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With Testimony Like This – Will Illinois Ever Get Medical Marijuana?
Not all is well in the “Land of Lincoln.”
The Illinois Senate Executive Committee fired up its first round of testimony for their MMJ Bill, HB-1. The intent of House Bill 1 is to legalize the use of medical marijuana for Illinois sick and suffering. While the forward looking bill easily gained acceptance in the House, not everyone felt warm and fuzzy about the idea of medical marijuana.
No doubt, MMJ has its fair share of supporters in the Illinois House of Representatives. But the open and unanswered question remains… with doctors and politicians willing to skew their data towards their speciality, like fear or fighting addictions – who are these lawmakers listing to – then regurgitating as fact?
Let’s listen and find out…
New Darksiders owner would like to work with former devs
Nordic Games announced its purchase of the Darksiders license yesterday, but the publisher and distributor will not be developing the series, nor any of its other THQ acquisitions. Owner and CEO Lars Wingefors told Eurogamer he is already looking into external partners.
“We are not a developer,” Wingefors said. “We should not create a sequel [to Darksiders]. We need to find the best creative team to look into a sequel. We will look into various options to make sequels.”
The “best-suited [studio] in the world to make a sequel” is Crytek USA, Wingefors said, as it is staffed mostly by former Vigil Games developers. But both it and Nordic Games have their own priorities and agendas, so it’s too early to talk about potential arrangements there.
Crytek USA simply wished Nordic the best in a statement provided to Eurogamer, though some of its employees have posted hopeful messages on Nordic’s message board.
Either way, Nordic does not have THQ’s millions to throw around making a game like Darksiders II. But Wingefors thinks that shouldn’t be a roadblock.
“We have to find creative solutions to make a game of that size. I’m not worried. If you have a great product and an idea, I’m normally good at finding a solution to it.”
No Place Like Oz: A VFX Sampler
We pull back the curtain a tad bit to learn about a few of the vfx secrets of Disney’s blockbuster prequel Oz the Great and Powerful.
Frank L. Baum, the prolific author of the original Wizard of Oz book series, believed that mankind was able to progress from the ignorance of the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization thanks to our gift of imagination. That’s why he would have definitely appreciated the creative artistry of the visual effects team at Sony Pictures Imageworks, which contributed more than 1,100 shots to Sam Raimi’s popular prequel Oz the Great and Powerful.
The film, which had the third biggest opening of a movie in March to date, introduces filmgoers to traveling magician Oscar “Oz” Diggs (James Franco), who lands in the wonderful world of Oz in a balloon. It’s in this colorful place where he meets some familiar characters (Glynda the Good Witch, the Wicked Witch of the West, etc.) and some new friends; a living China porcelain doll and a friendly winged monkey named Finley (voiced by Zach Braff). Not only did Imageworks vfx supervisor Scott Stokdyk have to contend with the public’s expectations from the 1939 classic, they also had to create many new digital characters and polish Oz for a stereoscopic 3-D inspection from today’s jaded audiences.
Oz the Great and Powerful
Having grown up in Kansas himself, Stokdyk says he always felt very connected to The Wizard of Oz and the world it came from. He, along with Sam Raimi and production designer Robert Stromberg, wanted the film to have a classic Hollywood feel—all shot on stage, heavily art-directed with controlled sets and lighting. That’s why a lot of the production was shot at the Michigan Motion Picture Studios in Pontiac, Mich.
“That specific aesthetic also carried into the visual effects work and post as well,” says Stokdyk, who also worked with Raimi on Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, for which he won an Oscar in 2005.
As part of his research, the dedicated supe read all the original Oz books penned by Baum.
Oz the Great and Powerful
Crafting Winged Monkeys and China Dolls
Among the new film’s many visual highlights is the creation of a tiny porcelain China Girl (voiced by Joey King) who befriends Oz and his winged monkey pal on their adventure. To help the actors interact with the CG-created entity, Raimi brought in acclaimed puppeteer Phillip Huber (Being John Malkovich) to introduce the character as a marionette on the set. Huber wore a blue suit and interacted with the other characters on the set so that the artists at ImageWorks could use the marionette as a reference to animate China Girl as a digital character.
“We weren’t really prepared for what he was going to bring to this role,” says the film’s animation supervisor Troy Saliba. “He was able to offer such tremendous reference and provide us with a lot of language that we couldn’t make up as animators. Her mannerisms, her innocence and childlike precociousness—armed with those references and the wonderful voice acting of Joey King, we were able to come up with a character that has real depth and a unique quality.”
“Everyone was so impressed with the movement of the marionette, even though all it could do was move a few limbs and blink its eyes,” adds Stokdyk. “Phillip was able to capture an amazing performance even with those limitations.”
Oz the Great and Powerful
Another memorable digital performance belongs to Finley the Winged Monkey, Oz’s put-upon sidekick who is voiced by Braff. Just like China Girl, Finley’s overall look was based on drawings by production artist Michael Kutsche (Alice in Wonderland, John Carter).
“We actually shot some reference footage with Crystal, the famous female capuchin monkey from The Hangover II movie,” says Stokdyk. “Our monkey had to be incredibly expressive: We had to get instant reads on his face. Capuchin monkeys have this great facial structure and they don’t have lots of hair, so you get a great read on their foreheads and wrinkles. In contrast to China Girl, who has a hard surface, Finley involved a lot of texture, hair combing, grooming and lighting. So it was a longer, more involved process. We had to inject a lot of human elements to his performance.”
To aid them with the task, the artists at Imageworks used some excellent footage of Braff interacting with Franco to help them create the digital monkey. When the actor wasn’t able to be on the set, they used a “puppet cam,” which was simply a monitor and a camera on a stick, manipulated by a puppeteer.
Oz the Great and Powerful
“We had a two-way video conference that was puppeteered,” notes Saliba. “Zach would be in a booth offstage and James Franco would react to his adlibs on the monitor. This definitely resulted in a more vibrant performance.”
The vfx team at Sony Imageworks relied on the latest versions of the studio’s proprietary software. The core animation and modeling tools are based on Maya, on top of additional plug-ins and software. The team uses Katana for lighting, Nuke for compositing and Arnold for rendering.
“We have a standardized lighting pipeline,” notes Stokdyk. “Imageworks has got into this great groove, where lighting is not a technical challenge anymore; it’s more of an artistic challenge. Most of our work is setting up the characters.”
Oz the Great and Powerful
When asked about his favorite moments of the movie, Stokdyk singles out a magical scene in which Glynda helps transports China Girl and Oz to her kingdom in her famous bubbles as they’re chased by a herd of angry flying baboons.
“That scene almost didn’t happen in the movie,” he recalls. “There was some discussion whether it would fit in the whole thing. But I really pushed hard for it. I love the flight over this exotic landscape, the subtlety of the interaction with the iridescent soap bubbles and the way the CG characters were featured in a special way. We also get to showcase the digital environment. It almost becomes a ride film as we fly through this amazing world, and you experience Oz the way characters on the screen are experiencing it, especially when you see it in 3-D.”
Oz the Great and Powerful is playing in theaters around the world. The film claimed the third strongest March opening in history with $ 80.3 million in the U.S. and $ 150.2 million worldwide. Disney has a sequel already in the works.
Oz The Great and Powerful
Oz The Great and Powerful
Oz The Great and Powerful
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High Marijuana Taxes Under Legalization Are Like Life Support For The Black Market
Joe | Feb 25, 2013 | Comments 0
One of the main purposes of marijuana legalization is to bring marijuana into the open and away from the black market, thereby reducing profits for criminal cartels. But this will only happen if the legal market price of marijuana can beat the black market price, which it can easily, barring one thing: high taxes.
Taxes raise the price of a legal product, be it marijuana or anything else. If taxes are high enough to push the legal market price above the black market price, consumers begin to shift to the black market, or back to it, as the case may be.
This phenomenon is so well-known that even the mainstream media recognizes it. And it presents a dilemma for legalization advocates.
Proponents of legalization understand that healthy sales taxes are a great tool for furthering their cause. At a certain point, however, high taxes will encourage an illicit market. Where is the line? It’s difficult to know for sure, but if a 50% tax were enacted on the federal level, the marijuana industry in a state like Washington would face at least $ 1.92 in tax for every $ 1 of product sold. Whether this level of taxation is enough to encourage a black market is difficult to say.
Exact numbers are impossible to know since the size of the consumer base is hard to get a handle on due to marijuana’s federal illegality. But one thing is for sure: Cutting cartels out of the marijuana business will only be possible if taxes are kept low enough to keep the price of legal weed lower than that of black market weed.
While it’s true that some consumers will pay a higher price to get a legal product and avoid the hassle and danger of the black market, many will not. So keeping taxes as low as possible is an important aspect of marijuana legalization for advocates, especially since our elected officials are not known for reasonableness or a basic understanding of economics.
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Filed Under: Exclusive Web Content • Politics • The War On Drugs
Maine Could Become Next State to Regulate and Tax Marijuana Like Alcohol
Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Maine unveiled the details of a new bill that would make Maine the third state in the nation to make marijuana legal for adults 21 and older and establish a system in which marijuana is regulated and taxed like alcohol.
If approved during this session, the “Act to Tax and Regulate Marijuana,” formulated by state Rep. Diane Russell (D-Portland) and supported by Rep. Aaron Libby (R-Waterboro), will be referred to voters in the upcoming November election. If the measure gets carried over and approved during the next legislative session, it will be placed on the November 2014 ballot.
“When it comes to keeping marijuana away from teens, keeping marijuana in an unregulated underground market is the worst possible policy,” Rep. Russell said. “Instead, marijuana should be sold by legitimate, taxpaying businesses in a tightly regulated market.”
Rep. Aaron Libby (WGME)
