Tuesday, September 28, 2010

iPadding the Future

(Gerry - since posting this Paul Melcher on his blog Thoughts of a Bohemian has posted Oct. 20th, "Beyond Metadata" worth a a read)

I have been accused of having shiny-object-syndrome. If I were 10 it would be simply AD of the HD. If you were ten 40 or 50 years ago they simply call it curiosity. Maybe that's why if you look around you see 40, 50, 60 year olds creating a pretty curious world full of things like the internet, cellular global communication, and stuff like touch-screen iPads.

But back to my focus issues for a moment. Focusing, I have always struggled with it. Having a laptop in front of me with Google open is the same as walking around in a tropical rainforest - I get excted about every thing that flutters past, flits by, crawls through my perception. I can barely read through a paragraph without highlighting and clicking a search for that word or idea and there I go - I'm off in a new wondrous direction. Unfortunately I have no light filtering through the canopy enabling me to "check in" once every so often and remember where I am, where I've been, and, oh ya, where I was going.

So I look at the iPad with trepidation - but I also know that somewhere in there lies my future. Not maybe the iPad itself, but the rainforest it will give birth to in a few short generations. As the iPad was nearing reality a photographer friend Michael and I had a pint and "it" came up and consumed much of the conversation. It was both the iPad and the rainforest. Ya see we are trying to figure out the future of our creative work, in turn a living from it, in turn our financial ability to continue the creative process. We came to a collection of conclusions, one was that quality would eventually be critical. But many conclusions rested on the creative inspiration of others - primarily the new publishing world; and I use the word publishing with considerable reservation. This snippet from media writer Colby Hall touches on the foundation of it, and slides forward in the direction we need to focus:

The question that publishers should be asking themselves regarding the iPad, and other tablet platforms, is not “how do we put our magazine on this device?” It should be “how can we best replicate the brand experience of our title, using the full suite of technological advances afforded by this new platform?” Follow up questions would include notions that would have previously been considered bizarre, like “What does our magazine sound like?” and “How many video advertisements is too much next this block of type?” (Because video stimulation hits the lizard part of the brain much quicker than the most well crafted and moving essay ever will.) It’s sad, but true.
Most of the web is frustratingly pathetic. On one level I understand and accept that because of the boxed minds that developed it. These were not audio visual people. That's why the web has been a hopeless place for kids. Kids are curious, the web is not designed in a curiously thinking way, although, as I said, a rainforest may be a short evolution away. If it is the iPad is a nice little muddy path leading in there.

What Michael and I discussed was exactly what Colby eludes to, that is, "best replicate the brand experience", although we think not in replication (which still implies backwards thinking to me), but in more creative (forward thinking) terms like, 'how cam we make the image come alive for the viewer', or 'transport the viewer/listener on our journey', or 'challenge the visitor to think anew'.

Those are the challenges we photographers, audioists, animators, film-makers and writers face. After a decade sort of away from my craft I'm incredibly excited to be back creating, it is filled with newness: I shoot digitally in both still and HD video from the same camera, upload into software like Lightroom, geotag my creative movement around the globe and listen for audio opportunities. iPad, Galaxy, even now Galapagos are, like the latter name suggests, new niches of evolutionary opportunity, creatively we can't think in replicating terms, those creatures die out, but in wholly new species.

I think we went through an odd transitional phase, past couple decades, and we aren't completely through it, as publishers will attest, where quality was down-graded and volume became king. If you walk the perimeter of a rainforest you see a pretty messy place - tattered bits of the original forest, invasive species, strangler weeds, garbage, it can all look rather depressing. Seen a few decades in the future and the order is returning, the forest re-assumes control, or more likely, a new order is established. I think we are there, in that messy place of chaos, where it is extremely difficult to see, hear, think. But I can also see some sense of order, new order with elements of old, taking root, sprouting forth. There will be devices and delivery methods that need brilliantly created content, designed to be probed and explored, and the world will pay for it, in a way that enables creativity to thrive not just survive.

Friday, September 17, 2010

The Unseen Sea

It's been rather quiet over here since I started work in the Gulf - literally and figuratively I have been swamped. I fly back to Portland next week and will catch up with several posts in the works for here and my Gulf specific blog. In the meantime Jenn sent me this very cool site with a time lapse piece on the fog and cloud formations in and around San Francisco which I wanted to share called The Unseen Sea by Simon Christen - enjoy!