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
