Category: Uncategorized

The wallpaper and paint are done

Just the carpet, fitting out the wardrobes, and details to go.

Is the paisley:

…mad, or inspired?

Don’t ask me, I haven’t seen it yet.

A Vulcan flies again! My mum rang to tell me yesterday, excitedly, that she’d been watching this live on News 24. The ‘We Love Vulcans’ sticker in our Austin Maestro had, we always claimed, been hers. (There’s a much better takeoff video than the BBC’s here, which captures the authentic Vulcan howl.)

There’s always been something a bit special about the Vulcan. Concorde, the other great delta, was svelte and lean and pretty; the Vulcan was squat and dense and functional. Not to mention loud. But there was something about it, something just a little unexpected. Almost alien.

It was designed to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union, but while the Cold War was hardly a happy period of history, there’s nevertheless a hopeful aspect about the Vulcan’s design. It first flew in 1952, yet somehow epitomised Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ vision of a decade later, despite the occasionally baroque testing procedures – see link on this entry.

The Victor was hardly less inspiring – similarly compact, with its weird crescent-curved wings, Küchemann carrots, spaceship nose, and ‘are you sure they got the scale factor right?’ area ruling.

The British public had seen these sorts of designs a few years earlier. In Dan Dare comics. Somewhere deep inside I still believe they hail not from more than fifty years ago, but from the near future.

Welcome back, Vulcan. I’ve missed you.

Announced at NAB this week: the Panasonic HMC150. This might, I think, be the camera which does for AVCHD encoding and flash card recording what the legendary Sony PD150 did for DV and miniDV tape. That is: get enough things right to make it a genuinely viable workflow.

The PD150 was the first camera that was small, light, and simple enough for production muppets like myself to use, that still produced more-or-less broadcastable pictures, and that hooked up to proper microphones. Sony sold bucketloads of them; I have one, and it still rocks.

HDV, in comparison, has always felt like a bit of a kludge. DV compression was already pretty nasty, and extending it to high-def produces some fairly grim failure cases. The cameras vary and some are rather good, but while tape workflows are fine for broadcast post-production and archiving, they’re clunky and restricting for fast turn-around web video. Specifically, capturing in real time starts to feel archaic when you’re standing in a lab with a class full of teenagers.

Over in the domestic world, meanwhile, there’s a revolution going on, with more and more cameras recording to flash cards. Convenient, efficient, but… ‘consumer.’ Eu.

The HMC150 (surely the ‘150’ is no accident?) looks like a proper ‘pro’ flash media camera: proper audio inputs, likely to have decent low-light performance, wide-angle lens, zoom ring with bobble thing on it.

AVCHD is still a pain to work with, but nevertheless… this could be it, folks. This could be it.

Question is: do I buy a Canon A1 in the near future, or tough it out until the autumn and jump to the Panasonic? Tricky…

Flossie is a girl of simple tastes. She doesn’t do fluff, nor fluster, nor faff. She likes ‘simple.’ Not ‘elegant,’ nor ‘minimalist,’ nor ‘ascetic’: ‘simple.’

This should not be mistaken for lack of sophistication, however. That’s going on too, but her fondness for the straightforward is more practical: fussy stuff merely distracts her from whatever is the focus of her attention. Hence, it is not favoured.

You may, therefore, expect her house to be a pristine haven of spaciousness. Not so. Current decorating efforts notwithstanding, it’s a modestly randomised heap of stuff. Not ‘clutter’ per se, since she’s not much of a hoarder; simply that organising and sorting and stacking and filing and filtering are activities which, in Flossie’s world, border on the faffy. Why expend such efforts, when any object can be found at a moment’s notice, just so long as it’s not moved since it was placed… there?

In the kitchen, Flossie is a cook, not a chef. No florid three-line descriptions in mangled French for her. What few recipe books there may be are treated as suggestions, as starting points, as inspirations – most certainly not as methodical reference or dictate.

It is with some pleasure, therefore, that I have managed to sully and complicate this world of simplicity.

With coffee.

Coffee, in Flossie’s life, should be black, fairly strong, and sweetened just a little. To simplify: it should taste like coffee. Coffee purchases are therefore packets of grounds; fairtradey; otherwise nondescript. There’s no particular preference, nor brand loyalty. Until now.

Behold, then, Illy. It comes in cans, glistening silver things which open, initially, with a hiss of pressurised nitrogen. It demands forced filtration, in a machine of some description. The result is rich, smooth, aromatic, and … coffee.

Now, Flossie may attempt to maintain that there is no conflict here. Perhaps, she will argue, Illy coffee is the canonical coffee, the paradigm of all coffees. Ur-coffee. Hence, it is about as simple as coffee can get.

But no, we know the truth. Illy coffee is not merely simple coffee, it is indulgently simple coffee.

Such indulgence should not, perhaps, be encouraged, but with Flossie I think I may be safe. Further, it makes me happy to see her put herself first, for a change. ‘Simple’ is all well and good, but it doesn’t relax, it doesn’t comfort, it doesn’t cosset. Flossie deserves those things, and if she finds them in coffee, then so be it.

Although…

There was the mildly extravagant vintage Laurent Perrier at Christmas. She liked that, too.

Oh shit. What have I done?

In years to come, we’ll recognise the disjointed, unedited style of email pecked out on an iPhone as a distinct literary style.

I’ve been in Cardiff all week, mostly editing. To keep you happy in the meantime, see this. Gosh.

For the record, I think Flickr’s imposition of a 90-second limit on video is inspired. It doesn’t necessarily help what I’m trying to do, but somebody has to take a stand against the proliferation of turgidly long films. Flickr realising that, as a still photography site, they have the perfect excuse, and then making it a hard rule – bold and brave. Bravo!

Likes: Creative Commons video hosting. Oh yeah.

Dislikes: No downloads?

Handy little post over at FontShop on the different types of figures available (oldstyle and lining, proportional and tabular), and when each is appropriate to use.

(via Chairman Gruber)

I missed this guest post on TechCrunch last year, about how to get your videos to climb the YouTube charts. It’s worth reading, in part because it’s rather depressing, though do see the follow-up.

Still too much for you? Here’s a viral video!

Ouch.

Things to remember, though:

• YouTube isn’t the only video site that’s important. It’s merely the most visible one. It’s a very broad, unfocussed audience. Is that what your video needs?
• 100,000 views is, in the UK, minority cable/satellite channel territory. The rule of thumb for BBC2 evenings used to be that one million viewers was a bit low, two million meant a recommission. 100,000 views globally is trivially small. Hence:
• What matters isn’t volume, it’s proportion. What proportion of your target audience sees your video?

It’s entirely valid for your video to have a target audience of one. If that person sees your film, and they react the way you’d hoped, then the other 99,999 viewers are either bonus or irrelevance.

We’ve known for a while that there are people in central government who are Mighty Clever. No, really – stop sniggering at the back. After all, somebody signed off on this, not to mention this.

But now: @downingstreet on Twitter? Probably easiest to follow via the relevant Quotably page.

This may not be the sort of thing that will scale to 60 million people, but still – good on them for trying.

[Update:

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