Why computers are still no good

19 September, 2007
Alex
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When friends of mine profess frustration with the technology in their lives, I remind them who to blame.

Picture the scene: It’s 1982 and some kids are asking their friend to come out and play. This 10-year-old has a choice to make. He can either solve the problem he has on his VIC-20 home computer, or go out and play in the sun.

The choice is between fixing software or being with humans.

The problem of how to program a computer can be solved. If you are smart enough, you can make the computer do what you want. If there is an error, you can find it. Eventually. Computer output can be predicted based on all the inputs. That’s the problem with humans. Their ‘output’ can’t be predicted. Even if you give them the same input, they’re always acting in inconsistent ways. There is not accepted way of understanding human actions and reactions. They can be difficult to deal with.

This decision wasn’t very difficult for many of those who went on to create the hardware and software we use today. It was simpler, more elegant, more satisfying to stay in their bedrooms learning Commodore machine code, CP/M, the Phoenix BIOS, dBase.

The irony is that the very people who find designing hardware and software so appealing are the ones that find it the hardest to identify with those who use the products of their labours.

So, when you next get a ridiculous error message, or your work vanishes for no reason, remember that you’ve done enough work in understanding how all this stuff works. It’s time for all this expensive technology to meet us at least half way. At least don’t feel you should know what went wrong. Understand that the creators of this technology barely understand the daily lives of the people who battle to use their products every day.

That won’t bring your work back, but at least you shouldn’t feel that you’ve done something wrong. Grit your teeth, hold on for another few years, and wait for the time when computers and software are good enough for you to use.

Making the director comfortable, but not too comfortable

18 September, 2007
editing, new york
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Alan Heim, editor:

The editor, the assistant, and the apprentice have been together for, say, there months. You’ve been sitting there looking at this material and occasionally muttering under your breath, being unhappy about it in some way, and suddenly, here’s the perpetrator. You’ve got certain loyalty and the director is now an outsider. You get to the point where the editor has to make the director feel comfortable in the cutting room.

Also from Selected Takes:

There are ways of getting your view across without challenging the original concept for the film. The whole process is a compromise and you have to be willing and able to get other people to compromise. That often leads to some tensions, and you’ll lose a lot of the fights. … I can work on a film and be tremendously intense about it, but after is said and done, it’s the director’s movie. At some point you have to be willing to give up and let the director do what he wants to do, even if you feel it’s not right.

He edited Network, All That Jazz and American History X. If you’re in New York on Thursday 27th September, you can ask him your own questions as part of the Manhattan Edit Workshop’s series of seminars with distinguished feature film editors. The event is free, it starts at 7:30pm sharp at the Helen Mills Theatre, 139 W 26th Street. RSVP to The Manhattan Edit Workshop.

Dialogue as temp music

17 September, 2007
editing, film making
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Listening to the current Filmspotting podcast (web/iTunes), I heard an interview with Guy Maddin. He was talking about an impressionistic documentary that he was commissioned to make about the town he grew up in: ‘My Winnipeg.’ At 18:25, he starts to describe how he constructed the film. He didn’t know how to structure the film, so he took his inspiration from the way his editor is sometimes inspired by temp music. He went into a recording studio and started to extemporise on the theme of his home town. Sometimes he would prepare a few words, sometimes he would go off on tangents. These recordings he gave to his editor:

My editor treated that as ‘temp music’ – temp narration. He would cut it up – sometimes space it out more and rearrange the words… Before we finally fixed it up, there would be inconsistencies with verb tenses and grammatical things because he was making a collage out of my narration just the way he would hack up some Mahler when we use it as temp music… So that a piece of action would happen on a cymbal crash or something like that. … I didn’t re-record much more than a couple of sentences to smooth out some inconsistencies…

Young people these days…

16 September, 2007
Alex
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…they use such weird language – they don’t know how to communicate like what we do. Have you seen the kind of spelling they use when texting each other? How can they be literate if they don’t spend time reading books. They are on the internet for hours on end. How will they learn how to put the right words together so that can make themselves understood?

Their constant instant messaging is the solution! Looking back at when I grew up, we spent a good amount of time on the phone. Parents limited that time because even local calls were expensive back then. Friends hung out together.

Last year I made a film that featured thirty people aged 11 to 16. I asked them about their technology habits. How they used instant messaging, bluetooth, texting and mobile phone calls. They confirmed that most people come home from school, log into some instant messaging software, do their homework and keep their social networking pages up to date. Bebo was the most popular this time last year.

I think that this technology may produce citizens who will learn to be more articulate when writing. They have had many years more experience than adults in learning how to represent their state of mind through typing simple messages on their mobile phones, IM clients and home pages. They have learned efficiency – who has time? They have learned accuracy – they don’t want to spend precious time with clarifications. These are some of the principles that are lacking from most adult communication.

It could be that when these people start communicating in business, they may avoid the pitfalls of presentation software. They may go back to the ways of efficient memos or carefully written reports. It is these that can be improved with the addition of other media. When there is a reasoned argument, pictures, audio, animation and video can be there to support the idea being communicated instead of vice versa.

Here’s hoping.

What can you add?

13 September, 2007
film making, Links
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If you’re in any business, it’s a good idea to get to know your target market. You should also understand those you need to sell to. For writers and directors, that means putting your feet in the shoes of producers.

Over at the USC podcast page, you can find what Suzanne Todd has to say about producing. She gives advice to directors and writers too. Suzanne produced Memento, the Austin Powers films, Boiler Room and Across the Universe. She uses a little shorthand that is best understood by students and almuni. Each course in a specific field has a three digit number associated with it. The method at USC is that everyone works on a film in each of the major roles. As part of the DP course, you DP on someone’s film. As part of the editing course, you edit someone else’s film.

She was one of the few people in her class that wanted to be a producer. Most wanted to be writers and directors. This podcast won’t tell you how to learn from producing many indie movies before getting a studio deal. Suzanne started with a studio deal. She does talk about the division of labour and the nature of development.

One hour 20 minutes in, she talks about how to select what projects to work on, and what to leave to others. She says that although you might think a script or a film will be successful, you should only work on it if you feel that you have something to bring to it personally.

The trick is to get yourself in the position where you have that choice. Some people think it’s a good idea to wait until the right thing comes along.

Yes… but… does she have a boyfriend?

12 September, 2007
screenwriting
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When writing films it is tempting to tell your audience everything about your most important characters: their surname, their job, how they met all the other characters they know in the film.

Four Weddings and a Funeral and Silence of the Lambs show that there might be things that the screenwriter knows about the characters that don’t need to be revealed in the film.

Some critics complained that we never discover more about the characters in Four Weddings. What jobs to they do? How did such disparate people meet and become friends? Critics may have complained, but audiences didn’t miss the information. Maybe critics found it difficult to summarise the plot without describing character careers. Richard Curtis decided that the lives of the characters away from these social occasions was off limits.

…sometimes if you create constraints for yourself, it makes you free. Instead of thinking ‘Where does Scarlett work?’ I had to say, ‘Where can I show where she stands emotionally?’ and devise something to do that job: talking to a little girl under a table.
…
…when you’re hanging around with your friends, who are often more miscellaneous than you might think, you don’t explain who you are. You don’t say, “Hello Charles Bennett. How’s life at the bank since your father died?’ You exist in a world which doesn’t reveal what you do and what your surname is. I wanted to reproduce real life in that way, not to have endless reference to extraneous things but for friendship to be the key.

Richard Curtis quoted in Story and Character.

When talking about Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster says that she is sometimes asked about her character’s love life. Does Clarice have a boyfriend? What does he think of Lecter? Her response is that Clarice might or might not have a boyfriend. It isn’t relevant to the story.

Media, mediums and meta-mediums

11 September, 2007
Links
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Michael Mace gives a great summary of media and mediums in a blog post and goes on to say:

The transcendent need for a billing mechanism.
When I said that the Web is a tool for creating new media, I left out an important detail. It’s three-quarters of the tool. We have a great delivery system, and Google is well on its way to dominating the advertising part of the financial model. What’s missing is a standard mechanism for people to pay for content that’s not supported by advertising. Some types of content work fine with ads, but I think some other types are better when paid for. Novels, short stories, music, and research reports all qualify. Creators and readers would both benefit from a system in which people could easily pay a few dimes or a few dollars directly to the author, but today we generally have to fumble with credit cards and awkward systems like PayPal. And credit card vendors strongly discourage small payments.

A few posts later, he covers a service from Amazon which will help sites all sizes charge for their services.

This could mean you!

The visual language of helicopters

9 September, 2007
Alex, film making
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As David and I walked through the Louvre’s courtyard, we discovered a display sponsored by the Museum of Flight at Le Bourget. Two real helicopters were parked there: one from 90 years ago and a modern helicopter operated by the French Marines.

That reminded me that in films and TV shows that feature helicopters, we never see the landing gear retract or deploy. Up to very recently, nearly all sequences of aeroplanes taking off featured footage of the undercarriage retracting. Sometimes we see the wheels deploying before a landing. It shows that the plane has taken off and has now committed to flying off. It won’t land any time soon. For some reason I’m always looking at helicopter skis and wheels in movies. One moment they are deployed. In the next, we see a smooth bottomed vehicle flying through the air. Unless our hero needs to hang from or go out on the skis to shoot the baddies.

The fact that this is never shown, means that we don’t need to see it. I suppose it’s that we know that helicopters take off and land wherever they want. Wheels and skis can be redeployed as needed. It follows that we are likely to favour shots as punctuation in the stories that we tell that seem to show a simple piece of information (‘the wheels are up’) that conveys a more advanced idea (‘they are committed to their journey – there’s no going back’). In this case, helicopters use a different language.

A multiTouch Final Cut Server client?

6 September, 2007
Apple, film making, final cut pro, Multitouch, User interface
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There’s lots of room for buttons on the iPod Touch home screen. How about:

Final Cut Server client: Stream the current version of an FCP project. Make selects and simple edits (a la iMovie 08) on an FCP project on a server somewhere using a gestural interface

AppleHome: stream my 100GB+ collection back home to me whenever I have Wi-Fi access

Sling-Pod: stream my TV tuner signal to me