The result of a real-world environment with light painted through it in 3D forms creates a beautiful otherworldly effect, like happening upon fairies in their night-time revelry.

Kurt Vonnegut and the shapes of stories

Now if only a computer could plot it for you!

npr:

newsweek:

In this week’s issue, Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney collects “The 10 Commandments of Steve.”

More than anything else, Jobs’s genius is in managing the creative process. Here’s his playbook.

 [See it full size]

Great chart! Also worth a look is former NPR designer Callie Neylan’s appreciation of Jobs and Apple: “Apple’s Secret Is In Our DNA” —Wright

I can see how every one of these philosophies could be adapted to the world of animation and creative filmmaking.

Here’s “Vincent”.  Have a gander.  Btw, we went to the Tim Burton exhibit at the LACMA in LA recently.  If you’re a fan and in the area, you can’t miss it!  There is a ton of art on display as well as artifacts from his movies.  It’s going to be up until Halloween.  http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/tim-burton

So classic and awesome. What great storytelling.

Hmmmmmmm.

waveybrain:

In the 80’s my best friend’s dad worked for Apple.  We learned to surf together. Actually, his dad was so cool that he’d drive inland a couple miles to pick me up so I could surf with them.  One day he brought home an Apple IIe.  That was the first computer I had ever seen.  There was something intriguing about it, but being only 11, I had no idea what it was for.  I do remember a primitive drawing or painting app. When other kids were putting O’neill stickers on their surfboards, my friend proudly had a big rainbow Apple sticker on his.  It looked kind of gay:)  Later, when my engineer uncles both proudly displayed their Commodore 64s, I was wise enough to know that there was something better out there.  Cut to last year when I gave my dad an iPad; he looked at the apple logo and recalled that he was going to work for them in the 80’s were it not for his undermining supervisor at the airline who gave him a bad recommendation, despite  earlier pleading with him not to switch departments because, ‘he was his best worker’-DOE!  How life changing would that have been had he worked for Apple??

I don’t know who I admire more:  Wozniak or Jobs?  One seems kind of oblivious and modest, the other focused and driven.  Both are geniuses, and they seemed to have needed each other equally to give birth to Apple.  I think Job’s genius has been the ability to connect dots and act as the catalyst in forming something substantial of those dots.  That takes vision and charisma.  

I know he made Pixar what it is, but I really think when he made the purchase he acquired two passionate animation junkies:  Ed Catmul and John Lasseter.  From there they brought in more passionate and talented people and created an amazing animation studio.  I wonder how much influence the culture of Pixar has had on Apple’s great resurgence.  They were (presumably) using Apple machines and software and pushing them to the max, which must have driven and informed progress.  Plus, the creatives of Pixar brought new visual and intellectual story-driven inspirations with them…I have a feeling that Pixar had much to do with Apple’s incredible success in the last two plus decades.  I’d love to hear what Job’s thinks about that.  Sadly, Pixar got sucked up by Disney.  I guess it was a shrewd move at the time, but I was very sad that he did that.  Disney had lost it’s way, and Pixar was a great beacon, making it apparent where and why they had lost their way.  Since then, Jobs became an influential Disney board member, which was another shrewd move-given that Apple was becoming more and more a content distributer.  Forming an alliance with Disney was a powerful move for Jobs and Apple.  It gave them tremendous leverage to influence and distribute content.  But, now that whole structure is being shaken. I can only assume that him stepping down is an indication of his health.  Why else would he surrender his position?  I’ve been trying to learn more about Tim Cook, and the only thing I’ve gleaned is that he’s not charismatic like Jobs.  He seems guarded, and calculating-but not spontaneous or exciting.  I think that’s a problem.  The only thing that gives me hope is that the culture of Apple is stronger than ever.  But, on the surface, Cook isn’t the best representation of that.  When I look at what Lasseter and Catmul are doing for Disney/Pixar some flags are also raised.  While they seem to have good instincts, they also seem to have succumbed to the cancerous corporate mantra of “stronger, faster, cheaper”.  I think they’ve lost sight of the core of what made Pixar, Apple and Walt Disney Studios great…vision.  So, now we’re at a deficit of charisma and vision in my opinion.  I think that needs to be restored, or else, here comes Google around the outside.

Whatever happens, I’m sad to see Jobs go.  He’s a great inspiration.

-Waveybrain

dragoni:

Essay: Jobs’s Departure as CEO of Apple Is the End of an Extraordinary Era by Walt Mossberg

In both areas, people are constantly looking for easy answers, formulas and short cuts.

And in both areas there are none to be had. And trying to find them will lead to cliched and unsatisfying drawings and stories.

The only way I know for sure to make good drawings or good stories is to constantly work at them and rework them and rework them and rework them and rework them until they are as good as you can make them. That’s why good stories and good drawings are rare and both are things of great value. Because very few people have the patience, discipline and humility to create great ones.

drawnblog:

(via How Hard Is It To Get a Cartoon Into The New Yorker? - By James Sturm - Slate Magazine)

James Sturm writes about his experiences drawing and submitting cartoons to the New Yorker.

Interesting read.

I think Girl Walk // All Day might be the quintessential representation of modern independent artistry. Yeah, that sounds like a string of BS buzzwords, but I mean every one of them. Think about it – a musician takes hits from across a plethora of genres and mashes them together into a fantastic and fun musical album, which he then releases online for free. A filmmaker hears that album and decides he wants to use it as the sountrack and basis for a short film/music video filmed geurilla-style in Manhattan, all shot, edited, produced, and released online for free. It stars a dancer who mashes together dance styles from every conceivable genre. A musician who cares more about making entertaining music than adhering to the archaic conventions of the pop music industry; a filmmaker who cares more about making an amazing viewing experience than adhering to the archaic conventions of the blockbuster film industry; and a dancer who cares more about expressing herself through motion and using her body to its limits than adhering to the conventions of any one style of dance.

There is something beautiful about all of those layers mashing together…and something magical in the realization that ten years ago the whole thing would sound insane, but in our modern age when we are starting to perceive of art and its distribution so differently, it is practically unsurprising.

Here is the Kickstarter video for Girl Walk // All Day:

There’s something about seeing a film that you know by heart, being remixed into sometimes poignant, sometimes beautiful, often hilarious chunks. Every 15 seconds there’s something new and different, every 15 seconds you connect with someone else from across the world who loves this movie as much as you do. I’m not sure there is any way to really explain it, it’s more of an experience any Star Wars fan can appreciate.

You can view the entire movie here…just remember to budget a couple hours to watch it, because it definitely will suck you in!

This short film won best video in the Experimental category at the Vimeo Festival + Awards. Though the concept might sound boring, or at best amusing, I believe the execution of this amateur hour remix is phenomenal and compelling. Chris Beckman (using a concept by Billy Rennekamp) took 37 reclaimed YouTube videos and seamlessly edited them together at the points in which the cameramen/women lose control of their camcorder/smart phone/etc., and the result feels like one camera being tumbled through time and space, moving from one haphazard situation to another. From the camera’s POV we are struck by fireworks and a train, sent plummeting down mountain paths and snow-covered hills, tossed into the air and strapped to a remote control helicopter, dropped down a well and into a pool, go crowd surfing in a club and take a roller coaster ride.

While I tend to find most artist statements about their work to be pompous and excessively full of conceptual buzz words, Beckman’s description of his work seems to hit the nail right on the head:

Somewhere between a home-video mixtape and a postmodern travelogue, “oops”—a ten-minute art video composed entirely of appropriated YouTube videos, seamlessly stitched together via a motif of camera drops—serves both as transportative adventure and metaphorical elucidation of YouTube itself (i.e. endless related videos), exemplifying the Internet’s infinite repository of “throwaway” social documentation. From suburbia to subterranea, the radically shuffling environs induce a vertiginous yet aesthetically contextual thread—a transcendent, reincarnating POV; our omnipresent Camera—by which, the nature of the ultra-verité videos, eschewing any filmic grounding, plunges the viewer into a relationship of fleeting immediacy w/ its many videographers: a self-portrait at arms length, the digital blur of an obscuring thumb, a disembodied narrating voice. This abstractly voyeuristic portrayal of an ever-filming generation (who won’t let the transcendence of being in A Moment inhibit their document-everything impulse) presages a future where every instant of our existence, from the mundane to the sublime, is preserved and catalogued for all to see.

Jay O’Callahan talks in this video at the 99% conference about storytelling and its powerful way of expressing that which cannot otherwise be told. I’ve known for a long time that storytelling can be a powerful way to express ideas; in my job as a multimedia instructional designer I’ve come across many a project where we believed the best way to get a client’s employees engaged was to tell them a compelling story about the organization, and it works.

But what O’Callahan does here is much more: he takes a story that everyone thinks they know, and tells it in a way that makes it fresh and new and…dare I say it? Exciting!

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with what my mom calls the “butt glue” lately. That is, the thing that gets you to sit down, turn off the TV, close the browser, and just write. I figured I wouldn’t have a shot in Hell of winning against thousands of entries that had more than half an hour to write their entry. But if I even made it as a finalist, that’s some sort of validation. And if I won, and was able to do it by pulling the entry straight out of my head and onto the page, then I must be doing something right, right?

The rules state that the work can’t be published anywhere before the finalist is determined, so I’ll wait to post my entry until the contest is over. It was supposed to be based on this image below…and just as a hint, most people appeared to think of this as a coffee shop, but in my mind’s eye I was seeing a pizzeria.

Whatever happens, it was fun.  :)

Photo by Robb Hill

…Anyone know how to put together a home-made motion capture studio for less than $1k?  :P

Anyway, I’ve been spending last night and today trying to figure out how to embed waves into WordPress, so I can experiment with the liveblogging that I mentioned in my last post. It took awhile just to figure out how to add robots like Bloggy or WP-Bot so that I can publish the waves

Luckily I found the WordPress plugin Wavr, which doesn’t require any extensions within Wave at all. (Though I did have to upgrade WordPress to 2.8.5 for it to work, and finally found the instructions on how to use it buried within the notes on the file list at Sourceforge.) The actual wave I’m using is embedded below this post…for those without Wave accounts, here’s a screenshot:

Still, while Wavr is cool and works beautifully, there are a couple of problems I see right off the bat that seem to be consistent across these Embed APIs, including WP-Bot and Bloggy:

• Only those with Wave accounts can see what is in the wave. This sort of defeats the purpose of using it as a publishing tool.
• In order for a wave to be seen on the blog, it has to be marked as public. If it’s marked as public, anyone can go in and edit the content or comment on it. (I could be wrong about this one, but so far I haven’t seen a way for a user to publish a wave publicly, and still keep it protected.)

My hope was that Wave would give bloggers a way to update posts dynamically in real time while readers watched. I’m not sure if this is possible without a Wave account on the part of the audience…and even if it is, I wonder if it’s possible to customize the wave in such a way that it appears more like a blog post?

I could see one way to build an extension that would potentially accomplish this goal: build an extension that interfaces with the WordPress install, but doesn’t embed it. Rather, it reads the title of the wave and makes a new blog post with that title. Then it reads each blip, and adds those as paragraphs to the post. When the writer is done, they publish the wave and the extension publishes the content as a post. If the writer goes back to edit the wave later, the extension goes back to that original post and edits it accordingly.

Of course, the problem with this is that you have to wait until the wave is “finished” before the post is published. And even if you were to set up the extension so it updates the post every time you finish a blip, not only would it not be updating character by character (which is way cooler)…but the reader would have to refresh their browser before seeing any changes. Lame.

Maybe it’s a moot point, as within the next couple of years it’s very possible that most of the technologically-savvy world will have Wave accounts anyway. Though honestly, that’s a bit optimistic. Another hope is that Google will open up waves so that everyone can see them…they just can’t interact with them (this would make more sense IMO).

Regardless, my “live novel” won’t be ready for the start of NaNoWriMo I don’t believe. Though I did find a cool extension called CountColon (countcolon@appspot.com for any wavers who want to add this bot to your contacts), which lets you count lines, words, characters etc. by adding it to the wave and typing “[count: words]” in a blip. (It doesn’t dynamically update though, so if you go back and edit, you have to re-insert the code to get a fresh count.)

Also, I’ve found a couple of pages that have been a big help as far as finding extensions for Wave…apparently there was supposed to be a welcome wave in my inbox when I first logged in that had this kind of info, but I never got one. So I’ve been spending a lot of time browsing forums and trying to glean the simplest of info on how to use the service…such as how to make my avatar appear publicly. Anyway, here are a couple of those resources:

The complete list of Google Wave Gadgets, Robots and Servers
Comprehensive Google Wave Extensions List

And for the wave-savvy, here is my test embed of Wavr!

EDIT: This code has been removed, as it now causes errors when viewing the page.

Or, if you’re impatient and don’t feel like siting through 1.3 hours of cool demonstrations, at least check out from about minute 19 to 22, which is what I’m going to be talking about.

So you can see how Google Wave is going to completely change communication, right? Not just the tools that we use to communicate, or subtle changes such as character-by-character transfer of information…but how those subtle changes will very likely modify our fundamental perception of communication. At least, I think so.

My first thought was about publication. Publishing has already changed dramatically within the past decade…we are in the middle of a revolution in which the public is now the publisher. We are moving away from trained professionals, censors, and media giants controlling the content – whether that content be news, opinion, fiction, or what-have-you – to the individual as the creator, editor, and publisher. And finally, we are getting used to that idea (or at least some of us are). Then along comes Google Wave to once again turn publishing on its head.

Let’s look at the current state of a typical blog; the user can be anyone from a trained professional to a budding amateur. They write posts as drafts; edit, modify, find and link to resources, delete and add content, etc. Then when the post looks pristine (or pristine enough to them), and they are sure it’s ready to post (I tend to double, triple, and even quadruple check mine), they hit the notorious “publish” button. Once that’s done, it’s out there in the public eye – and while the user can always go back and edit a post (hopefully before anyone has a chance to read it!) there’s no guarantee that a reader hasn’t already seen that first post, or that it hasn’t been archived by a search engine or saved for posterity on Archive.org. This means that what we publish once, we can’t unpublish. Hence why we’re so careful that a post is “ready” before it is put out into the world.

Then along comes Google Wave, with its ability to show a post being edited as it happens right within the browser. This means that if a reader across the world happens to be on your site at the right time while you’re creating a post, they can watch live as you create and edit, just as if they were looking over your shoulder while you write. This is what I’m talking about when I imply that Google is introducing a revolution in communication.

A friend asked me a few weeks ago (he has a teenage son) why it is that young people seem so much more willing to share information, info that in my friend’s day would have never been discussed with acquaintances, let alone the public. He wondered how the shift happened from not talking about our most private matters to posting them publicly on LiveJournal, Facebook, or Twitter. It was a question I had to think about, and one that I have a theory for, but I’ll save that for a future post.

The point is that there has been a shift from privatized information to public information…from assuming that sharing will always produce negative results to believing in the transparency and openness of information and people alike.

Considering this, we’re already skirting the edge of comfort with anyone and everyone being able to create, edit, polish, and publish their own thoughts. Now, we’ve removed the “edit and polish” part of that equation. Anyone who comes across a blog that has embedded Google Wave will now be able to read along as the blogger writes. This removes an important aspect of publishing that has been inherent in every form of the written language from the invention of print to the modern web: the ability to keep what you write to yourself until it’s “ready” to be seen by the public. It is a truly live form of performance, a form which to my knowledge has never been achievable by writers.

How do you think that written content, or the process of writing, will change when writers no longer choose to check and recheck and then check their post again before publishing it? How will it change when all of the mistakes – spelling errors, content errors, continuity errors, incorrect facts, etc. – are visible to anyone who cares to tune in? I think many writers will assume that their integrity as content creators will go down – that their readers will lose respect for them and their craft. I assume this because of how trained journalists have reacted to the transition from news being reported by newspapers to being reported by individuals. It makes sense in a bizarre, if antique, way – how can your news have integrity if the reporter has no institutional integrity?

However, I don’t think this will be the case. I think that fans will have a growing respect for the writers they follow…I think that being able to view the drafts as they are being built will not only entice readers to check the site often in order to catch the writer in the act, but I think it will make them feel much closer to the writer in the way that Twitter has made us feel much closer to the celebrities we love. It will help to narrow the gap between celebrity and fan, without forcing the two into mutual territory.

I can already imagine what I’d like to do with Google Wave when it’s released. I would like to integrate it with my WordPress blog, so that I can see what this effect might have on anyone who cares to read my work. I would also like to try writing a work of fiction publicly, perhaps a short story or novella, and encourage people to log in and view as I work (talk about public accountability! If you’re not in the act of writing, your fans will be able to see right away and call you on it). If this is possible before November, I think it’d even be great to attempt this during NaNoWriMo…what a great union the two could be!

And completely out of left field, even though the extension doesn’t yet exist (to my knowledge), what if you could create an application that uses Google Wave’s ability to collaborate and update live for visual art? To draw live online or in your friends’ waves…or to even publish webcomics live – no, to draw them live as your audience watches – that could be the next evolution of streaming live!

But I’m getting way ahead of myself, I think. First thing’s first: it has to be released!