Welcome Back, Shelley!
Can’t wait to have Shelley Winters back in my life.
I’m currently building a website for a new business I’m starting, and I keep being surprised at the user-interface challenges posed by designing a way for people to give you money.
Hitherto, most of my web development experience has been about presenting information, which just means doing a specialized kind of graphic design. Self-critical as I might be about my graphic design skills, this limits the number and kind of choices I have to make.
In this case I’m using the much-vaunted (and so far not over-sold) Squarespace for the design and hosting. I went with one of their lovely templates for the site because I didn’t want to spend forever on the coding part of the process.
This works as advertised. What Squarespace can’t do for me is make decisions. Which page should contain this or that idea? How do I want to describe the services I offer? Will people just click a button to go the payment page directly, or should I first take them to another informational page so they know exactly what they’re getting into?
It all needs to fit together in a way that makes people feel confident about what they’re buying, and that’s challenging. I know how my brain works, but it may not be the way the masses’ brains work.
I guess this is just another way that everything takes longer and gets more complicated than you imagined when you started.
July 3, 2012
Tonight I read the first of several introductions to my recently-purchased copy of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. As part of a project I’m working on, I’ll be reading several classic works of feminism (The Beauty Myth is next on the list).
I grew up in a post-suffrage society; first-wave feminism had made its mark and become normalized. But even though second-wave feminism had also largely arrived by my first years of intellectual cognizance, in the sub-culture of conservative evangelicalism it had yet to take root. The third wave was still just a gleam in the eye of sexually-independent women everywhere, but somehow I missed that, too.
My upbringing may have protected me from outside ideas more effectively than I originally thought. Or possibly I was too busy with other pursuits during my young adulthood to give much thought to the tangle of competing post-modern ideas reshaping feminism at the time.
Whatever the reason, I now find myself with a need to absorb and synthesize the history of feminism as it has developed since the 1920s. Betty Friedan’s seminal Civil-Rights Era work seems like the right place to start.
June 30, 2012
I’m going on vacation, Nerds! T minus 3.5 hours (-ish) until I’m off work for a whole week!
Get ready for lots of exciting blog posts from places like: My Desk and The Couch. I’ll be sharing lots of beautiful images of my adventures. For example:
Also, prepare yourselves for mesmerizing tales with titillating titles like: “How Hard This Scene Was To Edit”, “What It’s Like To Sleep At Night For Once”, and “I Spoke With My Wife Today For Five Whole Minutes”.
That’s right: I’m really just taking a week off at home, and my goal will be to finish the rough cut of this movie. I did this once before, in December, but instead of accomplishing my goal, I got sick. So this is Try #2.
I’ll let you know how it goes. There may be blogging, but only if I’m making fantastically speedy progress. Otherwise you folks and your endless need for entertainment based on my life are going to lose pretty severely to the competitive powerhouse that is Me Accomplishing Things.
March 1, 2012
I was in Ft Wayne today at the Bridal Extravaganza because my wife was exhibiting there. My presence is required at these events because there are lots of things to lift, carry, assemble, and disassemble, and Sally’s twiggy arms are insufficient. But once the show starts there’s not much for me to do, so I usually end up finding a place to hole up and entertain myself (by which I mean: “nap”).
I always do a quick tour of the vendors first, though, and this time I met Samuel from Thread & Film, a Ft. Wayne-based wedding cinematography company. Notice the careful use of the word “cinematography” as opposed to “videography”. Thread & Film creates wedding movies, not wedding videos, complete with trailers and shot at 24 frames per second.
They have a very beautiful, useful website, and I particularly love their explanation of the philosophy behind the services they provide and the artful way they seem to occupy the space between documentary and narrative production. Watch some of their trailers if you want to see what I’m talking about. UPDATE: Apparently these aren’t live yet, but make sure to check back later.
Browsing their website got me thinking about what it is people are hiring them to do, and I don’t think the answer is: “make a visual record of the events of their wedding day”. Certainly that’s part of what they offer, but it’s almost incidental to their actual product, which is the experience of hyper-reality–the near-tangible feeling that your wedding (and by extension, your very existence) is a larger-than-life event.
I’m definitely expressing my opinion here; the fine people of Thread & Film might disagree with me, and I don’t want to put words in their mouths. I feel like this is an interesting concept to explore, though, as being indicative of a larger overall trend.
People understand the world in terms of narrative, and the best communication leverages this. The prevalence of black-and-white thinking in politics, for example, illustrates the fact that people like a story with a hero and a villain, because that kind of story is easier to process than one in which all the characters have mixed motivations and do both good and bad things, often at the same time, for reasons that aren’t always entirely consistent.
Because we process in terms of story and serially consume so many different types and lengths of stories as part of the inescapable over-abundance of media in Western culture, our mental paradigms have evolved. We’ve grown to expect life to have that heightened, epic, near-mythical quality so frequently present in depictions of normal life on both the big and small screens.
How we deal with the perpetual disappointment of discovering that life almost never resembles our over-hyped mental image is a subject for a different day. Every now and then, though, the opportunity comes along to participate in something that will give us a taste, if only for a few moments, of that longed-for adventure we imagine life to be. People with abundant resources are naturally better positioned to take advantage of these opportunities, but not all of them are life-shattering or expensive. In fact, Donald Miller argues that the best kind of life is one that consistently makes the decision to seize small moments and build them into a larger, better story.
Thread & Film does the same thing I do, but targeted at specific individuals. Whereas writing and filmmaking provide escapism to a large audience from their life into a fantasy life, Thread & Film provides escapism to one couple from their life into a better, more idealized version of their life. I’d love to learn about the psychological impact of having a piece of your life adapted to the screen. If you watch the movie of your wedding once every few months, will it inspire you to idealize other parts of your life, then make those ideals reality? That kind of thing could prove addicting.
Far-fetched, maybe, but I firmly believe that telling a good narrative about yourself affects your self-image, which in turn can effect life change. While not everyone can afford to have a movie made about their wedding, the concept is adatable and extensible, and it’s worth thinking about how we can re-tell our own story to ourselves in a way that inspires self-idealization.
For brides-to-be, this involves a single, magical day that will live on in their memories. For the rest of us, the process may look more prosaic and mundane. Build a good habit of self-narrative, though, and we might see long-term change in reality, not merely in our imagination.
February 27, 2012
Great post by Kelly Thompson on objectification and over-sexualization of female comic book characters. This is only one of several reasons I can’t get excited about Marvel and DC superhero comics.
February 22, 2012
Here is an un-corrected A-Camera still from the scene I’m working on right now:
Obviously it’s too bright (this scene takes place at night, in the dark), but that’s easy to correct. Going darker is not a problem; in fact, we shot it this way on purpose. I’m not going to comment about the blue tint. That’s not the point.
Now, here is another, also un-corrected still, from the same scene, and in fact the same moment in time, but from our B Camera:
In case I wasn’t clear above, these shots were simultaneous; we were shooting multi-camera. The compression on this image makes it look a tiny bit worse than it really is, but you get the point.
Now, the two cameras we used were different models–similar, even down to the sensor inside them, but not the same. One of them had a few stops more latitude than the other, which probably explains the difference. This is a limitation we just had to deal with. The proper way to deal with it in this situation would have been to throw more light at the scene and lower the ISO on Camera A.
But we didn’t do that. Why?
Because I didn’t realize what was happening. You’ll hear me singing that song a lot (here, for example) about this movie, because everyone was doing too much, including me, and we were all exhausted most of the time. I lost track of hundreds of tiny problems that should have been noticed and resolved. This one isn’t quite as tiny.
See, I can fix this, but the B-Camera shots will get grainier. It’s way harder to go lighter on digital footage than darker. So when you eventually watch this movie, look for the disparity, because unless I discover some sort of magic previously unknown to me, there will certainly be disparity.
If I’d had a monitor with us on set I would have looked at it, and I would have noticed. In fact, we did have a monitor on the show, but making sure it followed the cameras around and got hooked up every time we moved so that I could look at it to check on what my camera ops were doing was another one of those tiny things that didn’t get done because it wasn’t anyone’s job, in particular. Welcome to no-budget indie production.
My friend Greg would probably favor me with a regretful shake of his head right now if I was talking to him about this, and David O’Donnell would graciously refrain from pointing out that he warned me I’d need an AD on set, because he’s a classy guy. But their point would essentially be made: you’re going to make mistakes like this, and they’re going to bite you later, and hopefully if you’re smart, you’ll not make the same ones again.
If you’re smart.
February 22, 2012
As I opened up the most recent scene of Murder! A Love Story for editing and started watching the stringout, I cursed myself for perhaps the thousandth time in post-production.
We didn’t have much time to shoot our scenes, so we shot two cameras at once as often as we could and tended to cover dialogue-based scenes in the “master-over-over” style. Besides being fast, it fit with the overall style and tone of the film.
I must have been tired on this particular day. We were shooting in a very small space, the office of Westminster Hall at Grace College. Our master was already a little weird because it was being shot from the end of a desk, which filled the foreground with furniture and desk accessories instead of the actors. I’m not a huge fan of masters anyway; when I cut I tend to use them very little.
So you’d think this would be an ideal situation to make the over-the-shoulder shots really good so I could rely heavily on them in the editing room. What I decided to do, though (and for the life of me, I can’t remember how this conversation went), was put a 50mm lens on the OTS camera and shoot everything handheld.
If you’re not familiar with these sorts of concepts, a 50mm is not a very wide angle lens, and on the APS-sensor cameras we were using, it was realistically more like a 75mm lens. When shooting with lenses like this, the kind of shake you get from shooting handheld is exaggerated. I don’t know what possessed me to let the camera operator go handheld instead of putting the camera on sticks, but this is what happened. Consequently, all the OTS takes are shaky, and the focus comes and goes sometimes because the depth of field was relatively shallow, so every time the operator moves the camera even a little bit closer to or farther away from the subject the shot goes soft.
Grrrr.
This is only the most recent in a long list of things I’d do differently if I shot this movie now instead of last year. Of course, I wouldn’t know to do those things differently if I hadn’t already made the mistakes that taught me those lessons. So there’s no use whimpering over it. As Edward Burns recently tweeted:
“Best advise i got when i was trying to make Brothers McMullen. ‘there are two types of pain. The pain of regret and the pain of hard work’ [sic]”
So I guess I’m experiencing a little of both right now, but I’d definitely rather be regretting my mistakes in production than not making the movie at all.
February 18, 2012
Yesterday Apple announced the upcoming version of its desktop operating system, Mountain Lion, or for people who don’t like kitschy names that are easy to lose track of, OS X 10.8.
You can read about its new features at… well, pretty much everywhere. Despite that, to me the announcement of Mountain Lion, apart from its earliness, is not that huge a story. The story about the story is actually bigger than the story.
Yes, I used my title in my post. You’re free to leave if you don’t like how I run things around here.
You can read over at Daring Fireball how John Gruber and an undisclosed number of other Apple/Tech journalists were invited to individual presentations by Phil Schiller showing off the features of the new OS. This is pretty strange because I can’t ever remember Apple introducing a new product in this manner. They either do a quiet website update with a press release or throw a big event in Cupertino and invite everyone in advance.
But from Gruber’s description, they essentially replicated the format and tone of one of their big events, just for one person at a time. No one knows how many of these mini-keynotes they did, although I suppose you could walk around on the web and count the number of tech writers telling the same story. So far I’ve only seen it from Gruber and Andy Ihnatko. UPDATE: It turns out Andy Ihnatko was not included. He’s apparently just really quick on the draw, because he had that article up like lightning.
Anyway, check out this quote from Gruber’s story:
But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion–or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?
That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.
“Now” presumably being delicate shorthand for “now that Steve’s gone”.
Interesting things afoot at the company I love.
February 17, 2012