The Global Lives project is an effort “to collaboratively build a video library of human life experience that reshapes how we as both producers and viewers conceive of cultures, nations and people outside of our own communities.”

They started with an exhibit of 10 people at the Yerba Buena Center. I missed that unfortunately but they’ve put some of the video online. You can even view the raw 24 hours of footage for each person, linked at the bottom.

It’s interesting to think about this as a resource for virtual ethnography–just dial up 24 hours in the life of someone in your target market and observe them on demand…

Paramount Studio map of California’s geographical facsimiles, fron The Motion Picture Industry as a Basis for Bond Financing, 1927.

Two beautiful timelapse shots from the movie Ghost Town.

From Ed Catmull’s talk at the Economist Ideas conference:

I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures.

One of the protections is the notion that they have the final say so. Now this is a very hard thing to say because we say we are filmmaker led. The reason its hard is if they can’t lead the team, we will actually remove the person from it.

We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’.

My favorite thing about working with stock image and music sites is seeing the same photo you used for a project show up in someone else’s work, or hearing the music you’ve repeated endlessly while editing a video project pop up in a commercial on tv.

It’s like being part of a big community of people who recognize each other by little noises and visual hints. Kinda like the Cylon’s music in Battlestar Galactica, I guess.

Apparently film editors have gravitated toward a consistent pattern for shot length in major films over the years, repeating shots of a few given lengths much more often than in the past.

“According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency.”

This power law formula is observed many places in nature, and corresponds to the natural human attention span pattern. This is also the formula for generating pink noise; to me, the pink noise sample at that link is more soothing than either the white or brown noise (more on the colors of noise). Is it the same for you?

Just saw a fascinating presentation by Bear McCreary (of Battlestar Galactica fame) at work. Among many interesting stories was his description of how he composed the adaptation of All Along the Watchtower used in one of the show’s most climactic scenes, the piano in the bar.

Apparently the inclusion of the song was director Ronald D. Moore’s idea, and over several seasons it became an increasingly important part of the plot (which I won’t spoil here). But that meant that the musical score for the show was now also something the characters were aware of, so Bear worked with the writers to weave his music into the story. And for the piano scene itself, the writers called him up while he was working on a particularly difficult cue and asked him to describe what it’s like to tease out a piece of music that’s stuck in your head. His responses went almost directly into the script.

I think as media continues to evolve, we’ll see even more examples where connecting music to plot, and to the other aspects of a story, leads to a more interesting and holistic experience. Learning ways to do this is an exciting opportunity for designers from all parts of the spectrum.

The entire presentation was captivating, including a bit where Bear taught the piano theme to someone from the audience, just as was done in the show, and his description of how he sees music while watching a scene (first he sees the overall shape, then starts to fill in the pieces). Hopefully it will be published online for more to see; I’ll link to it if so.

A fascinating view into the cameras and technology used in Avatar. The new technology included a virtual camera that lets you physically shoot a virtual scene, augmented reality that overlays live footage with CGI backgrounds, face-scanning cameras, and a combination 2D/3D camera.

Another innovation was adding imperfections (camera movements, lens flares) to make a “perfect” virtual world more believable.

Really interesting to think about what this technology might do when released to the world in a few years…

Update: i09 has a bunch of great interviews with designers who worked on Avatar: part 1, part 2, part 3

The interesting thing about Avatar to me was not the in-theater experience (which I thought was good but not revolutionary) but rather the fact that 12 hours later I still see Pandora whenever I close my eyes…something about the visual experience got deeper into my brain than any other movie has.

I would like to be more intentional about how I consume media. Here are some thoughts on how I might do that in the coming year.

Read the Eternities (via)

Focus my reading on classical writing, not modern writing

Books first

Books are the complete thought meal (Tim Sanders). Films can be good as well, but leave less to the imagination. Video/tv is the least considered and most ephemeral.

70/20/10 rule

• Time: 70% pre-1900, 20% 1900s, 10% 2000s
• Media: 70% written word, 20% films, 10% tv/video
• Reading: 70% books, 20% magazines/journal articles, 10% news/opinion

Balance media with life

Media should be a relatively small part of life…80% life, 20% media (meta-life)?

Balance consumption with production

80% production, 20% consumption?

Think in the morning, act in the noon, eat in the evening, and sleep at night. – William Blake

(I read this originally as “read in the evening”, which likely works better for me than Blake, given the miracle of incandescent light).

Don’t start the day with someone else’s thoughts (via)

It’s the only chance you’ll have to think your own.

So, what might this look like in practice? All of these 80/20 or 70/20/10 ratios are terrifically arbitrary, but they’re an interesting starting point.

• 16 waking hours each day
  • 20% media = 3 hours
    • 80% production = 2 hours, 26 minutes
    • 20% consumption = 34 minutes

Of those 34 daily minutes:

• 70/20/10 eras = 22 minutes pre-1900s/7 minutes 1900s/3.5 minutes 2000s
• 70/20/10 media = 22 minutes writing/7 minutes film/3.5 minutes tv/videos
  • Of the 22 minutes writing: 15 minutes books/5 minutes magazines/journals/2.5 minutes news/opinion/blogs

Now, pre-1900s is really only books, so that would wipe out the entire “writing” allocation, leaving no room for magazines, journals, or opinion, or for anything since 1900. And you wouldn’t really watch video news from any other era than the present, so the 3.5 minutes on the 2000s would be all video news. So some wiggle room is necessary.

Still, the rough daily schedule is something like: 22 minutes reading classic (pre-1900s) books, 7 minutes watching a film, and 3.5 minutes catching up on the news.

That’s not much time! And it’s hard to imagine watching a film 7 minutes each day. So let’s expand it to a two-week scale: 5 hours reading books, 1 1/2 hours watching a film, and 45 minutes catching up on news. That would roughly correspond to 1 300-page book (at a thoughtful rate of 1 page/min) and 1 film every two weeks, and 45 minutes on blogs/news catchup.

The era breakdown is probably best spread out over time, so that you’d tackle one book or movie at a time rather than splitting your attention between several. So at a rate of 26 books per year, you’d have 18 pre-1900s books, 5 from the 1900s, and 2-3 from the 2000s. Your 26 movies, being mostly from the 1900s and 2000s, could be split more evenly, and perhaps given their rapid evolution give half (13) from the 1900s and half from the 2000s. (Having just reviewed my Netflix queue, I’m tempted to give even more emphasis to recent films. Movies from the mid-80s don’t carry the same weight as Plato’s 2000-year-old dialogues).

How would you practice this? It seems important to first have a set of items that you are interested in consuming in the near future. I keep a massive Amazon wishlist of things I’m interested in, so I’ll need to prioritize from that a set of 18 pre-1900s books, 5 1900s books, and 2-3 2000s that I will actually tackle. Same exercise with films from my Netflix queue.

Next is to set aside the time for consuming and producing. A daily time for reading seems right, as does a biweekly time for a film. News or blogs could be done as either a daily check-in (3.5 minutes! What tools would make that possible?) or as a biweekly binge (might help prioritize what’s really important). Experimentation is probably necessary here.

Producing is a more nebulous area, but setting aside an hour to write each morning, and perhaps one afternoon a week to film or write something longer, would be a good use of that time. And, similar to consuming, keeping a list of things I’d like to produce–and scheduling them–would make sure I’m ready to go immediately.

So, given that I started with those arbitrary numbers, how does this look?

The first big ratio was “80% life, 20% media (meta-life)”. Is it right to spend a fifth of my waking life on media? Well, the average America watches 5 hours of television each day (almost a third of their waking life), and my combined internet and video consumption is probably at least that much. So slimming down to “just” 20% actually seems like a good first step, and I enjoy books and films enough that I’m happy to start there.

The producing/consuming ratio is the part I’m least clear about. Is producing media really 4 times as important as consuming it? Worth spending 2 1/2 hours a day? How would I even do such a thing? Well, blogging is a part of it, and personal journaling could be considered media production as well. Beyond that, it would be interesting to blend more rich media production, creating video or music on a variety of topics. This is something that is subject to big change given experimentation, however. The thinkers I most respect, however, are tremendously prolific in their writing and filming–even if they are not “professional” writers or filmmakers. So there’s something in this media production craft that seems worthwhile.

And the 20% consumption is not the limit of all media I’ll see. Media is a part of many other parts of life (that other top-level 80%), and if movies, books, or the internet are included in my work or social life I consider that separate. Watching a movie with friends is socializing, not “consuming”. But I hope to be more intentional about the things I personally choose to consume on my own time.

Here’s the schedule I’m going to start with during my sabbatical:

• 1 hour of writing daily
• 30 minutes of book reading daily (~1 book every 2 weeks)
• 5 min blogs & news daily (5 min catchup at the end of the day)
• 1 filmmaking or long writing session each week
• 1 film watching session every 2 weeks

I’ve also separated my media wishlists (Amazon & Netflix) into the appropriate categories:

• Pre-1900s books (targeting 18/year)
• 1900s books (5/year)
• 2000s books (2-3/year)
• 1900s films (13/year)
• 2000s films (the rest of my Netflix queue; 13/year)

Thoreau said that we should “be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on [our] attention.” Hopefully my new media diet is an appropriate mix! I’ll check in later with an update…

Likely the most original film I’ve seen all year; tremendously rich premise and insightful commentary. Still the requisite blood and guts for an alien/monster summer flick, but I could have watched 2 hours of just the social commentary, presented in a mix of faux news footage and documentary-style camera shots. And like the best speculative fiction, it leads you to reflect on our real world relationships and actions.

The film’s website is similarly innovative, presented as an artifact of the situation, with more man-on-the-street interviews.

If you can handle the monsters and gross special effects, this one is highly recommended.

Update: Oh wow, for the original short District 9 was based on, they actually asked people about the Zimbabwean immigrant problems South Africa was experiencing. Art imitating life…

Some really fascinating insights into the early explorations of a Pixar film–color studies, storyboards, clay models, test animations, dioramas, etc. Cool to see what a “prototype” looks like in their world…

• Lou Romano’s work as production designer – color studies, animations, dioramas, etc. Here are his animation tests on YouTube.
• A few storyboards from early scenes – really quite detailed.

I’m always interested in documents from past technological revolutions since they echo so strongly in the current ones. Triumph of the Nerds is a great example of this, a film that shows how characters change (except for Steve Jobs) but the script so often stays the same…

Part 1

Hey, it’s Art Walker, my old cycling coach! – 5:00 Definition of a “nerd”:

I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer. – Douglas Adams, 6:18 Poetry in products, a la Steve: To me the spark of that was that there was something beyond sort of what you see every day. It’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. And I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I think that that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. – Steve Jobs, 30:00

Part 2

A good test for your beauracracy: how long would it take for your company to ship an empty box?

At one point somebody kind of looked at the process to see well, you know, what’s it doing and what’s the overhead built into it, what they found is that it would take at least nine months to ship an empty box. – 6:00 “DOS” comes from “QDOS”–”Quick and dirty operating system”. So did that make DOS just dirty? – 22:00

Part 3

What PARC was really about:

People came there specifically to work on five year programs that were their dreams. – Adele Goldberg, former Xerox PARC Researcher How to design, a la Steve: Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing. – Steve Jobs, 26:00 Though that doesn’t guarantee success; the importance of innovating in business strategy as well: The problem was the industry wasn’t measured by who has the best selling personal computer or who has the most innovative technology. The industry was measured by who had the most open system that was adopted by the most other companies and the Microsoft strategy ultimately turned out to be the better business strategy. – John Sculley, 39:00

From the Charlie Rose interview with the great cartoonist:

We soon discovered that with humor, the more a person is playing a bit crazy, the funnier it is…The more you narrow a character down, the better it gets; the more fat you can pull out. – 24:00 Humor is always based on the loser; that’s why we always understand them so much better. – 27:30 A good animator, working for a director, can produce maybe 15 seconds of screen time per week–with the help of an assistant. – 42:00 He draws throughout the interview; consistently uses lengthy quotations of others.

Interesting film about the jazz legend (Netflix)

Mingus’s personality ran like the color spectrum, from hot to cold. From beautiful to, well, you take it from there – John Handy, 6:00 Charles was just testing people, to see how far he could go. And he went very far; most people did not confront him. – Sue, 7:45 The importance of finding “your component”–someone who can match with you. If I could find my component–you see, like you take a light and screw it into a socket, you dig? Well this [light bulb] ain’t nothing by itself, but you screw it in the socket, it lights up, dig? – 9:00 His wide-ranged personality translated into a wide range of music: His music is one of the widest-ranging sets of music you can find composed by one single human being – Gunther Schuller, 11:00 He was not victimized by a style. – Wynton Marsalis, 12:30 Like Thelonious Monk (“I like all kinds of music”), he denied giving things names, categorizing it – 13:00 Struggled a lot to join an existing ethnic group, but with a black and Swedish father, a Chinese-black mother, and a black-Indian stepmother he didn’t fit in with any of them. – 18:00 Studied European composers Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartok before playing a lot of jazz – 19:00 I had a right to love Duke [Ellington] because everyone has a right to tune into something they love. – 20:45 Once told a loud audience, “Ok, you won’t shut up. How about doing fours with us? We’ll play four bars, and you shut up, then you can do whatever you want for four bars, and we’ll accompany you.’ “And it worked, and they loved it.” – Eddie Bert, 30:30 We have a straight line, like a railroad track, but we don’t play a straight line–we suggest the line [by playing notes around it]. – 33:00 Charles said, ‘Well, I like what you’re doing, but you must remember that your playing is the same as a conversation. When you walk in the room, you don’t just say “Hellowaywhoahyeah!!”…first you say ‘hello’, take a breath, ‘how are you’…and you take another breath. And it’s like a graph, you start here and go round and round and it gets larger and larger, and at the same time you have to come back to where you started. – Dannie Richmond, 34:30 He’d write parts that were a little harder than what you last played–and harder than you thought you could play–to help the group grow. – 37:45 He wrote parts…that were a little out of the range of most of the instruments, because he liked the sound of the struggle – Lew Soloff – 37:00 Even when he was paralyzed by ALS, he would still sing into a tape recorder to compose new music. – 1:02:45

Film mostly made of recovered footage, called “the Dead Sea Scrolls of jazz”. (Netflix)

In the bebop period…the musicians weren’t obviously trying to please an audience, but they were playing their music their way. It was a real independent expression. – Harry Colomby, 11:40 In NYC you had to have a police-stamped card in order to be a musician. If you committed a crime, the police took your card away. Monk had his taken away helping a friend evade arrest for drugs. – 14:00. Interesting that this was even a system! Start with a little bit: If you get four bars done, you might have something. – 19:30 The beauty of simplicity: I want it to be as easy as possible so people can dig it. Then it’ll be good. – 20:30 Don’t overpractice: Usually we’d take the first take, sometimes the second, but never the third. He’d say ‘Once you play it the first time, that’s the way the feeling and everything is. And after that, you start going downhill.’ And it’s more like a challenge when you do that. You know that you got to play it correctly the first or second take, or that’s it. He would take it any how. If you mess up, well that’s it–it’s your problem, and you have to heard that all the rest of your life.- Charlie Rouse, 22:30 After all: You rehearse every time you play on an instrument. – 24:45 He works so hard, sweating constantly even on slow pieces, wiping his brow during the middle of a solo. Interesting quote from the Guardian on his first visit to London: He does not take his jazz the easy way. Each note is apparently considered, weighed, analysed and then reluctantly committed to the audience. It does not make for easy listening, but why should it? Although he has a superb sense of melody he seems less than happy with it and prefers to explore the intricacies of harmonic improvisation, finding a nerve-tingling discord and playing moodily with it while he considers how to get himself out of it. Interviewer: Do you think the piano has enough keys? Those 88? Monk: Well, it’s hard work to play those 88 – 1:00:45 His styles today don’t seem so shocking, but given the musical landscape at the time they were hugely innovative. Monk paved the way for so much more. At one point he just got overwhelmed and stopped playing, confessing that he was “very sick”. Never spoke of it again, but was clearly wrestling inside of himself with something. – 1:21:00

About once a year I read my dog-eared copy of On the Road, and for a few days dream of road trips, ’50s cars, poetry readings and camping. The lifestyle expressed in Kerouac’s books is so unique yet so consistent, so I was interested in the life of the author, since I didn’t really know “what happened” to Kerouac. Turns out the man responsible for these documents of hope and exploration was deeply troubled by many things, and his refuge in alcohol finally overcame him. The film What Happened to Kerouac enlists many of Jack’s friends to tell his story, and it turns out dark and depressing. Some moments of hope, but certainly not the story of creativity I expected.

Notes

Kerouac couldn’t speak English until he was 6. He apparently said that since he was Catholic and not allowed to commit suicide, he would drink himself to death…which he did. Kerouac came up with the title “Naked Lunch” for Burroughs. “How would you define the word ‘Beat’” “Sympathetic.” – 15:00, asked by Steve Allen “He said, ‘I am a spy in somebody else’s body’” – Burroughs Carolyn Cassady guessed that Jack envied Neal’s self-assurance and macho nature; Neal envied Jack’s education and middle-class security. Kerouac had very little in his room at home, living “like a monk”, but he did have a big crucifix above the typewriter, apparently having great devotion to it. (Father Spike Morrisette) Kerouac would get himself in good shape before a crazy writing spree–sleeping a lot, exercising, eating well–then completely devoting himself to the work, without sleeping or eating much. “He had little brown-paper manila-covered notebooks, in which he would write in pencil a lot…his theory was that you should have a notebook and pencil at all times.” – Gary Snyder, 58:00 Best parts are the times Kerouac reads his own work. Really a great performer.

This remarkable film shows the process of Picasso creating 20 different paintings, using a camera mounted behind the translucent canvas. You see his process of trying things out and discarding them, prototyping the work directly on the canvas. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and wanted to view this since viewing a short clip online. It starts out a bit slow, with lots of real-time marker sketches. Still, his comfort with “just drawing”, and letting things evolve is clear and remarkable. Gradually the film speeds up, with more artistic selections of frames to summarize the process. Around 50 minutes, he starts painting which was much more interesting. The final painting had me gasping out loud as he repeatedly changed his painting in progressively greater ways. He continually adds detail to pieces, and then often blacks out over sections of detail he added. His detailing jumps all over the page; he builds the entire piece at once rather than sections at a time. The story is that the paintings were all destroyed after filming–however, one of the commentators notes that this was not the case; several are known to exist still, one in the Musee Picasso in Paris.

Notes from the film

~23:00 he starts using abstract lines and shapes and then turning them into people. It’s hard to imagine he was planning this from the start, but it’s possible. That initial grid structure, however, helps define major body shapes and also connects one body to another with shared lines. “So, what do we do now?” “Let’s do another one. Unless you’re tired.” “I don’t mind being tired.” – 29:00 At 30:00, a remarkable 5 minute real-time scene where he paints an intricate detailed chicken and then uses that only as the shape of a human head in the end. Unlike the 22:00 ones, other paintings he begins with much more realistic scenes and turns them into cubist pieces later. His inks tend to simplify the piece, overriding lines and blocking the piece off. He takes less care with his sketches than I could have imagined; seemingly confident he can fix them up later in the process. Even shapes of heads, etc, are by no means realistic. At 50:00, interesting exchange about “going deeper”…followed by much more interesting paintings using oils to “show the layers”. Five hours to do that though. (54:00) Interesting that he didn’t know how long it had been. Collage + paint at 54:00 Realistic sketch -> cubist at 55:45. Erases the sketch to draw over it differently. At 1:00:00, he begins the painting I saw on Google video, painting a very realistic bull and matador, then at 1:02:30 totally warping the bull into a cubist shape. Final painting (at 1:04:30) is a real trip…he paints over the same scene dozens of times, finally becoming unsatisfied with it, using paper cutouts (again layered) to prototype different approaches, then painting over once more before deciding to start over, now that he knew what he was painting. “I’ve never worried about the audience, and I’m not about to start now, at my age” – 1:11:45 “Now that I know where I’m going, I’ll get a new canvas and start over” – :1:13:00. And on that second one, he quickly paints exactly what he wanted. The first was apparently just for experimentation, literally throwing away the first draft. One commentator thinks that this could be partially showmanship by Picasso, who was “very aware of his own stature in the art world”, but regardless it shows a remarkable ability to discard the past and move forward.

This movie is about Jerry Seinfeld starting over. He threw away all his bits and went back to begging clubs for a short set, floundering on stage, trying to figure out how it all works.

This is how comedians develop material. And as you can see it’s quite painful. – 6:00 That’s painful, watching yourself on tape. Even if you’re doing well, you’re like, ‘Damn, look at the way my hand moved.’ – Orny Adams, 9:30 When you’re growing up, everybody is funny. And then at some point, everybody went off and got jobs. – 14:30 It does not matter what the audience is…get up every night, anywhere you can…when you’re crafting an act, you need to see how that material works in front of each type of situation. – quoting Colin Quinn, 17:00 20 minutes in 3 months is a TON…[but] 20 minutes is not comedy. An hour, an hour-fifteen minutes is comedy. You learn how to open, how to sustain, to pace. – 19:00 That’s why I’m doing this, I’m scared that I’m not going to be able to do it anymore if I don’t keep doing it, and it might leave me. – 19:45 If [construction workers] can exhibit that level of dedication for that job, I should be able to do the same. – 48:30 This is the greatest comedy show in the last 10 years…you know, since that Sinbad show in the Caribbean. – 59:00 I guess it’s just my nature, it’s just never good enough. – 1:12:00 Get into something dumb–deep into it–you’ll find the greatest wisdom. – 0:30 of Porsche clip I find nothing more arrogant than people talking about where ideas come from, as if they know, and as if they had something to do with it. I was absolutely nothing but a conduit for that line. I don’t know where it came from; I just wrote it down. And I never liked it. Never supported it, never believed in it. And it has shown itself to me to be worthy, and I have begrudgingly had to admit it. And there it is, it’s in my act. And there are other things, like DNA, which I’ve loved, and nurtured, and fed with an eyedropper, and massaged its little wings, and every time I push it out of the nest it falls right on its head. – 1:15 of DNA clip

A fun portrait (Netflix ) of the famed Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones, creator of Road Runner & Coyote, Pepe le Peu, and more. “Smear drawings” – using “smeared” frames to transition from one view to another view; a form of “limited animation”, e.g. not drawing every single frame realistically – 14:45 Don’t give up:

I got fired a number of times, but they didn’t seem to take…I didn’t know I was fired, so I just stuck around. – 15:30 Bugs Bunny as “the anti-Mickey Mouse” – Leonard Maltin, 17:50 Daffy as Bugs’ foil: If Bugs were there, he’d be triumphant; but if Daffy’s there, you know he’s going to screw it up. – 21:00 Pick a cliche and work within it to help you focus on character: The genre parodies give you a big leg up. You can just focus on the content–the form is all set…because the audience knows the reference points, he can move much faster and just concentrate on what he does best, which is being funny. – Lorne Michaels, 26:00 Music (usually classical) often provided the constraints for him to design something great. Jones is famous for using famous classical and opera pieces in cartoons. If you’re dealing with a hunk of music–notes–you have to be honest with yourself, and them. And the more you narrow it, the better it gets. – 59:30 Ah, the true goal of animation: I don’t want something that’s realistic–I want something that’s believable – 1:09:40

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