The woodcarver starts with a blank form, a lump of tree that suggests… something. They might see it, in their minds eye, as a suggestion: a shadow or ghost. Or they might, in a flickering glance askew, glimpse the finished article.
But it’s not there. Not yet. It must be revealed… or found.
Imposed?
So one sloughs away the outer layer, the detritus that has played its part, of supporting the essential internals. Sloughs and hacks and chops and lops and cares, hoping and trusting that the process will clarify rather than obscure.
And repeat.
And repeat.
Until… there! Do you see? No? No!
More. Invert. Rotate. Walk around, return.
There. Definitely there.
Yes.
More digital celluloid sawdust hits the cutting-room floor, and the work is revealed.
And now we finesse, and polish, and seal.
]]>about:robots in the address bar.
Via Danny O’Brien.
]]>Nope, didn’t see that coming. The ending, that is — Davros had been telegraphed months ago. Not entirely sure I’m happy, since Tennant pretty much rocks, but there we go. I guess we’ll see what happens next week.
Also: damn, but this series needs a better script editor. My hunch is that Davies is a great producer, but I’m sorry, the show falls into the Battlestar Galactica trap of having lousily-uneven pacing and over-ambitious storylines. As a result, huge swathes of material have to be cut, and with all that goes any semblance of character continuity. The first half of this episode was insane. ‘Breakneck’ I can cope with, but this was plain broken. Yet amongst all the ‘Wait, she said what? Why?!’ moments, there was still time for not one but three ‘We know who you are’ reprise gags? Oh, come on.
I guess the hope is that the production machinery is sufficiently well-oiled that the series can more-or-less run itself (which in practice means that the production manager needs to be hard as nails). In that situation, the job Moffat is inheriting isn’t to mould and shape a franchise: all that heavy lifting has been done for him. It’s to shape a series.
The concern, then, is that Moffat has written some outstanding scripts… but how will he cope with a larger project? Jekyll was a good sign, but still, it’s a big step.
Fingers crossed. I never like the end of Who series, as the big cliffhanger/world-in-peril stuff doesn’t really fit the character or show in my book. So I guess I’ll grit my teeth through whatever happens next week, then… roll on 2010. Or something.
]]>This is still long-distance.
Yes, it’ll be nice. Yes, it’s a distance one can complete, one-directionally, in an evening. Rather than in a day.
But it’s still long-distance.
Sheesh.
]]>Anyway: here’s the original Discovery ident, and I note there are plans to get xkcd fans to make their own version, collectively.
Hmm. The BIG Event isn’t that far off…
]]>Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.4 USM: RRP £310.
Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.8 II: RRP £90.
Nikon AF 50mm ƒ/1.4D: RRP £250.
Nikon AF 50mm ƒ/1.8: RRP £90.
Compare:
Sigma 50mm ƒ/1.4 EX DG HSM: RRP £380.
Er… what?
This had better be a little stonker of a lens.
]]>OK, so currently, you pay twice for commercial music: first, you pay a royalty to copy it into your project (‘mechanical copying’). Second, you pay when your work is published or performed. Broadcast, web publication, public performance, whatever — you inform the Performers’ Rights Society (via ‘music returns’), and they collect performance fees from you.
In the old media model, the producer pays the first set of fees (or, more likely, uses production music that’s on a blanket deal — hence ‘royalty free’ from their point of view), then the broadcaster/publisher/venue pays the second set of fees.
With web publication you still have to cover both sets of fees, one way or another. Even if you’re using Garageband, say, you’ve already bought bundled production music (included with the software), then at point of publication you’re not a PRS member, so there are no fees to collect and hence no music return is required. But the principle still holds.
The music industry has dumped huge resources into, amongst other things, legal fees and lobbying for DRM to sustain this model.
Here’s another way things could be:
Suppose we standardised the metadata fields available in media files to include a music track URL. Now, the PRS (and other national equivalents) holds a huge database of tracks — how hard would it be to expose that via standardised URLs? http://www.mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk/publisher/artist/trackID, say?
That URL could happily redirect to the accessor’s national equivalent, but the key concept is this: the page returned by that URL holds copyright data on the track, including links to places you can buy it. Amazon, iTunes, whatever Microsoft are doing this month, and so on. PRS takes an affiliate cut from referring visitors to those sites.
Under this model, the resources PRS puts into lobbying and pushing DRM and policing usage, they now put into lobbying people writing media tools (Microsoft, Apple, Avid, Ulead, Sony, and so on) to (a.) read and write the audio URL metadata fields, and (b.) allow easy access to those links from their media player software.
Example: you’re watching a YouTube video on your iPhone, think ‘this music is cool,’ click the music button YouTube have added to their player, and a couple of links later you’ve bought the album and it’s downloading to your iTunes library. I’d do that. Wouldn’t you?
Crucially, the music industry declare that this is how you’re going to do music clearance for online media. They’re not going to do returns (huge overhead, surely doesn’t scale to millions of websites even from the collecting agencies’ end?), they’re not going to do DRM. They’re just going to make it trivially easy for people to say ‘I like this track’, find out what it is, and buy it.
In some alternative universe this is what they’ve been doing from the start. Right now, I’m scratching my head trying to work out what would be so hard about making it happen. And I’d love somebody in the industry to do the sums to work out how much it might cost, net, compared to maintaining and defending the current disaster.
]]>Well worth a read; useful stuff to fire back with next time someone starts banging on about ‘being viral.’
]]>Thank heavens for listen again, or I’d have missed it.
]]>The finished films have finally gone up: not embedded, curiously, but there are links to iTunes and direct podcast feeds on this page. Note that the ‘high quality’ version plays just fine on my iPod touch, and should look similarly lovely on a current nano or full-size iPod; the ‘iPod quality’ version is only necessary if you have the first model of iPod video.
Interesting experiment, anyway. We’ll see what the take-up is like. There’s lots of interest in this sort of thing around the arts community, it seems, but perhaps not much clarity on what it’s all for.
]]>Large time display, filling the screen in landscape format, showing time of day in the following format:
[selectable digits]:[hours]:[minutes]:[seconds]:[frames]
Where ‘frames’ counts 25th or 24th of a second (or 29.97th or 30th, for those in weird non-PAL countries. Doubtless Kevin will roll his eyes and explain why it’s really not that simple, etc.
With this, you velcro your iPod to a clapperboard, and you have an el-cheapo timecode slate. Lovely. Should be trivial, right?
]]>Science Shack was an Adam Hart-Davis vehicle for BBC2, filmed very close to transmission in autumn 2001. Close enough, in fact, that I had a heated telephone discussion with the BBC’s tech review department following their receipt of the first programme: “You can’t send us something this close to transmission! It’s a breach of your contract!” / “It’s a requirement imposed on us by the controller of BBC2. You can tech the tape, or explain to him why there’s a 30-minute hole in tomorrow night’s schedule. Your call.” (I paraphrase. I almost certainly wasn’t that heroic at the time).
The reason for the tight turnaround was that we were intended to be incorporating feedback from the series’ website into the programmes themselves. That is: the site was to go live a few weeks before filming/transmission, and be trailed on BBC2. We’d develop ideas and solicit help from the audience, and even drag some of them along to the filming. Thus, we’d foster a community of people discussing science topics, including academics from the Open University, who’d help answer all the questions that didn’t make the cut for the TV show.
Well, that was the plan.
In the event, the website did go live before the TV show. A year before. Thanks to an almighty scheduling cock-up, it had been running for a year, been a bit of a giggle, had built a decent-size community, and shut down before production on the TV series even started. BBC Online, doubtless slightly narked that they’d done their bit and where-had-the-broadcast-muppets-been? declined to extend the site. So we were left with trying to make a TV format that contractually and practically required an integral website, but whose website was being actively torn down.
Compromises were reached and, somehow, a modicum of funding was found. Then the real bombshell — marshaling viewers’ comments and responses from the OU academics and TV production team was clearly a workflow/content management problem, and the Online team got back to us with their ideas. Implementation cost: twice our total budget. Schedule: test deployment February 2002.
This was in early September 2001, with broadcast scheduled from mid-October. Spot the snag.
In the end, the public BBC website was entirely static (!), and I lashed together an admin back-end in the then-new Geeklog, which received questions and comments and allowed a researcher we took on to work out what to do with them. The OU panel had access to parts of that, and used it to answer queries (so they could see what each other had written). When they were happy, the researcher wrote up their replies into something resembling English, and published them on the public site.
Online were aghast: this was not a robust, scalable, secure system. On the other hand, I countered, it had the benefit of extraordinary flexibility: if we wanted sweeping changes we could simply ask Jess, the researcher, to do things differently. Much of her job was crappy copy-and-paste between disconnected systems, but for the sake of a ten-week project that was an acceptable limitation.
We had another staffer on the web team, Toby: he and Jess shot photos and bits of video, and updated the site from location while we were shooting. Today, we’d say they were live-blogging the recording… but hey, this was late 2001. Movable Type wasn’t even out yet. Besides, thanks to the baroque BBC Online approvals system, the web team’s updates often took days to actually go live to the world — I think in one case the BBC2 broadcast beat them, not that this was their fault.
If this all sounds like a total farce… well, that would be about right. But from the audience perspective it wasn’t too bad, and it amused me at the time that a series based around gaffer-tape-and-string experiments should have a website built in the same sort of way. I still think the decision to replace code with a real person was crucial, and some of that sort of approach continues to inform my thinking about web systems. Too much flexibility and you can’t get anything done; too little and you can’t move if you get one tiny thing wrong in the design; in some circumstances, people are both cheaper and faster than code.
And yes, it was experiences like this that led, ultimately, to things like the ‘360 commissioning’ mantra, and the television world getting better at integrating online and broadcast production. However, I’m still not convinced the BBC is genuinely good at this beyond their work on a handful of key properties — like Doctor Who. Also, I can’t see that much has really improved from the perspective of indy producers, in that the BBC’s web platform is still rather closed. While they do have valid concerns about long-term stability, it seems there’s little scope for doing things quickly.
Right now, I’m much preferring the fleet-of-foot feel one gets from working online to the turning-a-supertanker feel of broadcast. Perhaps this is why I rail against hideous monolithic content management systems that get in the way rather than smooth the workflow? They’re too reminiscent of the broadcast world I’m trying to leave behind.
But anyway, the real joke about Science Shack was why the first series was in 2001, but the second didn’t happen until 2003. In autumn 2002 I was at a conference of science TV producers, and Science Shack’s original commissioner, by then in another rôle at the BBC, was surprised to see me there. “I’d have thought you’d be at the frantic stage right about now, if you’re going to make transmission.” I was confused, and the chap went on to explain that he’d been pleased to see Science Shack 2 appear in the advance broadcast schedules.
This was news to me. Only the previous week I’d spoken to the owner of the production company, and things were looking pretty thin for them. So former-commissioner-chap and I toddled over to current-commissioner-chap, who was also at the conference. We put the conundrum to him: could he explain the discrepancy?
He blanched.
“Oh shit!”, he exclaimed, “I commissioned the second series, but forgot to tell the production company!”
True story.
]]>k thx bye.
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