Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
It’s easy to be cynical about other peoples’ work, especially when it’s from those notably treacherous TV types. But still, what do we think of this: the Brainiac bunch dropping alkali metals into water, including Rubidium and Caesium?
OK, it’s a heap of fun. But my guess? Fake. It doesn’t ‘feel’ right.
…or am I just snarky because it’s not my show?
See, I read this headline and immediately thought, “They’re doing live link-ups with the Comedy Store? Cool!” Sadly, the truth is a whole lot less amusing.
Giles Turnbull may not, in fact, be suggesting what I’m about to attribute to him, but I’m wearing a Helm of Immense Lummoxness +3 so I’m going to pretend he is.
Go and read this post, then Giles’ comments about a ‘British Boing Boing,’ then come back here.
Now, I know that ‘British Boing Boing’ is a rubbish phrase. But, tell me, honestly – aren’t you a little sick of Boing Boing? Yeah, me too. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why, but I’ve noticed it’s dropping down my feeds list in NetNewsWire.
But anyway, forget all that. I’m going to pretend that Giles is suggesting we start this. Yes, really.
So… him, me: who else? Gia? Dave, are you still ranting about blogs being pointless, or have you come to accept that they’re only as pointless as everything else in life, and therefore worth doing anyway? Gia, would you like to invite Tom R? Damien, want to resurrect the spirit (and possibly domain name) of ItLikesYou?
No, I haven’t thought this through. Sometimes that’s the best way.
(oh, and… post 1000, baby. Technically it’s serialed a little higher, but the excess must have been unpublished drafts. Woohoo! One thousand posts! Where’s the cake?)
If you’re going to post a video of an ant wandering around inside your monitor, do what Matt Thomas does here: post it with a choice of music that makes me laugh. Some of the comments are worth reading, too.
Meanwhile, I’m off to mid-Wales for the weekend. There’s going to be rain hurtling down out of the sky, I’m camping halfway up a hill somewhere, and I really, really don’t care. I so need a couple of days off. Oh, and if anyone happens to be in the Sheffield Apple Store on Monday morning, say hi as my Dad buys a Mac mini. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Ya got me. I was Googling myself again. Yeah, well, we all do it – why pretend?
Anyway, I have absolutely zero recollection of doing this interview. Which quite likely means that I didn’t. Weird, but it would explain the rather blatant lack of factual accuracy. Around that time I did talk to a chap from some Scottish newspaper or other, but AAAS Science Careers? Not that I know of.
Odd odd odd. Not bad, just odd. And maybe, just maybe, I did do an interview with ‘Hilary Marshall.’ Who can tell?
I may as well explain why I’m being so curmudgeonly about TV this week. Last Friday, Scottish Television officially closed their studio in Glasgow; in two months’ time they move to a new building on the South side of the river here, leaving their Cowcaddens site after 49 years. I’ve worked in that studio for almost ten years, and it carries lots of memories – some happier than others. The tragic part is that it’s not being replaced – STV will, as of August, be a broadcaster without their own studio space. Since much of my work has been unfashionably studio-based, I find this rather depressing.
But the party… the party was weird. For starters, I wasn’t invited. Only current staff were, and since there’s recently been a huge bunch of layoffs, most of the people who made significant contributions over the years were… er… not on the guest list. However, as it happened I was working in the building on Friday, so I managed to sneak in. It may have helped that I’ve known Dixon the security chief for a decade.
Getting inside was merely the start of my troubled mindset, however. The attendees split rather too neatly into two groups – the old hands who I know, have worked with, and have deep respect for; and the youngsters, who to all appearances had never been in a studio before. I’m all for fresh blood in the industry, but… who are these people, what do they do, and how can they not know what a studio represents? It’s the heart of the company, the essence of television, the… see, I’m officially one of the ‘old fogies.’ Right there, I’ve joined them.
At one point I found myself surrounded by a plethora of the bright young flittering things, which I’ve noticed tends to happen once they get wind that one’s a Producer. It’s a sort of inverse pulling contest, as the lovely girls (mostly female, the Bright Young Things) vie for the attention of what might be the source of their next job. Poor deluded fools. Anyway, once it transpired that this bunch of newcomers had only been in the studio for staff meetings, I found myself pointing upwards.
“That,” I proclaimed loudly, proudly, and possibly a little drunkenly, “Is a lighting grid. It’s a magnificent toy, one of the finest pieces of equipment you’ll ever get the chance to play with. It can make your sets and shots come alive. And you’ll probably never anything like it again.” Sad, really.
The best/worst part of the night, however, was the clipsreel, shown on a not-especially-large projection screen. Notably, it had been made by the news crew and hence was linked from their piddly little studio and not, er, the main one. A few old archive clips, the odd modestly-amusing story from a staffer, some admittedly rather good mugging from the news team. But since most of the old hands have been laid off, there really wasn’t much history. The tradition, the ambience, the… well, for me, the magic of TV, it just wasn’t there. I’m sorry, but I love this business, I take entertaining people and making them laugh extremely seriously, and I still feel slightly giddy and deeply privileged that I make programmes watched by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. Deep down most of us feel that way, but that sense of occasion, of Speaking To The Nation, was entirely lacking. Tragic, tragic, tragic.
There’s worse, too, for the whole clipsreel was shown with lipsync way off. The dubbing boys and I reckoned it was three frames out, all the way through. And then there were the dropouts – it looked like a dodgy digitize onto DVD, with block errors, but could have been a tape dropout or even dirty heads.
Mark this carefully – this was a national broadcaster, the absolute definition of professionalism, in their own studio. From the room up the stairs you can flip a switch and go out live to the whole UK. In that space, that group of people, showcasing the best of their talent and output over the last 50 years… cocked up.
I’ve a sneaking suspicion that even when I started, that would have been a sackable offence. As it was, we fogies merely stood and looked on, slack-jawed. Then we turned away and muttered into our beers.
The BBC Creative Desktop. Anyone want to clue me in? It’s extremely hard to get a handle on what they’re up to. I would add ‘because I’m not within the BBC,’ but I suspect much the same is true internally, too. But so far as I can tell, it goes like this:
There’s supposedly some sort of standard desktop system that’s going to be rolled out into production offices, but I know even less about that. I’m guessing it’s some ruddy awful Outlook-based scheduling system, stuff that ties into SAP or whatever for budgetry wibbling, and ScreenWriter – or whatever it’s called – the BBC’s Word-based script diddling system (Windows-only, which is why I’ve never used it).
The only other thing I know is that the new Glasgow facility will be entirely open-plan and hot-desking for production staff. There’s a lot of fretting about this within the Beeb, but a large part of me wants to say ‘grow up.’ I’ve always been freelance, so I’ve always ‘hot-desked,’ and yes, it ruddy sucks. See how you like it for a change.
However, I’d love to see what happens when they first try a children’s make & do show in an open-plan office. We attempted that once with How2, and the Politics department across the gangway moved. Boy, are they in for a shock.
Anyway – anyone know any more about how this brave new world of production is supposed to work?
Peter Serafinowicz was one of the chaps behind Look Around You, a pastiche of 70s science education shows that was (a.) brilliant, (b.) skewered some of the stuff I still do, ouch, and (c.) oddly managed to overstay its welcome anyway. He’s also the voice of Darth Maul, apparently, which I didn’t know until today. Anyway, he’s been making funny shorts and shoving them up on YouTube.
I think – hope? – there’s going to be an interesting culture shift in TV development soon. See, current TV models are predicated on the assumption that making TV is expensive. Which is still true – mostly, it’s £100,000/hour and up. One practical upshot of this is that the single most difficult thing to do from within most TV companies – the thing that requires one to jump through the most hoops, file the most paperwork, and generally prat around for days and weeks – is getting stuff on tape.
Which is, of course, crazy. Oh, sure, those processes made sense back when cameras cost £50k (without a lens), when a minimum crew was three people, and when editing was something that required another £100k’s-worth of kit. But that was – woah! – eight years ago. Today, if you have a half-decent idea you might as well just grab a couple of Z1s, busk the piece, fix the bits that don’t work, and lash it all together in Final Cut on any nearby laptop. The result won’t be properly broadcast-quality, but there are enough of us who are good enough at the different stages that it’ll be at least presentable. Heck, we made all of Scrap It! that way, and it pretty much worked out.
There’s another stage missing, another assumption. Since shooting stuff is expensive, pilots are funded – and hence owned – by the broadcaster. So pilot tapes are only ever seen by very, very small audiences. But if pilots cost basically nothing to produce, where’s the advantage in that? Just make the thing, already.
I’m waiting to see which production company is going to be first to say ‘sod it,’ and start video blogging their taster tapes. While everyone else is focussed on trying to make money from the net, by selling tens of thousand of copies for pence each, you’ll be building an audience for a show before you’ve even sold it.
Picture the scene:
‘I’m not interested,’ says the commissioner.
‘We’ve had twelve thousand views on YouTube,’ you counter.
(Oh, and if anyone reading this happens to be interested – yes, I can help you do this).
Recent Apple PowerBooks and MacBooks feature a ‘sudden motion sensor,’ that’s designed to detect when the laptop is in freefall and park the hard drive heads. It turns out that the thing is a pretty nifty accelerometer, and there are several unexpected uses for it. One is the Carpenter’s Level dashboard widget, which… er… turns your extremely expensive laptop into a duff spirit level. Huh.
Another use is MacSaber, which plays lightsabre sounds as you swing your MacBook around (video here).
Unexpectedly, there may be a practical use for all this nonsense: desktop switching. Huh? SmackBook Pro, a patch for a Mac multiple desktop manager doohickie, allows you to switch views by… er… slapping the side of your laptop. Watch the video and tell me that doesn’t look cool.
Apologies to hostees – you may be experiencing email troubles, either for sending or receiving, or even both. My own inbound mail was down yesterday; today it’s back up, but outgoing mail is borked.
Dreamhost assure me they’re fixing the problem. Honest.