Don't Be Eager to Buy Stuff

I’ve met a couple of incoming students this week (Yes, people show up at odd times with family in tow, wander around and get the lay of the land and they’re not even local. It’s cool.) and e-mailed a handful more, well their parents that is. All of them were interested in what kind of computer or camera they should buy to come to school.

My answer is always the same. The first year of college is the worst time to buy a fancy computer. Anything that will turn on is fine. The IT people hate it when I say that. They have their “minimum specs” that HAVE to be met. OK, Maybe Windows 4 is too old and weird, but hey, all versions of Windows are weird. Anyway, the point is don’t buy stuff in a vacuum of knowledge, wait until you actually know the answer for yourself. If you have to rely on “others” to tell you what you need, no matter what they say it’s really for them, not you.

As for cameras - don’t buy any. But wait, don’t filmmakers need their own equipment to turn out the best work? No. You don’t know what we really work on so therefor you don’t know what you really need. Really. Honest.

We’ve got lots of cameras you can sign out from Media Services in the library, and you should. Then, after technology churns under you (ie. time passes), after you’ve got some work under your belt, after you’ve worked in the labs and see how the workflow runs, then, maybe, you might want to buy a camera, or not - maybe even wait another year.

Knowledge, personal knowledge, is always the best advisor and allows you to speak for yourself with confidence and authority. That’s the goal at Hampshire. It doesn’t come overnight, not maybe even in a semester, but we all work at it daily - all of us. Keep your eye on the goal, relax, experiment, have fun and only worry about the really important stuff: What’s the infant mortality rate in the US, how many women start businesses, what’s all that dark matter really doing, etc.

The Tobolowsky Files - podcast

I can’t remember how I found out about this for the first time, but this is a really great podcast. This is something you’re best friend should tell you about immediately and you should share with your friends. Stephen Tobolowsky is a “character” actor that you’ve probably seen before, but maybe not remembered. I recognized him as the insurance salesman in GroundHog Day, but he’s been in a lot of good films and bad.

All he does is tell stories about his life. Yep, it doesn’t sound like much, but it is. I found parts of the first few episodes a little irritating, but give it a chance. There’s the introduction, a story, a musical interlude, another story, and the outro - simple. You laugh, you cry, what more do you want?

Look it up on iTunes under podcasts. He’s at episode 36 right now, which I’ll listen to later today as I take my 93 year old mother grocery shopping. She’s really slow, so I’ve got lots of time to wander up and down the isles listening to this and freaking out the other shoppers as I chuckle and sob.

He’s also got a web site off of SlashFilms with old photos of himself and Ann (you’ll meet her later - much later). If you listen to these in public people will definitely think you’re weird as you laugh and cry. Have fun.

Talk About Workflow!

Here’s good old Chase Jarvis yelling about his digital workflow process. It’s good to see what people actually have to go through when you’ve got a client project to worry about. Maybe it’s a little over-kill for us, but be sure you understand why he’s doing all of this.

It’s all unnecessary for a class project, but very reasonable for a Div III. The answer is no, sorry, we don’t backup any of the drives in the media labs, but now you know that. If you want a backup, you have to do it yourself! Maybe you should.

Transcoding with MPEG-Streamclip

The easiest way to get that wack-o footage you recorded using your mothers underwater camera into Final Cut is to first run it through MPEG-Streamclip and convert it into a format that Final Cut likes.

The final answer to what that format is may depend on what style of work you’re making. If you’re doing a lot of compositing then I’d stick with a format that works well with colors. That usually means ProRes, but as with most HD formats ProRes comes in a lot of flavors. Most of the time good old vanilla is fine. Or for those of us on a file storage diet ProRes LT might even be a good choice.

Almost never will you want to bump up the quality to anything higher than this. The concept of using an uncompressed file format (or ProRes 4:4:4:4) to increase the quality of your movie is, well, it’s just plain wrong. You movie will NEVER look better that it does right now, our goal is just to make Final Cut more happy by using Intra-Frame formats instead of the GOP formats that a lot of DSLR or Flips or other H.264 cameras shoot in. We’re just trying to convert our unruly files into a personality that will play well with others, no more than that.

And always remember: your mom’s shooting HD and you’re downloading movies off of the internet from YouTube. Who’s the filmmaker now? Seriously.

Campus Tour Groups

Wow, I've been overwhelmed recently by the frequency of campus tours and the number of people in them. When holidays happen parents and prospective students must hit the road fast to furiously drive up and down the east coast shopping for colleges. It must seem like getting up early to hit a string of great tag sales on a Saturday morning – grab that brochure, look over there, talk to those people, keep moving, where do we go next.

I'm always struck by how differently each tour group behaves. It's similar to a production class dividing up into smaller sections when I give a workshop. The first group is sullen and unresponsive, then the next is effusive and insightful, but they're all in the same class. Odd. Similarly, some of the tour groups I'd like to talk to all day. They're all fun and engaging. With others, the conversation dwindles, no one asks questions or makes comments, and I wonder where in the world their silent student will end up.

On Friday, Good Friday, three large groups right in a row, only six or seven minutes apart bumped into each other like ocean rafts. The second group arrived pushing the first out of the way and then the third group appeared just around the corner ready to do the same. I'm a shy, quiet guy to start with so it's a stretch for me to do any of this in the first place, then the forced repetition on top of that adds more stress. Oh my, did I talk about Anna Elliot and Chris Applebaum just a few minutes ago or did I say that to the previous group?

The groups do have the usual common concerns, misunderstandings and questions, but each family is different in interests and their ability to articulate useful questions. As I always say to Division III students it takes about an hour of back and forth questioning to finally get to the heart of their project and truly understand what they're trying to do. That three sentence description from their Div III contract really isn't deep enough, nor revealing enough to elicit the informed discussion that's so necessary in letting others understand and finally give back a useful response. No one believes that initially, but later they're astonished that we've uncovered new problems with their project or that they could take a new direction in method, outcome or presentation. It really does take that long and you have to stay with it and not give up just because the conversation seems too difficult or makes you uncomfortable.

So tour groups with their enforced brevity will also leave with an equally abbreviated understanding of what we do and how we do it. That's too bad, but I understand the reality of the situation. For me the easy way of interacting in that short time frame is telling stories either of alumns that I knew personally or the Div III and Div II students that I'm currently working with. While most of those stories seem well received, after so much repetition I feel them unsatisfying – at least for me. I wish we could talk more about theories of education and what have been parents and students personal experiences with learning and understanding, but no, that doesn't happen. It's a simple show and tell, not a deeper prolonged experience.

This frequency of interaction is happening because I now have an additional office in the new Jerome Liebling building of the film/photo program. The building is a show case and an obvious part of a general tour of the campus whether people are actually interested in media as a concentration or not. I'll happily continue to talk with prospective students and their parents and try and fill in their understanding of what Hampshire offers and allow them to decide if it's a good fit for them. However I'm only in the building on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I wonder who they talk with on Tuesday and Thursday?

gunther

Technology Fair

We just participated with the IT department in a Technology Fair last Friday. Using the basement as the location was the real draw for us since we're always looking for more exposure down here in the invisible recesses of the college. We feel over-looked by tours of new students and faculty so we relish visibility in any form. The IT side of it was to help people with laptop problems either real or imagined.

I was given two time slots for a talk titled "media for the masses", whatever that is. But as I prepared a Keynote presentation it felt awkward and forced. Technology isn't what we really do, though it may seem like that to outsiders. What the media basement is for is storytelling – in a lot of different forms using a lot of different methods. That's what we do.

Media is just storytelling from one person to another without the teller actually being there. That surrogate "other" is media. It's the autonomous teller, an automatic presenter of the story thoughtfully packaged and tuned for an effective unfolding of a particular story. Some stories need to be told in a specific way for reasons of content, effect, or cost. Others can be related in many ways and often it's the audience that selects the form to which they are most attuned.

So I stopped the presentation in the middle and launched into what I think is one of the fundamental elements of media in form, method and philosophy and that's making posters. They're simple, powerful and work best when you finally understand the essence of what you're trying to say. The form forces you to edit down to what's possible to display on a single page and that usually improves your thinking and writing. It's a refined combination of design and concept. If done well you get a lot of bang for the buck.

So I talked about my personal progression of poster making – the first and its results, the following ones, the most successful ones, the most contentious ones, the art ones, the business ones, and the personal ones. At least it was colorful and fresh. The poster of Ken and Jerry is really popular with donors to the college. The one on lighting technique is the most popular with students (it gets stolen the most, which is one of the best metrics for gauging success or at least desirability).

I use the software application Pages for doing the work. It's Apple's version of InDesign, but a little lighter and much easier to use. It's true for some images I do a lot of the work in Photoshop first, but for the text and layout I work in Pages. It's part of the iWork collection of software: Pages, Keynote and Numbers. Pages can do both word processing and layout. Keynote is Apple's version of Powerpoint, only it's fun and easy. Numbers is the equivalent of Excell, only better with images and layout. I do confess that I don't actually use Numbers that much and Excell, for what I do, is fine after all.

So in the end the presentation went better than I expected since I didn't really know who would show up or how many people there would be. I confirmed in my own mind that we're really storytellers first and tech people second. Everything we do is at the service of the story. We learn what we need to know in order to help the story unfold and find its own voice and form and we always try and push that form into new shapes using as broad a range of methods as possible. Often out of that re-directing or re-presenting of the story we get a new story or at least one with a different flavor - a variant, but in the end the final vote of success is always made by the story itself. Did we serve the story well? That's what the world of media is all about and anyone can learn to do that. It just takes attention, practice and the desire to tell an effective story.

gunther

The New Alumni Reel for 2009

Here's the talk I gave on Saturday to about 50 parents and students in the Main Lecture Hall to introduce this years Alumni Reel showing.

Every year the Hampshire Alumni Relations people ask graduates to submit a clip of recent film or video work from which I build a compilation reel that gets shown first at Hampshire, then in New York, then in LA, and also at other locations across the country as needed. Each year the collection of submissions from alumni is slightly different and has a unique flavor. Some years it’s thin and cold, some years it hot and spicy. This year the vintage is good, but with a still yet different taste. Like any collection of submissions what we see is only what’s submitted. It’s not a true reflection of what’s being done – good or bad.

The odd part is both the list of usual suspects and the ever broadening list of just-past-recent graduates, not yet settled into that perfect job, but not too far away from it. They pop up in strange places and also have very strong ties to each other.

Even with the crowd that’s off in the distance, their friendships are personal, professional and re-occurring. Their names and titles are links that weave back and forth from project to project. They work for themselves, corporations and each other.

The near-recent travel in groups and maybe if they've grown apart they also eagerly come back to the center for fun films that might or might not even be real paying commercial work.

This year there are a few people that pop up more than once doing different jobs and working with different people. What’s instructive about this multiple submission is it’s a reflection of the reality of the new world of work. People don’t do just one thing any more, not even in the same year, certainly not for their entire career.

I met Ann Harrison at an alumni event back in May. She had graduated in media theory, went to grad school and got a masters in journalism, worked for newspapers, produced videos, wrote for magazines (Wired). I asked her what she was doing now and she said, “reconciliation”. Immediately I thought of divorce cases and winced. “Who was your last client”, I jokingly asked. “Liberia”, she replied, “I had a very good year.”

Even closer to home, outside the Liebling building in the stone entrance area are bricks with names on them (a fund raising device). One is from Donna Rockwell. She too went to grad school and got a masters in journalism, did on-air reporting, and now, I find, she has a PhD in psychology and teaches.

Still closer, my daughter is a recent Hampshire grad and is currently in graduate school in psychology. She did photography for her Div II and writing for her Div III. That’s what we call the “Hampshire straight line” of study.

But back to the Reel. People come and go each year for good and maybe not so good reasons: way too busy; on a shoot in Australia; we’re still in pre-production and I can’t talk about it and that last one, well, that’s so over now; Teresa can you take this call; oops, gotta go Paris Hilton just came in.

Yes, then there’s the range of work. Some, well, I don’t know. Others give me a hard time finding only a two minute clip instead of the ten minutes I really want to show.

So, as I always tell tour groups. You’ve all seen Hampshire work. Some times it’s obvious as with Ken, some times it’s invisible as with Dan Epstein. Some times you never thought about it - MTV and Chris Applebaum. Some times you’d be surprised - Lord of the RIngs, Spiderman III, Up, 60 Minutes.

On the technical side, this year all of the submission were on DVDs. About 60% were QuickTime files and 40% were video DVDs. The QuickTime files look better and proves to me that we’re moving into a new world of distribution with a new way of watching work.

Most people selected their own two minute clip, but some didn’t and those are the hardest. My selections are sometimes just for expediency and don’t really reflect the full tone or importance of the work. That’s my failing. This year I finished the reel the latest ever, just two days ago and any misspellings or typos are my fault because no one else has seen it yet. You’re the first.

On with the show.

gunther