Month: September 2008

I’ve been watching 30 Rock recently. Late to the party, I know, but what’s new?

It was a slow start for me – I probably wouldn’t have stuck with it past the first few episodes had they not been only 20 minutes long (my heavens, does American TV really have that many adverts in a half-hour show? Crumbs). But I’m glad I did give it the benefit of the doubt, since once it loosens up a little it’s a terrific show.

There’s nothing particularly innovative about it: dysfunctional, mildly neurotic, ‘kooky’ young professional woman struggles to maintain sanity/control/dignity in her all-consuming job while contriving narrowly to miss the American dream despite seemingly ‘having it all’ in New York. Gee, where have I heard that one before?

However, Tina Fey is, I now understand, something of a genius. Her performance is smart – it’s tempting to write ‘sassy,’ but that’s curiously old-fashioned, right? – and her character stops just short of ‘cutesy,’ somewhere around the ‘adorable’ mark. The supporting cast is a mixed bag, but Alec Baldwin is wholly brilliant, and Fey cannily cedes the comic initiative to him whenever they share the screen. One gains the impression that she enjoys writing his character even more than she does her own, and her delight at his performance is palpable.

But there are two things that really set the show apart from the crowded middle ground of comedy. Actually, one thing, come to think: the show has a very clear idea of its own limitations. It’s not trying to be anything other than straightforward entertainment; it never forgets that it has to make you laugh.

So, the Tracy Jordan character is problematic. It’s a very broad stereotype, played equally broadly. But every time I think I’m about to throw something at the screen, some twist or nuance to the character is revealed that dissipates the tension. It’s brilliantly-judged.

Similarly, the show manages never to take itself too seriously. This was, of course, the problem with Aaron Sorkin’s superficially-similar Studio 60, which somehow got itself portrayed as comedy despite being fairly straight drama, and then disappeared up its own redraft in a horrid molasses of self-referential fermentation. I rather it enjoyed it, but then I work(ed) in TV.

In contrast, the worst judgement involved in 30 Rock is the title. Once the characters, setting, and dynamic are introduced, the show settles into a pleasingly genial attitude of mucking about with the format. One suspects the following exchange occurs frequently:

“You can’t do that! It breaks the rules.”
“It’s only a TV show. As long as it’s funny, who cares?”
“Oh yeah.”

For example: it’s become gratingly commonplace for shows like this to break the fourth wall – that is, for characters to turn to camera and address the audience directly. At times this can work rather well (Hustle), but usually it’s plain irritating (also Hustle). 30 Rock does it sparingly, and on at least one occasion I was willing them to do it, and was still surprised when they did.

That sort of willing conceit, where the audience is almost literally cheering the show on, waiting for the line or pay-off we know is coming, is desperately hard to pull off in practice. By the end of the first series, for me, 30 Rock is doing it in almost every episode.

Aware that they have the audience exactly where they should be – rooting for the show – gives the writers leeway to arse about. And they do. Gloriously. Gags, set-ups, locations, and even music sequences that ought to be appallingly indulgent are instead pulled off with such bravado that we’re left gasping for more. There aren’t many examples of productions with such a clear sense of joy, perhaps outside children’s TV.

We worked desperately hard with The Big Bang to buy ourselves the latitude with the viewer to do basically anything: we were cheeky, broke our own rules, played with the format. It was a joy, and the flexibility we granted ourselves was why I loved the show. But in practice it was a tremendously difficult thing to do, because that sort of flexibility requires that the audience indulge the show, and that sort of respect has to be earned. With The Big Bang we only really got it right after nine series.

30 Rock is there before the end of one. Terrific writing, exemplary attention to detail, and ruthless production discipline: it’s a brilliant example of television craft. I love it.

That was a bit gushing, wasn’t it?

If you’ve been trying to reach me by phone in the last few days, and your switchboard blocks your caller ID number, it might help if I made you aware that:

1. My phone cuts off when I try to receive such calls. I don’t know why. Also:
2. It won’t connect to my voicemail either.

Yes, you’d be right to think that this is broken and ridiculous. Surprisingly, people wonder why I’m not entirely happy with my N95.

Anyway: email me as jonathan[ at ]quernstone.com.

Though… I’m going away for a few days. But at least I will receive your message eventually.

A year behind Adobe, Microsoft are rolling over and have announced they’ll support H.264 video in Silverlight.

That’s now a clean sweep for the format – if Microsoft handle file formats in a sane way (and that’s a big ‘if’), we should be able to encode once and embed as Flash, Silverlight or Quicktime, stream through these or (gaak) Realplayer, and download via iTunes to iPods, Playstation Portable, and other portable devices. Another compression pass at higher bitrate gets you Blu-Ray.

Game over. Finally, we have one video codec for everything. Astonishingly, it’s a good one, too.

Now that the delivery part of the process is sorted, and AVCHD is happening for acquisition, attention is rather drawn to the edit suite. Come on, Apple, let’s have Final Cut Studio 3 with a workflow like that for HDV: edit raw but render, when necessary, to ProRes.

[Edit: There’s a catch, of course. At the moment, standard H.264 formats aren’t supported in Windows Media Player. So Windows users viewing a film in Silverlight in their browsers would need Quicktime or VLC or whatever to view the same file downloaded. I’m going to assume Microsoft will plug this ridiculous hole at some point in the near future.]

You know, I’d be sorry to see the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley go under. Not because I have any particular vested interest in them – though I do hope a chum of mine who works at the latter is weathering this particular storm – but rather for their names.

See, ‘Goldman Sachs’, ‘Morgan Stanley’, ‘Lehman Brothers,’ ‘Merrill Lynch’ – these are names from a previous era. In my book, large companies should be named after small groups of people, who built the business out of a cowshed with their own hands, slaving late into the night with only a kerosene lamp and a dream.

Engineering companies used to be like this: Hawker Siddeley. Armstrong Whitworth. Vickers Supermarine (though I’m not sure who Mr. Supermarine was, it’s a cool name). The decline of interest in engineering careers can, I posit, be traced to the amalgamation of these proud institutions into the likes of the antiseptic ‘British Aircraft Corporation.’ Even ‘English Electric’ was better, barely.

If all financial institutions end up with names like ‘HBOS’ or, worse, ‘Lloyds TSB HBOS.’ it’ll be the end of Britain as a financial centre. The kids will simply lose interest. You mark my words.

• Burning dual-layer DVDs
• Printing, cropping, folding, and stuffing DVD slip cases
• Labeling DVDs
• Encoding MPEG2 from HDV/ProRes source material
• Encoding WMV9 from ProRes for DVD-ROM delivery
• Doing all of these at once

yawn

RED’s forthcoming Scarlet mini marvel is shaking up the video world somewhat. A 3k HD camera for circa. $3,000? Blimey. Two problems, and two reasons I’m not planning to wait for it:

1. That $3k figure is for a pretty basic camcorder. By the time you add monitoring, storage, and some grips it’ll likely be comparable in price to more conventional camcorders.
2. Post-production workflow. Ouch.

RED is doing amazing stuff, and it gives us a glimpse of what the future holds. But their cameras are designed for film production, and film production models.

I’m a television and video guy. In my world, colour grading is a luxury, not routine; audio post-sync is something we resent because it costs us extra; we don’t faff about with ‘dailies,’ we shoot, log (if we’re lucky), and cut. We use slates or claps to sync multiple cameras when we don’t have genlock. Audio is onboard.

So my camera dilemma at the moment is between hiring Sony Z1s and Z7s, buying a Panasonic HMC151, and waiting until the end of the year for a Sony Z5. This choice, it turns out, is about post-production workflow:

• Z1 & Z7 capture HDV to tape. I don’t actually have an HDV playback deck, so I’d probably end up having to buy a Canon HV30 anyway.
• HMC151 records AVCHD to SD cards, which means transcoding to Apple Intermediate or ProRes on import. I’ve been cutting HDV in ProRes, of late, and it rocks… but how slow are transcodes from 24Mbit AVCHD? Until the camera appears, we don’t know.
• Z5 records to HDV and – with an adaptor – simultaneously to Compact Flash (as does the Z7). This could be the best of both worlds… or the last gasp of MPEG2. How well does Final Cut handle .m2t files? (hint)

It’s all well and good gushing over a Scarlet, but handling any form of HD – even HDV – is non-trivial. And until you’ve got a reliable post-production workflow, you’ve got nothing.

This is true even of domestic gear, where you can shoot onto miniDVD-R only to find you have a slot-loading drive, or HDV to find you’ve no Firewire, or MPEG2 .mod only to find that Windows Movie Maker can’t handle it.

Don’t be seduced by glamorous bits of kit: the connections are just as important.

Another month, another minor bugfix update to OS X. I particularly like this line from the release notes for this one:

Addresses an issue in which some Macs could unexpectedly power on at the same time each day.

Woah. Last person working in the Mac lab late one night? That could seriously freak you out.

A rather fetching young lady – who shall remain nameless – just apologised in email for kissing me the other night.

News to me.

You’d think I’d notice something like that, wouldn’t you?

[edit: turns out she apologised to the wrong person. Having kissed someone else first, who was also the wrong person. Sounds like it wasn’t her best night ever…]

Outstanding article at Ars about 17 year-old Bridger Maxwell and the multitouch display screen he developed for his MacBook. Great stuff.

One of the things that amused me was mention of Space Camp Utah, the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Centre, which uses custom simulators to give kids experience of group-working while commanding a spaceship. The settings and scenarios are taken from Star Trek, mostly, so it’s live-action role-play gaming, but in a space science context.

I’d completely forgotten, until reading this, that one of my more ridiculous TV series ideas was to build a full-size spaceship onto a bus chassis, so it could be driven around a huge aircraft hangar. Situated around the hangar would be modular planet or space station sets, at which the ship could ‘dock’ or ‘land.’

In each show of the series we’d recruit and train a new crew, and set them off on a mission. From that point on we’re into live role-play gaming – along with the director we’d have had an off-screen game-master keeping the pressure on, and a team of actors sitting around waiting for the ship to arrive at their location.

The whole thing would, of course, be insanely expensive to do well, and tragically awful to do badly. But on the face of it, it could be awesome. Most kids’ game shows involve purely physical challenges – there have been occasional quizzes and the like, but not since The Adventure Game and Now Get Out Of That has there been a properly puzzle-based show. Which struck me at the time – and still strikes me now – as a significant failing.

Time Commanders was the closest we’ve come in recent years, and it always surprised me that it never felt quite ‘right’ somehow. Of course, none of these were exactly ‘children’s’ shows, but then it’s not clear that my space mission project should have been, either.

Anyway, the ‘willing conceit’ involved in my format was… er… large, and that proved something of a stumbling block. Everyone at CITV thought I was nuts, and CBBC’s commissioner thinks kids aren’t interested in space (seriously, she does). Since the idea was kicking around at the same time that Time Commanders wasn’t quite setting the world on fire, and it would have been more expensive, it’s not hard to see why my format was going nowhere at warp factor nothing.

In education, the closest I’d heard to the concept before today was an earth observation scenario run by – I thought – either the Starchaser folks or the British National Space Centre, but I’m stuffed if I can track it down this morning.

What’s really odd is the coincidence that yesterday I was talking to a development researcher at Tigress about another project I desperately wanted to do, that never really stood a chance. Again, it was clearly too complex to make happen.

Depends how big your ambition is, though, doesn’t it?