Personal Video Biographies

Some years ago I worked for a non-profit and had the opportunity to travel across the world. Of all the types of videos I produced, my favorite became BIOGRAPHIES.

We were often dispatched to some part of the world to do a documentary on some individual who was doing extraordinary things. News of such individuals usually came from others, and from these news and reports a script treatment would be put together. While the existing research and scripting seemed to portray, well enough, an extraordinary story, I soon found that the news and reports that generated the interest in a project and the subsequent research and scripting usually barely scratched the surface.

You see, as I was to discover, these "extraordinary" people didn't think of themselves that way. The "extraordinary" things they did were, to themselves, quite ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, that below the surface of what other people knew about them and may have passed along, were some amazing details that nobody knew--and I eventually learned how to uncover them...

The Resurgence of Art

The earlier article on the degradation of art may have seemed a bit grim.

Perhaps so.

But life can be grim and rose colored glasses won't change its essence.

Yet "The Degradation of the Arts"  wasn't written without the intent to follow it up.  It was a statement of the problem.  Not a gleeful, spectatorish, nothing-to-do-with-me commentary so typical of the mainstream media. It wasn't written as a doomsday prediction or as an epitaph for this current civilization either.

It was written as an observation of something to confront.

The first step of being able to handle anything is the ability and willingness to confront what it is in the first place.  If a man with a gun and murder in his eyes bursts into your bedroom at 2am and you rationalize that he must be a policeman on his way home and just got confused about his address, you're not likely going to handle that situation very well. It might also be the last situation you ever fail to confront.

So if societies are perverted in large part through a degradation of the arts, by turning the arts into vehicles for re-defining social mores and values--in other words by using the arts for propaganda to popularize and eventually "normalize" all aberrant behavior, then the antidote must be the sum of all actions that serve to popularize true art...

The Sport of Exporting from Final Cut Express to YouTube

I can't be the only one who's had nightmares doing this. I mean spending countless HOURS exporting movies from Final Cut Express to the great YouTube Engine in the Sky with variations close to the near infinite possibilities available in search of the magic combination that crunches gigabytes into dust without turning your movie into mud.

Reminds me of the true story of some young aircraft engineer who wanted to know the meaning of the "PFM module" in the Boeing 747 blueprints. No one knew. But years later he tracked down an old engineer who could tell him what PFM stood for: Pure Fucking Magic.

So here we have the PFM module of the Mac exporting to the PFM module of YouTube and only God and his Super Geek Consultants know what happens in the mix.

Well, evidently God and the Geeks were replaced by Google.  Thank god...

Degradation of the Arts

This is an expansion on the little statement there at the top of the blog:



ANY GOLDEN AGE IS PRECEDED BY A RESURGENCE OF THE ARTS, JUST AS ANY DARK AGE IS PRECEDED BY A DEGRADATION OF THE ARTS.



The first real Golden Age on Earth was the Golden Age of Greece, also known as "The Age of Pericles", the leader at the time. We all know there was a huge resurgence of art in many genres. But it was also a time of peace and abundance for the inhabitants of Greece. Pericles was a benevolent leader and government served its proper purpose, unperverted by corruption and greed.

The Roman Empire followed on its heels and was the longest surviving civilization on earth to this day. 

But Rome crumbled and collapsed under criminal and perverted leadership at the top tiers of government.  In the latter days of the Roman Empire, the restless population was quelled with free "Corn and Games", i.e. free food and death battles in the arena.  Next time you watch "Gladiator", notice the scene where a food-laden cart is moved through the arena as the food is being tossed up into the crowd.



I'm not a historian, so correct me if you will, but these are broad strokes to make an observation that probably isn't in the history books...

Camerawork

The derivation of the word cinematography comes from Greek:
kinema (motion) + graphein (to write)

Motion writing.

Modern use of video cameras are not exempt from the principles of cinematography, though "video" is derived from Greek thusly: Gr "videre" (to see) graphein (to write). It's meaning is more illustrative of the electronic birthright of video technology more than of its application.

Of course before motion pictures we had only still photographs.
With the advent of motion pictures we now had motion within the picture.

Then came zoom lenses, dollies, cranes, and much later, steadicam. Now we had moving cameras shooting moving pictures.

But the basic motion is still the motion that occurs within the frame. One doesn't need to move the camera to compose or convey motion.

So what does one move the camera for?

MESSAGE

The purpose of composition, whether it be photographic, cinematographic, videographic, choreographic, literary--or any other form of art--is to arrange and integrate the parts to communicate a message.

That may be the most fundamental basic there is in art.

It isn't to "please oneself", to "flaunt technical skill" or anything else.

It's to COMMUNICATE A MESSAGE to the intended audience.

Message is senior to technical rendition. One brings his technical up as high as possible without losing sight of or obscuring message.

The Film "Avatar" is an example of near perfect technical rendition that purely forwards the message. All of the technical expertise is channeled toward communicating the message.

Technical for the sake of technical, camerawork for the sake of camerawork, effects for the sake of effects are each a violation of this fundamental principle. People who do this are communicating an altered message of "look at me!".

Let's take an example of a standard issue MTV video.

So I'm a Blogger now

That's all right. I like to write, I learned my basics from a master, I've got experience, judgment, a modicum of common sense, I like to teach and I've got opinions. So I'm all set.

Now what?

OK, my first urge to say something to somebody somehow (before I ever even heard of blogs) was when I decided I'd like to start a video business--this after 20 years of working for a non-profit doing film and video.  I wanted to find out what people were charging, but found few who had the decency (or guts?) to post any kind of price guideline on their sites. But I did find a lot of "Silver, Gold and Platinum" packages which seemed all the rage. Then, in checking into these I found that if I wanted a personal biography, the "Gold" package would get me "one hour of interview...50 photos, blah, blah blah".

Ridiculous.  That's not how you do a biography, documentary, wedding video or ANYTHING ELSE.

But I figured out what was going on.