Flickering in the darkness

Distracted? Moi?

Yes, basically. I’ve started doing movies… which is to say, I’m skipping the whole “building up slowly” thing and heading straight for a feature. There’s a lot to learn. A LOT to learn… but obviously being a 21st century kindof auteur, I’ve started a blog before I’ve even bought a camera.

And being a 21st Century kind of blogger, I’ve launched it before I’ve finished the design properly, and it’s still all filled up with lorem-ipsum and such. It’s called bodg.it

Of course it looks a bit woolly – it isn’t finished yet. Jeez you people are pernickety.

But there is a point. Of a kind… “good enough” is better than “perfect”, because “good enough” allows other people to think “wtf? I could do that”

Anyway – technology has shifted to the point where you can now buy a camera good enough to shoot a feature on, for less than it cost to hire one for a single day, ten years ago. So much of the film-industry infrastructure is built around the needs of 15 kg cameras, that cost 3k a day to hire and which eat thousands of yards of silver-nitrate for breakfast. All these assumptions and scaffolding etc.

You don’t need it. Not any more. You can get away with a Canon EOS 550 and a fairly punchy laptop.

A proper paradigm-shift… and by that, I mean a really, real proper one and not just an incremental innovation being hyped to make money… propagates through everything, changing everything… Like Amory Lovin‘s efficiency theories – when you make things efficient, entire subs-systems of hassle fall away.

In this instance (ironically), the paradigm-shift has actually come as a result of incremental innovation… the price of camera, and computing technology finally dropping to the point where a critical mass is hit, and people can wing-it on their own. And they do – all flying like moths (or spitballs) towards the silver screen.

So anyway, on that note… maybe I’ll get around to making bodg.it a bit more lucid tomorrow… but in the meantime, here’s a load of footage taken from a hexacopter

From DIY Drones

I really like the idea of this – but it kindof looks like it’s taken from a toy helicopter – which is breaking the 4th wall a bit. I don’t know what I feel about that – I don’t think I like it really. It’s one of the driving forces of entertainment technology – to make the 4th wall as invisible as possible. That’s the logical limit of emmersive entertainment…. 3D and such… this relentless drive to make you forget that it’s not real… and maybe, a difference so small that it makes no difference, isn’t a difference. It’s hard though – reality.

Fortunately, art comes to the rescue – exaggerated reality – which means you can go all arty like the camera-work and editing in U-Turn, and get away with really crashing continuity errors.

But anyway – um… from now on, all the filmy stuff will be thataway ->