Two “Invisible Hands” Touch

In the short time I’ve been playing on the Internet with a few cutting-edge media and networking toys, I’ve seen a trend that will encourage any fan of peace and prosperity. It reverses a troubling tendency from the 20th century that led to great domestic strife, mistrust and inefficiency. Two former enemies are coming together in a happy middle ground. “Wow,” you’re thinking, “Twitter [or insert favorite social media geegaw here] did all that?” Yep.

Give Me a Mic, and I Might Say This

I’ve been listening to a treasure-trove of podcasts from South by Southwest Interactive, recordings of many of the sessions. They get my brain working, sometimes straying off the topic, and I find myself stopping the playback in the car and addressing an imaginary audience. At first, in my mind’s eye, they all look like me, but eventually they start to look like typical people of my generation and above, active people who like to upset expectations and grab the present-day by the horns. They’ve been called Baby-Boomers, but the Internet Generation doesn’t know what to do with them. Since the media pieces from the younger people deal with interests that have little to do with age, the Boomer generation represents an untapped resource for at first an audience, and eventually new participants. Simultaneously, these Boomers are thought of as “grumpy old men” who will reject newness ad hoc, and are a path of more resistance than there’s time for in a day.

Seems it’s time for one or more people who find one foot in each world to get the two worlds to talk to each other, in a common language, with wise-ass lingo kept to a minimum and the Golden Rule practiced in every exchange. I know Len Edgerly does this with arts groups in Colorado and wherever else he’s invited.

I can picture me doing this, too. I’d do a great job. Let’s discuss this at PodCamp NYC at the end of this week.

A 3D Question at Easter

This is a letter I wrote to Pixel Corps honcho Alex Lindsay, maybe not the only guy who could get charged up about this, but the only one I know.

Alex,

I’m a regular listener to This Week in Media, and with the arrival of a new computer that can play back large files (finally!), I’m watching, too.

Either this is an old question among 3D artists (sorry) or I’m the first to ask (I’m glad I took the time).

As you may have noticed, the Easter season brings about discussions of the Shroud of Turin, and the pursuit of experts to study it and give an opinion of its origins, all recorded in documentaries. But to me there is a glaring omission, an unasked question, and an unrepresented expert.

The image of the body with the bearded face and long side hair is familiar to us all. But if you wrapped a linen around a face, you wouldn’t get such a photographically flat image, would you? The cheeks would be pulled out to the side, and you’d have more than just a frontal view of the hair covering his ears, if not the ears themselves, spaced about 12 inches apart. You’d also see more top hair. And if you attempted to drape linen over the top and the sides of the head at the same time, wouldn’t there be wrinkles?

I’m visualizing the images I’ve seen of character skins laid out in 2D for painting (for those who don’t have a product like zBrush).

To get such an image as the Shroud, you’d need to support it over the body and stretch it like an artist’s canvas. Then whatever was making the image would have to project perfectly upwards to the canvas, and the effect of the closest body part (I guess the nose) would have to be the same as the farthest body part (the fringe of the hair, or the neck).

There is a guy who ran a photographic experiment using a camera obscura and a silver compound impregnated in the linen. But there was no discussion of the flatness of the canvas. You wrap a body in a shroud, or it’s not a shroud, is it? And when you wrap, you get dimensional skinning, no? Current documentaries (even on PBS) don’t say.

Has anyone ever approached you about this question? Has it ever made any discussion forums that you know of? Why aren’t they coming to you for these documentaries and asking you this question?

Clearly it’s too late for this Easter season. But I wonder if there’s something the Pixel Corps could assemble for next year. Just an idea. And if the question has been hashed around in forums, maybe it needs to break out of the echo chamber and go off on a vision quest.

Helpfully,
Rick Wolff
Putnam Valley, NY

Fred and Sharon Spencer Are My Heroes

I have such a natural impulse to sound like the tongue-in-cheek city slicker who calls the heartland “flyover country” and goes for weeks without getting my hands dirty. I am one of those, but I must fight the tendency. Because that’s not what’s inspiring my fascination and delight with a recent YouTube find. It’s a video capabilities brochure called “Who Needs a Movie?” from a ma-and-pa video production company in (I think) British Columbia, Fred and Sharon Spencer of fredandsharonsmovies.com.

This guy Fred (I’m assuming he’s the principal; if not, forgive me) follows his own muse. He’s a video jack-of-all-trades. And say what you will, he’s done more media on the Internet than I have. When the man with the advice said “Just do it,” Fred heeded the call, while I’m still getting my act together—just as soon as I figure out that that act will be. While we who are obsessed about things like production values and instant success and reputation and personal branding and monetization have all we can do to start, much less finish, Fred is up and running, his wife Sharon right by his side when needed.

And while I’m now hobnobbing via Internet with people I know can run rings around the Spencers in terms of production quality, I know they’re beating their heads against the wall (and each others’ heads) to find the next eyeball-attracting idea. Fred’s views for this little ditty? Nearly 577,000 as of this writing.

On his website, there’s one freebie video (a YouTube embed—why pay for your own server?), and a chance to pay (!) to see more (possibly more YouTube embeds). You laugh. Think he hasn’t made back his initial investment? You sure about that?

Yeah, the views are racked up by kids who can’t believe such a video exists, and judging by the comments, there is a city-slicker ridicule factor. Think Fred cares? Should he? Would you?

When next you hear of Fred Spencer, he’ll be hired by some huge ad agency to produce the next “viral video.”

The Pimps from Austin

I think it’s safe to draw a big enough circle in the Venn diagram to include new-media people along with new-marketing people. You’re all on board with each others’ agendas. We all know how suspicious everyone has gotten of being marketed at, and the practitioners in my circle particularly so. Interruption marketing has given way to conversation marketing, so goes the mantra.

So now that South by Southwest Interactive (good to see it spelled out once in a while) is over for ‘08, all the attendees are busy cataloguing and posting their media recordings, and Flickr, Qik and Utterz bulge visibly. And you invite me to check it all out, via a link in Twitter, as well you should.

So far, more often than not, it’s some short piece where the holder of the camera records the target of the camera pimping whatever project he or she is working on, or some online gig or other.

I feel like the boy in Gene Shepard’s A Christmas Story, laboring over my Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, only to decipher “Don’t forget to drink Ovaltine.”

It seems the message of “personal branding” and that of “conversational marketing” are still perceived to be at opposite ends among today’s plugola-savvy mediamakers. This in spite of SxSW. I hope not because of it.