The argument for Standard Definition

Hello all and welcome back to my blog.

I was having a brief thought this morning which I believe should be shared amongst all of the film community in and out of Cape Town, as well as everywhere else. As we all know, the film industry is a difficult one to enter because of the high costs involved in film production. And right now, these costs are the barrier to a lot of aspiring filmmakers. This is a problem - effectively, those not rich enough to make their own films are being silenced.

And I think I know why.

You see, when I was in Film Production class at UCT, our generation seemed to be obsessed - and I literally do mean obsessed with production values. Production values ostensibly refer to quality, but I think they actually refer to how 'polished' a product looks. What that means is that when we see a feature film created by Hollywood, we're often seeing something that has been shot on actual film, scanned onto a computer, edited and printed back on to film. That gives their pictures a visual quality we long to match.. which is something that can't be done without shitloads of money. Everyone knows I have my issues with Hollywood, but surely I can't be bashing films that look nice?

Well, I'm not doing that either. It's wonderful that we have visual masterpieces on film. Two of my favourite films ever, Sin City and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow are on my favourites list mostly because of the production design elements, which look the way they do because of expensive equipment (although I would like to point out that Sin City was shot in HD and not on film).

So here we have a new generation of young filmmakers, most of them without large cash deposits longing for their films to look like those, and in the process scorning films with so-called 'low' production values. THAT's where the problem lies. So concerned with production values were we as a class that most groups, for our final graduation project, refused to shoot with a Sony NX5 (1920x1080 at 24 Mbps, this is full HD at three megabytes per SECOND, so a 10-minute film weighs in at 1,8 GB), despite the fact that we could get hold of this camera for free. Instead, we went with the Canon 5D Mark II, which shoots at 38 Mbps. For this we paid R400 per DAY - at a 90% discounted rate (the original rate being R4000/day - all this for the camera BODY, with no lens).

The problem, again, is not that we are making films that look beautiful, but that we are continuing a trend in which visual quality is more important than content. This is likely to hurt freelancers with older equipment especially - they will not be hired because they haven't yet saved up the R100 000 necessary to buy all the latest stuff. And we are feeding a capitalist industry that just loves to tell us how bad Standard Definition is.

When I uploaded the aforementioned film, Nje Ngathi to Vimeo, their specifications for the upload were 640x360 at 2 Mbps. And rightfully so... imagine how long it would take people with South Africa's shitty internet to buffer it in full HD? The point is, here I am uploading a version that is 1/19th of the original's quality - and that's just OK. It still looks good enough.

So the point, then, is not to stop recording movies in HD - after all, we do need technology to continue to expand, become cheaper and more accessible. What I'm suggesting is that production values, which are not limited to picture quality, but in fact cover many aspects of video production, scale in diminishing return - the more you spend on making them right, the less output you get for each rand you spend. And if you have little or no money but still want to make a film, you'll be derided for not matching the production companies' standards. That is how they stay in power and keep you out of it.

What we need is a realisation that glossy finishes do not make good films. That content is more important than visuals. The next time you see an independently produced film in SD, don't shy away from it just because its visuals aren't as impressive as Avatar. Remember that over 2 billion rand was spent on that film - then the fact that it's visual quality is only 20 times better than an SD film produced for less than R1000 starts to put it in perspective for you.

The Neurotypical Emulator

The following post is based strongly off a conversation I had with a good friend. You know who you are.. thanks man.

Understanding of this article will be quite strongly biased in favour of those who have a decent understanding of computers and programming at their most basic levels. If you struggle to understand the terms I use, it would really be better to look them up as I can't predict in advance how many terms I'm going to have to define for different members of my audience. Of course, you can always just ask me what I mean, too.

Hypothetically, aspies run different operating systems to neurotypical people. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. And there are many more NTs (neutorypicals) in the world than aspies, so NTs by default are running different variations, but with mostly similar source code operating systems. Aspies have a different system. Neither should change their native OS, because their native one is the most efficient type of system for their neurochemistry. (This is far from suggesting neither should IMPROVE their OS or use different examples as a way of learning), but that the building-block source code does not necessarily need a vendor change.


As Linux (an open-source OS) has Wine (an emulator designed to run Windows applications), aspies need a sort of emulator, or virtual machine to run NT apps. Exactly which applications constitute NT status are very disputed, and I will not attempt to list them in this post. That is a story for another occasion. What I would like you to remember though, is that the more tired the particular aspie is, the more bugs will be present in his/her NT emulator and the less effective that aspie will be in communcation. When the NT emulator crashes, the term 'meltdown' is used to explain the condition.

That is all, as I have to run.

Humanity

I've met many people over the course of a lifetime who, oddly enough, seem to have humanity all figured out. I usually ask such wise people to share their insight with me, and am most often met with a result suspicously similar to one of the following.

-People suck
-People are cruel
-You shouldn't care too much about people because they will always disappoint you in the end


When I ask for proof of such assertions, I typically get answers such as Nazi Germany, Russian communists and Internet trolls. Basically, their thesis is that because there are this many shitty people in the world, that shittiness itself is the lowest common denominator following humanity itself.

The simple truth is that yes, while there are extreme examples of human cruelty and inaction in the face of extreme violence, there are also extreme examples of selflessness and goodness that all too often go unnoticed because they are performed by everyday people. As such, they are not 'newsworthy' and slip under the radar.

No extreme examples are going to tell us very much about human nature, anyway. They are outliers. And it is my belief that humans are in fact inherently good, but can be easily corrupted. Most people WANT to be good, they just don't know how.

Why don't they know this? I think you can see where this is going. Goodness is easy to corrupt. If you make people believe that if they are good, they will be walked all over and bullied (which is easy to do if you are one of the bullies) but convince them that if they look out solely for their self-interest (which all too often ends up being the interest of the upper-classes) they will be OK, then perhaps they'll try it. And in the beginning they may even appear to succeed. For they arent being bullied anymore, which negatively reinforces their behaviour of supporting the man. It doesnt matter if the man was the one bullying them in the first place.

See, people really WANT to do the right thing, but are corrupted into doing less because they believe it is the only way they will see results of their actions. Wake up. The system was not created for your benefit. If you want to do the right thing, then do this: Spread this information. Wake other people up. Educate. Be a leader. Save that person from the bullies. Intervene. You may just save their life, and then that person could one day become someone influential that saves the world.

Because the world needs to be saved. There is too much preventable unhappiness in the world at the moment, and we have all been conditioned to accept this state of affairs, lest it be us suffering like that.

It doesnt need to be this way.