Recent conversations – in person and on Twitter – have had me thinking about creativity and art: what are they and how do they apply to film, television and other production?
Most people associate “art” with the fine arts, but I think the term gets used without much real content. Most often “art” is conflated with “creativity”. With the additional complication that most people don’t understand what they mean by “creativity”, once again conflating it with fine art.
After perhaps one tsunami video too many, we got to talking seriously about backup and how “secure we were”. It was a disturbing revelation, particularly for people who live in an earthquake zone where the next “big one” is expected before I die!
Of course we both have dedicated drives for our Time Machine backups (being all OS X based here) but they’re in the same physical space as our computers, so if for some reason that was destroyed, we’d be no better off than having no backup. Â Ditto the demonstration media and archives of projects. Locally they’re stored on a RAID 1 drive for redundancy.
Having started raising the question, what are the answers? And that leads to the examination of what it is that you would need to get your “life back”, at least close to where it is now. I thought I’d share our thinking to stimulate your thinking, not only about a total disaster, but an immediate smaller one.
Dear Hollywood: It’s Time To Realize Artificial Scarcity Is Gone… And That’s A Good Thing
The economics of physical goods followed a supply and demand curve, as you no doubt learnt in high school: the larger the supply of something, the lower the cost; conversely the tighter the supply (a.k.a. scarcity) lead to higher costs. But classic economics doesn’t deal happily with “goods” that are effectively infinite, such as digital copies of media are.
This will be my 14th consecutive NAB, starting in 1998 when I travelled from Australia for the conference. (And again in 1999 and 2000 before moving to the US in 2001.) Needless to say, I find it worthwhile both professionally and socially.
You absolutely need an Exhibits pass – going to NAB without one will make the trip much less worthwhile. Good news is I can offer you a code to get a free one:
Simply register at http://bit.ly/NABSM08 to get the discount automatically, or at http://www.nabshow/register using the code SM08
Even better, that code will also give you a $100 discount off any education package, including:
Professionalism is for Amateurs http://tinyurl.com/45doktd
After making the case that “professionals” rejected the founders of Google, the founders of Apple and that amateurs created the “much bigger than the pro encyclopedia” Wikipedia, the article finishes with this clincher:
My reluctance to work with so called ‘professionals’ goes so far that whenever someone says “Lets do this the professional way†or “But that doesn’t seems professional†I can’t help but instinctively move in the other direction. If it seems professional to me it sounds boring and unoriginal.
Its the awkward people, the creative thinkers and the unconventional innovators that rule the world. Not the people who act ‘professional’ and follow the beaten path.
Re-invent the world; act unprofessionally!
But what really is a professional?
Want a truly horrible customer experience? Buy from Wildform. The product is fine and does the job, but the experience of buying it, doesn’t measure up.
For Every Entertainment Industry Job ‘Lost’ To Infringement, – 12 Jobs Be Created Elsewhere? http://tinyurl.com/4vtott2
It’s an interesting piece of research particularly int he light of the discredited (by the US Government Accounting Office) “studies” by the RIAA and MPAA, which never take into account any potential positive of unauthorized distribution, aka free publicity.
How TED Learned That ‘Giving It (their talks) Away’ Increased Both Popularity And Revenue http://tinyurl.com/4qo4g6k
LinkedIn purchased CardMunch and the service is free. Take pic of card, send. A while later, it’s back in text as a contact. I’m loving it!
More Music Sold Than Ever Before, Despite Piracy http://tinyurl.com/28m66jw UK’s BPI claims sales dropped but it’s a very selective reading of the data.