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
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?
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
Birds hide above me somewhere. Their song fills the green spaces like batting, like goose down in a comforter. It's morning, and the sun breaks through tree limbs and leaves, cascading like smooth-edged glass polygons. The world does not really care if I'm here. Tripod leveled on uneven ground, I'm the one who'll have to adjust to fit in.
There are no pachyderms on the horizon. There are no Acacia trees casting patches of shade beneath an equatorial sun. I'm just down the road from my house, standing on the edge of a frontage zone where an uncountable row of steel towers suspends high tension electrical wires like tightropes in the sky. But I'm outside. There are no computer screens; there are clouds.
Does the furtive chipmunk I just saw dashing from one mound to another have any place in the creation of digital media? Not specifically perhaps. Not directly. But to spend a portion of your life outside is to remind yourself about a vital perspective when so many modern careers and school activities and urban obligations force us inside. Standing here surrounded by coarse, ankle high grasses, I find the natural world gently chiding me, reminding that it will simply continue into the future no matter what deadlines our company may be facing, nor what demands our clients, or families, or neighbors maybe asking. The forecast calls for rain tomorrow, but it will rain whether there is a forecast or not. If rain comes at noon or rain comes in the evening evening, it will just come. Or it won't. Things will change, and things will continue. Deadlines have no place here.
Most days, we at 1AU spend inventing the largely artificial world of modern media. The great irony is, I love that space, no matter how unnatural it may be. But the jangling din quiets when I feel a breeze on my face, propelled only by rising convection zones from the nearby hills. It's ironic, but out here everyone clambers for advantage just as aggressively as they do in the city. Out here, however, it's a bird looking for a grub, or that chipmunk, now hidden, grabbing a nut that might have gone to a slightly slower squirrel. Fast-growing vines compete for water sources that choke off slower growing blooming plants. Aged trees send roots deep into the earth, selecting slow, strong strategies to outlast competitors.
Here's the epiphany: it's a riot of creativity. Human perspective changes like a kaleidoscope outside. On a tough day, the natural world is a seething cauldron of violence, each life form angling for vicious advantage, each disinterested in the success of the other. On a good day, the outdoors is a teeming garden of life's great promise, of endless possibility and endless variations and romantic ideals literally taking wing.
I suppose I'm a part of all this. We all are. For many minutes, I forget my camera altogether. It's my camera perhaps and maybe these few words that allow me to bring a spark of the natural world into my more typical electronic, human created spaces. But life is short, and standing here I cannot help but notice that in its most ordinary expressions, life is everywhere. Speaking for myself, I find a utility and deep value in the abandonment of all human all tools for a few minutes at least. It's good to stand still and simply be a part of the natural world, even as those overhead electrical lines remind me how much humanity in general, and therefore myself as an individual, cannot separate human history from natural history.
--MS
CITY, BREATHING
Foot on the brake two cars back from the red light, I catch a flash of motion over my left shoulder. A bicycle messenger glides past at high speed like a barracuda, snapping his head left and right to see if the coast is clear. He hardly slows down, dashing through the intersection. A woman in a sleek navy suit, waiting for the light at the crosswalk, checks her smart phone with one hand. It's 6:45 in the city and the morning sun angles orange between the gray cement edifices like the day's first jolt of caffeine.
The city is its own organism. It hums, it seethes, it moves on its own power. City councils and zoning boards, police and fire departments, laws and courts and the unspoken social order that keeps hotdog vendors on their own respective corners barely begin to describe the essential nature of the city. As the saying goes, the sum is greater than the parts. Those people ostensibly in charge can only influence the works when it comes right down to it. They do not decide; they cajole. The nudge. They try, try, try. Cities take lives and characters of their own depending on endless factors, just like the history of anyone you've ever met takes on his or her character from a lifetime of influences and experiences.
The ambient jangle of cities can lull the people inside them into a kind of hypnotic, buzzy trance. It's easy to see why. If a city visitor or resident didn't somehow compartmentalize the input of disparate signals, he or she wouldn't be able to function. There would be no music in the symphony; there would simply be a cacophony of sounds, unrelated.
But today I'm sitting in traffic, absorbing the buzz differently. The barracuda bicyclist has a beauty to him completely different from the Mondrian formality of cold architectural blocks. Each car at this busy intersection is a cell in the bloodstream, containing singular, discrete stories, all heading somewhere, somewhere, always somewhere. There's salsa music coming from the truck just in front of me, there's a police whistle a block or two away, there's the drum of my own heart beat, keeping an eye on the crowded intersection two cars up.
The light goes green, and my thrumming traffic lane slides into motion. Things are happening today. Aware that I've filled my car filled with thousands of dollars of camera gear and rigging, I smile at the duality represented by the simple action of easing my foot off the brake. Today I'm here to capture some essential aspect of the living, ungraspable life of the city, an observer recording what he sees. But I am also aware that in doing so, I am very much a part of the cellular corpus that makes the city breathe in the first place, and therefore one tiny, participant reason why it's the city holds mystery, edgy promise, and endless potential.
-MS
P.S. Next week's post: life outside the city.
Truth is reality. Truth is an invention. Both are accurate.
What we see only counts insofar as it describes perception. Ask a vegetarian to describe a barbecue: qualitative perceptions will be dramatically different for the vegetarian than for the grill master. Truth lies somewhere in between.
It follows, then, that truth may find its currency in argumentation-- determinations made simply because one person can argue a point better than an opponent. There's a risk, of course, that if this proposition holds even a smidge of truth, one has to wonder if there's ever anything close to an absolute truth. I'm not talking about religion here, no matter where you fall on that color wheel. But somehow, some way, truth is a balance between reasoning well stated, and something immutable. More and more, I believe that balance hovers on a flinty-sharp point, always at risk of teetering into chaos.
Much like reality itself, I think absolute truth and reasoned arguments each have validity. Truth demands perspective to define its boundaries; that's the immutable part. But truth also asks for smart argumentation; that's perception. While not a demand, per se, the "ask" about truth always seems connected to questions of relevance: if something presents itself, or someone otherwise presents an argument for something to be regarded as "true", it deserves a well reasoned position to make it clear and strong. Fact or philosophy; truth stands in the context of the rest of the universe.
Speaking of the universe, what of gravity? Of color? Of finite lifespans? Is there a greater value to something true described by physical immutability, or is there equivalent merit in well-reasoned argument? Does a philosopher's proof constitute an equivalency to the rising sun?
I will not be the last to propose this discussion, although I'll welcome it's continuation. But I firmly believe that while the question provokes spirited debate, there is a response that goes between the horns of the bull. That is, truth always lives in the expression of creative acts. When a person, or city, or civilization creates something new, it resists chaos; it establishes connections and order. Creativity cannot ever be false, no matter how qualitatively weak or uninteresting it may be. I may not want to consume every new thing brought into the world, but I certainly cannot refute the truth of its making. Even an insincerely created moment, something done for the most base, selfish, crude purpose stands up to this reasoning. Creativity by itself is always true; it exists without qualification, the act itself a moment of choice, a declaration against entropy regardless of its motivation.
Truth is its own engine. That's why we do what we do.
-MS
Just do it.
What are you waiting for?
There's no better time than the present.
A stitch in time saves nine.
Get 'er dun.
If you live in the modern, technologically connected world, you already know there's too much stuff to do. People with aspirations of excellence often find that personal life interferes with pursuits of passion. Kids, family, bills, endless electronic jabbering: there's too much to keep track of without placing powerful filters to block out the noise. But the problem with broad-spectrum filters is that they block out positive signals as well as negative signals. Filters can be pernicious. That's why I regard one particular technique as an unusually effective way to accomplish big things. It's simple to say, if perhaps not always simple to do: if you can get something done right now don't wait to do it later.
Committing to write a novel does not fall into this category. Making a movie does not fall into this category. Remodeling the kitchen does not fall into this category. But taking two minutes to transfer a file to somebody across town who will have eight hours to work with that file DOES fall into this category. A moment of procrastination on your part can catastrophically cascade and make ordinarily challenging projects unnecessarily hard, or worse, mediocre in their result. Completing a five-minute, tedious phone call you've been avoiding will simply remove its burden from your back. Organizing yourself to assign tasks to trusted team members, getting the next in an endlessly nagging stream of documents out the door, or just taking out the recycling so it doesn't pile up in the corner keeps your to-do list from growing so large as to be unmanageable. Get something done... and it's done.
Now, here's the secret. All of this dogged diligence is not about establishing metrics for yourself about the vast amount of work you can complete in a given period of time. Work for its own sake simply hauls bricks from place to place with no great value in the counting. But show me somebody who's hauling bricks to build a house and now I'm interested. The secret is that the completion of mundane tasks right now, this instant, so that they're gone until the next mundane and task…is all in an effort to compartmentalize bigger blocks of time for far more important, far more interesting, much more relevant creative work. Don't sweat the small stuff: dispense with the small stuff. But ignore the small stuff at your own peril. These little tasks are a tight rope between the safety platforms of "The Before" and "The After", where the first represents the moment before you enjoin a giant project and the second is that moment of its satisfying completion. The tight rope––that viciously thin line barely connecting the two––is irrelevant compared to the stony stalwarts on either side of the chasm. But it's also the lifeline. One misstep and you fall to your doom. Nonetheless, that line itself is an aesthetic irrelevancy. The tight rope itself is made entirely of a million tiny threads -- all small stuff-- but it's the overall collection of small stuff that gets you across the void.
So don't let the dishes pile up in the lunch room table; get them into the sink. Better yet, get them washed. Pay your phone bill today, get your equipment room organized, make sure you've successfully crossed some of the little stuff off your list. Because the rest of the day awaits you, and there are big things to do.
--MS
The crazy thing is, you don't have to do the job well. What job? Any job. No one's forcing you to get outside, shovel the walk to the edges, clear your car windows frame to frame, completely dig out the mailbox. It's up to you how to do it.
But getting a job done versus getting it done well will almost always reduce to one essential decision: are you willing to do what it takes to do the job properly?
For most things in life it doesn't really matter. To build a peanut butter sandwich like a perfectionist is to misappropriate effort to goals of limited value. Not everything demands perfection.
But walk carefully along this ledge. The slapdash peanut butter sandwich may not matter too much, but there's a measure of finesse that accrues to the person who can balance the knife across the open jar rather than simply set it down on the counter, requiring you to clean up the smear. More precisely, the implied finesse is not one of manual dexterity; it's is, instead, one of awareness, of attention to detail, of genuinely taking pleasure in the conscious choice to do things attentively rather than chaotically. There's an aesthetic value in placing the peanut butter covered knife across the jar without slathering up the counter that goes beyond simply not having a messy counter.
Doing a job right means holding up standards you cannot deny. Doing a job right is often subjective, too; there's rarely just one way to do a job right. But there are guidelines to consider. Is there a measure of invention, no matter how small, in the technical performance of incremental tasks? Is there an economy of effort in the overall performance? Do the results confer an aesthetic value beyond the simple delivery of a completed job? Are there details that might have been perfected if they had only received a little time or attention? Are you rationalizing a low quality effort just to get it done?
Quality matters. But without a singular definition of what that means, the pursuit of quality matters most because it helps build an intangible something greater than the thing itself.
The forces standing in the way of getting a job done on time pile up like wind-blown snow pressing against your front door in winter. They accumulate when you're not looking, require force of will to suit up, head out, muscle in with shovels and willpower.
But the snow piles up whether you want to deal with it or not, and staying inside where its warm is so easy…so cozy…so inviting…
This is not a rant against taking the easy way out. (That comes in the next blog post!) The easy path is subjective; this is a statement about reality.
It's hard to do hard work. Hard work takes…uh…work. But I think I speak for the whole team here that this one point, perhaps more than anything else, is the great differentiator between merely good and stupendously great.
There's no olympic gymnastic performance, nor virtuoso jazz riff, nor even a bravura explanation of a painfully tangled mathematical principle that comes without years of hard practice. That much isn't too hard to understand; most people get it.
What people sometimes misunderstand is that expressions following those many years of practice are not without effort. It's not as if practice alone makes the work any less labor intensive. Practice makes impressive action and insight possible in ways that may completely elude novices, but the level of effort in the execution of a roundoff-back flip or the Paganini Violin Concerto #1 remains the same no matter how expert or innocent the person trying to do it happens to be. The easy misconception, however, is that resulting performances following many years of rigorous practice are not hard. Not true. It's still hard. You think a ballet dancer standing on a single pointe isn't hard? It only looks easy. But the moment of execution does not reveal the total level of effort; much of that work has been spent in thousands of hours of sweaty, lonely, brutal effort leading up to the point of performance. And let's be clear: we're not talking about Hollywood fabrications about extraordinary savants a la Rain Man. Reality demands work, plain and simple.
There's another thing, too.
It's one thing to be "well practiced", to be an athlete in shape for a race, or a business leader prepared with a go-to-market strategy and a superb business plan for investors. But the moment of execution still requires great, intense, focused energy. The difference is that the person spending that effort knows what it's going to take. He or she is prepared to shoulder the burden, expects it, even counts on it. The effort does not surprise.
Excellence comes from many things, but it first comes from a willingness to do excellent work. Excellent work means putting in effort--focused, intense effort-- motivated solely by the desire to achieve excellence. The reasons why someone might pursue excellence is not at issue here, and there are many reasons. But excellence always means the same thing in practice. No externally generated motivations will deliver it. Excellence is something you either care to do, or choose to live without. Without a certain acceptance of that reality, good intentions, great dreams, and sweet spirits simply will never amount to more than mediocrity. Doing the work is the only thing that will delivers the goods.
-MS
Physicists say that time is a dimension. Even if we understand this intellectually, it's somewhat outside of our ordinary human experiences. Time moves invisible, even as it surrounds us, and shapes every aspect of our days. Now more than ever, we are attuned to time's relentless march than we ever have been through history.
Time has always been a component of human civilization. Agrarian societies knew time as a function of seasons, counted in days divided by nights. Modern societies developed calendars to keep track of the passage of the year. Days of the week broke it down even further; sundials and the introduction of mechanical clocks made time even more divisible. But now we are surrounded by the tick-tock of endless devices that keep track of time, usually by electronic means. Yet one thing hasn't changed. The flow of time is governed most of all by our own perceptions of it. There is no amount of mechanical nor other logical record-keeping that matters so much as how we relate emotionally to the passage of time.
Consider this experiment. Sit quietly for five minutes doing very little, if anything at all. (Tell you what: make it 10 minutes. Five minutes of peace and quiet is now a welcome respite for most of us in the modern world! But I digress…) Sit quietly for 10 minutes, doing very little. The passage of time feels slow, lethargic, for many people even endless. Then try the alternative. The next time you're facing a deadline, say some project, or an appointment you have to make, or a date that you've been looking forward to, 10 minutes feel like a wolf at your heels. Time races forward; it's leaves the world like water evaporating from a hot surface.
Perhaps the physicists are onto something when they say that time is another dimension, but time in fact is really a magician. We know the magician is doing a trick for us, and yet we willingly give ourselves over to the act. It's the same with time. Just as we know that 10 minutes spent sitting quietly takes precisely the same number of seconds as a frantic effort to get that Fed-ex package to the pick-up location before it closes.
Recently, parts of the 1AU production team were working on location in a busy urban setting and we didn't have much time left to get the remaining shots of our day. It's not that they were hard, per se; it's that with limited time available the press to complete each one started to take on a breathlessness borne simply from a growing awareness that there would be no other chance once the day ended. I looked over at Vicky fiddling with a tripod a few feet away, and smiled, fully aware of the pressure suddenly on her shoulders. If you work in media or performance of any kind, this is an ordinary experience. You even come to rely on the buzz as a trusted companion. But as I consider the situation, it's ordinary for anybody doing something with the clock against them. That's most of us. Everyone knows the feeling. Time is the arbiter of all things. And like an arbiter, it's best addressed with a level head, a rational argument, and his sense of humor. Time is not a judge for whom anger or false argument is ever successful.
But lest this all appear as some sort of bleak capitulation, the mature creative person, or ambitious professional, or smart parent juggling multiple schedules of kids and jobs and commutes and getting the laundry done, knows that time is the ultimate tool for focusing the mind. Without a deadline, there's no pressure to pursue quality, because there's little motivation to get something done well before time runs out.
-MS