The Daily Grind

Darn.

For years, I’ve idly wanted to name a production company ‘Media Offline.’ It’s a joke, see – when you’re editing on an Avid, and the blasted thing can’t find your clips, it flashes up a dour grey screen with block capitals reading ‘MEDIA OFFLINE.’ This can happen at any stage of the edit process, and it’s one of the reasons one watches through the final layback to the edit master. You want to know that the tape you send the broadcaster has your show on it, and not 30 minutes of ‘MEDIA OFFLINE’ card.

So I desperately wanted to use a facsimile of that Avid card as the production company’s credit caption at the end of a show. Anyone from the industry catching it out of a corner of their eye would immediately panic, wondering if it was their show which had screwed up. Fun times.

Sadly, it seems this dream will never be realised. Partly because any production company I might form is more likely to be doing web video than TV, and ‘media offline’ is a lousy name for an online media agency. But also because the domain is registered… by somebody apparently pulling the same gag.

Darn.

One of my indulgences at Christmas was to give all the adults in the family the best-packaged chocolate I’ve ever seen – from impossible-to-pronounce Kshocolat, based here in Glasgow.

It turns out the packaging was designed by Third Eye Design, also in Glasgow, and has won a ridiculous range of awards. If you stumble across it in Harvey Nicks or Liberty (or… er… Peckhams, which is where I found it), you’ll notice how dashing it is.

As for the chocolate itself: now, I’m a little snobby about chocolate. I like small amounts of the dark, smooth, and nutty stuff. For me, therefore, Kshocolat rocked. Sadly, I can’t report on the ‘white chocolate with lemon and pepper,’ since dad had that bar and he guarded it jealously. Perhaps he’ll leave some notes in the comments.

Anyway, I note all this because there’s a bit of a hoo-hah going on in the blogosphere about Tcho chocolate, currently ‘in beta’ (oh, for heaven’s sake…). They might have a Wired co-founder on their side, but I’d like to make it clear that for once, Glasgow got there first. M’kay?

It’s well worth watching Tufte’s video on the iPhone right to the end. I don’t agree with quite everything he says along the way, but his closing thoughts are gloriously subtle. Including:

“To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. … Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design.”

Lovely set of films from my chum Alom, of scientists showcasing their work: Labreporter.com.

One of my ambitions for SciCast this year is to intersperse films of this nature with ones from schools. Crossover films like this one are particularly interesting, too. My gut feeling is that the 2:30 duration is still the right way to go, but I need to refine a template format for undergrads and academics – and that means making a bunch of films myself.

One of the joys of How2 is that one started each item with a single question, and the job of the film was to answer it. Things went off the rails when films grew to include loads of other stuff – while it might have been interesting, if it didn’t contribute to answering the question, it shouldn’t have been there.

One idea per film.

That’s hard enough to hold professional film-makers to, let alone professional scientists holding a camera for the first time.

Alom’s films are delightful, but they’re also very professional. I want to find a happy medium, where the bar is set high enough that people have something to shoot for – but not so high they assume they’ll miss. Tricky.

is:

What sort of people do we want in the future?

This is how children’s media intersects with formal education. But the latter is bogged down in ‘What do we want people to know?’, while public service media has never had that constraint. So it’s been about style, and vision, and passion, and inspiration.

Right to the end, this question is what informed and guided children’s television. It was rarely vocalised, because it didn’t need to be. It was in the atmosphere, in the walls, in the blood of the departments and the people who made the programmes.

I’ve seen nothing in web media which reassures me that people are thinking on this sort of level.

That worries me.

Last week, I bought an iPod touch, with the intention of using it to test video formats for SciCast. I’m trying to produce ‘one download to rule them all’ – a file that will play on an iPod, but will also project up onto a classroom wall and still look pretty good, and can be converted to a DVD and work OK. Ambitious.

The touch is an amazing piece of kit. It’s an iPhone without the phone; you get the gorgeous touchscreen, the media player functions, and web browsing over WiFi (Mobile Safari rocks – quick enough, sharp text, works well). Unfortunately, in my testing I managed to produce files that looked great on the touch, but didn’t play on a chum’s video iPod. Apple’s specs say they’ll play the same formats, but… that’s not what we saw. Merde.

So I booked a ‘personal shopping’ hour at the local Apple Store, Buchanan Street in Glasgow, and left a note to the effect that I wanted to assemble a bunch of iPods and throw a range of files at them, because the published specs don’t seem right.

That’s what we did today. Credit where it’s due, the Glasgow store staff were terrific. Informed, interested, patient – an absolutely first-class experience that fell somewhere between ‘personal shopping,’ technical support, and web media business consultancy.

It’s hard for me to do justice to them, actually. They were great, to the point where I’ve ended up keeping the Touch and not even minding that I’ll be shelling out another £12 for the latest software for it. It was, I think, the best ‘shop’ experience I’ve had since the days of family-run bicycle shops, which of course have all gone bust now. They’ve saved me a day of farting around, basically.

Remind me – Apple kit is expensive because… ?

(For the geekily interested, the bottom line is:

• Apple’s published specs for iPod video support are wildly conservative. The current models will handle bitrates far beyond the quoted limit.
• The exception is the older 5G iPod, which won’t play some files that appear within spec.
• The Classic and Nano allegedly share a hardware platform, including video decoder chip. The touch and iPhone are different again, however – though I’ve yet to see a difference in practice.
• I’m now working with tech support for my chosen video compressor, trying to resolve a couple of issues I’m seeing with it. )

1. Tax Demand.
2. Server Outage.
3. Backup Failure.
4. Reached End of Moleskine Notebook.
5. Dirty Lenscloth.
6. Smacked Self in Face With Juggling Club.
7. Royal Mail Special Delivery Failure.
8. Accidental Television Series Commission.
9. Surplus-to-Requirements iPod.
10. Returning Home to Find Burglary in Progress.
    (For the avoidance of doubt: one of these is hypothetical, and another turned out to be somebody else’s. The rest happened, mostly but not necessarily recently.)

Why is Masterchef over-exposed? It looks like it’s been shot on a Z1 and graded with no awareness that the food’s all on white plates. We can’t see any of it. Crazy.

When I see things like this set-up (AJA Io HD, Sonnet Fusion F2 SATA array), and Sony’s new Z7 camera, I start to fret about how easy I’d find it to drop a year’s pay on gear right now.

Bother.

My chum Vinay points me towards this article, which scores a selection of science fiction stories against the prototypical hero’s journey.

Personally, I think the genuinely informative parts of that post are the first few comments. It’s more that the Hero’s Journey is an abstraction of a satisfying story structure, vis: there’s a protagonist who advances the story and serves as our proxy; shit happens to him, by definition; some form of conflict occurs; conflict is resolved, leaving the world in a different state.

I’m slowly wading my way through Christopher Booker’s “Seven Basic Plots”, which is terrific. There’s a lovely section where, in two pages, he compares Gilgamesh – the oldest known story, we have a written version from something insane like 5,000 years ago – and Dr. No. Basically the same story. Genius.

What I think is interesting isn’t that many sf stories are basically similar, but that:

1. There are so few fundamental narratives.
2. None of these appear to be ‘new’ – ie. enabled by technological advance.
3. Despite these limits and repetition, we still find stories satisfying.

I think one is gently pushed towards a position where stories are less about individual expression and creativity, and more about discerning how one relates to the world, and judging oneself against others.