You're not imagining it: we updated our website with some new art on the 1AU home page. Cool projects are bubbling in the lab and a refreshed home page is the happy byproduct of all that creative fermentation. ("Maybe we'll cut a record, take the band on tour...!")
Cut a record…ha!
Kids these days...
See you on Monday.
--MS
There's always a storm ahead. The question is when. Then the next question is, "What are you going to do when it comes?"
History rarely celebrates The Couch Potato. Crowds never gather to cheer the timid, the sedentary, the boring. Sing it, Virgil: "Audaces Fortuna iuvat."
But you know what? A day or two after a natural calamity, everyone's wishing for a little prosaic ordinariness.
The mid-Atlantic states got clobbered by a colossal storm on summer night in 2014, knocking out power, felling massive trees, ripping power lines from their poles like spider webs ripped from backyard porch railings. It came on a Friday and by Sunday morning more than 1 million people were still without power. Substantial water restrictions were imposed due to a suddenly darkened water pumping station in the region. And may I add parenthetically, that this all sent a particular pang of fear into my heart, because triple digit temperatures dangerously threatened to desiccate my thriving tomato crop. But perhaps I shouldn't jest about such widespread woe.
Widening the metaphorical lens, I can't help but be aware of the tragic fires this year in Colorado. Homes and lives have suffered terribly, and major portions of vital national wilderness have turned to ash.
Pulling back even further, it's inevitable that perditions elsewhere in the global village should immediately come into focus. Debt crisis, Syrian upheaval, African strife, environmental decay, abrasion of the American social fabric: trapped in an art gallery a hungry person hardly notices the paintings all around.
Of the many lessons a life in the arts teaches, the two most essential are fortitude and perseverance. No kidding: "the show must go on" means so much more than simply a rallying call for nervous high school students at the spring play. But the real world often requires us to drop philosophy for practicality. Philosophy informs how we will act; that's why it's essential to develop deep philosophical skills early on. The actions we make in life are choices shaped by a life of philosophical training--good choices if we've trained ourselves well, not so good choices if we've missed the forest for the lumber mill. Surrounded locally by a calamity that merely hints microcosmically at the substantially larger challenges elsewhere around the world, I'm aware of the discontinuity between philosophy and practicality.
In the past few days, we've been working hard to develop a number of new, substantial projects. New treatment pages and reference art are starting to add up, starting to gather exciting critical mass. We're aiming high, looking far, and running the engines at high revs. Nobody cheers for the complacent, and these days we've been pretty busy.
Then the storm hit.
As I turn in my chair to look out the window, it's a lovely morning, now two days after a gusty wind and rain have stopped. The air is almost still, the sunlight golden yellow, the few singing winter birds giving no indication of the rough night they weathered just recently. But the storm also forced momentum to come to a crashing halt on those new projects, as practical realities and the emotions and energy necessary to propel them got siphoned elsewhere.
That perseverance thing, that thing about the show going on? It's not about dumb, donkey-headed stubbornness. It's about taking the day in stride, come what may, no matter what winds or rain may lash fragile flesh. It's about a sense of humor, grim sometimes, but a sense of humor fundamentally. It's also about a determination to be undaunted, even as the unexpected knocks you for a loop. Because the unexpected is always gonna knock you for a loop.
Of course, you can't think these things when you're wondering where your family is going to sleep now that your home is a pile of rubble, or your nation in tatters from political unrest. But later, later, later… long after the smoke has cleared and democratic elections held, and people you love are together again telling stories, the artists of the world will have led the way in making sense of events that really had little to do with ordinary reason and rhyme. Acts of creation matter most when the world runs down. The perseverance inherent in those who have something to say puts a frame around the otherwise Brownian chaos of unpredictability. By framing the world, we make sense of the world. By making sense of the world, we find our fortune.
In case you're wondering, by the way, we're back to being full speed ahead getting those new projects off the ground. Stay tuned. Go farther.
@michaelstarobin
facebook.com/1auglobalmedia
PS -- To our regular readers, please take 20 seconds (or thereabouts) and retweet, cross post, or otherwise pass the link for this blog--and its 1AU Global Media home--onto your own readers and friends! Call it karma, call it kismet: we'll just call it cool! Cool?
Live performance is the ultimate Turing test. What happens on stage is what happens for the audience. There are no re-dos, no edits, no clean-it-up-in-post. Live lives.
But "live" doesn't just happen. In broad terms, a good live performer describes someone with an acute sensitivity to the world around him or herself. More specifically, a compelling live performer is somebody who knows how to rehearse.
Deeper still, rehearsal is not enough. It's possible to be well rehearsed and yet to have rehearsed poorly. Ultimately this is where skilled direction and production come to bear. Message, motivation, mechanics: you've got to have the tools to make a live event come alive for an audience.
A few days ago I went to the opening night performance for Diana Krall's 2012 world tour. Playing at Meyerhoff Hall in Baltimore with her stunning quartet, she made it look easy. Chatting with the audience, turning casually on the piano bench to regard her fellow musicians, clearly enjoying the night, the music radiated out across the packed hall into the summer air. There's nothing like a live event.
But even though she commented several times how she wasn't sure what they might play next, and even though the group clearly left room for improvisation and on-the-fly set changes, nothing was left to chance. To say they were well rehearsed is to understate the obvious. But what they really expressed were lifetimes of craftsmanship, and deeply felt affinities for playing music.
Simple statement: I like music. But here's the question, at least for regular readers of this blog: what's the direct relevance to what we do at 1AU Global Media?
As a production facility specializing in real world images and CGI and carefully crafted storytelling, one may think the more specifically human aspects of live performance might not resonate as intensely for for us. Not true. We pride ourselves in extensive live performance backgrounds. Superb production in a traditional sense should appear effortless. That's why Krall's performance sounded so good. To the audience, it just sounded like they were playing. Playing: that is, the act of having fun. Serious things done well can still invest audiences in a sense of fun, particularly if you broaden your acceptance of the word to mean enjoyable satisfaction in what you're doing. At 1AU, we care intensely about making it look easy, even as the craft of doing so requires lifetimes of practice. More to the point, doing a job well, especially a creative one, is precisely what defines fun.
Our clients know they can turn to us for highly sophisticated media. But if you're new to 1AU, consider us next time you're planning a live demonstration, or your executive staff needs to make a public statement, or speak on camera. Preparation for a live event divides the merely enthusiastic from the pros. Sometimes the line is wide; sometimes it's narrow. But there's always a line. Cross over… and go farther.
-MS
PS -- To our regular readers, please take 20 seconds (or thereabouts) and retweet, cross post, or otherwise pass the link for this blog and it's home at 1AU onto your readers and friends! Call it karma, call it kismet: we'll just call it cool! Cool?
There's something else about music that begs consideration. Two weeks ago I decried the ubiquity of ordinary music. Today I'm celebrating the plethoric diversity of great music from all corners.
Part of this bounty comes from a strange economic phenomenon: when supply becomes so available that financial value plunges to irrelevancy, aesthetics and beauty become the coin of the realm. When work doesn't bring in revenue, pleasure in simply making it becomes the ultimate reward.
It's like that in all things. Why do poets endure? Painters rarely stain a canvas these days to put food on the table. Acts of creation explain themselves. Creation denies entropy. Creation imposes meaning and structure on forces working mightily to spin apart. Do we ever need excuses to embrace our lovers?
But what of music specifically? There's no way to hold it in your hand. The moment it's brought into being, it's gone. We all recall songs and tune snippets, but recollection is not the same as permanence and presence. Recordings preserve music, but in an essential, existential sense, music flees like time.
Music is the epitomized aesthetic of emotion. Its ability to organize and synchronize other senses affects us all, even if we hardly realize it. The ubiquity of music, from commercial jingles and cell phone ring tones to the person in the next cube who plays that maddening radio station all day makes it easy to dismiss and overlook.
I love listening to street musicians play next to subway station entrances. They might be asking for a few dollars (and they usually get something from me, no matter how I feel about their particular groove), but there's no way that the thousands of hours of practice time accumulated throughout their lives are worth the few bucks that speckle their instrument cases. They play music…because playing makes living worthwhile.
There are so many essential threads to pull here: are traditional, western instruments a dead-end in an electronic culture? In an era of grinding competition, does music have a cultural value if it can't sell a million downloads? Does anyone ever just listen anymore, or is music now just an art form to color the atmosphere of inveterate multi-taskers?
There's a lot to the subject. But as the great Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninov famously said, "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music."
D.S. al coda.
-MS
Right now I'm really jonesing for a thunderbolt RAID. I'd also love to order a short stack of what the smart money thinks will be new, kickin' Apple laptops, and hand 'em out to the team. The Apple World Wide Developer's Conference starts this week, and the latest coolness from Cupertino promises all sorts of speed, efficiency, and future-forward sleekness. Coupled with a new set of Canon cameras for a big new gig we're currently developing, hot software upgrades, and a fabulous motion control system, our purchasing spreadsheet starts to look awesome.
In the meantime, we've got work to do.
The funny thing about gear is that it can become a means to an end for people who aren't careful. It's not about wasting money, per se, although that risk certainly exists. The real danger is about thinking that some piece of hardware or software is going to make your work better. You know the type: some people geek out on acquisitions for their own sake. They buy fabulous guitars without learning how to strum more than a few chords. They spend big money on rounded, gleaming kitchen appliances without knowing how to cook much more than microwave dinners.
The right tools most certainly matter. Roads are not built with carpentry tools, and you can't expect a cell phone camera to stand in for an Alexa. When we need to use specialized gear, we do. (Don't even think of looking in our cable closet!)
But more important than the latest and greatest gear is mastery of what you have at your immediate disposal. The most powerful tool in your arsenal, no matter what business you're in, will always be your willingness not to compromise on your vision. The right tools can help you say what you want to say, and we strongly believe there's almost never a reason to use anything less than the best tools you can put your hands on. But tools are only just means to an end. Would you rather your bright idea lose some of it's luster while you spend days upon days grinding away on new user manuals, or would you rather dive in to the project like a pro and make that idea shine right now?
New gear--of all sorts-- is fun, no doubt about it. New gear also facilitates acts of creation that you might not be able to do otherwise--and that most certainly makes it valuable and essential. In the production world, new gear isn't a luxury but an endless part of the landscape. But new gear in and of itself…is just stuff. Ideas, in contrast, are transcendent.
This week at Apple's WWDC Jonathan Ive's Elves will undoubtably give us glimpses of shiny futures, and I'd be lying if I said we weren't watching the event with close, geeky interest. But before we start pricing new kit, there's a set of cool storyboards we're working hard to refine, and when we get it smoothed out in a couple of days the shot is gonna be awesome! Then we'll think about what we need to bring it to life.
Thanks for reading. Next week…what's that? They're going to give clues about the new iPhones? Right on! I just know that everything will be better if I can snag one of those…!
-MS
Those of you who know something about modern production techniques know that music doesn't count for much these days.
Sad, sad, sad.
Music tracks can be purchased by the bushel, like cheap plastic baubles selected from endless market stalls. There are fine jewels out there if you know where to look, but most never catch the light. They just play in the background, adding volume but limited mass.
Part of the problem can be described by a strange paradox. As content of all types becomes easier to produce with the advent of cheap, powerful software and hardware, the signal to noise ratio rises. It used to be that people who created music were musicians. But that's not necessarily the case anymore. Plenty of people can now create complex, even specialized music tracks with only minimal musical training. Orchestration, arrangement, performance: the skills for making music only a few years ago have largely transformed into a different set of skills today. People still play, no doubt, but in terms of those vast bins of music for sale, playing bows to programming, or even lower down the food chain: knob fiddling. I'm not saying programming is easy, and good programming is even harder. But what of great music?
The question is one of need versus desire. For many purposes, adequate is more than enough, and in an age of ubiquity, adequate is everywhere. Virtuosity is much, much harder to come by. Ironically, it also has more limited purpose. Virtuosity either facilitates some sort of qualitative measurement that presents it subjectively "better" than other similar works, or virtuosity completely changes the rules by radically leaping forward. The second purpose is more exciting, of course, but it's also the most precious, most elusive thing of all. In terms of leaping forward, objective, qualitative comparisons are irrelevant. Virtuosity speaks a special language.
Goodness, greatness, and irrelevant ordinariness extend beyond the ear, of course. It's simply that because of music's untethered nature, the subject is more ripe for examination. Photography, video, graphics, animation: ease of content creation does not confer greatness. The challenge is to recognize and appreciate what's truly superb amid the clutter..
But should any of us ever care? If adequate is good enough--if what you need built on your property is an ordinary garage and not the Sistine Chapel--is there ever a reason to care about virtuosity? Everyone needs food to survive, but nobody needs to dine in four-star restaurants.
Don't believe it.
Virtuosity redefines the middle. It sets the bar, it shapes the culture. Without any judgment I make the following declaration: the great and vast aesthetic middle describes the mass of most people's days. Most music you hear--on the radio, in commercials, in movies--keep the pace moving perhaps, but doesn't do much to change the conversation. Same goes for middlin' photography, video, food, architecture, and everything else in the purview of creative human effort.
But as we all know, it can. Music matters because it's intangible. It's a proxy for the intangible nature of our own lives, descriptive of our moods and our endless lists of things to do and sometimes even our dreams and hopes. I don't know anyone who doesn't dream in some way about his or her own future. The value of great music rather than simply ordinary music, particularly in multimedia production, is as much a statement about refusing mediocrity in life as it is about also finding a great beat.
As far as I'm concerned, that's why the beat goes on.
--MS
Last week I mused about the value of photography when everyone's snapping shots willy-nilly. In the age of YouTube, Vimeo, and countless other outlets, does video provoke the same questions?
Nope. Video is not photography in motion. Moving pictures are different.
Okay, I know someone out there is going to bust on my ontological parsings. Someone's going to assert the obvious: videos and photographs are certainly closer than tomatoes and bulldozers. Fear not, this is not an academic deconstruction.
But video and photography not the same.
This is to say that video's ubiquity reflects a different phenomenon. Where photography freezes time, video extends time. Video is not so much the capturing of a moment that can be repeated in motion, but a technique for reliving an experience, or experiencing it vicariously. When time stops for a photograph, we must stop too, even for an instant. We spend time with photographs considering single, immeasurable instants. No matter how briefly we flip through photographs we always spend more time with them than the asymptotically short amounts of time it takes to freeze that image.
Moving pictures have no such gravity. They're ephemeral, like sound. Unless they have either an unusual value afforded by some rare scene they've recorded or (and this is more to the point) a particularly refined aesthetic sense about their presentation, video is just a time-suck, a drain in the day, a deadening thickness of air.
Wait. What? Video? Time-waster?
Yes, video IS one of the biggest parts of our production company. And…why, yes, we DO think we're really, really good at it. http://www.youtube.com/user/1AUGLOBALMEDIA
But video demands consumption of time differently than photographs. If you turn away from a photograph you've just seen, the singularity of that image has already been imprinted. If you turn away from video…you're missing it as it happens. People watch video while doing other things, no doubt, but they're not watching intensely, deeply. You cannot ponder what you do not fully sense, and you cannot fully sense visual media without seeing it.
So, does video ever have a place in fine art? Does video ever matter? I believe it does. But it's not the same as a photograph in motion. Video excels at telling stories, at narrative trajectories and passage of time. Photography captures feelings and moods. No doubt each discipline can steal air from the other's balloon: video can evoke moods while a picture can tell stories in single frames. But if you're asking someone to invest time in a moment you consider important enough to share, be sure you've chosen the right tool for the job.
-MS
You're probably wearing a camera right now. So is the person next to you. You may have already shot a bunch of photos today, perhaps even distributed them for the world to see. But who has the time to take this very seriously? With everyone shooting and sending all day long, what kind of demand could there possibly be with so much supply?
They're just photographs, after all.
150 years ago, a photograph would have been nearly uncanny super-science, as hard to imagine as cars that self drive themselves. (Oh, wait: even that's not really a big deal anymore http://bit.ly/IHY1VT .)
All things that once looked extraordinary become ordinary in very little time. Remember your first email? Your first cell phone? Your first online video chat?
Don't be confused. This is not a question about the value of technological advancement. This is about the ability to be moved emotionally.
Photography still matters as much as any other ubiquitous act of creation these days. Did you hear any music today? Any at all? If you say "no", remember that the commercial jingles you heard at the red light from the car next to you counts. Music is so ordinary these days as to be completely overlooked. So is electricity. So is photography.
So what?
Photography stops time. Photography focuses the mind on a singular moment. While fundamentally visual, photography also evokes overtones of memory, like intangible notes of wine evoking smoke or chocolate on the palate. It's magical, and not because of the astounding technical advancement employed to capture and preserve an image. Photography is magical because it resists our shared, inevitable plunge into the future. Photography suspends…everything.
We see photography everywhere these days; it's so common as to be invisible, ignorable. Perhaps this is as it should be. You've had breakfast thousands of time before, too. Not every breakfast is gourmet, memorable, or extraordinary. But sometimes…sometimes…you have something one morning that's not like other mornings. Perhaps it's the fresh squeezed orange juice, or the heavy, smooth glass it's in catching the light from the sunlit window. Perhaps it's the company you're with that morning, or the unusually rich vanilla scent that reaches you before even so much as a warm plate.
Photography is the act of remembering rigorously. It's an act of declaration against the finite. Other senses only exist in motion; there's no continuity of sound the moment vibrations pass your ear, no continuity of scent after aromatic molecules dissipate. But with a photograph, you can linger. You can ponder. You can remember. Most of all, you can wonder.
Even the most ordinary things have extraordinary attributes, but only if we take a moment to notice.
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On a recent camera shoot, light and shadows played tricks on us all day. We were working with a terrific young actor, seated in a flower garden for a series of related shots. Tight spatial relationships among our set elements, and natural shadows cast by the sun's relentless glide past tricky, unreliable clouds tested our patience. The obvious question we started to ask ourselves was, Shouldn't we just MOVE?
That would have been easier, I suppose, but not better. Changing location would have wrecked the beautifully composed, rather precise look we wanted. In the finely tuned balance of sunlight and shadow, the actor's face popped off the screen. The saturated primrose blossoms at her folded knees burst like dreamy splashes of paint, and the rich soil underneath grounded the scene like a a stage. To move would make the location simpler to manage perhaps, but far, far less interesting.
Everything has a finite amount of time to take shape. Nothing has indefinite, endless amounts of time, at least nothing worth hanging around to see. There in the aging afternoon, we felt the pressure of an advancing clock like a nearby beast growling in the woods. But like hunters waiting until just the right moment, we held our ground, struggled to keep our breathing under control, and did the hard work of just staying put.
I recall something visceral, too, something I've felt many times before when I'm chasing a compelling goal. I felt hungry. I should be clear here: I do not mean "hungry" in a metaphoric sense. I mean, I felt hungry insofar as I wanted to eat something.
I've been thinking about this, and it occurs to me that the feeling did not come specifically because I was burning energy, although that's most certainly was a the case. Even a 15 pound tripod begins to feel heavy after it's been moved a billion times. Adjust it, test focus, reposition the dolly, refocus: work takes work. That hungry feeling was the direct result of suppressing ordinary comforts until such time as the goal gets done, and gets done properly. Hunger becomes a secondary concern, just like changing the radio station in a skidding car becomes a secondary concern until you manage to get the car slowed down and under control. The sun and clouds and shadows from the bare, early Spring trees were in conspiracy to drive us batty. What's more, the actor, though a great sport, was only 8 after all and we didn't want to drive her batty. The crew was tiny, the weather at risk of shifting, the shooting day unable to be rescheduled. Most of all, we didn't want to blow what was turning out to be a great shot.
Hunger is my trusted companion on a shoot. It's often the physical signal that tells me when I'm fully invested, if I've gotten deep enough into a moment to know that we're getting somewhere. When I'm NOT getting somewhere, it's easy to break for lunch, for some water, for "Ok, 10 minutes everyone!" Don't misunderstand: lunch is a good thing. We're not ascetic monks here, or crazed self-abusive task-masters. But hunger is the body pulling the mind back into balance. It's a physical way to let you know you're onto something, that you've been giving something your full attention. That doesn't mean feeling an uncomfortable emptiness will ever guarantee something good--if it were only that easy! The point I'm pushing is about something less literal.
Would I rather not be made uncomfortable? Would I rather not be tired out by schlepping gear, hungry from long hours, grimy from climbing on hands and knees to make sure the electricals are hidden from the lens? You bet. Like most people, I try my best to minimize discomfort; craft services are always in the budget!
But hunger and the related discomforts that routinely come about when you're focused and perseverant on completing a tough goal, offer end-game rewards for those who can see the process through. Discomfort makes completion relevant, makes victory sweeter, makes morning coffee taste good rather than simply like a caffeine delivery system. The potential trap for some is to court discomfort for its own sake, as if it were a penance, or an armor against facing the hard work of bringing something to life. Discomfort can be a person's excuse. "Do you know how much stuff we had to set up? Do you know how many hours we put in?" The secret is to realize that your own discomfort in the moment it's happening doesn't matter at all to the person next to you, no matter how close a relationship you may have or how long you may have worked together. He or she is feeling it too; they know already. You can share the feeing, but you can't seek sympathy. The secret is to turn those discomforting feelings that evolution has tried so hard to help you avoid into a buzz that keeps you engaged. You're not kidding around, what you're doing right now is more important than pangs of muscular fatigue or a rumbling belly, and you're not about to let it go just yet.
Even if you disagree with this premise--even if you think there are many other ways to be fully invested--it's certain you already agree about one thing: nothing of value ever comes without an application of intentional effort. Nothing at all. Therefore, I believe that fully embracing the discomforts that sometimes arise from intentional, focused effort--not courting hunger, or cold, or exhaustion, per se, but embracing them when they inevitably emerge--is a private tool for letting yourself know you're not wasting your time.
So….baby, it may be cold outside....but if you get that last shot of the snowflakes drifting past the street light, it's gonna feel terrific when you go inside to warm up.
-MS