Small Mammal

Synopsis of "I, Party Cup" that was sent to Solo Cup Company

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:15:00 -0400

In February, after discussing “I, Party Cup” with a representative for the Solo Cup Company, I sent the following document summarizing the film as well as the materials that Solo had offered to provide. Several weeks later, Solo (under auspices of Dart Container, the company that acquired Solo in 2012) informed me via their representative that they had decided to rescind their cooperation. I’m posting this here merely as reference for forthcoming Kickstarter update to the film’s backers.

——————————

WHAT IS THIS FILM ABOUT?

This film is about the human being(s) whose choices and stories brought the “red party cup” into our world. Who are they? What are some of those stories, those choices?

Think of the film as a short documentary “portrait” similar to this…

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/who-made-that-soy-sauce-dispenser.html?_r=0

Who? This is the key, core question of “I, Party Cup.”

The trailer I created encapsulates this approach succinctly:

https://vimeo.com/48953139

WHAT IS THIS FILM NOT ABOUT?

“I, Party Cup” is not a piece of outsourced “PR” about the Solo Cup Corporation, or the history of this product. Nor is it a muckraking “expose” about environmental impacts or trash or corporate policy. This is not an “issue” film. It’s not Frontline. It’s more like This American Life, or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqYFFLKeLPo

WHAT APPROACH AM I TAKING WITH MY RESEARCH?

My approach—as with most documentary projects—is to accumulate much more information and material than I’ll actually use, and sculpt it down in post-production. In this information-gathering stage, I make the analogy to “following bread crumbs”: I won’t know which story or stories are exactly the right ones for this film until I encounter them, which I can only do by moving from one person or bit of information to the next.

WHAT MATERIALS AM I INTERESTED IN?

These are all archival materials that you’ve said Solo is willing to give me access to:

- old video, old commercials, some marketing vids as far back as the 70s.

- technical drawings of the cup, engineering sketches, prototypes, and other product-design materials

- print ads and marketing literature from the origin of the party cup to the present day.

WHO AM I INTERESTED IN TALKING TO?

To facilitate my “following the bread crumbs” approach, I’d love to talk to all of the following as a start:

- head of marketing

- retired plant manager (Neil, you mentioned him in our call)

- someone in charge of sustainability

- someone in product design

These conversations can happen over the phone. They are intended to fill in background information so I can start to narrow down my ideas about who, what, and when to shoot on-camera interviews. (This is called “pre-interviewing.”)

INTENDED LENGTH: 5 to 10 minutes.

WHERE IT WILL BE SHOWN: online, premiering on Grist.org. Documentary festivals may follow after that, but the primary distribution will be on the web.

TIMELINE: My intention is to continue research and production through February and March, and finish postproduction by April.

New Work: "Limited," a music video mashup about a lonely AI trying to connect

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:48:10 -0500

Here’s an experimental music video I made for Jascha, remixing footage from 2001, Moon, TRON, Robocop, and WarGames:

I’ve been curious for a while about whether I could re-edit images, shots and scenes from well-known movies to tell different stories from the ones I borrowed them from. The music video for Jascha’s “Limited” seemed like a great opportunity to experiment with this approach, since the song instantly suggested to me a science-fiction short story — and I didn’t have the time (or interest, to be honest) to create sci-fi production value from scratch.

It also seemed like a fun challenge to take images that have acquired so much “baggage” over the years — like the glowering cyclops eye of HAL from 2001, which has become visual shorthand for “evil machine” — and try to attach completely opposite emotional associations to them. What if something like HAL wasn’t evil at all, but just misunderstood in its intentions, like a puppy who plays too rough with its owner? That’s exactly the image that Jascha’s plaintive refrain in “Limited” put into my head.

Remixing material from five very different films creates a necessarily impressionistic approach to telling a story, so maybe the story this video tells in your head isn’t the same one that it tells in mine. Either way I hope it’s a good one.

And here’s some interesting background on artificial intelligence from BERG, a tech/design consultancy in London, that I only discovered after making the video but seems to be in the same wheelhouse of what I was thinking about when I edited it.

“Limited” is the first single from Jascha’s album THE FUTURE LIMITED, which you can download for free for a limited time here.

TV on the Radio

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:01:00 -0500

Mainstream web video bugs me. So often, I find myself wanting it to be something… more. More inventive. More cinematic. More … I dunno, something more than the completely obvious, the half-assed, or the seen-it-before.

Google just unveiled its first crop of science channels on Youtube, which are part of its gajillion-dollar push into developing original content. I checked out the channels and immediately harrumphed out an email to some friends about how “spectacularly underwhelming” they all were.

Talking-heads-‘n-greenscreens. ENG-style “reports from the field”. Infomercial production values. This is what a gajillion Google dollars buys? (Yes, I know the whole gajillion didn’t go into creating these channels. I’m sure the guy who created CSI costs a lot. But still.)

As a viewer, I guess my feeling was: We could be seeing the Youtube version of COSMOS or Radiolab. So why the #&*@ aren’t we?

A few weeks later, it’s hitting me that maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe I’m finding these science channels — and the overall “poetics of Youtube” — so frustrating because of my own old-media associations with this new medium. Which just may not apply.

My standard lament with a lot of this stuff is that it’s too much like old TV, when it should be more like movies, music videos, or Tim and Eric-style pop art mutations. It should immerse, delight and surprise me. Instead, it often feels fast, cheap, and ~~out of control~~ totally predictable.

The “values” I want from mainstream web video, and feel are too often missing, are certainly great for creating engaging one-off experiences. (Like my “Lego Antikythera” film, which got gangbusters views.) But Youtube is mostly about something different. Another one of my standard gripes is that it’s like watching “radio on TV.” (Show don’t tell, mother$#*ers!) But really, Youtube is more like TV on the radio.

What do I mean by that? Geniuses like Jad Abumrad like to say that radio is a medium that literally gets inside your head. It’s very intimate and relational. Even though it’s technically a one-way experience (unless it’s a call-in show), great radio feels like personal conversation: just for you. Successful Youtube channels have much more in common with that kind of media experience than they do with watching television shows or movies or ads or experimental films.

It’s not so much about feeling immersed as it about feeling conversed with. How often do you blow up a Youtube video to fullscreen? I hardly ever do, even with the ones that I really love. The pictures are like words in radio. You don’t need to go fullscreen for them to do their job any more than you need to blast Radiolab through an enormous roof-rattling subwoofer. Youtube isn’t internet television. It’s TV on the radio.

The science channels on Youtube disappointed me because I expected/wanted them to be, first and foremost, aesthetically immersive artifacts. (“Do something with this medium, damn you!”) But if I’d come to them with “TV on the radio” expectations, I might not have been so disappointed.

Then again… even when re-appraised through that lens — which at least helps me understand how these channels can rack up the kinds of views they do — I still find them kind of wanting. Minute Physics and Vi Hart make wonderful “TV on the radio” about science, and have the views to back it up. Their work is just as appropriate to Youtube’s “poetics” (and Google’s mass-audience goals) as the stuff on these new official science channels, but it’s orders of magnitude more clever, fresh, and informative. Why can’t these channels, with all of Google’s support and influence behind them, be just as great — so that I deeply want to watch them, instead of just weakly “want to” want to?

Maybe it comes down to the “voice” part of my TV on the radio metaphor. The new science channels don’t seem to have much in the way of distinctive voice (either literally, thematically, or visually/formally), whereas with Minute Physics and Vi Hart, the overall “video voice” is immediately and uniquely apparent. Here’s two physics-related videos: SciShow with Hank Green (the best of Google’s new crop) followed by Minute Physics:

And here’s two math-related videos: the Google-backed Numberphile, followed by Vi Hart:

Maybe this is just personal taste, or comparing apples and oranges. But to me, even as “TV on the radio,” the Google-backed videos feel shticky and didactic, while the other two feel authentic and engaging. With Minute Physics and Vi Hart’s clips, there’s no part of me that’s willing myself to keep watching; I can’t help but do so. But that just doesn’t happen with the other ones, even though I want it to. (Which is odd, because Hank Green’s old “Brotherhood 2.0” series felt authentic and engaging too, if more than a little Ze-Frank-ish.)

Whether you agree with me on these particular videos or not, “voice” is what creates the kind of crossover appeal that Youtube science communication desperately needs. When it’s there, almost any topic becomes appealing, informative, and viral. Do I give a damn about art criticism? Not really, but I’ll sing Art Thoughtz’s praises to anyone who’ll listen. Do I care about this or that new video game I’ll never play? Nope, but I still enjoyed Zero Punctuation immensely.

What I’m realizing (grudgingly) is that not all science web video can or should be like Radiolab or COSMOS — i.e., a transporting, innovative aesthetic marvel. Simply being “TV on the radio” is just as good. But a Youtube version of Radiolab or COSMOS would actually be — and should be — just that. Not “expensive, complex and time-consuming to produce”; just undeniably, unignorably unique in its voice.

Final Cut Pro X: a sketchbook for students?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:36:16 -0500

Science writer and filmmaker Tom Levenson asked me for my thoughts on the whole Final Cut Pro 7 vs Final Cut Pro X thing, because he was wondering what he should use with students in his filmmaking classes. I wrote my thoughts to him in an email, but figured I might as well share them here too. This was prompted by an app I saw that purports to convert FCP7 project files into FCPX files. If it could also convert them backwards to FCP7 — so you could hot-swap your projects between both editing paradigms — that would be truly awesome.

I’m torn. It seems obvious that Apple is going to have to let FCP7 die at some point. And it also seems clear that they’re distancing themselves from serving pro markets — the Mac Pro tower hasn’t seen a decent upgrade in years. That doesn’t seem to bode well for putting much stock in FCPX as a truly professional-grade postproduction solution.

However…

Just because Apple may be distancing itself from serving the pro market in terms of feature filmmakers, TV producers, and other “big scale” production workflows, doesn’t mean they’re necessarily leaving mixed-media/multimedia producers behind. I’ve heard that FCPX can be pretty powerful for quickly putting together short films for the web shot on DSLRs and other tapeless media that outputs h.264 rushes. And because you can edit any codec natively without transcoding, it sounds great for remixing and collaging footage from the internet. It can also (apparently) run like lightning on a Macbook Air.

So FCPX might be a pretty great teaching tool. Like a sketchbook for short-form editing or experimenting. If I had the money to buy an Air just for the hell of it, I’d put FCPX on it for exactly this purpose. Not as a bulletproof postproduction solution, but as a sandbox for messing around with ideas on the fly, like this (a mix of original DSLR footage and found stuff from the web, cut together in about a day):

Stuff We Love: Eames Chair Assembly Film by The Eameses (who else?)

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:35:41 -0400

I could not love this more. I love the jumpcutty “special effects.” I love the pixilated animation. I love the chair (of course). I love the process value. I love the blown-out cinematography. I love that they box it up at the end.

God bless Charles and Ray Eames. Every film they made is inspirational. Even when (or mostly when..?) they were just doodles.

This Is How We Do It ("process value" and why it matters)

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 10:05:00 -0400

I was recently invited by the folks at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple Restoration Foundation to give a talk as part of their Break the Box series, which celebrates “creative nonconformity.” It was a real honor. I’ve written here before about a design pattern in media/culture that I informally call “process value”, and this talk was an opportunity to really attempt a deep dive into the idea.

Here’s the presentation:

From the program notes:

What do homemade music videos by OK Go, live Twitter updates about Egypt, and industrial films from the 1950s have in common? They all have a high degree of “process value”: a willingness to expose the creative act itself and embed it, front and center, in the finished product. And they generate intense engagement on the web — often much more than their big budgeted, high-production-value counterparts. Wired and Fast Company writer and filmmaker Pavlus looks at why that is — and how to put it to use.

One thing I wasn’t able to talk about in the presentation (because I’m just not knowledgeable enough about it) is how this idea of process value applies to architecture. Luckily, there was a gentleman in the audience who filled in that gap for me during the Q&A session, explaining how Frank Lloyd Wright himself was very much into “exposing the scaffolding” of his process both literally and figuratively in his architecture and architectural philosophy.

Here’s a list of links to the videos that I included in the talk:

C’Etait Un Rendezvous, by Claude Lelouche

Here It Goes Again, by OK Go

Touch Wood, by Morihiro Harano, Kenjiro Matsuo, et. al.

A Glorious Dawn, by Symphony of Science

The Monitor, by me, Christie Nicholson, and Christopher Mims

7 Ways to Walk the Walk, by Alissa Walker

Lego Antikythera Mechanism, by me, Andrew Carol, Misha Klein, Adam Rutherford, et. al.

Also:

RadioLab, Infinite Jest, Longshot magazine, slow food, Michael Bay, Kickstarter, and many more.

New Work: Watch a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist figure out an iPad app

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 10:28:47 -0400

Howard Hughes Medical Institute creates a monthly biomedical newsmagazine that has some of the best editorial design in science media. Now they’re making the obvious jump and putting HHMI Bulletin on the iPad. The app is supposed to appeal to any science-curious layman.

But how does Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist (and bowtie enthusiast) Eric Kandel fare with it, when using it for the first time? Watch and find out. You’ll also enjoy some balletic beauty shots of Dr. Kandel’s signature lab animal, Aplysia californica, courtesy of my ace cinematographer AJ Wilhelm.

New Work: book trailer for "Food: The Good Girl's Drug", a memoir about an invisible eating disorder

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:09:43 -0400

Millions of young women overeat, binge, and use food to control their feelings. But how many of them know that this is an actual eating disorder?

My wife Sunny struggled with binge eating disorder (BED) when she was a teenager and only recently recovered. She wrote her first book, “Food: The Good Girl’s Drug”, so that girls and young women in the same position would have a resource to turn to for understanding and support. The book comes out today, and I’m honored to be a part of getting the word out with this trailer.

If anyone you care about has an unhealthy relationship with food, please share this video for the book, as well as Sunny’s website with resources for “getting sane about food,” HealthyGirl.org.

Behind The Scenes

How do you show binge eating without… actually showing it? That was the big problem to solve with this video, because the last thing Sunny wanted to do was show anything onscreen that might be uncomfortable or “triggering” for an emotional overeater. We needed a vivid way of depicting what it feels like to be in that position, but without showing any food.

I was idly scanning my Twitter feed when I saw something about scratch-off cards. It suddenly hit me that those cards could be a perfect physical metaphor for bingeing: how it starts off as something kind of fun or harmless (or just something one does when bored), but can easily cascade into a compulsion or even an addiction. Bonus: the real emotional reasons for bingeing are hidden under the surface — just like the material that’s revealed when you scratch away the silver stuff on one of those cards.

Creating the cards (or, why a good associate producer is worth her weight in gold)

After Sunny approved the concept, I had to figure out how to get these cards made on our slim budget and tight schedule. Luckily I have a human Swiss Army knife for solving these kinds of problems named Fran Laks. I used to work with her at NOVA and she is pretty much an associate-producing genius (this is the woman who found an artist with a laser cutter in his apartment to create the oversized smartphone-shaped dry erase board for my NPR Android spot). She dug up a company based on Ohio called ScratchOffWorks who could handle our small-batch print job in a matter of weeks, at less than half the price that other companies were quoting us. We also received amazing personal customer service from their VP, Chrys Kozak.

The food icons needed to have a very specific tone. I wanted them to look friendly and cute — totally the opposite of anything “addict”-ey or sinister. I was on the verge of hiring an illustrator when I found this stock set, which had the perfect look. The font for all the sayings underneath the icons (“I don’t feel pretty enough”, etc) is Gotham, the same typeface that the title of the book is set in… and which also had a just-right combination of friendliness and seriousness.

Everything else (if you like geeking out on this kind of stuff)

We shot in a friend’s kitchen with a crew of one (me), nothing but ambient sunlight and two DSLRs (a Lumix GH-1 for the “gods eye view” overhead angles and a Canon T2i with a 100mm macro lens for the closeups). We shot the “my boyfriend dumped me” scene first. The sunlight was so weak that I decided to attempt a “day for night” look, and white-balanced the camera for tungsten lighting. This amplified the blue tones in the image, which (combined with the dim exposure) created a vaguely “moonlit”/evening look… or, at least that’s what I was going for!

In other scenes the daylight got a bit stronger, but not by much. Luckily, the chips in these DSLRs are so sensitive that with a few easy tweaks from Final Cut Pro’s color correcting filters, I was able to make it look like a bright summer afternoon for the first scene (where the teenaged girl encounters the cards).

One thing I learned (or rather, re-learned): those damned LCD screens on the back of DSLRs are big fat liars. They display the image at a much brighter level than it is actually being recorded at. But a rough rule of thumb I learned with video exposure is that it’s better to err on the side of underexposing anyway (within reason), because you can always increase the midtones in post. If you overexpose video, it “clips out” and portions of the image will be irrecoverably lost, no matter how many fancy filters you apply later. (Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite of what I learned in film school about shooting celluloid, where you want to err on the side of overexposure.)

One final thing should be said about the music, created by Jascha Hoffman. It’s probably the most perfect piece of music I’ve ever had the luck to find and match to one of my videos, and I’m very grateful to him for letting us use it for free. It’s an instrumental version of the track “Green & Grey” from his forthcoming album “A Cure for Sleep”, and it is just amazing.

Live the Language: This is kinetic type done right

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 09:11:00 -0500

You’d think that a pretty girl + Paris is really all you need to make a great short film. Maybe. But if you add pitch-perfect typography, you get something truly magical. I was literally tearing up by the end (although there may be other reasons for that).

This is one of a series of promos called “Live the Language” by EF, a foreign language school. The typography is so seamlessly, perfectly integrated that it makes this whole “kinetic type” fad look like total amateur hour. Here, the type looks still, but if you pay attention, you’ll notice that it’s actually matched up to the subtle handheld jiggling of the camera. Which makes it feel authentic and embedded in the reality of the scene, not like some douchey special effect. It’s a completely perfect visual metaphor for the phrase “Live the Language.”

The only other short-film distillation of being young in Paris I can think of that’s this diamond-perfect is the classic 1976 film “C’Etait un Rendezvous” (“It was a date”), in which the equation is “pretty girl + Paris + purring sports car driven at high velocity.” Trust me, this is the best ten minutes you’ll have all day:

Understanding Higher Dimensions via "Conflopulation"

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:28:40 -0500

This video didn’t win the Ars Technica science-explainer contest, but it was my personal favorite. So good on so many levels: process value, snappy writing, creative visualizations, irreverent humor… it really, really does teach you something by pummeling you with sheer delightfulness.

This is not to slag the video that did win, though: it’s also firing on all creative/intellectual cylinders, no doubt about it. I’m just partial to the ambition of trying to video-ize highly abstract math concepts. Especially when it requires inventing awesome new words.

Beautiful. Heavy handed and guilt-trippy (let’s try...

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:03:16 -0500

Beautiful. Heavy handed and guilt-trippy (let’s try pulling some OTHER emotional/psychological levers, eh greens?) but beautiful nonetheless.

curiositycounts:

Little Things – a simple, moving reminder of our relationship with nature. PSA for the TEED study of the economic impact of biodiversity loss.

(via PepFly)

Stuff We Love: Stop-Motion Ozzy and Machete-guy

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:49:00 -0500

Misha Klein, the Hollywood-caliber stop motion animator who animated my Lego Antikythera film, just finished these witty spots for Brisk iced tea:

Hell, that was better than the actual trailer for Machete! Misha rules.

New Work: Introducing The Atavist

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:33:00 -0500

The Atavist is a new e-reader-slash-indie publisher for original, narrative, long-form nonfiction. It’s basically iTunes for New Yorker-esque features. They asked me to create a promo for the app and after seeing it demo’d, I was all too happy to oblige. They’ve put serious thought into this — from a reader’s (and a writer’s) perspective, not a money-hungry/digitally-tonedeaf publisher’s.

I’ve also been a huge fan of Evan Ratliff (The Atavist’s editor and de facto leader) ever since I read his killer science feature about zoonotic diseases in the African bush. Total badassery.

Behind the Scenes

We needed to do two things: set up the question “Why do we need another e-reader?” and then present The Atavist as a really compelling answer to that question. For part one, I settled on a Royal Tenenbaums-meets-kinetic type concept: show a creamy, “classic” printed page as the symbol of what reading should be, and then transition to a distracting riot of app-like text animations to show how the digital age has mangled those once-simple pleasures.

My intrepid animator/art-director (who prefers the pseudonym Piq until he quits his day job) created a truly luscious design for the opening “storybook” shots — using typographic references I pulled from McSweeney’s, Moby-Dick, and Gould’s Book of Fish:

For the second main part, presenting The Atavist itself, I felt that instead of having voiceover or onscreen captions bear the weight of explaining why the app is so great, the app should literally “tell its own story” — by embedding the written explanations of its features into its own user interface. Sort of as if it were just another compelling narrative alongside the real ones for sale in the app: showing and telling at the same time.

Apple ads, with their simple angles and muscular editing, were my obvious inspiration. Because of our small budget and tight schedule, I “shot” the app by loading it into the iOS Simulator on my Macbook Pro and screencasting my interactions with it. Much faster than animating every frame, or setting up an actual physical iPad in a perfectly-lit shot without any glare or shadows — and no hand model necessary.

After capturing and editing the screencasts, I plunked them in front of a Photoshopped iPad frame that looks more pristine and perfect than a real one ever could.

Last but not least was the music — by the übertalented Corey Wills (who also composed the score for the Lego Antikythera film). Mothertrucker banged out that crazy-catchy tune in one night, with no visuals or rough cut to work with. To say it ties the piece together is a major understatement. Corey is some kind of miracle worker. He’s planning to rework the music into a single for his band Inspector Owl, and I can’t wait to buy it.

In the meantime, go check out The Atavist for great longform readin’. It’s available for iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Nook.

Blogging While Rendering: Could Fatherhood Make Me More Creative, Not Less?

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:26:00 -0500

As Jack Black once said: “Now this is happening.”

Yep, in a little more than 6 months I’ll be a dad. Or, as the old cliche goes, “a formerly intelligent, well-rounded individual of above-average talent capable of doing interesting creative work. Emphasis on formerly.”

It’s like that old saying: what would you do if you found out you only have six months to live? Well, in filmmaking terms, maybe I do only have six months to live!

Or maybe I’m about to enter the most creatively fruitful period of my entire life.

Obviously there’s no way to know ahead of time. The experience of being a parent is as fundamentally inaccessible and alien to my understanding as what it’s like to be a bat. But I’m already noticing some changes that give me a hunch that maybe I won’t instantly shrivel into an uncreative, rote-thinking breeder unit for the rest of my days:

1. I seem to feel emotions more deeply and easily

Granted, I’ve already spent a good decade evolving out of my post-filmschool “meh-to-everything” stage. But something feels qualitatively different about the past few months. Powerful, un-self-conscious emotion seems able to well up out of nowhere at the slightest aesthetic trigger: a pop song here, an image there — as if some pane of formerly bulletproof glass between me and my own id is starting to dissolve. (A friend says it’s from all the new “lady hormones” bubbling up inside.)

Whatever the cause, it’s strange and embarrassing to find myself suddenly tearing up at some cheesy TV commercial that happens to strike a chord for some reason I can’t understand — but on the other hand, emotion equals inspiration. Film and video (even about science and tech!) are emotional media more than anything else. Having more direct access to powerful feelings about stuff, even when I don’t quite “understand” it, may lead to powerful inspirations that could actually help make my work more vivid and engaging than ever.

Or who knows, I could just become this guy:

2. I’m beginning to feel like my work has newfound purpose

Please excuse the drama (see: #1), but not only do the reasons I already have for going to work in the morning feel more meaningful in the context of adding +1 to the population of the world — whole new ones are mushrooming up.

I focus on science and tech topics because I like to spend my workdays (the good ones, anyway) a) being amazed and inspired by human achievement, and b) bringing that amazement/inspiration to others by communicating the topics well. I’ve said before in job interviews that I consider this work (not mine, but in general) to be noble in some microscopic sense of the word, because communicating these achievements makes the world a better place to live in (also in a very microscopic sense).

Well, now it’s not just my world that I’m (hopefully) making better by nano-increments — it’s her (or his) world. That makes the same sentiment feel all the more concrete and real, not just like pretentious and self-serving rationalization (which it can feel like, not infrequently). Put simply, I want my kid or kids to be proud of me someday. That’s a powerful incentive to do great work.

I’m also the kind of knowledge-worker who responds well to pressure. The obligation to keep this future kid fed, warm, and content by running a profitable business is one that I think will become a clarifying and powerful source of creative/business momentum. If everything is generative, then lots of new and unpredictable and interesting things should soon start sparking to life, because like it or not, I’m going to be “generating” my damn ass off just to keep this new arrival in Pampers.

Of course, one of those “unpredictable” and “interesting” generative outcomes might be that I can’t continue to operate Small Mammal at all, and have to get a job. Well then, it was a good run while it lasted! But even that won’t mean my creative life is over.

3. Perspective, I Can Haz It Now

So “duh” it barely needs mentioning, but once that baby comes, everything I ever thought was important beforehand (including my precious “creative work”) will instantly shrink from mountain to molehill. I’ll keep doing the work, of course, but I can see myself being much less clenched-up about it in general. It just won’t quite matter in my personal universe the way it used to, and that loosening-up might end up making me more willing to take creative risks, or just not let the perfect get in the way of the good so damn much.

At the very least, I’ll have a big reason to avoid painting myself into corners that lead to frantic all-nighters and other such “be a hero” nonsense. “Being a hero” will mean finding a work/life balance that favors life when the chips are down, not work.

So, that’s just some thoughts. I’m sure I’ll read these a year from now and laugh, and laugh, and laugh…

The hierarchy of project-based creative-professional needs....

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 13:04:38 -0500

The hierarchy of project-based creative-professional needs. (Pace Maslow.)

You are what you make. Make accordingly.

piratepickings: Happy birthday, Einstein! Celebrate with...

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 16:32:38 -0500

piratepickings:

Happy birthday, Einstein! Celebrate with this 1923 silent film explaining the theory of relativity

Blogging While Rendering: Rushmore, "Style," & Originality

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:27:00 -0500

[This is the first in what may become a regular series of posts in which I damp my foot-tapping frustration with long exports/renders by writing stuff instead.]

The “Wes Anderson style” is instantly recognizable: arch, symmetrical compositions in a single anamorphic focal length (40mm), often locked off like dioramas but sometimes punctuated by a) self-consciously retro snap-zooms and whip-pans or b) hypnotic slow-motion shots, peopled with characters sporting perpetually deadpan expressions and terminally fussy wardrobes.

The style seared itself into cinematic mass consciousness in 1998 with Rushmore. Premiere magazine compared it to Annie Hall; later, Martin Scorsese himself would call Anderson “the next Scorsese.” I was in film school at the time and I just didn’t get what the fuss was about. I found Rushmore overly affected and deeply irritating. Everything in it seemed airless and forced. Eventually I came around; now, like everyone else on earth, I earnestly regard Rushmore as a masterpiece. But its uniqueness at the time felt like artifice, like posturing. I didn’t know how to process it.

13 years later, Rushmore feels even more electric and vital and original than it did back then — not leastwise because we’ve endured several waves of Wes Anderson manques. (Cf. Napoleon Dynamite and all its unholy commercial and music-video spawn.) Even good filmmakers like Adam Lisagor can — just by dint of breathing the Wes-infused air of the past decade — often seem like Andersonian Xerox-copies-of-copies. He may not have been explicitly channeling Max Fischer, but it’s probably safe to say that without Rushmore as a template, this video (or others) could never have existed:

Is it “wrong” or “bad” or “lame” to be influenced in an outsized way by the singular cinematic figure of your generation? Not at all. Hell, I am too. I’m currently finishing up an app promo myself that takes explicit inspiration from, among other things, the opening of The Royal Tenenbaums. The shit is good.

But the worm has turned. At this point, “Andersonian style” is mostly just Andersonian shtick: a collection of empty, predictable visual tics that reference nothing but each other’s hip knowingness, like visual Foursquare badges. Are you a Wes Anderson-ey kind of person with Wes Anderson-esque tastes? Well then you’ll love this Wes Anderson-ish commercial!

All of which makes it feel like some kind of religious ablution to actually sit back and watch the genuine article. When the man himself has become something of a self-parody, it’s easy to forget that this stuff is The Real Effing Deal™:

All those “style” flourishes we know and love/hate were once firmly embedded in an emotional universe that felt unique but also completely familiar. Everything seemingly affected and hyper-stylized about Rushmore is because it’s set in and around … Rushmore: an affected, hyper-stylized prep school. The style is for something, it has a purpose. It was only in later films (starting with Tenenbaums, but mostly after that) that the calling-card style got disconnected from the emotional truths in Anderson’s movies and took on a phantom life of its own.

We all know this, so what’s my point? I guess it’s two things:

1. Originality is possible: Rushmore was showered with superlatives for a reason: it’s probably the only truly original American film in the past 25 years. There was literally nothing like it. But it didn’t pop out of a vacuum: Anderson borrowed tons from Scorsese, the French New Wave, and sundry other sources. But he wasn’t just slavishly aping those influences the way zillions of filmmakers now ape him. There’s a difference between true inspiration and lazy imitation. The key to Jim Jarmusch’s advice below isn’t the first sentence, it’s the last…

2. Originality itself is not worth aiming for: “Uniqueness” on its own is empty, it’s aped “style,” it’s transient and silly and pointless. It should be a means to an end — or better, something that naturally emerges from seeking that end — not an end in itself. Trying to be “original” is like trying to alchemize gold out of lead. It’ll never happen — the closest you’ll get will be you-know-what. Anderson makes films the way he does (or did?) for one or both of the following reasons: a) he doesn’t know any other way; b) because he feels that’s the most authentic way of expressing the emotional truths he’s interested in. Looking awesome to other filmmakers or critics or whoever never had a damn thing to do with it. It’s like Paul Rand said:

If you do both of those things (and by “you” I mean “I” — let’s face it, a big part of my motive for writing this is to lecture myself) you will probably avoid the lazy, predictable imitations of whatever “filmmaker style” that is en vogue, Wes Anderson’s just being the one of the moment… and maybe you’ll end up making something truly original in the process. But that’s just gravy.

Stuff We Love: "Process Value" and Physical Explainers (or, why OKGo could make better science videos than Harvard BioVisions)

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:12:00 -0500

Do you know what a differential gear is? (Or more importantly: why a differential gear is?) Me neither. Until I watched this, along with 1.2 million other people:

How does this olde-tyme video manage to be so engaging and educational? Two words: process value.

That means making it physical. Props, not simulations. Hands, not animations. Shots and edits that are psychologically (or literally) contiguous in space and time. We know that when we watch another person doing a physical action, our brains “mirror” that action using some of the same mental circuitry as if we were physically doing it ourselves. It’s the science-nerd version of that old maxim: “I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember; I do, and I understand.”

Film and video aren’t interactive (usually). You can’t literally “just do it.” But watching another human manipulate physical objects in “real” space and time is the next best thing. You understand. It sticks.

It ain’t a magic bullet, of course. There are plenty of crap explainers on YouTube that use these methods and still fail. But in general, I think these methods — which I call adding “process value” — tend to work much better than the superslick, sometimes beautiful, but often forgettable digital abstractions that are commonplace today in science and tech shows.

Obviously, engineering topics like differentials are easy to physicalize. But I believe you can apply process value to any video subject, no matter how abstract. The results may rely more on clever visual metaphors than slavish reconstructions of real data — but odds are it’ll work better. Viewers will be not just delighted, but informed. Personally, I’d rather see a video explaining how a mitochondrion works using fishing wire and Silly Putty than sit through another weightless, meaningless CGI wankfest.

Here’s another one of my favorite examples: how a mechanical watch works, using (you guessed it) a giant-sized physical model. Amazing!

A first person guide to the history of video games. SO. GOOD....

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 10:41:06 -0500

A first person guide to the history of video games. SO. GOOD. (It’s long, but the ending is worth the wait.)

(via Reaction!)

oh, to have Google as a science-video client. One can...

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 10:35:05 -0500

oh, to have Google as a science-video client. One can dream…

jtotheizzoe:

Google Online Science Fair. (Or is it a new video by OK Go?) Entries due April 4th, 2011!

vitalvids:

Google Science Fair Experiment