Back to the Beginning, Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gunther

What Do You Call Those?

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

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

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

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

As always, thanks Jerry.

gunther

A Three Light Night

Thinking in small units is sometimes a big help.

What the heck are you talking about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gunther

The History of Photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gunther

What Works Around, Goes Around

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gunther

Working Your Way Around

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gunther

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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