MTV’s Movies blog asked me to come up with my choices for best movie bad-asses, which I took to encompass both heroes and villains. You can see my list here.
Horses and books
In his lengthy essay about e-books, John Siracusa makes a good point about how new technologies rarely completely replace what came before them.
Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word “horse” for “book” and the word “car” for “e-book.” (…)
“Books will never go away.” True! Horses have not gone away either.
“Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome.” True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don’t go everywhere, nor should they.
“Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can’t match.” True! Cars just can’t match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn’t. I’m sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a “horseless carriage” — and they never did! And then they died.
For the record, I love my Kindle while acknowledging its many shortcomings. I’m looking forward to the next version, and whatever Apple finally releases.
(Kind acknowledgements Daring Fireball.)
iMovie 09 is much better, still maddening
A few weeks ago, I expressed exasperation upon seeing demos of iMovie 09, which seemed to be working hard to fix exactly the wrong problems. Now that I have it installed, I’ve been able to spend a few days playing around with it. And you know what?
It’s actually a lot better.
Yes, that could be damning with faint praise. iMovie 08 was terrible, a one-fingered monkey’s paw of doom. But iMovie 09 is genuinely useful and fun. The new themes are incredibly powerful; throw it a bunch of photos and you’ll have a slick slideshow in under 60 seconds.1 The filmstrip-like browser is a smart way of showing projects. In addition to new eye candy, many little grievances have been fixed.
To demonstrate, here’s a slideshow of some of my Africa photos that took three minutes from drop to export. Yes, it could be better, but the point is that it’s fairly competent even on automatic.
A big public thank you to all the Apple folks who clearly put a zillion hours into making it better.
That said, there are still a lot of little grievances. The interface is confusing at times, with a lot of unlabeled buttons, and contextual menus that only show up with a left click, rather than a right click. The only way to save a project is to duplicate it first in the project browser, so if you make a horrible muddle, there’s no going back to an earlier version. 2 I have no idea why Clip Trimmer exists. With the exception of very short clips, it simply lets you drag the handles you’d think you could in the normal view.
In short, iMovie 09 makes it easy to do very complicated things, and complicated to do very easy things.
By far the most maddening thing for me is iMovie’s bizarre alternative to a timeline, an unlabeled space I guess is called “Projects.”3 As I’ve already confessed…
Yes, I have the curse of knowledge: I know how an editing system is “supposed to” work, as it does in Final Cut, Avid and to some degree, the original iMovie. But I’m always game for a new and better idea, particularly if it makes heretofore complicated things easier for newcomers to understand.
This Projects space is a mess, no matter what your experience level. For starters, it wraps like a word processor. Every single piece of video you’ve ever seen on the web has had a playhead that goes from left to right. In iMovie, it goes left to right, top to bottom.
And I still have no idea why. It’s a fundamental decision Apple made with 08, and it persists. I wondered if it was to help people with smaller monitors, so I tried it out on my 13″ MacBook. Nope. It’s actually worse on a little screen. You see very little of your movie at a time. On a big monitor, you can make the area big enough to see most or all of a movie.
It’s not like a horizontal timeline is too complicated for the average user. GarageBand is nothing but a stack of scrolling horizontal tracks. (In fact, if you export a movie to GarageBand, you end up with a rough approximation of what the interface could be.)
Responding to the problem it created, Apple came up with Precision Editor, a genuinely clever way to visualize cuts and transitions that I hope and assume will gravitate up towards Final Cut Pro. I think they made the word-wrapping thing work as well as they could.
But it’s a good implementation of a bad idea.
For example, let’s say you need two songs to play — maybe you’re switching back and forth between them. In any other editor, this is trivial — you slice them up and put the pieces where they need to go, perhaps checkerboarding them. But, sticking with its word-wrap philosophy, iMovie only lets you treat music as an envelope wrapped around the whole thing. You can “unpin” music to slide it around, but if you’re coming back to a song six times, you need to add the same track six times.4
iMovie 09 does a lot of things right. Some of its choices, like keeping sound effects pinned to a specific frame, are smart. And many of its new bells and whistles, like video stabilization, will be a huge help.
iMovie 10 needs something resembling a horizontal timeline. It doesn’t even have to have “time” per se. Since iMovie makes everything magnetically click together, it’s not nearly as important that the horizontal scale represent seconds. Just give us a playhead that shows us where we are in the project and lets us line up simultaneous events. (The current version comes tantalizingly close at times, such as when you add picture-in-picture, so it’s clearly an achievable goal.)
The new version is good enough that I’ll certainly use it for some projects that I would otherwise do in Final Cut Pro. That’s a big reversal for me.
- Granted, it will probably look like everyone else’s slick slideshow, so do yours first. ↩
- True: iPhoto doesn’t have a Save command either. But you’re not likely to spend an hour tweaking a single photo. And iPhoto always lets you revert to the original. ↩
- If you hover over the double-arrow button that divides top and bottom, it offers to “Swap Events and Projects.” ↩
- Yes, you could do this in GarageBand. But the point of cutting to music is *cutting* to music. ↩
Nice to meet you. Again. Maybe.
Let’s say I’m a development exec and I’m going into a meeting with a writer (a big, successful one) whom I’ve met before — but it was a brief conversation and it was ten years ago, possibly longer.
When the writer says, “Nice to meet you,” I shouldn’t say, “We’ve actually met before, but it was a brief conversation and it was ten years ago,” should I? I should just act like we haven’t met before, right?
Or would the writer be flattered that I’d remember the conversation and was excited to have it, since the writer is a big deal? Which is the truth?
— Anonymous
Okay: It’s entirely possible that I was the writer who didn’t remember you. I’m sorry. We’ll get to why it happens (The Kevin Williamson Problem) in a second. Let’s solve your issue first.
In the situation you present, there’s generally a way to point out history without making too big a deal out of it.
WRITER
Nice to meet you.
EXEC
You probably don’t remember, but I met you years ago on that Goblin Bikers project at Cinergi.
WRITER
Wow. Whatever happened to Cinergi?
...and so on.
It’s for exactly this reason that I’ve gotten in the habit of saying “Hi” or “Hello” instead of the default “Nice to meet you.” And I don’t end a meeting with that phrase either. “Great talking with you” or a simple “Thanks” does the trick.
But why does it happen in the first place? Are writers such social abominations that they can’t even remember who they’ve met before?
No. And the perfect person to illustrate this fact is another screenwriter.
The Kevin Williamson Problem
I’ve named this phenomenon in honor of Kevin Williamson, a screenwriter who is now a friend, but who for many years was the guy who couldn’t remember that he’d met me. We would be introduced by a mutual acquaintance, and he’d go right to “Nice to meet you.” Nevermind that we’d met three times before. Nevermind that we had shared interests, friends and connections (such as Katie Holmes). He was perfectly nice to talk with, but I sensed that every time I walked away the slate was wiped clean.
What a jerk.
Except of course, he wasn’t. He’s a nice guy. The problem was the complete disparity in our rememberability. The fair question wasn’t, “Why can’t Kevin Williamson remember me?” It was, “Why can I remember Kevin Williamson?”
Simple: When I met Kevin Williamson, I already knew who he was. He had movies in theaters and a show on TV. He had profiles in EW. So the first time I shook his hand, I knew a lot about him, and had already formed opinions. Again, I knew him before I met him.
The first time he met me, I was a brand new person. So after a brief conversation, he was no more likely to remember me than any other cocktail party guest.
I understand this because I now suffer from the Kevin Williamson Problem all the time. Among the tiny subset of people who pay attention to screenwriters, I’m “famous” enough that strangers sometimes recognize me. This is odd. And even when I enter a conversation heretofore anonymous, the projects I’ve written get attached to me: He’s the guy who wrote that Willy Wonka movie. So, after a brief conversation, I’m more likely to be remembered than do the remembering.
In the situation presented, you as a development executive have had the chance to see this writer’s name in the trades for years. You’ve had a lot of memory reinforcement. He hasn’t. So it would be pretty remarkable if he remembered you. Therefore, it’s smart of you to provide a lot of context and no implied request for apology.
They grow so fast, don’t they?
A related situation I’ve been grappling with is how many new people I’m expected to remember now that my daughter is in preschool. It’s not just the fifteen kids in her class; it’s all of their parents, and siblings. A weekend birthday party can mean 45 names I’m suddenly supposed to be able to recall. Is Daphne Kate’s mom, or is Kate Daphne’s mom? Add in bouncy houses and screaming, and the name buffer quickly overflows.
Luckily, there’s cake.