(See what I am saying?)

Last minute thoughts

364

The Night Before Christmas

It had snowed for 3 days.
Roads were closed schools and churches shut down. and daycare centers were on delays. The words scrolled by the bottom of the T.V screen on the 11:00 news. It was the night before christmas and i had one thing to do.

i sat in the kitchen.
with the pumpkin pies and disconnected tries and counting the time difference on my fingers. it was the night before christmas and i sat all alone, just me, and the international dial tone. i sat there with the pies, cheesecake, walnuts and chocolate covered cherries, hunched over the little keyboard and reading the phone number on my father's blackberry.

it was the night before christmas and it was 12 below in 20 inches of snow.

it was the night before christmas on the farm in ohio and i all i wanted was to get a phone call through to mexico.

Conventional Vision (Digital #2.)

"Why does every DV Cam, computer LCD displays, and software all use RGB color space but TV's use UHF color? it is such a problem to convert the colors and they never look as good."

It was the second day of of the training workshop. Questions full of acronyms like this were commonplace. That particular question and it's corresponding answer remained in my head after the 8 hour session- along with the subtle sound similar to bacon frying behind my ear drums- as i left the training session:

In 1953 the color Television signal was created. (the first nationwide color TV broadcast was the tournament of roses parade, january 1, 1954. ) The signal could have been made in RGB color mode, allowing for a wider range of colors that more closely resembles the human perception of the world. but because everyone only had black and white TV sets, a lesser signal had to be used that allowed the color spectrum to be viewed when de-saturated on black and white sets, or no one would have been able to see the broadcast on the existing black and white screens. we have sacrificed 50 years and 11 months of how we see every image in a television ( the average american watches over 3,082 hours per year. [source]) we are still dealing with the limitations of the previous convention.

I walked out of the Expo center and into the quiet and rainy night. the L.A. skyline looked down at me with an expressionless stare. I began to think about color televisions. I began to think about the standards we live by. i began to think about every limitation from a previous convention. i began to think about everything that once was new that all too soon became a hinderance. I thought about all the conventions we build that elevate us, that we become comfortable with, that we understand, and that then prevent us from moving on.

the metaphor resonated through the vacant downtown parking lots. it echoed off the peeling paint off the ritz milner hotel and through the stale cigarettes crushed out in the ashtray like tombstones in a cemetery on flower street. It rippled through the 14 lanes of tailpipes idling in the dark like like herds of sheep on the 101, the 405, the 10, the 110, as they wrapped around the city like a poorly tied turnicate. if i would have let it, the metaphor would have run down every lane of traffic in my head until i began bleeding at the seams.

the evolution of our intellect is always held back by its own residue. And we never seem to ever have enough foresight - or are able to resist emotional and financial dependency on the current convention- to come up with designs that are truly new. Like digital methadone, we build our future on what we were dependent on in the past.

HDTV will be standardized. some say within 3 years. that means the colors in 3,082 hours of our lives each year we see in every broadcast will be with RGB color space. and so in very much like a 12 step withdrawl process that will have taken over a half century, we will finally be able to start seeing things a little better.

It has taken the better part of a generation to change the way we see T.V.

Strange i thought, as the rain fell down on cars sitting still on the interstate and slid down with paint on the side of the ritz milner hotel, and dripped into black puddles in the ashtray, how long it takes to begin learn how to see more clearly.

Iconography (Digital #1.)

The city of Los Angeles is an icon for american life. But is more like a jigsaw puzzle that is falling apart. It spills out and on top of itself and is held together with concrete highways like loosely wrapped ribbons. The 101, the 405, the 10, the 110, wrap across the city like a poorly tied turnicate, trying in vain to keep the city from hemorrhaging at it seams anymore.

Contrary to my prior notions, the city does have a downtown. It pokes out above the haze like a periscope looking at the rest of the world with an expressionless stare that could be either indifference or envy. and right there among the skyline that bristles up from the city, the L.A. Expo sits like an airport that forgot the airplanes. Its steel trusses spider out at 45 degree increments like a wire frame rendering wrapped in a glass shell. the entire structure straddles Pico street in the quiet downtown area collecting dust like a shiny high school trophy forgotten on a shelf.

The 2004 Digital Video Exposition was in the south hall of the building. people don't like writing too many letters. We don't like speaking too many syllables in a row either. so the sign in in the South Lobby read DV Expo. Through the glass doors Apple, Avid, Sony, Panasonic, and Canon staked their claim like prospectors on the floor of the South Hall.

I signed in at the registration desk and picked up my badge and textbook. I walked out into the pavilion and sat down at a table. An older gentleman was reading a Final Cut Pro HD software manual like he was cramming for the SAT exam with a starbucks latte in hand. I looked down at my own book: DVD Studio Pro 3. The book was published on August 24, 2004. The software i was there to learn about was released on April 19, 2004. The computers we were using were build in mid July, 2004.

Suddenly it began to dawn on me:

No on really know what is going on here. suddenly i realized there are no role models for me to learn from. there is no one to apprentice, no past generations to hold up as examples, no precedents set, there are no fool proof formulas developed. the leaders in the industry who have been here the longest were sitting right beside me nervously reading the manual. we are all on the same playing field.

Suddenly it dawned on me:

i am trying be like no one else.

I can find inspiration in painting, music, architecture, or writing. but the best that i can do is take any existing process or product i have learned from and loosely migrate it into what i am doing. and we try our best to compare the methods and tools for digital creation to something familiar, something that everyone can relate to. we build software interfaces that use metaphors from the physical world. we use terms like "copy and paste" and "pen tool". software icons are made to represent tangible tools like magnifying glasses, razor blades, and paint buckets.

but the truth is that working this way is like nothing else that has ever happened. there is nothing physical, nothing real, nothing linear about it. we are manipulating intangible material with equally intangible tools. With digital video, we work with a representation- and icon- of film on the screen which is a representation - and icon - of time and and space. and after we have cut it, de-interlaced it, mux it (again we don't like multi-syllable words; i.e. saying the word, "multiplexing"), and encoded it, we bring it back to something tangible: DVDs, Film, or at the very least, projected light - and we believe it to be reality once again.

at 2 pm the class started and i walked in the with several more older gentleman. as the instructor began the class, he asked us about who we were. i looked around the room. i wasn't the youngest, but most attending the class could have been my father. there were business owners, producers, and creative directors. and none of us knew what we were doing.

The city of Los Angles is an icon for american life. Outside, as the real world stared back at it with part indifference, and part envy, as the city sat tied up and twisted in its concrete ribbons and bows. Above me the steel frame of the L.A. Expo spidered into the sun. I sat down. I opened the 17" powerbook, turned it on, and started looking for icons that i recognized.