Just Some Guy Who Works Here

Back to the Beginning, Again

2011-11-17T12:16:00.001-05:00

One of the things that strikes me again and again as I see tour groups come through the film building is the difficulty that people have in asking meaningful questions, even when it’s really important that they do so. It’s hard for people to put up their hand and ask a question that would give them sufficient information to make a decision. Most of them just stand there and look around as if seeing a hallway will provide enough information from which to select a future college for their student.

But with a little banter back and forth, a few pointed questions at them, a slow painful response, you can build up a back-and-forth exchange that will finally allow them to express their concerns and address their uncertainties. It takes time to build that interaction and time for it to unfold. Usually that time is lacking.

I see this also with first year students in class. Everyone sits there uncertain what a reasonable question would be. What, they think, do I even know enough of, to be confused about. They’re baffled by the whole thing and sit there in a puddle of inertia waiting for clarity to simply strike them.

How do you break people out of that and get them going?

The real goal is to get them finally to a level where new questions can be self-answered or they have sufficient skills to discover the answer. But, fundamentally, you need to learn how to discover what is the question that should be asked right now?

So I see all of this as much the same problem, the problem of being a beginner. At the earliest stages of learning anything you have no vocabulary, no methods, no history, no resources, and often no hope. It’s depressing.

It is problematic, but if you make your way past this initial stage with even some modest amount of understand under your belt you might find yourself, through positive actions, miraculously able to do things , which then allows you to feel better about what you’re doing, maybe even good, which then makes it easier to learn the rest of it all. A rolling stone gathers good will and then goes faster, sometimes even in the right direction.

If you miss that turn in the road of simply being able to do things, you will, mostly likely, never succeed. Energy sapped, you’ll give up and walk away disappointed and disgruntled thinking you failed. Mostly, you never had a chance. The deck was stacked against you and you didn’t even know that.

So what’s it take to show up at the right place with just enough skills to do something that makes you feel good enough to keep going and eventually get much better?

Part of it is understanding that there is an emotional landscape that we’re walking across with dips and hills, elegant vistas and murky views, quiet times and hectic days. We’ll experience a range of emotions and feelings that we need at times to embrace or ignore, but always realize that it’s a flow that’s as natural as the passing of the day. Some days it rains, some days the sun shines brightly, but it will always change and then change again.

We also need to feel that there’s actually a path we can follow. Even more useful, that there could be a map to show us where we are, where we’ve been and what the options are for future exploration. With out a map to discover the terrain we’re not just lost, but lost with no insights about where we even want to be. Maybe we’re actually right where we want to be, but we just don’t know that.

Questions are like surveyors sent out ahead to draw the landscape, plot the pathways, find the way and then report back information that we can use to make better informed decisions. Without strong questions we’re just wandering in the wilderness, just short of being totally lost.

The Hampshire way is to ask, ask again, and ask someone else. None of the answers are necessarily true. So not only do you need good questions, but you also need to question the answers. It’s up to you, with strong questions and valid answers, to build the map to find out both where you are and where your really want to go.

gunther

What Do You Call Those?

2011-11-13T14:25:00.001-05:00

This week Johnathan Singer, the person who printed Jerry Liebling's fantastic show, visited Kane Stewart's photography class and spoke for about three hours. He was quite interesting and shared a lot of background information about the process and his studio.

It's really remarkable that even after Jerry has died he's still leading the way for us, showing us what photography has to offer. HIs show in the film building now is a collection he curated himself and had printed on large format Epson flatbed printers at Singer Editions in Boston. The images are from Jerry's original film negatives scanned at high resolution, lightly processed in Photoshop and mounted and framed in Jerry's traditional white frames.

It's a great show and Jerry was really happy with the results, seeing things in the prints that were not possible with previous darkroom processes. It shows that photography isn't tied to any one medium or process. It isn't a fixed concept, but a constantly evolving approach to capturing images from our lives, from the world and sharing them in the form of prints on the wall.

These images are much larger than we've seen before which just by itself allows us to see deeper into the image, with new discoveries, new appreciations. I feel inspired to shoot more myself. It's like Jerry is there leading us down the hallway as usual, pointing to things we should see and waiting for us to hang our own prints to talk about. It's all quite inspiring, motivating and emotional.

As always, thanks Jerry.

gunther

A Three Light Night

2011-10-16T22:11:00.000-04:00

Thinking in small units is sometimes a big help.

What the heck are you talking about?

Constraints. If all you have is a one foot ruler, then all of your measurements end up being in units of one foot. If all you have in a light kit are three lights, then you start thinking in terms of a three light setup. If all you have available to you to shoot with over the weekend is a Canon HV-30 camcorder then thatʼs what youʼre going to use. Life gets easier, well sort of, but you see my point.

We donʼt really have to know how to use all of the cameras in the world, just the ones we can get our hands on. Suddenly the world is a little easier to understand, well, at least for a while it is.

Iʼve been reading a very interesting book (Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner) on the history of audio recording and the mutual effects that both technology and commerce have on what we think is a viable and desirable recording, or more accurately the sound of a recording. Weʼve gone from the attempt to capture a faithful acoustic recoding of what it sounded like to be in a small room with a bunch of musicians to electronically manipulating sound recordings to produce previously unheard sounds and effects.

The evolving commerce of records, tapes, and CDs over the years has taken itʼs toll on what passes as good music. The complexity of multi-track recording moves a lot of decision making away from the performance of the music to the mixing of the music.

The early Beatles recordings were faithful acoustically, certainly more immediate and most likely more fun to make. The performance was the recording. Later with 24 track tape decks, the song was manufactured in the control room on playback, not during the recording. That meant the performance part was really just collecting elements from which you would later build the song. You were just making parts for the whole, more like filmmaking than a faithful live performance.

This approach of after the fact mixing led to many heated discussions in the control room and fostered conflict among the participants. A lot of bands didnʼt survive the method. It wasnʼt what they signed up for.

Itʼs no longer can you play the drums and sing, but later can you survive the discussion of what kind of filter should be applied to the sound and how many small clips from multiple takes can you cut and past together to produce a completely new sound. Many additional people get to throw their opinion up against the performers view of what they should sound like. More people, more opinions, more arguments. Bands now need counselors to keep harmony on the emotional plane, not just in the music.

So thatʼs the other side of constraints - how many. When your options multiply and more and more people have a vote in each decision the kind of work thatʼs happening changes from a maker to a manufacturer, from artists to committees. This is the dangerous side of the concept of collaboration.

gunther

The History of Photography

2011-07-30T10:24:00.003-04:00

Jerome Liebling died this week. I hadn't seen him for almost a year and I knew his health was an issue. He founded the film/photo program at Hampshire College and taught here from the beginning until 1990 when he retired. When I read the date 1990 in the Daily Hampshire Gazette article I was quite surprised. For me Jerry had just left a few years ago, but I was wrong, quite wrong.

When he retired he had a wonderful photo show in the library gallery and I had the honor of helping to hang a couple of walls of his photographs. Toward the end of the day there was a discussion about how to hang two photos (part of a larger group of images) - which should be on which side. I said the distant shot should be on the left and the closeup shot should be on the right as if you were looking into the group of photos (scanning from left to right you moved into the image), not away. Everyone paused and looked at Jerry. He thought a moment and said I was right. Bingo, best evaluation ever. Jerry though I was right. Hah.

I think I took his concentrators class four times and each time my photos got better. Jerry could make a walk down a hallway a memorable experience with questions, comments and stories. It was the stories that surprised me the most. I loved his photos, but his stories were even better which I guess was the real reason his photographs were so good. He saw the story in the image and as a result each single image had the depth of a ten minute story in it, not just the length of the click.

I always said when you talked to Jerry you were talking to the history of photography and you felt it. After he retired that history, without him, took many odd turns at times. Photography seemed to flounder and not know what to do with itself. Fashion took over and every year there was a new "look" to how photographs should be made. The classic documentary photo was deemed old fashioned and out came "text". You had to have "text" somewhere in the image to be hip or look like you were "making a statement". Gender politics took over for several years, and hasn't completely disappeared, making photos an ideological opportunity, though not really interested in photography at all.

It all thrashed around. Color came and went and then came back again. Size has always been troublesome and unresolved. There were arguments about frames, but everyone has forgotten that now. Digital was the new kid, then the only kid, then still a kid. Finally everyone just got tired of the changes every season and it's all settled down again. Most photos look like classic documentary photos after all. What a waste of effort. It should be a lesson for all of us, but it isn't, is it.

So Jerry really was the history of photography - from World War II until now. The people who knew him, were students of his and, ever widening, were students of his students have had that history touch them.

The power of photography is in the story that's captured by the image and the relationship of the photographer to that story. The method of a great photographer is to have the camera disappear in their hands. The measure of a great photograph is to have the photographer disappear and leave only the image and the story. Jerry's photos are still telling his stories and will forever. Thanks Jerry.

gunther

What Works Around, Goes Around

2011-07-15T08:52:00.001-04:00

Thankfully there are a lot of smart people out there poking Final Cut X with a stick to see what it'll do. Sometimes that's even useful. On Ken Stone's web site Steve Martin posts a method of making and using disk images to keep your work separated from other editors on a station. It's easy and clever and has the added advantage of allowing us to also edit across a network as we did previously with Final Cut 7. So that takes care of my two big complaints against the new kid.

It would have been nice if Apple has just mentioned this right from the beginning, but maybe they didn't know about it either. I can't tell if I think that's good or bad. Hmm.

I surprised myself yesterday, editing in Final Cut X, with the ease of copying a "look", or rather matching a color pallet from one shot to several others. That was useful. It gave a more unified look to a quick montage sequence I cut using good and not so good shots.

I had the RGB parade view up (to give me insight into what's off with the color) and I was also using a second monitor for the Events window which made it much easier to see the clips I was working with. So, all in all a pretty good experience with our new friend (or is it the devil in disguise, just tempting us).

I haven't had as much time working in Final Cut X as I would like because we're, as usual most summers, remodeling the labs in the media basement. This year I cut down the depth of the desktops by about a foot. I built them quite a while ago to fit all of the video equipment we used to have at a station: decks (DV and VHS), video monitor, two 17" or 19" CRT monitors, a tower computer, hard drives, (Zip and Jaz drives, remember), a mixer, headphones, speakers, Final Cut colored keyboard and I'm sure something else, too. Well those days are over. We have much less stuff at a station now and that empty space ends up just collecting dust bunnies and tumbleweed.

Now, we're down to an iMac, an external Raid drive. speakers and headphone, a regular Mac keyboard, an Epson flatbed scanner and a couple of desk lamps. A little sleeker and, I hope, a little sexier. I still have to stop off at Target and get some more of those chrome desk lamps that everyone likes.

We used to have a couple of stations facing each other, but now they all look in the same direction at the large projection screen so it'll be easier to do training sessions in the lab. We're also taking over the old tech shop space and converting it to a classroom. That will relieve the use of the studio as a classroom space and get it back to being a real shooting space again, something we all need desperately.

So lots of real work to do yet, but the results are already paying off in the cleaner look and feel of the lab, which always makes it easier to maintain, and the open-ended potential of an adjacent, high-end, media classroom. We were surprised to notice that we'll end up with three adjacent spaces all with large projection capabilities and good traffic flow from one to the next.

Oh, and we have the new InfoBar concept to work with up on the main floor of the library – we'll have a public presence for a change (that's a whole other post to talk about). Looks like it could be a fun year.

gunther

Working Your Way Around

2011-07-04T13:10:00.000-04:00

So I've had a little time to work in Final Cut Pro X – just a couple of days. But first we really do have to modify the name. It's now "officially" FInal Cut X, no Pro in the name please. Now I'm not mad about it, not crazed like some have been, but let's be honest it's not a pro app based on what's still in our heads from past experiences. Sure it still has some bugs if you go by the discussions, but it is a good application for editing video in an easy, yet powerful way. I want to use it and I think a lot of students will also. It's what iMovie should have been.

If you remember, my biggest complaint was that it wants to give you access to all the footage and projects all the time. For a home computer that's OK, but not in a multi-user environment, nor particularly in a business environment, no, not at all. Is there a way around that – yes.

In the old days the Avid Media Composer had the same problem. All we did was add our name to the name of the folder and it disappeared. The software could only see the 5.xMedia folder and nothing else.

Well, same thing here. Final Cut X makes two folders. One is the Final Cut Events folder for the footage and the other is the Final Cut Projects folder for the sequence (see even the application doesn't call it Pro). All you have to do is rename or better yet move them into a new folder with your name on it and the application can no longer see your project and footage. Easy.

OK, it's not going to be easy, people are going to get it wrong and lose track of their footage and project, but in the end it'll be OK. Does it bother me that I can't output to tape? No, in my world tape is dead, no loss there. Do I think the color correction is a little clunky - umm, yes, but I"m far from being a perfectionist. In fact I may be the perfect customer for Final Cut X – lots of in-house projects, mostly short form and working in a lot of differing formats.

So, will I toss out the old Final Cut Pro Studio? No way. People are still working on projects with that and I suspect people will also start projects with that. Will I switch over to Adobe Premier to edit? No, probably not, but I am interested in their DVD authoring application to make interactive Blu-ray disks and once I've got the whole package of applications maybe I'll use Premiere a bit.

In the end it's been useful to see that a monolithic approach to our problems isn't such a good idea after all and that we should have a broader range of options for doing work. It's also important to notice that, for a lot of us, the work has changed and the concept of the monolith video editor is no longer true either. It's a new day for all of us in all respects.

It's also been amusing to see how vocal everyone has been. We don't usually get as rilled up as this. That has made us feel like a community of users, but also with differing opinions and different needs. Let's keep talking to each other and help all of us get through this transition into the future. As we say at Hampshire we're driving fast into the fog. Good luck.

gunther

Final Pro – It's not just software, it's a business.

2011-06-28T12:53:00.001-04:00

Oh my goodness, what a ruckus. Just when you though you knew the lay of the land and the direction working in media was headed we suddenly get involved in a four car accident in the middle of a busy intersection with thousands of bystanders gasping and running around in circles shouting that aliens have landed. Well it sort of seems that way.

What really happen was that Apple computer said some things about new software that most of us impressionable youths took to mean one thing and then the reality was something different. How different depends on what kind of work you do - broadcasting, web-based, feature films, art, student work. If you have clients you were mad. If you work for yourself it was odd and maybe you were mad. If you just play around it was great. Pick your favorite. Oh wait, I'm in all of them - drat.

So I've always said that we have no real loyalty to any software, we just like to use the best tools we can find. For quite a while that has been Final Cut Pro. When I said that people would smile and say, oh sure, you're always going to go with Apple no matter what they have, right.

Well, maybe not, but, sure I do, have always, liked Apple products and I would just expect that to continue, right, but the bottom line is I have to get work done for me and for a lot of film students in the easiest, safest, most reasonable way possible. Over time I've built up expectations, developed an approach, experienced successes and failures and come to think that the way we work is the norm and is a reasonable, thoughtful method. If a new software doesn't fit into that method I stop fast and say, whoa, what's that. That doesn't seem right. In fact that's wrong. Stop. Corporate rhetoric doesn't play a part in shaping what I think is an appropriate approach, just my personal experience. Hype quickly disappears with a few frustrations under your belt.

So what's the new reality? Well, I think we've all agreed the new software isn't Final Cut Pro, it's iMovie Pro, but wait, it's a really good replacement for the old iMovie (not that I ever liked iMovie, but I've gotten over that). For some people the new app is just what they need, a really powerful, sophisticated, more reasonable, more understandable iMovie replacement (upgrade).

For the Pro crowd, the business crowd, the people with clients standing behind them it's not enough. It may not even be usable. For me the worst part is the lack of accommodating multiple users. The application thinks you own the computer, all the footage on it is yours, and it would be a good thing to have access to that footage all the time. That's a problem, it's not what I want to have happen and I need control over that. I need to hide projects and footage from other users. I can live with almost everything else.

When the new fiscal year starts next week I'll buy a copy of Final Cut Pro X, throw in some clips and see if I can figure out a work around to hide projects and files I don't want seen. Either I can do that or I can't. After I find out I'll decide what's next. Luckily it's not the end of the world, it's just an inconvenience and has added more uncertainty to the media world that we really needed, but in a few months we'll all be working some how.

gunther (1)

Hey, Watch Out, I'm Backing Up

2011-05-15T20:42:00.004-04:00

There were things in those golden days of yesterday, well last week really, that did help us out, sometimes more than the help we get currently, in recovering from a project crash. Mostly it's the fact that we shot on tape and after we captured the footage, we put the tape on the shelf as a backup. It sat there until, or if, we needed it and it did that really well.

Now days, when we’re shooting on flash cards, after we “ingest” our footage and erase the card to get ready to shoot again, we don’t actually have any backup. We’re walking the tightrope wire without a net, heck we're walking with out a wire. It’s dangerous out there. What should we be doing?

You would think this would be easy to explain to people, but hey, you’d be wrong. So footage first. The easy way to get your flash card based footage into Final Cut is to use the built-in Log and Transfer window (say you’re shooting with one of the Canon Vixia’s), set your Easy Setup, set your destination, set your format, select the clips and let Final Cut do all of the transcoding from, what, AVCHD files into, what, say a ProRes LT format. It’s easy, relatively fast and you can tell what’s going on.

Yes it’s true that a lot of the time we might use MPEG-Streamclip to transcode our H.264 files into ProRes, but that is, you have to admit, adding an additional step in the process. But say we did do it inside Final Cut, what afterwards should we back up? Well, if you waited until after you erased the flash card the only thing you can backup is the footage you just imported and now it’s in ProRes, which might mean that it’s larger now than it was when it was on the card. Hmm.

Yep, you should have made copies of the files on the card (first) instead, but remember a lot of formats are susceptible to becoming orphans if you don’t also copy the file structure completely intact (meaning Final Cut can’t actually see them without the menu structure – ouch). Also remember we’re trying to save on space here so making a “disk image” using Disk Utility and also one that's “compressed” of all the files on the card is a really safe way to go. You can then burn that compressed disk image onto a DVD and put it on the shelf, just like we did with tape. With luck you’ll never need to see that disk again, but it’s there if you do need it. When you open it it’s like you were just back at the beginning again and will import the files using Final Cut and transcode them just the same way. Which also means you need to know what those settings are because you might need them again, right. Hey, that’s what screen captures are for – use Grab.

Now some people don’t like to burn DVDs because it costs too much and takes too much time and what the heck I’ve got a really big hard drive, I’ll just pull them over with the rest of the project and save all that effort. What do you think I bought this hard drive for anyway.

Whoops, you just bought a “single point of failure” scenario and the clock is ticking. If all the elements of your project are on the same hard drive, if anything happens to that drive you’ve lost everything. That’s not backing anything up at all, it’s putting all of your eggs in one basket and then kicking it. The goal is to have several places for your project to live, giving you options and the possibility for re-birth (miracle, miracle) if one location “bites the dust”. That’s cowboy lingo for dies, partner.

But wait, this is important too – it's the second part, the organization, the real work – the sequence. You still need a copy of the “project” file which you should have also kept a copy of – in still yet another safe place – say like on a USB “flash drive” (because project files are relatively small). Then if your original hard drive takes a dangerous spill on the downhill luge track you whip out your trusty USB flash stick with the project file and those dusty DVDs of your footage, pop them into a computer station and suck your project back to life. It’s easy, well it’s easier that going out and shooting it all over and making a new edit – isn’t it?

So this needs to become a habit in the way we work. Sure we’re just working on a class assignment and if it all blows up you can just do another one, maybe better, so who cares. You’re right, but we’re also trying to build good work habits and learn what the real workflow is (workflow is the secret password – don't tell). So try it out. Just be careful when you back up you don’t run over anyone.

gunther (4)

Close to the End and A New Beginning

2011-05-04T16:09:00.001-04:00

We're almost at the end of another fast year. The pace has picked up dramatically this week since all the final assignments are due on Friday. At this time of year I often get a student or two that finally realize they might actually need to know how to edit in Final Cut, but not this year. Everyone seems to be already working under their own power and while maybe a little anxious, are chugging along on their own steam.

So it's slightly odd that at this time of the year I'm looking for an overriding approach to what we do, and will do again, in the fall semester. Happily I think I've actually found it. There is a link off of http://99percent.com web site about a Kevin Kelly post discussing the necessity of remaining a newbie about learning software – for the rest of your life.

Wow, that's just our philosophy. We're always learning new applications, new methods, new approaches both for good reasons of progress and for bad reasons of fashion or following the hot new thing.

Kelly's quote is really "You will be a newbie forever." I changed that slightly to: You will be a student forever, which directs it, I hope, away from only a techie mindset and reminds us that we're always going to be learning something through out life. If we're only in college for four years there's more time out of it learning that spent in it learning.

What we ought to get out of college is to be really skillful at learning all of the other things we'll need to know later and to be able to learn it more easily than when we started college and maybe more importantly learn all of this while you're still in college and could really use it. Right.

The other part is the asking, making, and sharing knowledge with others, all linked parts of learning and living in the world.

Making, we know, is one of the best ways to finally understand how those theoretical concepts play out in the world. Without theory we have to try things out every time to discover what the outcome might be. With theory we can project ahead what an outcome could be, try it out to prove the theory's validity, then build on that. The more correct our prediction the greater the reach we have in thinking things through. It's using that leverage, validated by direct experimentation, that gives us power.

The other part is asking questions of each other, the world itself, and oh yes, ourselves that keeps the dialog of learning going. The process of the dialog helps refine our thinking, our rhetoric, our plans and it can also show us when we're way off base, or our thinking is just fuzzy.

Sharing our knowledge with others is a terrific way to realize what we don't really understand after all and to also realize, proudly, what we do grasp and own as our personal area of expertise. Too often we gloss over what we think we understand until, whoops, we're called up short by having to clearly explain it to someone else. Working an idea through in order to be able to explain it is the best way to really understand it.

My work target now will be to develop ways to build a program to develop the skills necessary to give us the best beginner mode possible. This isn't just a button you can push to run the "easy scenario" of life, but a mindset that gives you an edge in learning the next anything. With beginner mode skills (BMS) you can shorten the cycle of learning and deepen your insights and the final outcome. CEB: Certified Expert Beginner. Cool.

gunther (2)

An Epic Change

2011-04-25T20:52:00.007-04:00

There aren't many times that I'm astonished, but this is one of them. The web-things are all vibrating because James Cameron has just (who knows when "just" was – recently at least) bought 50 Red Epic cameras. Wow, that's true conceptual art. Can you imagine what that really looks like. 50 boxes of $58,000 cameras sitting all in a row. Amazing as a concept, what would it be in reality?

(OK, it's true that Peter Jackson bought 30 Red Epics to shoot the Hobbit with, but maybe both of these together is even more impressive. What do you think?)

So much for the hype and yelling, what's it really mean? Well first it's a validation of the Red concept and the Epic format in particular. This is a camera that shoots 5120x2700 for a 5K format. That's 6 times the area of an HD camera. On top of that the camera body (just the body, so you can triple that for the full effect) weighs 5 pounds. The lens will probably weigh more than the camera. Talk about freedom of movement. And it's got 13 stops of exposure.

OK, just before we hyper-ventilate what's the point? It's the business model guys, it's all new. It's also the workflow, not that it's that new, but that he's committed to it in a really big way. It's the future of making (big) films. It's the future period. Film is dead, tape is dead. Really.

This is real trickle down technology. Ronald Reagan was an economic fool, with the highest deficit, at the time, ever (only supplanted by George W. Bush thanks to years of an unfunded war) and Reagan's trickle down economics was just voodoo (the rich kept all the money). Later Reagan actually raised taxes to try and get out of it – even he knew it was a disaster. However, now, this kind of technology/business trickle down (which actually does benefit all of us by permeating the work process) will change the business landscape of filmmaking at the high end and cascade down the food chain to even our level.

We can also see how this all plays out as a workflow. We shoot at really high resolutions – all digital – edit high (isn't that what the new Final Cut Pro and Thunderbolt really mean – really high data rates, meaning large files, meaning large frame sizes), compress it all down and distribute at smaller resolutions (meaning HD – isn't it amazing that small size now means HD). On the distribution (selling side) we're now looking at radically many different sizes and ways to sell, rent, give away the work. Work high, sell low – but often. Kind of an odd mantra, but there it is. It's seldom you get to stare the future in the face, but here it is.

Oh, look, they've got the rods! I knew I needed the rods.

gunther (4)

Thinking It Through Again

2011-04-24T19:36:00.002-04:00

It’s time to come around again with a new re-evaluation of what we make and how we make it, or at least to notice all of those things. We tell stories: strange stories, normal stories, idealistic stories, real stories, feminist stories, ironic post-modern stories, common stories. We tell stories. It doesn’t matter how we put them together, just how people view them later. We’re never really judged by how we make them, just how good, or effective, they are as we watch them. So let’s think a little about the range of the forms of what we make.

There’s still images. It’s hard to tell a story with one photo, so we make a sequence. (How ironic this is. I’m the guy that loves to make posters in Pages. That’s one image to a page. Yes, maybe it’s not a story, but more of a statement. Hmm, I’ll have to think about that more.) How many? Who knows, maybe 10 is the magic number for a sequence – beginning, middle, end, with transitions, and a poignant moment or two, or three. We shoot stills, edit them down, sequence them and put them up on a wall, or in a book, on on a web site or make them into a slide show. It’s Photoshop images dropped into iPhoto, InDesign, iWeb, or Dreamweaver. It’s Keynote or Powerpoint (poor thing). It’s printing out books from iPhoto or Blurb.

Well, with a slide show we also have the option of adding sound and sometimes we do: real sounds, life, people talking, questions and answers, narration, music, sound effects, interviews, reflections, summations. It ends up as a slide presentation or a movie of slides and sounds. We make the audio in GarageBand, SoundTrack, Final Cut Pro, ProTools and drop it into iMovie, with the honestly really great Ken Burns effect of panning, scanning and zooming into and across the images. There’s the more formal Soundslides for a traditional journalism approach, or the sophisticated “key-framed” Final Cut Pro versions. While I love Keynote, it doesn’t do audio well at all, so it’s always silent (for me).

We’ve arrived at movies, made with stills, audio, film, and the stuff we shoot ourselves. It could be in iMovie, but mostly we’re in Final Cut Pro with excursions into Color, Motion, SoundTrack, and AfterEffects. iMovie is better than it was, but not as good as it should be and Final Cut, is, well it’s waiting to change and we’re waiting with it. It’s been a good friend, along with Premiere and Avid (both from long ago), but Final Cut has been there when we really needed it and it came through.

Then there’s sound alone, not lonely, but it can be if it wants to be. We can work for free in Audacity, or slightly free in GarageBand, almost in Logic, but it’s realistically just for music. SoundTrack is helpful, but mostly as a utility and finally ProTools is where we would all want to work in long form multitrack audio.

So that’s a broad range and long list of applications that help us with our work, some a little, some a lot. What I’m always looking for is a button in each of these applications that says “better story” and, no, it’s not really there, simply hoped for; just as there is no button on the piano that says “better music”. It’s all in the skills of the person playing that makes the piano turn out sounds that we love to hear. Alas, there’s no button in our software that gives us a better story. It’s us, thinking it up, working it out, thinking it through that makes the story better – hopefully. We’re the key. So what we need for ourselves is better skills, more experience, and a renewed understanding that we experience and understand the world through stories, not new software at all.

gunther

Let There Be Light, But First Throw Me A Line

2011-04-08T20:10:00.005-04:00

So in the beginning it was all about light. That sort of makes it an optical universe doesn’t it? Kind of a what you see is what you get world and what you see really is what gets lit; thereby allowing you to see, or rather, more bluntly, to force you to see what we (filmmakers or gods, remember) want you to see. No, no, look over here, now over there. Movies are all about controlling our vision – in the service of telling the story. We point you to the images to follow, to think about, by lighting them well. We make them pop out from the background to catch and hold our attention.

OK, so how does that happen really? It starts with placing the subject(s), and then placing the camera in relationship to the line. Once we have the line we can start. Line? What’s the line? Oh, that’s the line we make in the air between one subject and another subject, you know, describing the line of action. The line that connects those two elements is important in the decision of where to place the camera. We’re always going to be on one side or the other of that line. Once we pick a side, that’s the side we’re on. We can’t really cross it and make the shots work. We stay on one side or the other. Sometimes in life it’s like that also, you have to pick a side and stay with it. (OK, that’s just silly metaphysics.)

If you have two people in a scene you place them in the set and draw an imaginary line between them, then place the camera on one side of that line. That’s so we can cut back and forth between shots of the two people and still have them look like they’re talking with each other. No matter where we place the camera, if we’re on the correct side of the line, they still look like they’re talking to each other. We can sell the shot. It works. If we cross to the other side of the line and back again it all falls apart. Now the directions they’re facing when they speak no longer makes sense – we’re crossing the line.

The reality, however, is that line is often quite dynamic. It moves. If it moves we have to move the camera with it (or before it) to stay on the correct side of the line. The two people can circle around each other or walk to different parts of the set, but they’re always connected by the line.

If we watch them change position, we’ve also changed the side of the line we’re on, but once it’s changed we still can’t cross it. We can watch it change (that’s OK and useful), but we can’t hop over it and come back. We can watch the guy on the left walk past the woman on the right and he then becomes the person on the right and she becomes the person on the left. The line has changed (sort of), but we’re still only on one side of it.

With a standard interview often the subject (talent) talks to a person sitting just next to the camera and the camera never actually moves, just zooms in or out a little. This is the easiest setup, and for what I do, the most common. Once you have that subject to subject axis and where the camera is placed in respect to that line, then we can start to light. I usually place the key light (the main source) to shine on the side of the face that's turned away from the camera – the short side. A back light goes on the other side of the talent (opposite side to the key) and hits the back of the head and shoulders, popping the talent out from the darker background. Depending on how much contrast you want you can add a fill light or use a reflector, again on the opposite side from the key, to fill in the shadows and control the contrast range.

It’s easy with two people and harder and harder with more, but more people (more lines) also allows options for selecting different lines – between different people – meaning we could be in different places and have it all work. Here’s our shot, now cut to a different line, on a different side. Wow. This is what a director does, figure out where the lines of action are and where the camera(s) should be placed. (What do we see in the foreground, what do we see in the background?) Again and again. And, yes, directing the actors, let’s not forget that.

Most of the people – audio, lighting, camera operator, and a lot of others – can do their jobs without a director, but placing the camera and directing the talent are all the obligation of the director. You always have to remember everyone on the set can make a movie without you, that’s why other people may have really valuable contributions, if you have time (and the wisdom) to listen to them.

gunther (3)

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?

2011-04-04T22:01:00.008-04:00

So it’s time for some harsh words. OK, it’s not that harsh, it’s just frank. Yes, that’s it, let’s be frank. Most of what first year film students shoot isn't very good. Ouch, that’s a little harsh. No, no, it’s frank. OK, it’s frank, but really, is that true?

This last year I had the opportunity to look at the footage that first year film students (that’s people shooting on real film) transfered from film into Final Cut Pro on the transfer station. You just sit down at the computer, open the folders and look at all the clips. They’re not good. (Now I have to confess that it's also true that everyone gets better as the semester progresses, and in the end, they can turn out a product they can be proud of – mostly.)

I guess part of this is also a comparison against the footage of the first year video students who shoot with easy to use HD video cameras. They get good footage immediately (it's not them so much as it is the camera), but the footage of the film folks is mostly dark (getting the exposure right means using a light meter correctly), out of focus (it's really dim in a film viewfinder, not at all like looking at the image in a video camera - you would be surprised), and finally and most damning, they’re all the same. What do you mean their all the same?

Well, they’re not exactly all the same footage, but they do have remarkably similar aspects. Lots of shots of trees, women walking in the woods, close ups of people in dorm rooms, shots out the window, women swirling in large skirts, etc. It’s odd, jumping from student to student and seeing very similar kinds of shots. Why is that?

I think it’s because it feels awkward going to public places with a real film camera (like a $6,000 Arri 16mm). It’s a little over the top, at least unusual; people turn around and look. So the result is that film students go to safe places to shoot. Not what you’d expect is it?

The general public is very used to seeing people shoot with video cameras all the time. No one really stops and wonders what you’re doing, they know. Ho-hum. Film cameras, however, are exotic – lots of chrome and black leather with long lenses and a very different profile, not that of a video camera at all. And the sound they make is the sound of a film camera. It’s unique. You know the sound when you hear it, but few people have actually heard it live, just in the movies or on TV. So people stop and look, and listen. If you’re looking for attention, then that’s the way to get it, if not, then you go where no one is around and shoot.

I guess that’s what filmmaking asks of you. Can you shoot where ever you want and not feel self-conscious or awkward. That’s a lot to ask of a first year student, but, I guess, that’s what separates the amateurs from the pros – the ability to do just that.

When I was shooting with my 8x10 view camera, at night, I’d get startled people looking at it and wondering what the heck I was doing, but mostly they kept on walking by. Except for the weirdos. They stop and tell you where they're going, what they’re doing, where they just came from, and that they have a sick dog at home. Stuff like that. Mostly I’d just nod and try and look busy with my light meter or write something in my notebook. It’s hard standing there for 10 or 12 minutes timing an exposure, holding the slider from the sheet film holder in front of the lens when a car goes by, starting and stopping the stopwatch to keep track of the time and also not get distracted by the people standing there telling you their life story, or some story at least as they take another drink from the paper bag.

So, yes, I know how it is to be out with a camera that draws a crowd and still try to get the shot you need. It may be the hardest part of photography and filmmaking, but you go anyway. As a producer or director of your own film if you’re not out there where you think the action is you end up with just generic footage and a weak film. It’s not really showing off using a flashy camera, it’s showing up.

gunther

But Officer I Was Framed

2011-03-28T16:30:00.022-04:00

I’ve found, over the years, that the most fundamental mistake video people starting out make is incorrect framing of the shot. Good framing gives balance to the image and subtly tells us where to look. Usually that’s at the people talking or the action happening. Film people make the same mistake, in addition to poor exposure and a few other problems I'll talk about sometime.

It’s surprising camera work isn't better though given the number of photos we all take. In Photography we call it composition and it's job is to find that "decisive moment", both in time and space, and capture the shot. Quite frankly that moment is really found later, looking at the negatives, or more currently, going over your images in Aperture or Lightroom (software for the digital photographer who can take 2,000 to 3,000 shots for a project. The number of shots we take now is a significant difference between the film way and the digital way - also something we should talk about later.). You're always trying to get the shot, but, as a photographer, you only know about it, really, later.

In video, it too, is an ongoing task to find the correct composition, but it's continuous and lasts over time. In this situation we call it framing, but we also talk about composition. We know if we have the shot while we're shooting. When we stop shooting we know, right then, if we've got it or have to shoot the scene over again, or with documentary work simply have to keep shooting. True, we may not know if we have all of the shots to tell the story we want to (that's sometimes because the story changes on us), but we can decide if we have this shot done well or not.

With both, we have, right up front during the shooting process, the power to draw the eye and help the viewer focus on what we think is the important part. That is if we frame the shot that way. If the shot is too wide we start to wander around with our eyes checking out what’s in the frame. You know I used to have a floor lamp just like that one in the back and look at those drapes, they’re terrible, wait, what did she just say. Missed it.

Good framing allows us to edit out the extra visual elements that draw attention away from what we’re supposed to follow. Too little information in the image and we start making up things, too much and we’ve got way too much information to process. Yes, it’s a balancing act. (The other tool we use to draw the eye and direct attention is lighting, but that’s still yet another topic for later – hey, how many is that now.)

If you’re shooting with a tripod it’s not going to be that difficult to keep stuff out once you decide on what the frame includes. If you’re shooting on a tripod, turn off auto-focus and set it manually; otherwise the camera starts to “hunt” with the lens and that’s really distracting. You zoom in all the way, focus on the persons eyes, then pull out and adjust the placement of the subject in the frame (with the camera, you don't move the people, well you do move the people, but that's before and that's all about directing and that's, yes, you guessed it, a topic for later.). Think what would make a nice photo for their mother to have. That’s it.

We don’t center a person in the frame, but slide them off slightly to one side or the other giving them empty space to talk into (this is particularly true now with the 16:9 aspect ratio of the frame). The empty space is in front of them, not behind their head. You don’t want someone's nose pressed up against the edge of the frame – that hurts. Slide over to the side to open up empty talking space. Think of a cartoon speech bubble floating in the frame (not above them, but to the side). Is there enough space for their words? Conversely, we don’t want them to feel lonely in a big wide shot that they’re only a little part of. Make the subject the star of the show, an important person, the center of attraction (rather the off-center of attraction).

While you usually don’t want to cut off the top of their heads, the most important element is placing their eyes. They should fall about 2/3rds of the way up the screen and the rest of the face falls where it may. OK, we don’t want to cut off their chin either – watch TV, see how they do it. Watch where the eyes get placed. Finally, TV is good for something after all.

Now here’s the hard part, you want to change the shot occasionally while you’re shooting. What? Well, not while the person is talking, but in between the responses, while you’re asking the questions. Just zoom in a little, but enough so it’s noticeable. It can’t be too little because when we edit those shots together if there isn’t enough difference between the two it looks weird – it jumps instead of cuts. It has to look intensional, not like you bumped the camera.

Generally we start wide and work our way in closer and closer. Then you may want to zoom way out wide again and start over. Remember when we edit this later the answers may not end up back to back in the order the person said them, but in the order that makes the most sense for the story we’re trying to tell. That’s why we edit, to make more sense of reality or at least to improve it. We’re like gods. OK, my therapists says the same thing, but I say filmmakers, gods, what’s the difference.

When you get really good with the camera you could try zooming in while they're talking, but only with a lot of practice. If you feel uncertain about it, don’t do it.

I actually often add a little zoom-in to a shot in the edit room to give it a more intimate, personal feel, but only by 10%. Beyond that much the image starts to fall apart, with that much it adds a layer of emotion to the ending of a shot; like you're leaning in to hear what they're saying. In Final Cut you do it in the Motion Tab under Scale. Set a keyframe 15 seconds before the end of the cut for 100%, then jump to the end of the cut, make a keyframe and set the Scale to 110%. Play it back and the image zooms in slightly just before the end of the cut and adds a little “oomph” to the feel. Cool.

Because we may find ourselves with the dilemma of having to use shots that don’t actually cut together well due to a mismatch in size or framing or whatever, we’d also like to shoot cutaways or cut-ins to cover over those jump cuts if we have to. Maybe a really wide shot of the room, or a shot of a hand on the chair, or some action illustrating what’s being talked about.

Same for audio. We need “room tone”. That’s just the ambient sound in the room with no one talking. We need it. Just have everyone stand still for 30 seconds and record nothing. Do it right after you finish shooting, but don’t let people leave, that changes the sound of the room. Later in the edit we’ll use that sound to cover over any audio edits we do that might not be perfect. Isn't it always perfect? Well, no, it's seldom that. Editing is trying to move us closer to that.

So like all of production, or all of life for that matter, it’s just about practice. The more you do it the easier it gets. Then there’s the lighting. (And that growing list of things to talk about later.)

gunther (5)

Making A Movie

2011-03-27T12:58:00.008-04:00

I go back and forth about whether we’re making a film or a movie. Sometimes people are actually talking about film with sprocket holes in it, other times it’s just something projected on a screen. The words are no longer as descriptive about what we’re doing. Just as some of the best music performances I’ve ever seen were open mic nights in a bar (I once saw a drunk homeless guy play a 12-string guitar that was a jaw-dropping performance); college level independent short films can be the best of class productions, but is it a film, is it a movie, is it something else – who knows?

In the old days (5 or 6 years ago) every project was a big production. You bought tapes, planed things out, maybe rehearsed, got the equipment, lugged it to the location, set everything up, shot the footage, packed everything up, took it all back, logged the tapes, captured the shots you wanted, and started to edit.

Now the equipment side is much easier to deal with in number of items, weight, complexity, and cost. You go some place, pull out your camera, shoot, then put it away. Later you capture the footage and cut it up. It’s more relaxed, more inviting – just easier.

However, one part is just as hard - really hasn’t changed – is telling the story. What is your story? Where does it start? Most stories can begin at different times in the unfolding of events. Some times you have a long lead in, other times you’re quickly in the middle of the action. They each have different effects on the audience and thereby different outcomes.

The usual rule of thumb is you join a scene (cut into it) as late as possible and you leave it as soon as possible (but not always); you string all of those scenes together to make the film. The effect is that it moves along. If it’s confusing cutting from one scene to another you add a transition of some kind to help it flow, to make it work. You frame the beginning with enough information to make it just understandable and you end with enough ambiguity to keep us thinking.

Needless to say there are a lot of variables all of which can be fine tuned for various effects. Consistency of look and tone allows the work to feel like a single experience, one cohesive whole, but with both the feel of inevitability and, at the same time, surprise. There’s the really hard work - surprising inevitability.

Just as in music, the story needs dynamics of scale, emotion and complexity. Most of that comes from how you arrange the footage (pacing comes from the cutting, not the action), but the catch is you can only work with the footage you have. Often we find that we’re actually short on footage of one kind or another and have to go back out and shoot it. The film can only be made from footage that you have on your hard drive, not what’s in your head, not what’s written in the script, not from wishes. You sometimes even have to give up on the script and make what you can with what you have. Now it’s a different film, but that’s OK. It’s what it takes.

For most narrative work you end up using one camera and doing multiple takes, but for documentary films it may be expedient to use more cameras since it’s a one time event and you might want several angles to select from later in the edit. That used to be a big problem for us, but it’s a little easier now with an inexpensive camera like the Flip. A couple of Flip cameras placed in strategic locations can give you a lot of coverage that’s really handy to have later. It makes it seem like a more “produced” movie. You end up with a more polished higher end feel. Cool. (The Flips are nice because there are so small it’s easy to carry a couple of them in your pocket. Having two of the same camera also makes it easier to have the look of the shots match up in the edit. And yes, they’re inexpensive, too.)

Similarly, getting good audio is a little easier on a narrative shoot. You know where everyone is and where they’re going to go. No so with documentary. You may need the “reach” of a shot gun mic because you can’t actually get close to what you want to record. You can “place” mics in the scene either by using a wireless lavaliere microphone on a person wandering in a crowd or use flashcard based Wave recorders, like the Edirol, placed as close as you can get. Later in the edit you “sync up” these loose audio tracks with the video you shot and cut it all together. (There’s even software now that makes that syncing up of audio and video really easy: PluralEyes. That’s what an editor’s assistant used to do, now it’s software – remember that.)

We’re shooting to get footage that describes, illustrates and contextualizes the story we’re trying to tell. That usually translates into a wide establishing shot (where are we), closeups (shows us some elements, parts, examples), action (what’s happening, unfolding, ongoing, changing and reactions, too), and good old beauty shots (people, things, events, places).

If you can’t record an explanatory shot that tells us or shows us what’s going on you’ll have to tell us about it later as a voice over in the edit room. A lot of people, particularly in college, think that’s a cop out and we should only use what the footage shows – for it’s purity. My view is if I can’t figure out what going on, I’m no longer interested in watching. I don’t have the time to struggle through a film that’s incomprehensible even if it’s arty – sorry. So help me understand. Talk to me.

Another false presumption is having a strong point of view, but not showing it. Letting the viewer decide what the point is or who’s right or wrong may be a nice liberal sentiment, but it makes for dull movies. If you don’t believe in your own point of view and tell me what it is I, again, don’t have time for your dull (slow) film. Stand up for what you believe in. Tell it. Show it. Make a point. I don’t have to agree, but it’s usually much more interesting to hear what you really think. That’s why I want to watch your film in the first place, to learn what you think.

After all the shooting is over, annotating the footage is both a lot of work and really worth while. It’s a chance to see it all over again more dispassionately and take notes about what your really have. I’m a firm believer in making subclips from your footage. In Final Cut (that’s the editing software), in the Browser (that's the area where all of your footage shows up), double click on a clip to load it in the Viewer (that's where we watch the footage). Then mark an In and Out point (start here, end here) to describe a “shot” (a unit of footage). Press Command + U and you get a subclip of that master clip sent back into the Browser, highlighted for you to enter a new file name. It’s a little awkward at first and you might be tempted to not do it, but this is the most powerful way to edit effectively - particularly with long form work. Go through all of your footage, break it up into shots that you name; then you can sort those clips into bins (folders) to make it all more orderly and understandable. If you can’t find a shot, your can’t use it.

I think of subclips as being able to see all of the elements I have to work with laid out to sort through. Not to use subclips is as if you were building a house and kept all of the lumber stacked on the truck that delivered it. Each time you wanted a 2x4 you would have to re-stack all of the lumber to find one. Painful. With subclips you unload all of the lumber, stack it up by size, or color, or shape, or reference number making it much easier to find anything, everything. The effort in unloading it all is greatly made up in the ease of finding it later.

One of the most exciting aspects of working in Final Cut is the ability to have multiple versions of the work. You can cut a sequence, duplicate it and then go wacky with changes and not have to worry about fixing it back to the way it originally was. What an opportunity.

Work in sections. Often what we thought would be a great ending we discover is really a great opening. We can pick sections up and plop them down anywhere we want in another master sequence and, yes, have different versions of that, too.

Work as quickly as you can and don’t bother to fix problems along the way. Do that much later after you’ve seen the whole thing from beginning to end. Most of the time we change things so much that any work we would have done fixing things gets thrown out anyway, so it would just be a waste of time. Save fixes until you know what’s actually in the film. It’s often on the second or third pass that we start taking the time to fix things.

Usually on a first past (rough cut) I cut only for audio. I don’t even have the video window visible. It’s really fast to look at the audio waveform (it's wonderful to be able to see audio) and see when a sentence starts or ends. Mark your In and Out point, do the edit and move on. The most important thing to discover is what the film is really about and you’ll only know that by playing it back. Then you start all over again with that information in mind and make it work – better.

I eventually change most of my edits into L-cuts. That is I lead with the audio track and after a beat or two I bring in the video track. (That’s why it’s easy to cut for audio first. That's also why it's smart to shoot a little long at the end of a scene. It gives you more time to hold on the out point of a clip. End of action, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, cut.) That smooths out the feel of the editing and makes it more flowing, more invisible. We’re drawn into the next shot by first hearing the audio, then seeing the image.

At some point we start adding graphics and music. If you have a montage section drop in some music to cut against for pacing and rhythm. You can change it later, easily. Musics job is to unify separate picture elements and make them seem more connected. An audio track under a bunch of image cuts makes the whole thing seem locked together. You delete the ambient sound from each cut and edit in a continuous audio track that covers the entire length of the edits. Now it's all happening in one place instead of many.

I’ve always found it useful to cut a "trailer" (preview) in the early stages of the process to act as a device to help figure out what the piece is about or to verify that I have the footage to tell the story I think I’m telling. A good trailer, even for a documentary, can help you clarify what the story line is and the tone of the work. Pull out some still images and make a poster too. It’s inspirational, well at least it allows us to be hopeful. See, it could work, it’s on the wall – coming this summer.

After it’s all over you need to make copies to hand out. For all our pretense of living in an HD world, good old standard definition DVDs are still what people want. Make Reference Movies and drop them into iDVD. Pull still images out and use them as the background for the menu. The more sophisticated the DVD menu the better the setup to your film. Really. Wouldn’t you prefer to have someone dressed up nice coming to your showing instead of arriving in their pajamas?

See, it’s all so easy.

gunther

Just Back From New York

2011-03-03T17:35:00.013-05:00

I arrived home last night at 3AM from a long, yet fun, trip to the big Gotham for an alumni film and video event. John Bruner drove a van of ten Hampshire students and myself down and back - a 14 hour day. I had thought it would be a grim trip stuck in such a small enclosure, but the students had a good time talking, telling stories, comparing favorite films and just chatting the entire time. They were great.

Every year alums send us a short clip of what they're currently working on, I cut them all together, try and match the audio levels and burn it all onto a DVD that the Alumni Relations people travel with and use as an event promotion tool. It's fun. I get to see great work, send hasty e-mails asking for a different codec, or what's the password for your download again, and be pleasantly reminded that students do turn into pros out in the world and continue to get better and better. Cool.

The current students that we brought down did a good job of smoozing with the older crowd. One of the first alums in the door was Anna who plopped down on a bar stool and told them all of the amazing things she's doing: working for whom, working with whom. They seemed a little taken aback by the fact she's just been out of school for two years and she's got a list of what she's doing and where she's going a half mile long. I was impressed.

The place was packed this year which always makes it seem more exciting, but also makes it harder to move around and mingle. There were also a lot of parents there reminding me who their student is and the previous conversations we had way back at the beginning of the year. My memory finally clicks in and I say, oh yes I remember you. I think it's nice that parents are interested and want to feel involved with their students progress and thankfully no one is over doing it. Just enough.

The alums were really the center of the show, fun to see again, hug, laugh, talk a little and move on to the next. That's both fun and emotionally taxing for me. Remember my passport says "shy, quiet guy" or something like that.

Larry Blume talked this year and showed some of his work both recent and a little older. It was nice to see clips and hear him speak. He mentioned briefly the inevitable demise of film as a production medium and the equally inevitable rise of HD digital cinematography (not using exactly that phrase) as a replacement. It's nice to hear a pro with real perspective say the same thing I keep saying back at school. Those old days are over and we need to run fast to either jump on the new cinematography bandwagon or build still yet a newer one ourselves.

My biggest complaint at these events, which in the cosmic realm of things is quite small, but in the more practical part of my day has an effect, is that I usually miss all of the food. OK, I get a little here off the tray, then some cheese, here she comes again with that tray, then a beer, what's that on the tray now - no thanks, another beer, she was just here with that tray again, but she didn't see me. Then I have to go set up some equipment, restart a computer, run the audio cables, etc. I go back and they're all wiping their mouths with napkins and the trays are all empty. Those lamb chops were perfect weren't they - what lamb chops? Story of my life. So I have another beer. Good thing I'm not driving back isn't it.

So in the end it was more fun than I expected. After a cell phone call to round up missing students and a cold walk down the street, we got the van out of the parking lot, started up the GPS and headed off back home.

Finally back at Hampshire, Bruner dropped all the students off at their different mods on campus (nice guy) and we returned to the parking lot behind the library to find that he has a flat tire on his car. It's 5 degrees and we're beat, so I drive him home to Easthampton in my car. I get home at 3AM and to bed after briefly talking to our befuddled cats who wonder what the heck I'm doing outside at that time. Where's he been anyway?

The photo at top is from Dan Epstein. That's Larry Blume on the left in the white shirt and the guy with the bald spot is me. One year, after returning from Paris, I was going through our photos and found this useless image of an old, bald, fat guy looking at a wall. I asked my wife why she had wasted a shot on someone we didn't even know. She paused a moment, smiled and said, "That's you." We all need a photo of ourselves that way at times.

gunther

Technology Changes - Again

2011-02-26T12:14:00.006-05:00

Sometimes tech stuff is a long slow process of incremental change and sometimes it's just a big jump from one technology to another - over night. Apple seems to be doing a combo of both right now. There's a new version of Final Cut Pro soon to be released. It's supposed to be a big jump over the current version, but only a handful of people have actually seen it and all current speculation is just hot air. The blogs say it maybe more of an iMovie-like interface, but only the insiders really know and because of those non-disclosure agreements they can't say. I guess we're all waiting for NAB to find out. Tick, tick, tick.

In addition there's a new kid on the block for data transfer: Thunderbolt. I've been feeling left out of the rise of USB 3 and it's dramatically faster data rate over FireWire. BlackMagic Design has a video capture device that uses USB 3 that I've been coveting, but alas Apple has not chosen to add USB 3 ports to their computers. In the past I've used eSATA connections to external RAID drives for size and speed, but you need a card in a tower computer to do that and we now have quite a number of iMacs that can't play in that pond. Now that's all changed. Thunderbolt blows all other data connections out of the water. Wow. Of course that's only in new computers, which means all the computers we own now are obsolete. Great. Thanks so much.

Finally in OS-land people are starting to talk about Lion. Who knows what the heck that brings. Maybe this one is more the slow evolving process than the big jump. The problem always is what's it do now and what does it no longer do that we weren't even thinking about. Ouch.

So, it's always a reminder that change is the landscape that we all live in (on) and much like weather and climate, change moves at differing rates as well. Welcome to yesterday.

gunther

The New Hunting Season

2011-02-26T10:11:00.007-05:00

The cycle has come around again and tour groups are massing on the horizon. It's sort of like an academic hunting season. I love to talk to tour groups of prospective students and their parents. They're all people with high hopes and the best of dreams for the future and their family. Promise and excitement flow all around them. They're a fun group, interested and eager to listen and learn, though often a little fearful or reluctant to speak out.

My only problem with the number of them is in repeating myself over and over. I feel like an idiot. Two groups in a row isn't so bad, but after three I start forgetting what I've said, lose my train of thought and head off in tangents. OK, I usually head off in tangents anyway; it's really my style. It takes much longer to approach a topic obliquely, but once you finally arrive you've got more background and depth of understanding - it builds contextualization. Well, at least I try to convince myself that's true.

This last Monday I finally gave up talking about the film/photo program to the fourth group and said, hey, let's talk about education. "Where do you think learning comes from", I asked a mother. She stammered, "you're asking me?" "Yes, what's your idea of that." She thought a moment and said, "asking questions." Bingo! Wow, that's just the answer I wanted. Yes, it's all about asking questions - back and forth much like a ping pong game.

The ball is the question or answer, the table is the range of topics appropriate to the discussion and the net is to judge the clarity of the question or response. It's the exchange that's the most beneficial - a flow of talking back and forth. Sure you could hit the ball off the table with a wild question, but then the exchange stops and after a few of those in a row no one wants to play with you. You're off topic, too erratic or seem incoherent.

So to play the game to learn you need to know the topic area - what's the appropriate range of discussion. That comes from doing the reading that's assigned and maybe a bit more than that too. It's also useful to know the history of the topic or even the history of the discussion of the topic. That, again, comes from doing the reading, but for sure this time reading more broadly than just what was assigned.

Finally and more personally you need to be self examining about your own clarity of understanding. Do you get it? Or maybe not so much. I often find that what I thought I knew well, when I go to explain it to someone else it's much foggier in my mind than I realized. I don't really understand it after all, though I thought I did. That social or public opportunity to talk allowed me to find out just how well I grasped the topic or surprisingly didn't.

We're all so clever in our own minds, but much less so once those thoughts get "published" and can be examined by others or even, by developing professional distance, hear ourselves talk.

I always tell students it's important to show work in class. Not because the other students are going to give you good advise. They may, but usually they're no better a filmmaker than you are. The real reason to show work is to discover how you feel about it when you show it publicly. Often we find that what we thought was so hot yesterday in the edit room makes no sense on the big screen after all and we cringe and slide down in our seat mumbling, what was I thinking of, gotta change that fast. That's what's helpful.

So thanks mom for the great answer. You do know a lot about education and you were brave enough to speak up. That's one of the debilitating problems at the start of any inquiry - fear. Managing fear, professionally, is a fundamental part of the learning process. At the beginning we all feel lost and unsure of what questions we even have, let alone how to ask them. With a little time and knowledge under our belt that passes. We discover the lay of the land, grasp what we've come to know and become equally aware of what we still don't know. This all falls, I think, under the heading of learning to learn, maybe the most valuable skill of all.

gunther

Better Off TEDing

2011-02-06T09:36:00.009-05:00

So what's it take to do a TED? No, not me presenting, but a bunch of real research people and hip academics. I just participated in a large "group-think" Future Search workshop on Friday and one of the best proposals was for Hampshire to put on a TED. I thought, wow, what a great idea and I started shouting TED, TED. It's just the kind of internal communication that we all would love to see. It would show us, in a fun and easily understandable form, what people, both faculty and students, on campus are really working on and have produced.

However. It's really hard work to get a presentation into such a compact and polished form. It's a little alien to the standard academic presentation no matter how hot the professor. It's a rehearsed intersection of content and performance, with enough popping exotic visuals to pull the thing along and develop as many "ah-hah" moments as possible and still keep it to 15 minutes. As I said, it's hard work, though it would "up-the-game" for everyone and that's always a good thing.

OK, maybe it's possible you don't know what TED is. Really? It's a conference of smart people, started in Long Beach (I actually thought it was in Malibu), but now in several places, too, that presents insightful, cutting-edge research work in quite a broad range of disciplines. It stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design - all my favorite topics. How could you go wrong? Here's their blurb about them. Their web site has tons of past presentations on-line to watch. It's a great way to spend a little time - you're well rewarded. All it costs is 15 minutes of your time.

Now all we have to do is set up guidelines, ask for presenters, audition them, cherry pick the best, re-tool the worst and try it. One of the side benefits of all of this would be that everyone notices, or gets told, their level of sophistication in "presentation-land"; something that makes any class or lecture more enjoyable regardless of the level of content. Even that part, all by its self, would be a benefit to the community. What could go wrong? TED, TED, TED, TED...

gunther

A Reasoned Approach part 1

2011-02-02T21:22:00.007-05:00

With this much time behind us we should stop, turn around, and look back at our rush to embrace the HDSLR concept (more useful here). Where did it come from, what was pushing it, where will it go and is it a big deal or not - or what.

In the recent past (the time of the miniDV camcorders) we were all thrilled that semi-good-looking footage was finally possible in an equally semi-robust format that didn’t cost an arm and a leg and another leg. We did, however, still envy the film folk for, well, their filminess. Many were the tirades about how great film was and that video could never (that’s never) equal that quality - yack, yack, yack. The video people would all sigh and walk away, thinking, you know, that’s a bunch of crap, but video did look like video.

Then somehow that vague future-concept high definition thing kind of oozed out of the woodwork behind us and suddenly there was a new format on the block. Mostly the new students showed up with those HD camcorders and we all went, whoa, what’s that. The image was really big and crisp and well - big and crisp. I had seen HD way back in the 1980’s at an NAB trade show and it was great, but amazingly expensive and not really on the market. Now it was and it didn’t cost any more than the miniDV camcorders we were still buying.

You’ve got to remember that miniDV replaced Hi8mm and that Hi8mm replaced regular 8mm, and regular 8mm replaced 3/4” and that had replaced 1/2” and that had replaced both 1” and quad (really 2” tape) and, oh yes, somewhere in there was VHS and S-VHS, but the common thread here is tape. It’s always going to be on tape, right?

Oops. Then HD (I’m not ever going to talk about HDV - just forget it) got really clever and you could record to tape, or a little hard drive, or a DVD-ish disk, or a flash card (a really, really expensive flash card: P2), and then a cheap flash card and wow, here we are. (Hey, are you going to eat the rest of that sandwich? This is making me hungry.)

So that’s just the history of the people who hold the cameras. On the other side, the manufacturers loved all the "Ezekiel begot Herinedies" upgrades and thought - man are we on the gravy train or what. Then HD hit them and they lost their nerve and all the ideas they ever had. (That and the fact that Broadcasting is going down the tube or rather over to the tubes.) It went dark on the factory floor. No one was buying equipment. We were just waiting to see what would happen and where it would all go. We all said, “I’m going to sit this one out.”

Then came Red.

OK, you either love or hate Red, but you do have to admit it was a game changer. People who made sunglasses are now going to design and build high-end digital cinematography cameras and what’s digital cinematography anyway - never heard of it. Once you stopped laughing and thought about it and then finally saw some footage - hey, that looks really, really good and that’s video?

Then we all did the math. Sure it’s 10 times the cost of a good miniDV camera, but look at those women, and the color, and the grain, and OMG look at the background all soft and well - filmy. So people bought them like VW’s (That’s Volkswagens to you young folks, you know like a car - the people’s car. OK, forget it.)

So we spent a whole year looking at footage online and checking the updates at Red’s web site trying to figure out if you really need rods and a matt box or more specialty cables. We kept track of how many shows were shot with a Red this month and what’s their workflow. Ah, the workflow.

Then one day a photographer posts some footage he’s shot with a Canon still camera. Yea, so what, my little still camera shoots video too. It’s great for the web. Want to see some party shots I took over the weekend? This dog is so amazing, you’ve gotta see it.

Then we all finally looked at the clips. Say, that’s nice. Wait a minute, that looks like the Red footage. Hey, come here and look at this. This is shot on a goddamn Canon still camera - WTF.

You’d look at the “milkgirls” footage from Red, then back to Vincent Laforet’s video, then back again and pause and think - gosh, this is shot on a $2,500 still camera. Whoa - the buzzer goes off - game changer. Red stops production and re-tools.

Then 6 months of looking at Canon movies online and yes, you can shoot with a Nikon (hmm, not as nice) or look over there, Panasonic has one too (OK, a little different). Now, do I really need a matt box and rods on this thing?

If you get your hands on one it’s quite a surprise that you can’t see a *&$# thing on the LCD screen outside in the sun. So now you absolutely need a clip-on viewer and magnifier for the screen.

No, I don’t have any Zeiss-Vistavision lens in my bag to pop on for those razor sharp, zero depth of field shots, but I do have an old Nikon lens so I guess I need a lens adaptor for that.

OK, now I can finally shoot. Hey, focusing sucks. Maybe I do need one of those matt boxes with the follow focus knobs (so cool), so then, yea, I do need the rods. Now what does that all price out at? Ouch!

Oh no, wait, I forgot about the audio. Camera audio is lousy so I’ll get a Zoom (save a little money over the Edirol hah, hah, ha). etc, etc. Notice no one is talking tape in audio land. Wearing a Nagra around your neck was like wearing a lunch basket. No more, no more. It all fits in your pocket, but we are back to the start line again shooting with dual system sound. Forward into the past.

So here we are: the big hand on February and the little hand on 2011.

End of part 1.

Hmm, I wonder, do I really, really need those rods?

Are you going to eat that sandwich or not?

gunther

HDR and the DSLRs

2010-12-11T21:21:00.003-05:00

A remarkable post on ProVideoCoalition about the fact that the Red camera people forgot that their cameras also shoot HDR video! Unbelievable.

A few days earlier a couple of guys had posted footage they made/shot/converted into HDR footage and it was interesting but it suffered from that hyper real look that puts me off of still photo HDR images. It’s just too much. But the Red footage is different. It just seems to have a lot of latitude. A lot. In fact the article claims they can get 18 stops of exposure. Wow.

Now it’s true that the Red One camera can not shoot this way. They used the Epic to shoot the footage, a camera which happens to shoot in 5K size. That’s about 30 times the size of a miniDV format image so it’s a significant jump in resolution, don’t you think.

The image is also flat (low contrast) which says a lot about their intent. This isn’t footage that’s intended to be show, but graded (processed for color correction) and shaped. This is a post-production format which is a perfect example of what I’ve been saying we’re all going to be doing – shooting in a really high resolution format (at least 4K), post-producing in that format or one slightly smaller, then compressing it down to a much smaller format size for distribution using lots of different formats for different distribution uses.

Notice this is a dialogue between the Red people and the Alexa people, with a glance over at the HDSLR group. (Canon just announced their radically large CMOS sensor and God knows what that means.) Everyone really seems to like the Alexa and we need to include it in the future watch process as Arri develops it more (even though it’s price point is way too high for us).

So in the end it’s not about HDR, it’s about a hugely extended exposure range that far exceeds the abilities of film in a file format that we’re slowly getting close to accommodating (faster machines and larger faster drives). You can see how the process builds, how the thinking unfolds and we all start agreeing on the production pipeline. You can still buy in at different price points, which modifies your particular version of reality, but we’re really discovering the future of media unfold in a continuing discussion. Cool.

And tape? What tape?http://www.red.com/

How Not To Get Sick At College

2010-11-03T21:20:00.002-04:00

One of the bitter realities of communal living is the unintentional transmission of illnesses. Ouch! All of those introductions and handshakes spread around more than cheer and good wishes, we get other peoples germs in the process. The single most effective method of getting though the first week in good health is simply washing your hands. Yep, it really doesn’t take much more than that, but don’t wait until the end of the day, wash your hands right after you’ve made contact with someone else.

Also you need to learn to not put your fingers in your mouth - ever. Don’t lick a finger to turn a page in a book or remove a smudge from the screen of your laptop. Also don’t rub your eyes. Yes, it sounds a little strange, maybe paranoid but the goal is to get to the end of the semester in good health.

Washing you hands is all about soap, warm water and lathering it all up and rubbing for slightly longer than you might imagine. How long does it take to sing the whole Star Spangled Banner? That’s how long you need to wash your hands. It’s all about flushing away the germs and bacteria, not killing them. Soap doesn’t kill germs, it allows you to flush them off of your skin with water. It’s mechanical more than chemical. The more you try to kill bacteria the more resistant they all become and that’s a really bad thing. Really bad.

Yes, you should eat well and get enough sleep too, but soap and water applied in a timely fashion are your friends. Be good to yourself and each other.

My Talk for the Fall 2010 Alumni Reel Showing

2010-10-16T15:40:00.000-04:00

When I get out in front of a large, or even small crowd, I frequently forget what I really want to talk about and start babbling about the brightest thing in my memory. So in the last few years I’ve started writing down the presentation I should make in case I don’t actually end up there. I hope what I say this afternoon will be somewhat close to this, but if not this is what I meant to say.

Usually I enjoy making up the reel every year, but not always. In past years it’s sometimes gotten in the way of the immediate and pressing. It can feel like a nagging burden to have to go back to it again and again until it’s done, and it can drag on for weeks. Last year I finished only two days before the showing instead of my usual two weeks. I hadn’t even reviewed it so I watched cringing in my seat, looking for spelling error, when it played the first time. Maybe we’ll even find a few today.

One of the past ironies of putting together this compilation was the fact that I had to have the final order of clips all lined up weeks before the show in order to have time to send that information to the printer and have a program printed up. That was a real pain and always ended up causing more problems, at least for me, since alumns are frequently busy and often send in their submissions late, way too late. Finally we all said “forget about it” and life got easier. I always thought it was a good example of old and new media, but my ability to print out 6 full color 11”x17” posters in 4 minutes at the duplications office in the library today modifies that truism somewhat. It’s not the media itself that’s dated, it’s our methods that calcify and need revisiting frequently.

This year I started the process the latest ever and as I write this I’m still not done - one more clip to drop in and several people I don’t have full information about. But this year it was really, really different. I did most all of it in two hours. I was shocked. It’s because 90% of the submissions were QuickTime files on a data disk. All I had to do was pull them off each disk onto a hard drive, sort, drop them in the timeline, add credits, adjust the audio and wow, I’m done.

After all the years I’ve been working in a digital format this was the first time I’ve actually felt such a remarkable advantage to the workflow. It’s saved me tons of time and effort. I don’t know why it’s taken such a long time to make this much of an impact, but it’s a major sea-change in workflow for me. For anyone in business this kind of workflow is obviously less expensive in both time and equipment and so I can fairly say, again for a variety of reasons – tape is dead.

Now it’s true I still had some problems with different formats and a little crunching of one file into another to get it to play, but it sure beats trying to find 90 seconds out of a 40 minute film shuttling the tape back and forth looking, looking, looking - ouch. Now alumns have already selected the in and out points they want, exported just that much from their sequence time-line as a ProRes file, burned it to a disk, and mailed it in.

But wait, there’s more. File sharing. A good number of people (5%) also posted their work to an on-line server and I just downloaded the file to my desktop. What could be easier? Oops, hey the file doesn’t play. Ah, that’s because it’s in some strange format that I don’t have a plug-in for. Ken, can you send another file type? Marvelous. The drawback here is that it often takes up to an hour to download a file using ftp. Then, I have to burn a disk to have a backup copy. Digital - the one hand gives and the zero hand takes away.

But there’s something else that’s different this year and I don’t know why. The submissions are mostly from much older alumns. That’s odd. The newly graduated are often the most prolific in their submissions, sometimes even offering up two or three clips. So where are they?

Then there’s another oddity. I dropped someone this year. Someone I actually like a lot, but the clip was offensive to me and I didn’t think it was appropriate, certainly not for a family event. I’ll put it back in for the west coast version. Sometimes an alumn pops a film in the reel just to get it seen by people and talked about. I think maybe that’s what this was, more of a “spec reel” than a finished work – still looking for another $600,000 and a name to attach, but want to see how much violence there could be? Ah, sorry, not right now, thanks. Maybe later. Nice bloody gunshot effect though, chromakeyed over an animated background set. Interesting.

It’s true that not everyone submits a clip each year. In fact, a lot of successful alumns never submit anything. This is the first time in about 10 years that Matt Danowski sent us a clip. He’s one of the senior editors at 60 Minutes and has only once sent us any of that work. He does jaw dropping stories, but never thinks it’s a Hampshire thing to send them in. This year is no exception. His clip is a nice little art thing, fun, short and friendly. Thanks for that.

Following him in the reel is a fellow student, Dan Epstein whose work all of you have seen over and over, only you don’t know it. He’s one of the classic invisible people working behind the scenes. If a film crew misses their plane or drives off the road in Poughkeepsie he’s the guy that fills in with his crew and equipment. He’s shot everything there is to shoot in New York City. His too is a lighthearted clip shot with his iPhone, not at all his usual commercial work.

On the other side there are alumns (5%) who send in a whole film or episode on a DVD and lightly say, “pick what ever you want” or, “use the part just before the end.” Those are the hard ones. I have to shake myself and keep saying, “don’t watch the film, look for a clip”. Then I realize I’m at the end, having been sucked into the story, but didn’t get around to finding 90 seconds to use. Why don’t we just play 10 minutes of everything and make it easy? Well, that’d be around 4 hours. Oh, I get it.

Then there are the films. Wow. It took this long to even mention the films. I don’t always like all of them, but it’s really interesting to me to see them over the long arc of time. You can see people work their way up the career ladder as their credits roll by each year. You can also see who continues to work with each other – patterns and names. Producers and directors have it the easiest. They can claim the whole work and submit anything, but actors are only in the shot for a short while and then vanish. Composers always want the dialogue to drop away so we can hear their music. Directors of photography are really just interested in the light - hey, look at the light. It’s all fun and interesting. The work of friends.

In the end the true use of the reel is as a simple device to bring members of the Hampshire family together to meet, to talk, to laugh, yes, to raise money, to be surprised, to be reminded about each other and relish the memories and friendships both long and new.

Well, at least that’s what I wanted to say.

gunther

Don't Be Eager to Buy Stuff

2010-10-05T21:19:00.003-04:00

I’ve met a couple of incoming students this week (Yes, people show up at odd times with family in tow, wander around and get the lay of the land and they’re not even local. It’s cool.) and e-mailed a handful more, well their parents that is. All of them were interested in what kind of computer or camera they should buy to come to school.

My answer is always the same. The first year of college is the worst time to buy a fancy computer. Anything that will turn on is fine. The IT people hate it when I say that. They have their “minimum specs” that HAVE to be met. OK, Maybe Windows 4 is too old and weird, but hey, all versions of Windows are weird. Anyway, the point is don’t buy stuff in a vacuum of knowledge, wait until you actually know the answer for yourself. If you have to rely on “others” to tell you what you need, no matter what they say it’s really for them, not you.

As for cameras - don’t buy any. But wait, don’t filmmakers need their own equipment to turn out the best work? No. You don’t know what we really work on so therefor you don’t know what you really need. Really. Honest.

We’ve got lots of cameras you can sign out from Media Services in the library, and you should. Then, after technology churns under you (ie. time passes), after you’ve got some work under your belt, after you’ve worked in the labs and see how the workflow runs, then, maybe, you might want to buy a camera, or not - maybe even wait another year.

Knowledge, personal knowledge, is always the best advisor and allows you to speak for yourself with confidence and authority. That’s the goal at Hampshire. It doesn’t come overnight, not maybe even in a semester, but we all work at it daily - all of us. Keep your eye on the goal, relax, experiment, have fun and only worry about the really important stuff: What’s the infant mortality rate in the US, how many women start businesses, what’s all that dark matter really doing, etc.

The Tobolowsky Files - podcast

2010-09-21T21:18:00.003-04:00

I can’t remember how I found out about this for the first time, but this is a really great podcast. This is something you’re best friend should tell you about immediately and you should share with your friends. Stephen Tobolowsky is a “character” actor that you’ve probably seen before, but maybe not remembered. I recognized him as the insurance salesman in GroundHog Day, but he’s been in a lot of good films and bad.

All he does is tell stories about his life. Yep, it doesn’t sound like much, but it is. I found parts of the first few episodes a little irritating, but give it a chance. There’s the introduction, a story, a musical interlude, another story, and the outro - simple. You laugh, you cry, what more do you want?

Look it up on iTunes under podcasts. He’s at episode 36 right now, which I’ll listen to later today as I take my 93 year old mother grocery shopping. She’s really slow, so I’ve got lots of time to wander up and down the isles listening to this and freaking out the other shoppers as I chuckle and sob.

He’s also got a web site off of SlashFilms with old photos of himself and Ann (you’ll meet her later - much later). If you listen to these in public people will definitely think you’re weird as you laugh and cry. Have fun.

Talk About Workflow!

2010-09-02T21:17:00.003-04:00

Here’s good old Chase Jarvis yelling about his digital workflow process. It’s good to see what people actually have to go through when you’ve got a client project to worry about. Maybe it’s a little over-kill for us, but be sure you understand why he’s doing all of this.

It’s all unnecessary for a class project, but very reasonable for a Div III. The answer is no, sorry, we don’t backup any of the drives in the media labs, but now you know that. If you want a backup, you have to do it yourself! Maybe you should.

Transcoding with MPEG-Streamclip

2010-08-11T21:11:00.002-04:00

The easiest way to get that wack-o footage you recorded using your mothers underwater camera into Final Cut is to first run it through MPEG-Streamclip and convert it into a format that Final Cut likes.

The final answer to what that format is may depend on what style of work you’re making. If you’re doing a lot of compositing then I’d stick with a format that works well with colors. That usually means ProRes, but as with most HD formats ProRes comes in a lot of flavors. Most of the time good old vanilla is fine. Or for those of us on a file storage diet ProRes LT might even be a good choice.

Almost never will you want to bump up the quality to anything higher than this. The concept of using an uncompressed file format (or ProRes 4:4:4:4) to increase the quality of your movie is, well, it’s just plain wrong. You movie will NEVER look better that it does right now, our goal is just to make Final Cut more happy by using Intra-Frame formats instead of the GOP formats that a lot of DSLR or Flips or other H.264 cameras shoot in. We’re just trying to convert our unruly files into a personality that will play well with others, no more than that.

And always remember: your mom’s shooting HD and you’re downloading movies off of the internet from YouTube. Who’s the filmmaker now? Seriously.

Campus Tour Groups

2010-04-04T09:30:00.011-04:00

Wow, I've been overwhelmed recently by the frequency of campus tours and the number of people in them. When holidays happen parents and prospective students must hit the road fast to furiously drive up and down the east coast shopping for colleges. It must seem like getting up early to hit a string of great tag sales on a Saturday morning – grab that brochure, look over there, talk to those people, keep moving, where do we go next.

I'm always struck by how differently each tour group behaves. It's similar to a production class dividing up into smaller sections when I give a workshop. The first group is sullen and unresponsive, then the next is effusive and insightful, but they're all in the same class. Odd. Similarly, some of the tour groups I'd like to talk to all day. They're all fun and engaging. With others, the conversation dwindles, no one asks questions or makes comments, and I wonder where in the world their silent student will end up.

On Friday, Good Friday, three large groups right in a row, only six or seven minutes apart bumped into each other like ocean rafts. The second group arrived pushing the first out of the way and then the third group appeared just around the corner ready to do the same. I'm a shy, quiet guy to start with so it's a stretch for me to do any of this in the first place, then the forced repetition on top of that adds more stress. Oh my, did I talk about Anna Elliot and Chris Applebaum just a few minutes ago or did I say that to the previous group?

The groups do have the usual common concerns, misunderstandings and questions, but each family is different in interests and their ability to articulate useful questions. As I always say to Division III students it takes about an hour of back and forth questioning to finally get to the heart of their project and truly understand what they're trying to do. That three sentence description from their Div III contract really isn't deep enough, nor revealing enough to elicit the informed discussion that's so necessary in letting others understand and finally give back a useful response. No one believes that initially, but later they're astonished that we've uncovered new problems with their project or that they could take a new direction in method, outcome or presentation. It really does take that long and you have to stay with it and not give up just because the conversation seems too difficult or makes you uncomfortable.

So tour groups with their enforced brevity will also leave with an equally abbreviated understanding of what we do and how we do it. That's too bad, but I understand the reality of the situation. For me the easy way of interacting in that short time frame is telling stories either of alumns that I knew personally or the Div III and Div II students that I'm currently working with. While most of those stories seem well received, after so much repetition I feel them unsatisfying – at least for me. I wish we could talk more about theories of education and what have been parents and students personal experiences with learning and understanding, but no, that doesn't happen. It's a simple show and tell, not a deeper prolonged experience.

This frequency of interaction is happening because I now have an additional office in the new Jerome Liebling building of the film/photo program. The building is a show case and an obvious part of a general tour of the campus whether people are actually interested in media as a concentration or not. I'll happily continue to talk with prospective students and their parents and try and fill in their understanding of what Hampshire offers and allow them to decide if it's a good fit for them. However I'm only in the building on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I wonder who they talk with on Tuesday and Thursday?

gunther

Technology Fair

2010-01-23T13:22:00.013-05:00

We just participated with the IT department in a Technology Fair last Friday. Using the basement as the location was the real draw for us since we're always looking for more exposure down here in the invisible recesses of the college. We feel over-looked by tours of new students and faculty so we relish visibility in any form. The IT side of it was to help people with laptop problems either real or imagined.

I was given two time slots for a talk titled "media for the masses", whatever that is. But as I prepared a Keynote presentation it felt awkward and forced. Technology isn't what we really do, though it may seem like that to outsiders. What the media basement is for is storytelling – in a lot of different forms using a lot of different methods. That's what we do.

Media is just storytelling from one person to another without the teller actually being there. That surrogate "other" is media. It's the autonomous teller, an automatic presenter of the story thoughtfully packaged and tuned for an effective unfolding of a particular story. Some stories need to be told in a specific way for reasons of content, effect, or cost. Others can be related in many ways and often it's the audience that selects the form to which they are most attuned.

So I stopped the presentation in the middle and launched into what I think is one of the fundamental elements of media in form, method and philosophy and that's making posters. They're simple, powerful and work best when you finally understand the essence of what you're trying to say. The form forces you to edit down to what's possible to display on a single page and that usually improves your thinking and writing. It's a refined combination of design and concept. If done well you get a lot of bang for the buck.

So I talked about my personal progression of poster making – the first and its results, the following ones, the most successful ones, the most contentious ones, the art ones, the business ones, and the personal ones. At least it was colorful and fresh. The poster of Ken and Jerry is really popular with donors to the college. The one on lighting technique is the most popular with students (it gets stolen the most, which is one of the best metrics for gauging success or at least desirability).

I use the software application Pages for doing the work. It's Apple's version of InDesign, but a little lighter and much easier to use. It's true for some images I do a lot of the work in Photoshop first, but for the text and layout I work in Pages. It's part of the iWork collection of software: Pages, Keynote and Numbers. Pages can do both word processing and layout. Keynote is Apple's version of Powerpoint, only it's fun and easy. Numbers is the equivalent of Excell, only better with images and layout. I do confess that I don't actually use Numbers that much and Excell, for what I do, is fine after all.

So in the end the presentation went better than I expected since I didn't really know who would show up or how many people there would be. I confirmed in my own mind that we're really storytellers first and tech people second. Everything we do is at the service of the story. We learn what we need to know in order to help the story unfold and find its own voice and form and we always try and push that form into new shapes using as broad a range of methods as possible. Often out of that re-directing or re-presenting of the story we get a new story or at least one with a different flavor - a variant, but in the end the final vote of success is always made by the story itself. Did we serve the story well? That's what the world of media is all about and anyone can learn to do that. It just takes attention, practice and the desire to tell an effective story.

gunther

The New Alumni Reel for 2009

2009-10-19T10:12:00.006-04:00

Here's the talk I gave on Saturday to about 50 parents and students in the Main Lecture Hall to introduce this years Alumni Reel showing.

Every year the Hampshire Alumni Relations people ask graduates to submit a clip of recent film or video work from which I build a compilation reel that gets shown first at Hampshire, then in New York, then in LA, and also at other locations across the country as needed. Each year the collection of submissions from alumni is slightly different and has a unique flavor. Some years it’s thin and cold, some years it hot and spicy. This year the vintage is good, but with a still yet different taste. Like any collection of submissions what we see is only what’s submitted. It’s not a true reflection of what’s being done – good or bad.

The odd part is both the list of usual suspects and the ever broadening list of just-past-recent graduates, not yet settled into that perfect job, but not too far away from it. They pop up in strange places and also have very strong ties to each other.

Even with the crowd that’s off in the distance, their friendships are personal, professional and re-occurring. Their names and titles are links that weave back and forth from project to project. They work for themselves, corporations and each other.

The near-recent travel in groups and maybe if they've grown apart they also eagerly come back to the center for fun films that might or might not even be real paying commercial work.

This year there are a few people that pop up more than once doing different jobs and working with different people. What’s instructive about this multiple submission is it’s a reflection of the reality of the new world of work. People don’t do just one thing any more, not even in the same year, certainly not for their entire career.

I met Ann Harrison at an alumni event back in May. She had graduated in media theory, went to grad school and got a masters in journalism, worked for newspapers, produced videos, wrote for magazines (Wired). I asked her what she was doing now and she said, “reconciliation”. Immediately I thought of divorce cases and winced. “Who was your last client”, I jokingly asked. “Liberia”, she replied, “I had a very good year.”

Even closer to home, outside the Liebling building in the stone entrance area are bricks with names on them (a fund raising device). One is from Donna Rockwell. She too went to grad school and got a masters in journalism, did on-air reporting, and now, I find, she has a PhD in psychology and teaches.

Still closer, my daughter is a recent Hampshire grad and is currently in graduate school in psychology. She did photography for her Div II and writing for her Div III. That’s what we call the “Hampshire straight line” of study.

But back to the Reel. People come and go each year for good and maybe not so good reasons: way too busy; on a shoot in Australia; we’re still in pre-production and I can’t talk about it and that last one, well, that’s so over now; Teresa can you take this call; oops, gotta go Paris Hilton just came in.

Yes, then there’s the range of work. Some, well, I don’t know. Others give me a hard time finding only a two minute clip instead of the ten minutes I really want to show.

So, as I always tell tour groups. You’ve all seen Hampshire work. Some times it’s obvious as with Ken, some times it’s invisible as with Dan Epstein. Some times you never thought about it - MTV and Chris Applebaum. Some times you’d be surprised - Lord of the RIngs, Spiderman III, Up, 60 Minutes.

On the technical side, this year all of the submission were on DVDs. About 60% were QuickTime files and 40% were video DVDs. The QuickTime files look better and proves to me that we’re moving into a new world of distribution with a new way of watching work.

Most people selected their own two minute clip, but some didn’t and those are the hardest. My selections are sometimes just for expediency and don’t really reflect the full tone or importance of the work. That’s my failing. This year I finished the reel the latest ever, just two days ago and any misspellings or typos are my fault because no one else has seen it yet. You’re the first.

On with the show.

gunther

Key? I Thought You Had the Key

2009-10-09T13:36:00.010-04:00

I don't usually use an e-mail I've sent as a blog posting, but this one is slightly different. We've all had different experiences lately with the new method of distributing keys to students. For some of us it's worked out OK, for others not quite so satisfactory. While I'm on the positive side of the equation I do see problems in the structural situation this represents and implications for future re-arrangements of methods and procedures. This change over seems to be having more problems that it should and that itself is the real problem. Here's my response back to an e-mail Glen Armitage had written last night.

Thanks Glenn.

I’m reluctant to speak out, but it’s turning into more of a philosophical and operational issue than just keys. We will, no doubt, be experiencing more of this kind of fall-out due to re-organizations in the future and all for a similar reason: that of cost cutting. It has turned, oddly, into a staff only issue with all of us uncertain who is in charge and who to even talk with at a college level.

The ad hoc solutions that some of us have come up with are varied and uncertain. One-card is only a solution if it’s installed. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it and a real solution is still needed now and right now. I’m lucky that I’m part of the library and fit into the “academic” list of users that are allowed. We’ve re-thought our keys, coalesced into using just one key for all of our doors and it is, so far, working, though the real burden has shifted from me onto the library people to enter our information into their data-base – and often. That turns out to be not as easy as in the past. More time of more people are involved now. How’s that for cost cutting.

It is also, I think, a reflection of the separation between the “class oriented day” and the “outside of class day” that both students and staff experience. People who are not involved seem to think it’s a small issue, but those of us who look students in the eye each day and have to say we don’t know what the answer is have a harder time understanding why no one seems to be helping. It’s sort of like the problem of getting water to the people trapped in the sports stadium in New Orleans – please help us.

John Bruner has solved his problem at the Yurt Radio with a biometric device (well it’s been working for a couple of days so far), but all of us have variants of who and how students need to get keys and the information trail that gets generated in its wake. What seems to be the real unifying theme here is variations.

In the past the switchboard operators were sophisticated enough and thoughtful enough to handle the oddities, subtleties and emergencies that surround the keys and through a narrative exchange tell us when there were problems. (there’s that word narrative again) Now, there is no one answer, no one experience.

So my real worry is that in the name of cost cutting we alter the usual landscape of student life and the flow of the day. We have, indeed, saved money with regard to Public Safety but we have incurred a real cost on the other end of the spectrum in daily student life. The social ecology of the day is often hidden or at least occluded to most administrators and faculty and it has fallen to staff, singularly, to solve, ad hoc, a complex and surprisingly far-reaching problem.

We all need to get better at doing this and I think we could use some help. It’s not just about the keys. If we can’t solve this what happens when we run into a real problem?

gunther

So, that's my e-mail to Glenn.

My key problems, thankfully, are small and we're still thinking of ways to re-work what we do to make more adjustments and allowances, but it's start and stop as we go along discovering both the good and bad of slightly changed and still changing  circumstances.

My point really is that as we come upon more changes in the future, and we will for good and reasonable reasons, we need to more quickly grasp the subtleties and newly induced problems and then quickly and commonly agree on implementations. The ad hoc problem solving ends up fractionating the daily student experience. No two offices now have the same methods. It's all a grab bag of reasoning and implementations. That's never a good user experience and that's my point.

gunther

Why We Are Here

2009-09-20T08:27:00.011-04:00

The semester starts so fast and with it classes and workshops entered into quickly. Later reflecting I think, wait a minute I should have had some kind of welcoming or motivational speech to give – first thing. It's always a failing of not having time to fully thinking things through. So belatedly here it is.

Some time from now you will be asked a question. It may be eight years or fourteen months or two decades, but it will come. It will be the most important question you will ever answer. You may not have studied it in school. You may never have thought about it at all. You'll think, why are they asking me, but they are and you'll need to answer, because there'll be no one else.

Your response will save the life of your friend, your lover, your next door neighbor, the person at work you hate. Your answer will save the company you work for, the neighborhood you live in, your daughters school, the little park just down the street, New England.

The person who asks you the question will be your younger sister, the guy in the elevator, your best friend, the woman in the car across the street. They'll be crying, depressed, fearful, in pain, desperate, stoic, angry, or simply have a blank look on their face. You won't have time to look it up, ask someone else, talk it over, think it through or read about it. Suddenly everything will stop. People will turn to hear your answer. Faces will lift. It will get a little quiet.

The question you will be asked is, "what should we do?" Your answer will change the course of your life and the lives of others for better or for worse. Will you be able to give an answer?

Is this likely to happen? Maybe. But here's the "really scary" version – perhaps more likely is that no one will ask at all; that people will stand there frozen, uncertain, bewildered and wait for something to happen. That's when, unasked, you have to step forward and say what you think we should do. That's when you need to lead. Answering the unasked question is the hardest thing in the world to do and the most important, but to be able to do it you have to practice – starting now.

So that's why we're really here, to get you to a point, much later in life, where you could answer that question or more importantly the unasked question. If you want to save the world you need to get ready. You may not think you're up to it, but everyone here is. However, if you're just here to only have a good time, later you're not going to be much help to anyone because you won't be able to answer the question – you didn't practice. You'll have no idea and the unasked question will just hang there, unanswered.

gunther

The Beginning, Again

2009-09-05T11:15:00.002-04:00

Well the month of August disappeared into the past amazingly fast and we're already into the cool weather of September. This weekend is move-in day for new students and their parents.

In the past parents had been whisked away quickly and without much regard. Now we offer them seminars, counseling, dinner, and frequent tours of the campus. I had the obligation and, I discovered, the pleasure of giving tours of the new Liebling wing of the film/photo building, but I was astonished to find fifty parents in the first group and the same number in still yet another group. In retrospect I see how that many people changes what you can talk about and it's a compelling validation for small classes. However, I did have a good time and a few parents told me afterwards they were grateful for the information I gave them.

With that many people, most of whom were not really interested in media education, but more general information about Hampshire, I simply talked about what I think it takes to get through Hampshire. Engagement. Positive engagement. That, like most of life, means something different to different people, but without it you'll flounder and drop away. It means interacting with the day, with your classes, with your professors, with administrators, with other students – not just showing up. Just showing up only gets you in the door. The rest is up to you and it's not enough just to go to class. You can take all the classes we offer and not be able to graduate! Work here is project oriented and helped along by friends and associates. Friends are personal and might be content free. Associates are content oriented, but could also be friends. You need both and you need to know how to get them.

One of the most interesting byproducts of the lingering of parents is the feeling that they, too, bond with the school and become interested in not just their own sons and daughters, but the campus as a place and as an idea. I also found, surprisingly, that it worked the other way too. I felt an obligation to pay attention to their specific family member and take a responsibility to help them through Hampshire. The families did their job and I think they'll get more out of Hampshire for being here.

So I always feel the glow of optimism each September. So much is possible, so many good things will happen, it could all work out for everyone. We can hope so, but we all have to work at it and make it happen. There's no free ride here, but everyone wants the students to succeed.

gunther

Home Sweet Home

2009-07-11T13:13:00.005-04:00

This morning while I was reading last Thursdays Home section in the New York Times and drinking my second cup of tea Danae poked her head around the corner and said, "there's a tour group standing in front of the house go look." Sure enough the Saturday morning Florence History Trail tour given by one of our local historians Steve Strimer has paused his group on our sidewalk and they're learning about the houses' history. We live, I've recently found out, in the Joshia White Cottage built in 1811 and moved to it's current location in 1879 (yes, they did that sort of thing all the time). The site where it had been before then became the very large brick mill building that sits on the edge of the Mill River just down the hill and around the corner from us. They saved our house and moved it probably a little more than half a mile (depending on the route they took). Thanks.

I've known it was an old house, but I was thinking Civil War era, not that much earlier. Joshia White ran a grist mill on the Mill River and built a large dam there to harness the water power for the mill. So it turns out our house was one of the earlier buildings in Florence. That's fun.

Florence has a proud and old tradition of abolitionists and workers industrial communes in the early nineteenth century. The communes were based on the concept of "free labor" or in other words, non-slave labor. They tried raising silk worms to compete with cotton cloth – a slave crop, but the New England weather didn't work out. Sojourner Truth lived around the corner from my house, just across the graveyard that's our quiet neighbor.

So it's fun to actually live in a part of local history and feel that connection of ideas and time, even while I mow the lawn. I've started to read Lydia Maria Child books to get a sense of what they though and how they lived. She was a active abolitionists who lived in our house for a few years around 1820 after Joshia White moved out and then rented it. Lydia was the Martha Stewart of her time, but switched to more impassioned anti-slaver topics. It's quite impressive. I'll have to learn more just to feel that I fit in to the responsibilities of the house.

gunther

All I Know About The System Is What People Tell Me

2009-07-02T09:43:00.014-04:00

Accounting wise the end of the year is always fraught with peril, confusion, anger and surprises. This year was no different. We had been warned to "use it or lose it" or "if you don't spend it they will" and several sentiments similar to that. It's a little paranoid, a little bitter, and a little true which motivates all of us to rush to judgments on items we've been thinking about way too long and now need to frantically purchase on the spot.

I usually try to resist the madness and haste, but it's hard not to get swept up in the fury. We're in such a moment of change. Change in the basement labs with the film/photo people pulling back into their own building, change in the formats and methods of recording video with SD cards, changes in the storage requirements of footage as we move more quickly into full HD. In other words there are a lot of places to spend a couple of hundred dollars, but as always some more wisely than others.

With the studio space returning to the possibility of actually becoming a studio again after several years being used only as a classroom the desirability of adding more lights was too captivating to resist. I really enjoy lighting. It's both a skill and an art and takes place in that quiet time, just before all of the shooting starts. Well, sometimes it's really frantic and pressured and then the shooting starts. In the old days we used the overhead light grids with most all of the lights turned on. Now I like to use much smaller, less expensive, more controllable stand lights – the little Pro-Lights from Lowell. Not only are they actually cute, but they're easy to use and give the quality of light we need now when we use much more sensitive cameras. OK, we've got a couple of soft boxes in the studio too. So a pair of Pro-Lights, a hand full of Avenger Maxi light stands. These are the best light stands I've ever used and they go up to 11 feet tall.(You know I've never liked C-stands. Maybe if I were in a more industrial production world I'd get used to them, but I'm lower on the food-chain, more local, more independent and yes, cheap. C-stands stack well in a truck or on a wall, but for throwing in a bag and traveling I like basic floor stands.) A couple of barndoors, a couple of snoots and bang I'm at $770 easily.

Just a little more money left, what to do, maybe that hybrid DSLR concept I've been dreaming about? We all are intrigued by the ability of new DSLR still cameras to also shoot quite reasonable HD video. It's a merging of photography and video that we never really thought would happen, but it has and it has a lot of ramifications that only direct experimentation can actually show us. (I'm a big believer in the value of direct experimentation to discover hidden meanings and appropriate methods.) So we need to get one at some point – why not now. So after spending a day going back and forth over the mangled handful of cameras available I selected the Canon EOS T1i for around $850. Well by this time there's less money in the budget than I thought (it's due to mingled accounts – OK that's another topic I know) so now I'm short of money by $400 and I trot off to talk with Andrew with my hat held out and yes, what a guy, he says sure he'll kick in the extra. Now we're short on time so thinking it will be the fastest paperwork turn-around I head off to the local Best Buy to get the camera.

Before I left I went on-line and printed out their price of $849 to have in hand in case the price had gone up in the store. Sure enough when I get there it's listed for close to $900. After waiting for about 10 minutes for someone to finally wait on me I have the camera in hand and go to the check out. They'll grant me the on-line price, no problem. I also have with me four sheets of paper describing in difference state forms that I'm a tax deductible institution. I'm all set. I show them the paper work, they hum a few times, show it back and forth to each other, ask for my drivers license, Xerox it all, then I hand them my corporate credit card and they ring me up. Declined. What? Declined. Your card has been declined. Great. Why? Oh it doesn't tell us that, but it doesn't go through that's all we know.

So the next day back at school I ask everyone why the card was declined. No one knows. I call the business office and find that now is a great time for most everyone to be on vacation and they are. Finally, I talk with a very nice and knowledgeable woman who tells me my credit limit has been reduced to $1,500 and that's why it bounced. Why? Don't know. Normally that's not a problem, but this summer I'm buying items for the new Liebling Center and I've been spending $1,500 a week for them alone. My limit had been raised to $10,000, but now it's back down. She suggests getting a PO for the amount and that way it's in the system and I've got 10 days before the paper work needs to clear. Good idea, I'll do that. I thank her for her kind help.

Now I'm off to get someone to help me write up a PO in Datatel our enterprise software. I hate Datatel and have found it one of the worst software applications I've ever used in my life. It makes no sense, there's no reason for anything, it looks horrible and it never tells me anything I really want to know – other than that it's fine. As I've found in on-line discussions people in my world think all enterprise software sucks. It's a bunch of aggregated feature sets that make up a disjointed collection of capabilities that only managers who buy enterprise software like ("Oh, look what it can do". The real question should be, "what does it feel like when you use it?" That too is another story and maybe the most important of all - hum.). I'm used to working with the best software in the world which is really quite easy to use and has the most important element of all - discoverability. You can teach yourself how to use it. It's easy and fun. Datatel on the other hand makes no sense and needs to be learned by rote. It works this way period and it's never any fun. So help I need. Hey, it's Friday afternoon now and every one is gone for the day. I'm help-less.

Andrew suggests just calling B&H and ordering it with his corporate credit card. OK, I'm worn down, let's try it. He calls, the price is only $800 with them, wow, let's do it. He does. Declined. Same thing. Your credit limit gets dropped and no one tells you! OK, let it go, just walk away. It's not worth thrashing around trying to use up the $400. (Did I mention that I'm on vacation. Yes, these last two weeks of my vacation I've worked every day. OK it's my choice. To me work is fun, but it's still a nuisance and certainly is to my wife.) I'm sure the school can use it somewhere else in the budget. It's my donation. The real problem is if you spend the money, but don't get it to register in this years budget you lose the money and then still have to pay for the item out of next years money, so it's like losing the money twice. It's not worth it.

Time passes.

Now it's the next week and I get an e-mail from Andrew saying the camera just came in. What? Yep, B&H shipped it. At some point Andrew's card reset his monthly limit and the order went through. Now we've got that great hybrid DSLR camera to work with. What a life.

Now all I need are some sandbags for the light stands.

gunther

Waiting for the Snow Lepoard

2009-06-14T14:16:00.005-04:00

I've been telling people about the importance of the new version of the OS coming at the end of the summer OS 10.6. It will only run on Intel computers. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is.

Recently I've been plotting about how to shift machines around after we do some upgrading in the library media labs. I've got two 24" iMacs on order with the hope for two more so thinking about how to deploy the four G-5's that they will replace is reasonable. It's like all things, planing makes good sense, but the realities hit hard and fast when you trip over some unthought of problem or your view point shifts and a new idea is discovered.

I was going to suggest that we give the Music Program one of our old G-4 machines so that they could run Siebelius on it for music notation. Well the Siebelius concept that I know is way out of date. It's a whole new animal now and has much higher technical specs, an Intel machine for one. That keeps happening more and more and bodes ill for the usual trickle down effect we normally get from updating. Nothing trickles down anymore and we're about to hit a big technology wall.

The newest thing I've just tripped over is QuickTime X that comes as a part of the new 10.6. It does streaming all by it's self. You no longer need a QuickTime Streaming Server. Yea, so what? Well it sounds to me as if a lot of people will be "doing the stream" all on their own maybe at a much lower level but much more often. Hum. No, I don't really know what that means, but I'll start thinking about it. Watch out YouTube you're in trouble now.

But what it really means is that there are a lot of hidden doors with problems and opportunities lurking behind some or all of the current and future changes. There's a flow to the direction of all of this. It's not a given that everything is going to work out well, but it also doesn't pay to go against the flow. We need to see the pattern, establish directions and ride the wave. SD cards, hybrid cameras, Intel processors, cheap RAM, AVCHD, H.264, full HD, working across the network - all of which require higher skill sets, deeper insights, more experimentation and most of all good humor.

gunther

Happy Vacation Days

2009-06-06T15:48:00.004-04:00

My energies have moved over to the new Liebling Center building this last week and it's both fun and physical. It's always exciting designing new installs – stations and labs – for working and learning, but it's also a lot of moving boxes of books, computers, monitors, and just stuff all over from one building to another in the heat, in the rain, and mostly right in the back - ouch.

I'm at a point now when I need the internet working in the building, but it's not there yet. So, I thought, now's a good time to take some of those vacation days that are still sitting there ticking away. Use them or lose them is the phrase. Bob Crowley says no internet until Tuesday so Friday and Monday are vacation days for me.

You might think that days off are happy and carefree, but not always. Yesterday a neighbor woman stopped at the door with a flyer of her white cat Twinkie who's missing. Oh my goodness what agony in her face. We talked a long time about cats and the neighborhood with tears just barely remaining behind her eyes. An hour later I went out in our yard to look around in likely hiding places and "meowed" out loud hoping for a response. I'm actually pretty good at it, but just silence. How sad. I watched her all day going up and down the street stopping at front doors and walking up driveways.

Today while working in the backyard garden my wife came over and said there was a tragedy. What? One of our resident chipmunks had drowned in a watering can left in the yard. Oh the poor little guy is all I could think, what a sad way to die. Our cats love watching him run across the deck with their eyes wide and their noses pressed again the sliding glass door. They'll miss him too.

Happy relaxing days off and it's only Saturday afternoon with two more days to go. At this rate I'll be a wreck by the time I get back to work.

gunther

Back to the Tube

2009-05-30T20:47:00.003-04:00

Through out the week, I confess, I still watch the Susan Boyle YouTube video of her first performance. I find it, or rather the first version - not this still slightly truncated one, to be almost the quintessential perfect story. It's just over seven minutes, has great background, asides, characters, music, heroic figures, the hero's quest, tension, drama, emotion, and a surprise ending. What more could you want in a story?

The second round I found disappointing both musically and as a story. It's distant, isolated, non-interactive and unresolved. It's a let down. I've seen it once and mostly likely never again.

Tonight I stumbled upon her "final" performance just posted on YouTube. I was 324 to view it - sort of like having a low license plate number I guess. It still has that distant feel to it that their level of production and staging makes. She sang her original song from Les Merisables and it was good, though I felt her first performance had much more character. In her interactions on stage afterwards she seemed on the edge of coherence, less certain, caught in the spotlight in the worst sense of the phrase. Not that I could do any better. In fact she seems to be doing much better than I would ever manage. I think I would have passed out by now from fright. Sort of like wondering how Jack Bauer can actually live through the day with that much adrenaline in his brain. But in my mind it does seem to highlight the artificial nature of that "professionally packaged" level of performance. You can't really see anything on stage from the glare of the spotlight - it's all black beyond a few feet and that emotional wall or distance seems to kill any spontaneous interaction that she exhibited at first. That "cheeky grin" and head shake that the crowd roared to. It's all deer in the headlights and stammering prepared quotes that don't exactly fit the question. But it's not her I dislike, it's the situation she's in. It's not real. It's fake and uninteresting.

Even the judges and the two guys on stage all seemed less interesting, less likable, more packaged with odd clothes and too much makeup. It was unseemly - unpleasant. Simon, unusually, was much more philosophical and tried to contextualize the situation the most with phrases of "no matter what happens", alluding to the fact that she, in fact, might not win the show, but would beyond all doubt still be a winner.

So, again we can ask, what's this really all about. It's classic. It's the contemporary intersection of commerce, talent-scouting, vaudeville, media in the form of both old-school TV and semi-new-school YouTube, and just people. People transposed out of their normal lives into environments unknown and not well understood; put up both for their own benefit and the vaster benefit of others to be poked and exposed on a scale that should cower most of us and certainly alter anyone.

Other than Susan Boyle's performance I've lost interest in the show, but I do miss that ungainly Scottish woman who sang the first time. I wonder where she went to and I wonder how she is. I wish her well and hope that woman gets to sing for the Queen. They both need it.

gunther

Graduation, Celebration and the New Liebling Center

2009-05-19T22:30:00.011-04:00

That bitter-sweet, happy-sad time of students finishing their final year with a flourish - speeches, applause, hugs, handshakes, tears and goodbyes - was mingled this year, as if that wasn't enough all by it's self, with the opening and dedication of the finally finished Jerome Liebling wing of the Film Photo building. This year held an unusually friendly collection of students who have all turned into friends and fellow workers to be missed most now, just at the height of their abilities - as their work shows.

Also sandwiched into all of that was an alumni weekend with older and wiser graduates returning for still yet more hugs and handshakes. Their stories of life and projects sounding bigger and bolder than we could have imagined interspersed with the hint of children unknown and travels previously unmentioned while eating, laughing, talking, drinking and more laughing all under a large tent.

The commencement speakers sheltered under the biggest tent of the day were official (president Hexter), funny (Bob Goldwaith), and deeply interesting (Ken Burns). Seeing the students so well dressed standing next to people who look much like them only older - of course their parents - made the day rush by and merge into the final ceremony under still yet another tent, of thanks to donors, praise for faculty and admiration of the new Liebling building as a shrine to photography and workspace for media.

I've seen the Liebling building grow from drawings and ill formed ideas stumbled over in meetings to foundations, steel, sheetrock and doors. Only days before the halls were still littered with conduit, ceiling tiles and buckets of paint, yet you could see how nice it was going to be, but when the track lights came on and the floors finally swept clean it seemed even more impressive - quite nice indeed. Then the surprise. Robert Seydel and a troupe of students started hanging the photos. Suddenly - what a change - we're all working in a museum quality space. A really great museum in which I have a small office. Wow. I'm actually impressed.

So now all of us have to "up our game" to measure up to what the building demands of us. It's a real tribute to Jerry who we all have admired for so long both as a working photographer and as a teacher. It isn't just a building anymore - it's a feeling - a spirit but it is a tangible reminder that what we do is important and substantial. Seeing the alumni photo work on the walls makes that direct connection from the past to the present to the future. You stand there and see current students looking at the work and you can read on their faces the wonder and the power of images and the stories that we tell through those framed prints. Earlier listening to the alums talk about what we all were thinking decades ago also reminds me that the uncertainty of that time was much like the uncertainty of this time. We didn't know then where we would go or how we would really live and oddly that seems to be closely reflected in our current time - a disappearance of certainty and a discovery that not only don't we control our world as we thought, but that we may barely know how it works.

gunther

Make - Don't Consume

2009-04-29T11:50:00.010-04:00

Who would have thought that Susan Boyle would represent so many possibilities for metaphor and example. The YouTube video that I linked to previously is dead - taken down by the poster. Well that's my impression of YouTube. It's quick and easy, but not to be counted on over time. It's unreliable as a reference or repository and for all of it's pretense at being able to show HD, most of it is technically inferior.

So now the remaining Susan Boyle videos that I can find are not up to my standard. They either don't show all of the footage (you miss the full story - I hate that) or they have bad audio (why post a music video with sucky audio?) or it's the wrong format (16:9 images squished down to 4:3 - again why do that?).

I saw someone on CNN last night commenting on the remarkable number of hits her video has generated - about 50 million (I had this at 500 million at first, then I doubted that number after a while and changed it, but the one that I'm linking to now already has over 50 million - so who knows?) That's a lot, but it's even a little more amazing because it all seems so ad hoc and kludged together. That must be an aggregated number combining all of the versions of her performance.

So what's the point to all of this. I guess this is just more of a reflection on the way YouTube has penetrated our world. It's an easy way to show ourselves work, but it's also too off the cuff, unreliable, and arbitrary. If we need to post a video to show to each other we need to control that ourselves, not rely on a middleman to do the heavy lifting, because later, it's just not there. Don't be a consumer, be a maker - own and control your work.

gunther

The Story Turns

2009-04-25T20:47:00.025-04:00

After discovering the "official" Britain's Got Talent web site and viewing the second episode I find myself mad about Simon's behavior. Who would have thought – certainly not me – that I actually have an option about this, let alone that I'm upset about it. The second show features some young man, lad I guess they'd call him, singing as if he were a Michael Jackson sound-a-like. Simon stops the music and has the kid select a different song, because he thinks it's not going well or he's not singing a sellable song. I don't think that's ever happened before – has it? The kid's OK, but only OK. He's not that great, but Simon looks like he sees a record deal in the future – hum.

Now I find that I'm actually rooting for Susan Boyle over this little kid. She's earned a chance, she's paid her dues. The kid is just a kid. Next year is fine for him – don't push it. Simon, don't be greedy. What am I saying?

Later....

Well the Wikipedia article about Miss Boyle is informative, perhaps psychologically therapeutic, and alludes to a record deal with Simon after all. It better happen. There's a page about the show too and I see I don't really know how the show works after all. i've never seen the American version at all. I'm not sure I've even heard of it.

Wow, I'm an "official" Susan Boyle fan and I didn't even know it. Yes, I've heard "Cry Me A River" that she does. It's pretty good. She infuses emotion into her singing and that was ten years ago. It's that disconnect between her voice and her look, but the more I hear her sing the more I like it. Just let her be herself. Isn't that what we all should wish for ourselves and others.

Maybe this is the new internationalism. We're sucked into the new world order by pulling for dowdy Scottish singers – of substance. In the end I hope Susan Boyle gets to sing for the Queen. I guess I'll be watching somewhere on May 23 for the next round. Who knew?

This is the real power of the internet. It's either personal, a strikingly good imitation of real, or it simply reads that way. Maybe we should all be afraid instead, because it's emotionally deeper than we thought. When it works, it really works. At least be wary – and always use a microphone. God save the Queen.

gunther

The Power Is In The Microphone and The Story

2009-04-24T17:53:00.019-04:00

I've been watching the Susan Boyle video from the TV show "Britain's Got Talent". It's a fantastic seven minute roller-coaster ride than ends well. (New Link Here) YouTube makes it easy to see this kind of thing, after the fact, so people link back and forth to it, though there are a lot of really bad versions out there, too truncated (you need to see the whole thing), bad audio, wrong aspect ratio. In fact the "official BGT" site on YouTube has the worst version of the performance – brutally edited down until it looses all of the tension. After watching a squished SD version, I finally found a full 16:9 version that looks and sounds good too. I was surprised by how choked up I was the first few times I watched it – it's quite emotional.

A few days later on BoingBoing I found this "Playing For Change" video that's a great music event, but doesn't have the full emotional impact of the other. The common thread is the power of a microphone, getting a great recording, and what mixing audio skillfully can produce.

On Wednesday I saw Hampshire student Will Bangs' Division III presentation. It was held in the Red Barn, a large rustic structure. He sat at a small table with a desk lamp, audio mixer, and microphone and just talked to the audience while he showed videos he and high school students he worked with had made projected onto a very small movie screen placed next to him. It was terriffic, but the microphone made all of the difference. If he had just sat there and talked to us – a crowd of over 50 people – it would have been a weak presentation. It was simple, but intimate because of the presentational power of amplification. Audio amplification is a lot like film lighting. It separates the subject from the background and draws our eye to what is meant to be seen or in this case heard. It was a lot like a "This American Life" show on stage. There were stories he just told as radio - voice only, then there were stories that were shown on the video projector and then he moved back and forth – each form playing off of the other.

The music video "Playing for Change" is a tour deforce of audio recording and mixing. It's subtle and builds and weaves instruments and voices as it progresses in complexity. It's one of the most restrained audio mixes I've heard. Think of all the audio they didn't use. The video part documents the making of it as much as showing the musicians and locations. You come to understand what's going on as it unfolds making it more enjoyable because of your growing understanding.

Susan Boyle, however, has a story behind it that adds more punch to the unfolding of events. It is a great recording and you can see fully how a microphone changes the sound of a voice from ordinary to extraordinary, but it's the context of the events that builds tension, surprise, irony, pleasure and hope. The performance by itself would be good, but not as uniquely memorable. However, what we are seeing is also heavily edited with the wisdom of hindsight and the power of a soundtrack that continues even after she's done singing. What we see has been arranged to bring out as much emotion as possible. It works. I wish all of my stories were as well told, succinct, and carried as much impact and warmth. Britain is a better place because it got to see Susan Boyle sing and I'm certainly looking forward to hearing more of her voice.

gunther

Showing the Work

2009-04-11T10:08:00.006-04:00

Class assignments are sometimes fun, sometimes hard, and sometimes late. Too often we watch students work franticly in the labs only hours before a class eager to finish a project then finally, depressingly, they realize it's going to be another hour to burn a DVD of it all – too late. Compression takes time. Yes, we do have real-time DVD burners, but you don't get a menu with it and they're sometimes hard to duplicate.

There's a slight disconnect between finishing a project and outputting it in a viewable format. In our wonderful world of widening formats where you end up isn't always obvious. As I've said several times, in the old days – last year – we were almost always going to end up with a tape as the finial destination, but that's not necessarily true today. If you've been working in HDV you might not be able to hand an HDV tape to a faculty member and expect them to watch that at home. You need to make a more universal and easily viewable product. Is that a video DVD, a data DVD with a QuickTime movie on it, a flash drive with a QuickTime movie, or even a CD with a QuickTime movie on it, or upload it to YouTube and watch over the internets. The answer is yes, pick one, pick all.

OK smarty, which one do I do first and what's the fastest and best looking. Enter the Turbos. In the Advanced Media Lab we have ElGato Turbo.264 USB sticks inside all of the computers. They're small hardware accelerated compression devices that output H.264 QuickTime movies. If you're still in Final Cut Pro you can export your movie by going to File> Export> QuickTime Conversion and finding the settings with Turbo listed next to the name. Then press the Options button to change any of the settings. I like the iPod High settings, but you do have to actually try them to see not just the quality of the image, but the resulting file size. You'll be surprised by how small your movie can end up and still look great in the process. If you want to view your work in a large window use the Apple TV settings.

If you've already exported a QuickTime movie or have a reference movie you can open the Turbo.264 application from the dock and drop your movie onto the window. It has a nice interface that shows how fast it's encoding and how long it will take to finish. The only constraint is that the ones in the lab are only for SD projects. I have a loaner one in my office that you can borrow that does HD, but it only runs on Intel machines so you have to work in the Inter-Media Lab: B-5, for that.

So while I always say USB is too slow for video, it's pretty terrific for these little hardware sticks. Give it a try. You can also batch process your movie and select the best format after all of them have been exported. In the opposite direction it's also a good way to sweep all of your work from the year onto a single disk for your semester or div II portfolio and don't forget to send a copy home to show mom. She'll love it.

Maybe she's shooting in HDV also, wait, it's better than that. She gave you the camcorder you're using and she bought a new one. Your mom's shooting in full HD and you're stuck in dinky HDV. And you thought you were so hot with this new stuff. Man, your mom's got it all down tight. She's savvy enough to buy the sharpest gear and have fun with it at whatever level she wants. If we want to beat your mom we all need to get faster, quicker and deeper than we ever thought possible, because we're up-against some stiff competition – your mom's shooting HD. It's "the new modern world".

gunther

Digital Realities

2009-04-08T11:36:00.001-04:00

It's been a hard week. On Monday we had a string of technical problems all day: hard drive failures, freezes, network hangs, etc. I remember when a Hampshire grad stopped by one time and talked with us about his experiences working on a technical help desk for a famous video editing software company. He said he would get the same software problems on the same day all across the country. I believe that. There are days that seem like we're trapped in an eddy of swirling malfunctions and "general errors". It's built into the systems – clocks within clocks and they all lock up at the same time. Well it sure feels like that.

Part of the solution is to keep people calm, try to give a reasonable explanation, restore functionality as quickly as possible, make suggestions for going forward, and give emotional support as you leave. Then you walk down the hall shaking you head wondering what the heck's going on. That's the easy part.

Then there's the hard part. A conversation that starts, "My drive is making a funny sound could you take a quick look at it?" It's a friendly division III woman with a 1TB drive that she accidently knocked over on it's side while it was running. We power it up and immediately I know it's the "click of death" sound. The drive is fried. Power down. We take the drive apart to see if it's really the drive or the problem is with the case. There's little chance, but we want to know for sure. Pop it in a Mac Pro tower, power it up, bang, it's the same thing. Quick, pull the plug, power down. It's dead.

At this point there are no easy words of encouragement, there's only silence. A student comes in to ask a question, sees us all standing in silent dread and quickly leaves. My whole division III project is on that drive she says and starts to cry. I don't have a backup, everything is on that one drive. So there we all are one minute we're working in the happy and productive world of digital media, the next we're stuck in the hell of a ephemeral universe that's capricious and uncaring, full of trip wires and spiked pits. You can almost hear the recriminations going through her head. Why didn't I....

I offer the suggestion that her committee might already have enough faith in her project to get a pass out of what she currently has, but she cuts me off quickly, "I don't care about graduating, I only care about my film." Wow, that's just the attitude we want – normally. Bruner quickly steps in and suggests the possibility of sending the drive out to have the files reclaimed and mentions a company. He pulls up their web page and calls them on the phone to get a price quote. It's between $900 and $3,000. It's expensive and uncertain, but maybe it's the only option. I package the drive in bubble wrap, find a small box and we both watch her walk up the stairs obviously shaken.

We give lip-service to the needs of backing up your work, but when it comes to actually doing that we all fail, but it's that quiet failing that remains unnoticed until failing turns into fatality and then we're drawn up short and surprised by the enormity of the situation. As hard drive sizes increase we become smugly satisfied with using them and fail to notice that now more and more of our work is at risk. Quite like our national economy, isn't it. The Black Swan is real and the demise of digital data is as likely today as it will be in the statistical future, but all of us need to get realistic about the realities of digital perils and make them a daily factor, not a perceived distant possibility.

UPDATE:

No, the data recovery did not work. It's all gone. The good news is she's made a terrific comeback on her own. I saw the second part of the three part film and it was really great – interesting animation, done cleverly yet seemingly simple, with an interesting story behind it. All of us who've seen it love it. A job well done and a display of resilience, intelligence, and skill.

gunther

The Liebling Center Continues

2009-04-05T22:52:00.001-04:00

I stopped in to look at the construction of the new Liebling Center addition to the film & photo building last week. As always the rooms keep changing. First I think they're too small, then they seem to feel larger, then a few days later they shrink again. It's amazing how your perceptions can change with the additions of sheetrock, paint, ceiling tiles, and lights. Think what it's going to be with stuff and people in it. Well, that's the problem – I can't.

Over the weekend my daughter received an invitation to this years alumni reunion/commencement/building opening (that's the new austerity – bundling events together, good thing there isn't a funeral happening too). She lives in San Francisco now, so I opened the invitation and discovered that Ken Burns is on a panel of distinguished alumnus and is doing the ribbon cutting of the new building on Saturday the 16th. That's just six weeks from now. Glad I know what's going on now. Wow, there's a little pressure to get stuff set up and at least look like it works. My daughter's not going to be there, but I'm an alumn too and I'll go.

My daughter and I talk about two times a week, three if I'm lucky, well two if I'm lucky. She's really calling to talk with her mother not me, but we have a good time. I'm really her step-father, but I like to claim her as my daughter since she's turned out so well. She told me once that she and I had the most in common of all of us in the family. I took that as an extreme compliment and a deep insight. We do. She studied photography and writing and is now in grad school for psychology. Psychology was one of my majors in college, along with photography, but my writing has come late and it's tardiness is noticeable. My daughter, on the other hand, is the best writer I've ever read and it's my only disappointment that she doesn't pursue it, but it's not my choice, it's hers.

So, just as it's often hard to see what rooms will turn into from discussions and drawings, it's hard to know how people will develop and what pathways are the ones to follow and the ones to avoid. You just have to let things unfold and make suggestions and hope all the changes are for the best. Cheap psychology tells us it's not the destination that's the goal, it's the journey and having fun along the way. I wonder what expensive psychology would tell us.

gunther

Wait, Stop the Clock

2009-04-03T22:27:00.002-04:00

I started this blog back in January with the modest intent of evaluating software, which I think is best done simply by using it. Is Blogger better and easier than Wordpress or what? I've been making web pages for a long time now; starting with something I can't even remember the name of back in the 1990s (PageMill), then Dreamweaver, then our content management system, then we changed to Red-dot, then I gave up because it was such a horrible experience, then I started up with iWeb – which I actually like a lot and feel quite productive with (we can talk about that some time), then I felt guilty that we didn't have cool enough web pages and thought maybe a blog would be easier - whew!

Suddenly, a lot of time has gone by and I've come full circle again. I've given Red-Dot another try. It's not as horrible as I remembered, but it's stiff and not much fun and doesn't seem to actually like to work with images, just those poor little slices of pictures that pass for photos. It must have been designed by word oriented people not image oriented thinkers. It's also a very formal and managed process. You write something then some one else has to "approve" it, then it gets posted, then you get to see it. My writing style, such that it is, is all about revision (I am, at heart, a video editor or as Bruner always interjects, no, you're a designer – I guess that's what friends are for, to tell you who you really are), but I like to see it posted, then read it, then revise it. For me, the form – how it ends up looking – is a real part of the work, not only the words. My sense of media is a merging of content with the shape of that content; design and meaning flowing together, one informing the other. It's not that easy to do with a CMS approach and it must not be that much fun either for those that have to do the approvals over and over. So much for the sense of live and immediate on the web. But blogging somehow has escaped that formalist approval process and even the administrators now have blogs made outside of our content management system. So it must be OK.

Anyway, that's not my point. The point is that a lot of time has passed. The semester has a speed and necessity all of its own. I get engrossed in something – the day, the week, student projects, helping, working, life – finally pause, look up and it's two months later. Guess I've been in the groove all that time. Isn't that what they call "the flow". Suddenly while working vast amounts of time have elapsed and you didn't even notice because you were having such a good time. Well, I was.

Now, when I've come back to this blog it turns out I've forgotten all the passwords and have had to struggle for a few days to think them back up. Freud would have been proud, I've recovered my memories or at least the quirky password I used and I'll try and get back into the swing of it all again. Though my viewpoint now feels slightly discontinuous. This must be what it's like to come out of a coma and join your family back in the world again – how would I know, huh.

gunther

Welcoming Speech

2009-01-30T09:17:00.002-05:00

I had only a limited amount of time with the new incoming class this week, but if I had been the speaker at an opening ceremony here's the short speech I would have given.

Welcome to Hampshire College, I'm glad that you are here and maybe more importantly to you, oddly enough, I'm glad that I'm here. As a student you want all of the support workers here to feel that way and generally I think that's true, we do feel that way. We like both the college as an idea and we like you, Hampshire students, as clients, colleagues, and friends. Some of us have been Hampshire students ourselves and some of us even have had our own children become Hampshire students, so we're invested personally and emotionally. I think that amount of attachment to the college is unusual in support staff and you benefit directly because of it. So with that degree of attachment in mind I want to offer you as much insight and perspective as I can that bridges the daily troubles and the cosmic nature of life.

While Hampshire offers you great opportunities many other people will speak to you about that and yes, I will too, but later. Now I'm more interested in problem solving. Hampshire, as any institution, is not without problems and you will experience some here. What you do about them is what separates the amateurs from the pros: the people who drop away unhappy and the people who flourish and prosper. If you have a problem, not just a difficulty, but a real problem tell someone about it, but choose wisely the person to tell. In fact deciding who to tell will often lead to solving your problem. Talking to the wrong person is a diagnostic, a proof, that you don't know how to solve your problem, you might as well be talking to a wall and often it feels just that way. Hopefully the person you address will realize your situation and help you find the correct person to talk with and in doing so will direct you to the possibility of a real solution.

Telling someone you have a real problem helps you directly in two ways. First it's simply therapeutic. You'll feel better even if nothing changes and honestly that is the most frequent outcome. You've stated your case, some one has listened to you and it ends there – you walk away. Secondly no one else may even realize there is a problem. Again, even if nothing is resolved you've started the process of simply having people notice the situation. If several people speak up about the same problem it will be addressed, but each one of you have to vote with your actions to insure that eventuality. If you don't speak up the failure is on your part. This is a way all of you, working as a group, can steer the course of the college. It's how you, as a collective, have the most power and authority to direct the thinking and behavior of the institution to your benefit. By not speaking out you forfeit a great deal of your power as students. Think of it as citizen participation, an easy and powerful way to vote.

A related classic problem at Hampshire is exemplified by the phrase "the Hampshire run-around". That is being shuffled from one department to another with no real answer seemingly being given. The correction to that kind of situation is easy but not obvious. The problem lies not in incorrect answers, every one tries to tell you the right thing, but in an inappropriate question. I always ask staff not to immediately answer a students question, but first to validate the question. That takes a little more time in back and forth conversation, but in the end both of you will know more about each other, which is always a good thing and more about your real question. If you're asking the wrong question the answer is moot, it's always going to be wrong. Who ever controls the question controls the answer, but remember that's you. You're the one asking the question. Be sure it's the question you want answered.

The next thing I need to tell you is a little sobering. You live in a dangerous demographic. Ten years from now one of you will be dead, mostly from car accidents. What does that mean to you personally? Other than not getting into a car ever again, I think it means have a good time now. Think short term. If you have a crush on some one tell them. If you ever wanted to play the piano do it now. If you want to go to Paris do it now. Work hard. Play hard. Enjoy life fully because you may never have another chance. Wow.

But wait, here's the next actuarial fact – almost six of you will live to be close to one hundred years old. Not just barely alive, but active and healthful. What does that mean to you personally? I think it means plan for the long haul. Live a healthy life. Always think long term. Invest in yourself and the society in which you live. Don't take foolish risks. See the future ahead of you as a real event.

And of course, the rest of you are somewhere in the middle of all of that. A little of this a little of that all mixed together in an unknown proportion with unknowable outcomes.

So there's a dilemma for you to work on – the balance of life – between the short term and the long term, both are your reality, both situations should alter your thinking. However, the fact is that no one else has a clue about what to do either. This is the first time any of us remember being alive, well most of us. We're just making it up as we go along, with a little help from some books we recommend to each other. So finally I'll end as I started, welcome to the world, welcome to Hampshire College.

Would that help you as a new student understand more about Hampshire College and maybe life in general? Maybe, maybe not.

gunther

The Semester Starts

2009-01-27T17:38:00.000-05:00

Tuesday morning the new incoming spring class showed up for a brief tour. They were great and I was very surprised at how many of them were transfer students. I'm always happy to see a transfer student because I know they, as a group, do very well at Hampshire. They have the advantage of already having left home and resolved those kind of emotional problems associated with departure. It is a drastic lifestyle change moving out of the only home you've ever know and in with a smorgasbord of strangers.

Just finding your way through the day can suddenly be quite daunting. Do you actually sit and watch your laundry or do you walk away and hope it's still there when you come back. Who would want my wet laundry anyway? Isn't that creepy? So transfer students have done laundry already and maybe some have even paid an electric bill. That's always sobering – the cost of just living, not even doing anything. Having had that as a previous experience allows you to move on to more important problems and dilemmas. Today they all seemed happy and eager, ready for the semester to start.

It's hard to tell new students what Hampshire is really like. First, it's not what you think it is regardless of what you actually thought it was. It's subtler and more internal than you might imagine. No one here is in competition with anyone else, but you are always worried about the quality and quantity of your own work. That's the competition here, your work measured both in pounds and weightiness.

That same afternoon I shot a one hour long interview with a final semester Division III student who has been working in the labs. She spent last year in Afghanistan working on an unusual television program. In the process of the interview I discover she proposed the show herself to Afghani television, found funding, and while traveling around the country helped produce it. The show is like finding a new pop singer on American Idol, but with business entrepreneurs as the singers – they don't sing, they show their business plan. What's your business plan look like? Now she's documenting the results in a video documentary and describing the process in the form of a handbook (both on and off the web) for other countries to try out. I'm impressed.

Beginnings of semesters are always promising, but it's always nice to see at the same time real results of what Hampshire students do in the world and then start the semester.

Convergence: the great transformation

2009-01-25T13:21:00.001-05:00

I talk a lot about Red camera and our relentless move into the newest future on the block – electron cinematography. It used to be that convergence was thought of as the merging of your television with your computer, so in the end you had no television but your computer thought it was one. Yes, that's happening, but on the viewing end. It's what's happening at the other end of the media chain that's the big news – shooting and editing. Photography and video are fusing together, first in the physical form of DSLR cameras that shoot in high-definition video.

Now my little Lumix still camera has always shot video and not too badly at that. My daughter bought one first and I was really surprised by the quality of the video and bought one for me too. OK, hers is sexier than mine and to be honest my wife bought it for trips and I just carry it and use it more. It's nice to have a camera small enough to always have it in your pocket.

In the old days when I shot on film I always had a half-frame 35mm camera in my pocket. When I first arrived at Hampshire back in the 70's you could always tell who was a Hampshire student on the bus because they carried a camera and most likely a half-frame. The most popular one was a Bell&Howell with a wind-up spring drive. They had a nice wrist strap so you could have it in your hand all the time ready to shoot. That was the whole point of half-frame cameras – you could get 72 exposures on a single roll of 35mm film. Yep, we all shot a lot of film then and I still have all of that film. It's archival. Where will all of your digital images be forty years from now? One year from now?

An even further aside – an old girlfriend though I was a really interesting guy because I carried a hand gun. She was disappointed when she found out it was just a half-frame camera. No, it didn't last. It's hard to measure up to that kind of image when I'm just a normal guy after all.

But the big difference between the Lumix family of cameras and the new DLSR HD video cameras is that they shoot full frame HD (1920 x 1080) and you get all the controls of a still camera at the same time. Are they ready for prime-time? No, not yet, but they're moving along quickly and there's a big market for them. Red camera cancelled its models last year and did a remake on them because of this trend. Now theirs shoots stills also, but they've moved way beyond HD and work in the 2K to 8K image size range. They even have a 28K camera in the works, though I have no idea what you could do with that after you shoot images the size of a house.

But that's the trend, the fusion of still photo controls and sensibility, with the philosophy of film, in the body of a video camera. You end up in Final Cut Pro cutting your video that looks like film shot with a photo camera. That's real convergence. So what we see for the future is we're going to work like we've always wanted to, but at much higher resolutions in the field and in the edit room and then distribute on some kind of Blu-Ray disk format. Remember what Steve Jobs said about Blu-Ray – it's a big box of pain (or was it hurt)(turns out it was a bag, not a box). So we have still yet another frontier to cross before all of this is settled in and we're back to working in a way we will call usual.

gunther

History, perceptions and personal experience

2009-01-25T10:22:00.000-05:00

Today is the 25th anniversary of the MacIntosh computer from way back in 1984. This video of Steve Jobs proudly showing it off is very revealing about the state of computing in those early days. What the Mac did then was not much compared to today, but the real comparison was against what other computers did at the time, which was even less with much more pain attached. We need to remind ourselves of that historical perspective. Don't compare history against today, but against the values and capabilities of the time. That's why they're all clapping so much.

My first computer was a Zeinth running some form of DOS. I bought it through the school and I had spent a lot of time asking people for recommendations. It was horrible. I had to have the manual on my lap all the time and I was always disappointed with the printing of my work. Using it was like trying to give yourself a migraine headache. Finally I just gave it back to the school and walked away. I didn't care how much money I'd spent on it I just wanted it to stop.

Then I got a Mac.

Wow, I did more work in that first week than I had the whole time I was using the Zenith and it was fun instead of painful. The world then divided into two groups – people who were using PCs and people who were using Macs. You felt sorry for the PC people who seemed to be self delusional about even noticing the differences. Over the years when Windows came out the PC people all said, see it's just like a Mac, but it wasn't, it wasn't at all, but they couldn't see it. Then when I asked for help with my computer I always got a twenty minute lecture why Macs were inferior to PCs. Finally it was too much and I started learning and doing repair work myself. It was easy and still fun. I no longer needed the IT people to yell at me. I was independent.

Over the intervening years we've all come to get along better, but there's still that perception gap, an inability to fully see that the user experience is primary, that it isn't at all about the hardware or the sever but the experience, that sophisticated software is actually easy to learn and fun to use, that a computer helps you more by doing less, that it's the work you make that's important not the machine, and finally that the best advise comes from your own understanding not from someone else's perceptions. My only wish is for you to have as much fun working as I do, but remember, it's all about the work and how you get there is up to you.

gunther

Red Camera – Red-Dot: Backing Into the Future

2009-01-23T14:40:00.002-05:00

Hi, we're the people who run the media labs in the basement of the Hampshire College library. You seldom see us, in fact you may never have been in the labs at all, so you'll really never have seen us. That's too bad. We're here to help Hampshire students using media find their way. We don't care what your concentration is. We don't care what you're making. We don't even charge you a lab fee. We only want you to be able to do your work (it's all about the work) – and maybe push you a little in a couple of directions you might not have though of, but in the end we'll back off and let you do your thing.

I'm back to trying out working in this form of communication, not just as a blog, but specifically using Google's Blogger software. Our "official" Hampshire web pages have languished a little due to the fact the the web application, Red-Dot, hasn't been the easiest software to run. In fact we gave up on it over the summer and haven't been back since. I've found that it's not unusual for "enterprise" software to be intrinsically hard to use and I have the option that it all basically sucks. While that may seem a little harsh my normal day is spent using some of the best software in the world so it's hard to come down to the level of corporate enterprise software that has a bad time built into it. Life's too short to use lame software.

So what's the point of all of this? I'm trying to show you what we have to offer, what my thinking is, where we're going and also let you talk back and tell me if I'm wrong about stuff and find out what you're thinking about too.

So what's hot currently? Well, the running joke has been our raffle on when the first Hampshire student will shoot a Division III project using a Red Camera – a year from now, two years? It turns out it's this semester – it's now. Some joke huh? That's what we're experiencing. The realities are appearing faster than our theorizing, faster than what we would expect in this ongoing transition from older forms into the no-tape, ultra-high-definition, progressive, 24 fps, electron cinematography world. Yes, the world of media is stranger than we know, but maybe you are too.

gunther