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November 20, 2006
Pithiness and New Media
I'll get straight to the point: the biggest distinction between old media and new media is speed. Be pithy or perish.
On the web, you're competing with 100 million others for someone's attention. To hold their audiences, TV and radio still rely on soothing transitions and interstitials to create the impression of "flow." So, does new media, like a good burger, benefit from all this dressing and "secret sauce" or is it just filler?
In a recent post, Jason Kottke explores how amateur podcasters and video bloggers, in an effort to look more professional, often waste their audience's time using old media techniques, like transitions and interstitials, instead of inventing new ones.
No one accidentally tunes into a podcast, so there's little need to "set the stage" or remind the audience of something they already know for the sake of "branding." As Kottke writes, "30 seconds of music before the actual podcast begins is the audio equivalent of Flash splash pages on web sites."
I listen to a lot of NPR podcasts and I've memorized the length of each intro and transition so I can scan past them on my iPod. But if the messages are short enough, I won't skip them. Attention sponsors: "Brought to you by x" should be enough. If I wanted to know your mission statement, I'd go to your "about us" page. Attention producers: if you want me to listen to the credits, give me an incentive. Put a joke in there or at least change the music up. Ira Glass does a good job of this on This American Life.
I admit that all this stripping down can go too far. Just look at The Show with Ze Frank. The guy never blinks! Creepy.
Of course, there are many videobloggers who respect their audience's time yet aren't afraid of the occasional pause. I like how this young youtube celeb cuts together the otherwise dead air at the beginning of shots for comedic effect in Knock Knock! In Amateur, Lasse Gjertsen transforms the humblest of footage into a dazzling synthesis of music and video. It's an inspiration for someone like me who wants to play music but struggles with the multitasking.
Although parents and teachers still scold teenagers for saying "like" too much, teenage video bloggers are starting to excise the boring bits from their speech altogether. The expert use of jump cuts in some of these videos reminds me of my favourite filmmaker, Errol Morris.
So, jump cuts are one example of an old media technique that work great online. Let's try and find some more and post them in the comments.
In an effort to be more pithy myself, I'm putting all my "outtakes" for this post in the "extended entry" section.
Addendum:
I think this all got started from reading last month's cover story in Wired about lonelygirl15.
Leftovers:
The 4 second rule. Cf. Jakob Nielsen's 5 second rule and "the competition is only a click away"
I thought about making a blog post genre called "triangulation" where you look at three links that deal with the same theme. Especially timely issues, the emergence of a trend. Something about how the web is about making connections and spotting patterns.
James Bond phoning home to HQ and all they do is a Google search for him. And how that's actually quite plausible. Good thing they save his life later in the movie. Reminds me of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with the phone homes.
We reach for our remotes (or tivos or torrents) because we prefer to be in control.
True flow requires a feedback loop between the person and what he or she is focused on. That is why video games are stickier than TV.
With the advent of YouTube, the interstitials have become the programming itself. When starting my bookclub, I appended a link to the Reading Rainbow title sequence to my introductory email.
I've been meaning to write a letter to the producers of On The Media because I'm just tired of hearing the same 4 songs during their lengthy (1-2 min) breaks.
Despite my beefs with NPR, I listen to professionally produced podcasts almost exclusively. It's because of the production values.
I like the way Ira Glass just casually reads the sponsor messages along with other show business so it doesn't feel like some packaged insert.
Posted by rsexton at 10:50 PM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2006
Murch Notes
Here are some rough notes I took during a presentation by Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, The Conversation, The English Patient etc.) at SFU on Feb. 17th, 2006. He's one of my all-time heroes so I was very excited (star-struck, even) to see him speak in person.
Whenever possible, I've tried to reinterpret and expand upon the scribblings in my notebook so they more closely approximate sentences but the result is still pretty fragmentary. To make matters worse, Murch speaks in analogies and sidebars (hyperlinks, even) so it will be pretty hard to follow, especially without a transcript of the talk. The event was filmed so I might try and hunt down the video to jog my memory. Anyway, here's my first crack at reconstructing his presentation and my response to it...
Murch is wearing black New Balance sneakers (see Behind the Seen for more on his jogging) and a dark suit. Seems confident, yet loose. Fast on his feet, he is comfortable deviating from prepared remarks. Yesterday's panel session was almost entirely from the hip.
He will focus on writing since he was invited by Praxis, the screenwriting group. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed when he said this because all I wanted to hear about was cutting. In retrospect, I got more than my money's worth.
Warning: this is a very long post.
PART ONE: Pre-editing and working with the script.
The editor is also a writer, he just works with different tools. Adaptation.
Why are features 2 hours long? Exhibition contraints. Theatre owners must get the most out of each film print because they are so expensive.
Before working on any project ask, "does the script resonate with me?" Also make sure it challenges you. Can't be too similar to your pov. The problem of identification.
Sound "punches above its weight" in film. To demonstrate, he blows into the microphone.
Feedback, cyclone, vortex, modulation. Is this about audiences and amplification (see electrical analogies in Behind the Scene)?
Dolby is like ski-wax. Interplay between surround and mono.
Editor as archeologist, sculpter (Tarkovsky).
He likes ten-dollar words. Ex: trans-substantiation.
Trance, resonance. Composition is math and performance is "sonorous air."
Bendai dots. Formula one, racing mods. No idea what this means. Probably another professional analogy.
Doctor/patient analogy. Films often suffer from referred pain. Other professional analogies: tailor and chef. To write is to cook with fire. To play is to cook with water. Density.
"And the light brigade charged". Is he trying to warn us to look for too many "light brigade" scenes?
The script walkthrough: use a stopwatch and time yourself acting out every scene in the film. This would also be a good idea before giving a talk. EMBODIMENT. Pre-visualization. Method filmmaking.
Time each scene twice to bracket your readings and re-do a week later. The script supervisor normally does this too. Compare your times with his/hers. Although this idea was broken up with other comments, I've re-arranged it into a single chunk because of its importance.
Early on in a project (at the speculative stage), send notes to director as a "shot over the bow". Your criticisms have to resonate too. Otherwise, you're just a pain in the ass.
Use whitespace liberally in a script to moderate density. Harmonize with the 1 page per minute rule of thumb. And respect its dominance in all aspects of the business.
Screenplay as blank verse.
Condensation, efficiency, attrition. No idea what this means or if he even used the word "attrition."
PART TWO - Tracking The Assembly
Bespoke suits vs. off the shelf (assembly line). Have to start with "too much fabric." Typical assembly: 30% over taget length. Malenkov's hat. Removing major parts leaves "echoes." I think he's maybe talking about phantom pain here and bringing back the doctor/patient analogy. And I think he means that the echoes of the missing scene are often enough to get the gist, even for a fresh viewer. But, don't cut it out until you've perfected it. Best clothes to be burned in. Be cremated in your best clothes?
Every scene must pull its weight when you have a long assembly (like Cold Mountain).
Murch likes to go running while on location. He drops a coin on a map and runs 4 miles away from where it lands and 4 miles back again for a total of 8 miles. Lit-up orange pylons. Are the pylons in Behind the Seen?
Divide the script into eighths on the page.
Now he is showing us his FileMaker database for each shot in Cold Mountain. I had to laugh because I had spent the last few months battling FileMaker at work every day.
Database fields per scene record (wish I had a copy of this slide): location, one line description, long description, scene #, sequence #, day finished shooting, on set running time, est. running times from ebodied walkthrough (x4), average on set running time, actual running time, est. time expansion factor, actual time expansion factor.
Another try: 1st walkthrough estimate, 2nd walkthrough estimate, script super estimate, average est. time, assembly time, est. time expansion, est. length (time-based, total of film), est. length (page-based), on set time, on set time divided by est. expansion, assembly time divided by on set expansion, scene, core scene #, location, one line desc., sequence #, sc #s, x to y, long description, day finished shooting, on set time, page count, actual edited time in assembly, active/omitted.
Track expansion factor as you go to warn director and in case you need to prepare for a long assembly, which will require some "major surgery."
The running time of a dialogue-heavy scene is harder to predict.
Take advantage of "negative shoot days" in pre-production. Combine hair and makeup tests with filmed rehearsals.
What if all the cast and crew predicted scene timings and bet on them ala Wisdom of Crowds?
What is supposed to go into an assembly anyway? Behind the Seen answers this pretty thoroughly.
Writer/directors, like Minghella, tend to be more willing to deviate from the script.
PART THREE - Robots and Snowflakes
While recording the sound of robot footsteps on THX 1138, he discovered that after more than three robots were on screen, it didn't matter any more if the sound appeared to synch up.
Slide of Chinese characters: tree, woods (2 trees), forest (3 trees). Is this also the point where he shows a scene from the Godfather with up to 3 simultaneous conversations? He struggled with finding the scene (even though he edited the movie) using the DVD menus. I got a kick out of that.
A Media Matrix (4 quadrants):
Repeatable/Unique
Consensual/Private
Consensual/Repeatable: film
Consensual/Unique: theatre
Private/Repeatable: everyday speech genres ("how was your day?"). Not all the way repeatable.
Unique/Private: dreams
In the middle: video games
The staggering number of choices available to the editor: E (n!) -1 represents all possible combinations of shots. This is scary! But video games make these calculations all the time.
Is it just me, or is he a little bit short with the tech support staff? Techies don't always have a lot of patience for other techies, I guess.
Had to cut out most material dealing with slavery to make Cold Mountain a reasonable length.
Apocalypse Now: Redux "probably too much". But ok in the context of DVD.
No test screenings were done on The Conversation or The Godfather. Test screenings began in the Golden Age.
Mentions Gladwell's Blink and the problem of measuring the reasons for unconscious decisions. Ask only one question of test audiences: "would you recommend this film to your friends?" Less is more.
Apocalypse Now, with surround sound, was originally conceived of as an attraction/installation.
Murch changes his film-watching diet. When working on dramatic films, he watches documentaries and vice-versa. Does this so that he can treat dailies as pure footage.
As filmmaking technology offers more and more options, there is increasing tension between two different approaches to filmmaking: the black box model and the snowflake model.
Black box: anything is possible with technology. Fine grained control, personal vision. Planning.
Snowflake*: constraints necessitate compromise, collaboration, and creativity. A sense of urgency and passion.
*snowflake refers to the ice crystals that form when water freezes suddenly, imperfectly and beautifully
More Murch:
http://www.lafcpug.org/feature_murch_speach.html
http://www.transom.org/guests/specialguests/walter_murch.html
http://www.worldtalkradio.com/archive.asp?aid=6871
http://www.bafta.org/site/page420.html
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~glhanson/readings/movies/nyt5.htm
http://www.telluridefilmfestival.org/schedule/06_films/01.html
Posted by rsexton at 09:16 PM | Comments (0)
Page A Day
Update: well, this "page-a-day" thing didn't really pan out for any of us. I'm gonna leave this post up though in the hopes that it will keep alive some of the fervor I had for this idea even though my experiment with it wasn't very successful.
The TV post was my first page in The 2006 Page-a-Day Writing Challenge. Even though I was adapting some stuff I had written previously, I went way over the 14 minute target. A little background: the 14 minute target and the whole philosophy behind The Challenge comes from our pal, Reinhard Engels, the creator of Everyday Systems. Some of us have already started doing shovelglove, "the slegehammer workout."
We're keeping the rules of The Challenge pretty loose, especially when it comes to what is considered a "page." Whatever amounts to 14 minutes of writing or rewriting. I don't think it even has to be writing. Drawings are ok, photos are ok--anything goes. So far, I'm the only one who has decided to blog.
Fellow pagers: Anita, Ben, Landon, Mary Jane, and Pete.
Fellow shovelglovers: Ben, Josh, and Pete.
Posted by rsexton at 12:24 AM | Comments (1)
November 01, 2006
Top 13 Oddities in the History of Television
I've noticed that top 10 lists always get a high ranking on digg, so I figured a top 13 must be even better. In a shameless ploy to drive traffic to my blog, I offer you a list of strange artefacts from the history of television. The list focuses on experiments in production technology and spectatorship.
- The Nipkow Wheel (1884). Paul Nipkow invents a mechanical system for scanning images by passing light through a series of perforations on a spinning wheel. His invention provided the basis for early television experiments along with Karl Ferdinand Braun's cathode ray tube technology.
- The Image Dissector (1920). Philo T. Farnsworth (age 15) sketches a design for what he eventually builds himself in 1927: the first prototype of electronic television.
- Telechrome (1946). Just before his death, mechanical television pioneer John Logie Baird demonstrates a fully electronic system for delivering high-definition colour images in 3D. However, the system was never seriously considered for adoption by government or industry.
- The Quiz Show Scandal (1959). Dashing "egghead" Charles Van Doren admits to cheating on several popular quiz shows forcing game shows to the margins of television where they would remain until the advent of reality tv.
- NASA's Mark-V Field Sequential Camera (1969). NASA records colour images from the Apollo 11 moon landing using a custom-designed lightweight mechanical television camera.
- The Gong Show (1975). A game show/variety show hybrid that thrived on chaos and interruptions, most notably from the judges who could bang the "gong" to dismiss contestants. It provided the template for pseudo-interactive shows like American Idol.
- The Magnavox Odyssey (1977). The first home video game system and the inspiration for Pong and Atari. The first video game "boom" followed soon after.
- The ADAM Computer (1984). A disastrous-selling upgrade to the popular Colecovision game console. Introduced at the end of the first wave of video games following Atari's meltdown. Only one year later, Nintendo was to usher in the next wave of video games.
- The PXL 2000 (1987). Fisher Price introduces the first camcorder for kids that records grainy black and white images on audio cassettes. Sold poorly but was later adopted by groups of underground filmmakers.
- Captain Power and The Soldiers of the Future (1987). A vehicle for Mattel's action figures, featuring interactive battle sequences whereby the toys recognize on-screen targets and register hits and misses.
- Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1988). A comedy series about "a guy named Joel" who is kidnapped by a mad scientist and forced to watch "cheesy movies" aboard a space station. Joel, and his homemade robot companions, are superimposed over the films and make wisecracks throughout. The show actively encouraged "tape-trading" among its fans, which contributed to its 10-year run despite being on marginal networks (it even started out on Minnesota Public Access).
- The BOX (1995). The first interactive music video network with no hosts or commercials, only available to the small home satellite audience (pre-DirecTV). Viewers choose the most popular videos by phoning in to a 900 number.
- ZeD (2002). CBC's now-defunct experiment in viewer-submitted programming, which billed itself as "open source television" and "surreality tv."
Linkography (will be inline soon):
http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/FINE/juhde/baird962.htm
http://www.tvhistory.tv/NASA-Camera.htm
http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/farnsworth.html
http://www.thebox.nl/
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6213/history.html
http://www.ce.org/publications/books_references/digital_america/history/television.asp
http://www.ce.org/publications/books_references/digital_america/history/videogames.asp
http://www.mst3kinfo.com/history/
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gong_Show
http://www.anzwers.org/free/moviewerx/pxlhist.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/quizshow/peopleevents/pande02.html
http://zed.cbc.ca/
Random thoughts and sketches...
Co-Le-Co was an acronym for the Connecticut Leather Company and they were also the maker of the popular Cabbage Patch dolls. They went bankrupt soon after introducing the ADAM and my family was able to purchase one at a discount at Canadian Tire--our first home computer. The following year, Nintendo resurrected the ailing video game industry, proving that video games were a new threat to television programming for youth mindshare.
What impact, if any, did game shows have on video games?
Other oddities:
1964 - The Killers. Originally conceived as the first tv movie, it is withdrawn from broadcast because of concern that its depiction of violence would offend audiences in the wake of the Kennedy assasination. One of the earliest eruptions in the ongoing "violence on television" debate.
HBO first to encrypt satellite TV signalOn The Air
Seiko TV watch
Super Mario Bros. Super Show
Quicktime 1.0 May 1991
Pippen, PhotoCD
DVHS
Hi8
SCOLA
Nipkow , Farnsworth, Baird, Bell Labs, Goldmark, Zworykin, Sarnoff, NASA
Posted by rsexton at 11:29 PM | Comments (1)