FIRST OF ALL – HAVE A GIFT! THE SECOND HALF OF OVER BARBARA ISLAND IS NOW AVAILABLE! READ THE FOLLOWING GARBAGE WHILE IT DOWNLOADS.
Glasnost spills across the virtual western world – open letters are opening up openly each opening yet another 1000 flowers of open-mindedness about … well … openness! Yes, we all opine on open source, open standards and opening doors. Open your mind and your mouth! Join in! Blog and Twit and let everyone know what you think about openness!
It makes me cry to think how lucky I am to be here – right now – in the moment when the whole world is opening. Best that I right away open up and show up how more open I am than anyone!
Of course if you want to keep your opinion to yourself … well nothing wrong with that I suppose. Don’t have to blog or twit every day. Mind you it’s kind of odd. You must have something to hide right? Scared that you might get found out. We know about people like you. Perverts.
Quick. Some technology talk. The police are watching.
Delightful toys descend upon me this week, as we gear up for second session. Kunst Kamp has been choosing new cameras and what a dizzy business it is. There used to be just two kinds of video camera = good but expensive OR near misses and cheap shit. You ask for the expensive ones and get the near misses. Easy. But this year the range of cameras has become like the Addams family.
Lurch – There’s great big ones like the RED that shoots video George Lucas could re-edit. It also costs the entire school budget. Even the cut down versions, the SCARLET and the SLIGHTLY TEPID PINK are too much for undergraduate movies.
Morticia – Then you have the SLR cameras, the Canon 5,7,9 and a half – these are still cameras but they shoot video too. Advantage is they have nice lenses. Disadvantage is the lenses cost more than the actual camera and a student will eat it in the first day. Other disadvantage is that all the fancy features turn off when you shoot video, which you can’t do for more than 12 minutes or the camera catches fire. But still you can do shallow focus and this is now synonymous with ‘good film making’. We bought a bunch of these and teaching is now solved.
Fester – Then the domestic AVCHD cameras. They don’t cost much, they record full HD and they are light and easy to use. You point on the touch screen at the thing you want in focus and it turns the focus knob for you. They’d be really sweet except we’re cursed with Apple computers, so it’ll take twice as long for Final Cut to import the footage. We bought a bunch of these too.
Pugsley – The one I bought myself … was the cheapest and shittiest one. Hey look, I don’t have a whole lot of money to splash around. But this is actually a great thing. The SONY Bloggie costs about 250 bucks and it’s about as big as a phone. Shoots full HD so long as you don’t wave it around in which case it gets seasick. Hang it around your neck, point it out a car window, throw it, tie it to a cat. The small size and price encourages the kind of silly buggers that bigger cameras don’t tolerate. I had penis envy for a while then realised how liberating it is to have a video camera you don’t feel precious about. Got a few videos up on YouTube, more coming.
The other toy is the new Adobe CS5 which I am going to be teaching next session. When you look at the new features, it’s like a poem celebrating life:
- Remove people from photos easily in Photoshop. Now you can be Stalin at home.
- Produce music without any talent in Soundbooth.
- New Flash Catalyst provides the ease and features that you used to enjoy in Flash. Flash itself is now so complex that it has become sentient and plans Armageddon.
- No one gives a shit about Premiere. It could buy you a necklace and you’d still sneer.
- Ah After Effects. My baby. Now with even more features taken from Nuke. Why don’t Adobe just go and buy Nuke if they like it THAT MUCH. I mean really. So the new feature is that you keep the person and lose the photograph. It’s like the anti-Photoshop. Heavy concept.
- Indesign now makes Flash. I told you Flash was planning something.
- Illustrator probably does something but that’s for School of Design, they can worry about that.
- Dreamweaver does some stuff that makes even more obscure complex HTML.
- All the other crap you never use.