The Third & Seventh threshold

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March 2, 2010 – 2:20 am

This movie was not made by photographing the world. It was made with Google and 3D software and compositing software. It’s not photographic. None of it is real.

The 3rd and 7th arts are architecture and cinematography. (Painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, dance, cinematography).

We seem to have crossed a threshold that I never imagined would really be crossed. From the bouncing ball 3D animations of the 80s through Toy Story, I didn’t think we’d ever really reach a point where it would be impossible to tell the difference between CGI and cinematography. (Obviously architecture is simpler than toys or fish, and humans are the most difficult, but still – surrealism is all that would suggest these images aren’t photographic.)

This movie is also a great example of user generated content [snicker]. The professional world of authoritative professional specialists and television broadcasters are quick to depict the internet as the domain of trash culture produced by amateurs for a laugh. YouTube. Poor quality viral videos of cats playing pianos. It’s dreadful, isn’t it.

In truth, there’s a digital renaissance going on. Computers make specialisation a mechanistic anachronism. Professionals are on the internet. They do all their best work in their spare time. HD is on the internet, not on TV. And this CGI is better than Hollywood.

(Computers are machines that simulate other machines. How can you be a specialist with a tool that simulates every imaginable kind of tool?)

Watch it in HD. Full screen. I’m beside myself.

The Third & Seventh Credits:

Alex Roman
CGI modelling, texturing, illumination, rendering. Post production and editing. Sound design. Music sequencing, orchestration, and mix.

Based on original scores by:
Michael Laurence Edward Nyman. (The Departure) & Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. (Le Carnaval des animaux)

By Brad | Posted in Culture, Front Page | Comments (0)

Vimeo HD off by default

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February 22, 2010 – 4:08 pm

Vimeo logo
It turns out that embedded movies from Vimeo have the HD switch set to ON by default.

The following line of code needs to be added to Embed and Object code in the HTML:
hd_off=1&

This switches HD off by default.

Vimeo say they will design a better long term solution.

Reference:
Vimeo HD off by default

By Brad | Posted in Front Page, video | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

On Digital Cinema

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February 10, 2010 – 12:53 pm

A few clips showing the same event on standard video (see me shooting) and then digital cinema style (what I shot, straight out of the camera).

Note that in the standard video footage, everything – including the unimportant background – is in focus. Everything is just as important as everything else. This is normal for video (and for the digital snapshot cameras we all use).

In contrast, in the ‘digital cinema’ shots, like the close shots of faces, the background is thrown out of focus. The subject is in focus, the background disappears.

Point 1: Both cost about the same amount of money – super cheap, relatively speaking – although one looks super cheap and the other looks like a feature film.

Point 2: The digital cinema approach means we can create really emotionally engaging images without requiring a lot of people, lighting and equipment set ups. The characteristics of the image are so good we can generally work without additional lights, and know it will look really good. In contrast, normal video traditionally seems to require very controlled lighting to get great images. In many ways, the ‘digital cinema’ approach is the best guerilla documentary option.

Point 3: If we were not shooting digital cinema style, we would be forced to spend much more money achieving much less. Double the money for a camera, to begin with…

DIGITAL CINEMA is an idea that sprang out of the independent no-budget filmmaking community on the internet, who used cheap, hacked consumer HD cameras – matching lens, shutter speed, frames-per-second, etc. – to simulate film. With the camera I’m using above, the front half is basically a 35mm film camera and the back half is a consumer camcorder.

The goal is making £4k (digital cinema) look like £100k (cinema). Why? it’s overwhelmingly better and cheaper – two of my favourite things – and it empowers a single individual to operate like a Hollywood film unit. Which is pretty amazing, really.

Granted, the standard video footage is SD resolution and shot with a digital snapshot camera, ie. it’s lowest in it’s class. But there are also digital cinema cameras with double the imaging resolution of the digital cinema camera shown too. In any case, it seems the difference in images has less to do with resolution and more to do with optical characteristics.

By Brad | Posted in Front Page, video | Comments (2)

Sociopaths | Moguls | Google | Aaron

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December 31, 2009 – 3:26 pm

The Last Tycoon

One of the best things about capitalism is the way it handles sociopaths. Major executives look up to Alexander the Great and apparently try to follow in his footsteps. But instead of leading a murderous campaign across Asia, they decide to make something people want: newspapers and movies and television shows. True, they’re far from perfect, but you have to admit it’s a lot better than mass slaughter.

Many books have been written about Google, even though we’re all pretty familiar with the company to begin with, but what makes Ken Auletta’s Googled interesting is that it’s a history of the company as told by the incumbent sociopaths. These are the people Auletta has spent his life covering: the media moguls who tried to acquire and conquer their own empires of content and delivery. And to them what’s most shocking and galling about Google’s incredibly rapid rise is that instead of being engineered by a fellow sociopath, it was largely done by normal, decent people plainly applying the forces of new technology.

Read more Googling for Sociopaths, Aaron Swartz’s take on the book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It

By Brad | Posted in Culture, Front Page | Comments Off

Final Cut: No monitor image – fix

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October 21, 2009 – 7:49 pm

fcpcache

Delete the following cache file:
~/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro Prof Cache.fcpch

You don’t even have to quit Final Cut. Simply reset the display with key command ALT+F12.

There. Now never forget that.

UPDATE: Sometimes you do have to relaunch FCP.

By Brad | Posted in Front Page | Comments Off

Delhi | Greenpeace | Bloom

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September 22, 2009 – 1:59 pm

A new commercial for Greenpeace: Voices of Change. Shot in Delhi a few months ago by Philip Bloom on a Canon 5dmkII digital SLR.

This is a another great model for a relatively low budget, high quality charity video. Philip Bloom is a leading sharer of knowledge on low budget digital cinematography.

By Brad | Posted in Charity Marketing, Front Page, video | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Charity:water September birthday video

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August 24, 2009 – 11:41 am

The ever media-savvy charity:water use a beautiful, emotive, digital cinema style to move people to turn their September birthday into a fundraising event.

Charity:water founder Scott Harrison brings the charity’s founding story full circle for it’s 3rd birthday. It’s notable that there is an individual personality behind the charity, who has much the same status as the author of a blog.

This is a great model for a relatively low budget, high quality charity video.

By Brad | Posted in Charity Marketing, Front Page, video | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

The Free Debate

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August 12, 2009 – 4:20 pm

Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of Radical Price has sparked up the debate about ‘free.’

Union Square Ventures has a good post discussing it. Thanks to James Cherkoff.

From Union Square:

Both sides of the debate about Free do not seem to acknowledge how fundamentally different the relationship between suppliers and consumers is on the web. Services are not offered for free at all. There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material – data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not dollars, it’s attention.

I have this creeping feeling that’s been bothering me for a while now. Part of it is familiar and part of it is new: charities have a natural advantage over commercial enterprises on the internet as they sell something abstract (community, communication), and because internet media is conversational, ie. charities have something to talk about: changing the world. (That’s not something you can say about Coke.) That’s the familiar part.

The sense of unease has to do with the possibility that charities will actually let commercial ventures lead them. This was natural in the mass media age, when communication was expensive. Today it looks more like squandering your birth right. Charities will not fully embrace the web, get attention, built communities, harness people’s ‘cognitive surplus,’ provide purpose to donors’ lives, and change the world until commercial businesses show them how to do it – at which point they will have blown their natural advantage.

There is something in The Free Debate that charities should be interrogating very closely. When attention is the currency of a digital economy, where the price is ‘free,’ what does it mean to put a price on – pick your favourite abstract noun – community, communications, purpose, attention….

Can you see the source of my frustration? Commercial ventures are dealing with free in an economy of attention. Charities are pretty much the only people who can charge a fee, deliver a flash of emotion, and then weasel their way out of delivering the substantial engagement the internet makes possible. In general, it seems the charitable world is overcharging and under-delivering. I begin to question how long this can be sustainable.

By Brad | Posted in Charity Marketing, Culture, Front Page | Comments Off

It Felt Like a Kiss Trailer

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August 12, 2009 – 7:21 am

Trailer for Adam Curtis’ only-available-on-the-web documentary about American culture It Felt Like a Kiss.

By Brad | Posted in Culture, Front Page, video | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Facebook Buys FriendFeed Compendium

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August 11, 2009 – 10:13 am

light trails, abstract

A list of responses to the news that Facebook is buying FriendFeed.

What I Read Today: Facebook Buys FriendFeed Edition – Publishing 2.0

I started using FriendFeed a month or two ago. It will amalgamate your activity on the web. This makes sharing things you come across on the internet happen automatically. I have mashed together my blog, Vimeo (my videos and bookmarks), and Delicious. You choose what you want to add together. Then your friends can subscribe via RSS and get everything automatically, which is a more convenient alternative than following you on each discrete service. It’s all about effortless, automated sharing.

By Brad | Posted in Culture, Front Page | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off