy. See it, be with it, relax, and GROW.

Every time you see it again, the concepts saturate your nervous system with reinforcing patterns that will later "echo" in your dynamics in synergistic ways. A seed gets planted and with repeated viewings the seed gets watered. Go to this event. See it from a seat that's within the first ten rows of the theater; immerse yourself.

Let go. All you have to lose loosen is identification with a reflection of the real you. Details Edit. Release date March 7, Australia. United States. Despertando a la vida Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 1 hour 39 minutes. Dolby Digital. Related news. Sep 12 Indiewire.

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