Thinking It Through Again

It’s time to come around again with a new re-evaluation of what we make and how we make it, or at least to notice all of those things. We tell stories: strange stories, normal stories, idealistic stories, real stories, feminist stories, ironic post-modern stories, common stories. We tell stories. It doesn’t matter how we put them together, just how people view them later. We’re never really judged by how we make them, just how good, or effective, they are as we watch them. So let’s think a little about the range of the forms of what we make.

There’s still images. It’s hard to tell a story with one photo, so we make a sequence. (How ironic this is. I’m the guy that loves to make posters in Pages. That’s one image to a page. Yes, maybe it’s not a story, but more of a statement. Hmm, I’ll have to think about that more.) How many? Who knows, maybe 10 is the magic number for a sequence – beginning, middle, end, with transitions, and a poignant moment or two, or three. We shoot stills, edit them down, sequence them and put them up on a wall, or in a book, on on a web site or make them into a slide show. It’s Photoshop images dropped into iPhoto, InDesign, iWeb, or Dreamweaver. It’s Keynote or Powerpoint (poor thing). It’s printing out books from iPhoto or Blurb.

Well, with a slide show we also have the option of adding sound and sometimes we do: real sounds, life, people talking, questions and answers, narration, music, sound effects, interviews, reflections, summations. It ends up as a slide presentation or a movie of slides and sounds. We make the audio in GarageBand, SoundTrack, Final Cut Pro, ProTools and drop it into iMovie, with the honestly really great Ken Burns effect of panning, scanning and zooming into and across the images. There’s the more formal Soundslides for a traditional journalism approach, or the sophisticated “key-framed” Final Cut Pro versions. While I love Keynote, it doesn’t do audio well at all, so it’s always silent (for me).

We’ve arrived at movies, made with stills, audio, film, and the stuff we shoot ourselves. It could be in iMovie, but mostly we’re in Final Cut Pro with excursions into Color, Motion, SoundTrack, and AfterEffects. iMovie is better than it was, but not as good as it should be and Final Cut, is, well it’s waiting to change and we’re waiting with it. It’s been a good friend, along with Premiere and Avid (both from long ago), but Final Cut has been there when we really needed it and it came through.

Then there’s sound alone, not lonely, but it can be if it wants to be. We can work for free in Audacity, or slightly free in GarageBand, almost in Logic, but it’s realistically just for music. SoundTrack is helpful, but mostly as a utility and finally ProTools is where we would all want to work in long form multitrack audio.

So that’s a broad range and long list of applications that help us with our work, some a little, some a lot. What I’m always looking for is a button in each of these applications that says “better story” and, no, it’s not really there, simply hoped for; just as there is no button on the piano that says “better music”. It’s all in the skills of the person playing that makes the piano turn out sounds that we love to hear. Alas, there’s no button in our software that gives us a better story. It’s us, thinking it up, working it out, thinking it through that makes the story better – hopefully. We’re the key. So what we need for ourselves is better skills, more experience, and a renewed understanding that we experience and understand the world through stories, not new software at all.

gunther