Following up on my post about [getting your kid into preschool](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/getting-your-kid-into-preschool), reader bensitzer tipped me off to an upcoming documentary about the equivalent madness in NYC. You can see the trailer [here](http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/nurseryuniversity/).
Follow Up
Cams, rips and release dates
Following up on [last week’s post](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/fansubbing) about international release dates and subtitles, I’ve been asking around to find more information about studios’ anti-piracy efforts. I didn’t get into any specific numbers — and I wouldn’t know how seriously to take the numbers anyway.
But based on these conversations, I came across a few broad bullet points worth sharing:
* Studios have gotten more sophisticated about putting tracking marks in individual prints, often localized by country, to help them determine the source of a leak. It’s not just the ugly brown dots anymore.
* For almost every movie, they can trace back bootlegs to one or two “cams” (in-theater camcorder recordings) and just a handful of subsequent DVD rips. They assign letter grades to these bootlegs based on quality. And quality matters: a cam which rates a “C” won’t be nearly as much a factor as a “B.”
* For certain countries, studios will delay theatrical release because of a history of cams originating there. They’ll then release the DVD as soon as possible thereafter.
* The subtitles issue becomes important because a cam or rip in the wrong language isn’t especially appealing.
* In Italy, where custom greatly favors dubbing over subtitles, you don’t see much piracy until the local language DVD rip leaks.
Obviously, this is only talking about feature films. American television is at least as important to many international viewers, and much harder to lock down.
And for independent film, it’s a whole other clustermuck. You’re dealing with local distributors, so trying to coordinate any worldwide effort is going to be extremely difficult.
Last night, I was talking with another friend about 3D. It hadn’t occurred to me that a 3D film is probably more difficult to cam. Possible, certainly — it’s a fun mental exercise — but not as easy to get something usable.
Show your work, pt. 2
Following up on [last night’s post](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/show-your-work), it occurs to me that designing and programming for the web also has an aspect of showing your work. Nearly every browser lets you “View Source,” showing how the page was constructed…up to a point.
For example, if you View Source on the new [Answer Finder](http://johnaugust.com/answers) I built, you can see the JavaScript (and jQuery) that drives the menu and shows/hides the various sections.
What you can’t see is the PHP on the server that generated those sections. In my case, this is a good thing, because the PHP is so awful and kludgy that I can’t explain or defend why it works.
So to make that one page, I’m relying on a bunch of technologies with vastly different levels of transparency.
The “transparent” technologies are available for anyone interested in looking. And that’s mostly good: Peeking beneath the hood is a great way to learn how a technology works. I often find myself opening the CSS for sites I like to see how they’re constructed. ((Keep in mind that you can learn bad habits this way.))
I’m classifying HTML as semi-transparent because so much of the HTML you see when you “View Source” for a site is generated by scripts running on the server, and it’s not automatically clear how or why. WordPress, for example, mixes in at least four parts (Header, Content, Footer and Sidebar) to make any given page. Someone familiar with WordPress might be able to deduce a basic structure, and figure out which parts were generated by The Loop. But in some cases it’s arbitrary. For example, the category links at the bottom of most pages on this site could be hard-coded or generated on the fly, and you wouldn’t be able to tell.
While you can find a lot of information about the images used on a site, including where they’re stored, you don’t necessarily know how they were generated. The chart above, for example, is a .png made from a snapshot of a Numbers document.
In the fully-opaque category are PHP and MySQL, who do most of the heavy lifting for the site but are completely insulated from the user.
Traditionally, programmers have been able to disappear behind the opacity of a compiler. Designers could hide behind the printing or manufacturing process. With the web, the process behind the product is much more visible.
(End of Geek Alert)
=====
The same thing is happening to movies. Not too long ago, a movie came into existence in popular culture just shortly before its release, when the first ads and trailers started running. I didn’t know anything about Die Hard before I saw a trailer. I saw The Blair Witch Project without any idea who made it or how.
Now, long before the marketing begins — before production even begins — details of projects spill across the internet for consumption and criticism. Scripts leak. Photographers sneak pictures of the set, or the costumes. The omission of a giant squid becomes the focal point of conversation for a movie that doesn’t yet exist.
For movies and television, I’m not sure we’re better off “showing the work” in advance.
I appreciate reading American Cinematographer to see how Robert Elswit lights There Will Be Blood, but I don’t read those articles before seeing the movie, lest I get too distracted by those details when I watch it. Likewise, I wish I didn’t know what I know about Terminator: Salvation or Dollhouse. It’s not insider knowledge, but rather the media reporting on the media.
This isn’t transparency, an invitation to come look inside. It’s forced exposure. It’s uncomfortable, and by nature we try to avoid uncomfortable things.
The Kindle is not good for screenplays
Many friends and readers have written to ask, so I thought I’d bump this note out of the comment thread. The new Kindle is terrific for books. But it doesn’t yet handle formatted text like screenplays well at all.
This is a sample of Go, converted from pdf:
(I’ve gotten roughly the same results when sending it in Word format.)
Are you an unemployed coder? A wanna-be web entrepreneur? Are you Nima?
Consider this a call to adventure. I’m envisioning a web service to which you could submit (or email) a screenplay pdf (or text file) and have it sent to your Kindle, nicely formatted. Charge a nickel for it, or just do it for free until Amazon buys you out.