32A DVD is coming…

Posted on | September 23, 2009 | No Comments

Delighted to say that the DVD of 32A is coming soon. It’ll be released on October 16th, Friday in Ireland available nationwide in Xtravision and for sale via the Janey Pictures site and via Amazon.

It’s actually available now for preorder on Amazon.co.uk. This will take a little longer to come, November 9th.

For those of you not based in the UK or Ireland, it’s a PAL disc with Region 2 encoding. So you’ll need a multiregion DVD player and television to match. That or a good laptop…

iTunes Extras – a start at least

Posted on | September 10, 2009 | No Comments

Well it’s a start.

It’s always interesting to see when Apple put a new element into the media mix. With iTunes extras, they’ve placed a marker in the sand, acknowledging the need to address additional content. but they have not provided a full solution. That’s a while away. I think that’s probably Apple’s take on this too, given the short amount of time it got at the presentation in San Francisco for iTunes 9. The independent sector is in full flight at the moment examining new ways of engaging audiences using additional content amongst other things, but there’s only studio offerings here.

Apple have taken one thing on board, that digital downloads provide a thin experience compared to DVD. The additional material is popular and acts as a piracy deterrent. Up till this point it has also been a deterrent to buying on iTunes. The public would sooner own a DVD with extras for the same money as a download. This decision is a step towards addressing that. Kudos to Apple for being the first major player in the market to step in and start providing a solution. But my hunch is that Apple have taken an interim measure to see how this shakes out. This has the vague air of the AppleTV about it in terms of Apple’s commitment.

iTunes extras are essentially websites bundled into a package for download. iTunes has Webkit built in for quite a while, it’s what the iTunes Store is built upon. As such the extras are designed for a specific screen size, resizing windows won’t scale anything, it’s a set frame. This means it won’t migrate to the iPhone or iPod Touch. it certainly could work well on an AppleTV, but there’s no news on that possibility. AppleTVs would need a system update, which is probably in the works, it would make sense. The extras would also have a lot of appeal on a future tablet which Apple may release.

When you download one, you get two files, the main movie file and the extras version, which also includes the main movie file. The main movie file is presumably for popping on your iPhone or AppleTV, the extras version is for watching on your computer. So flexible on one hand but, given the repetition, a bit clunky on the other. it would have been smarter to see a version that knew what it was playing on, but that’s not how they’ve been built, and it’s not how iTunes works. The Wall-E movie file is about 1.4 Gb and the Extras version was 1.8Gb, pretty big chunks of data given space and download caps. This clunkiness extends unfortunately and has implications.

The first howl of protest you’ll hear from the buyer is ‘No commentaries?’ and on first look through the offerings, there’s none. A closer look shows why.

The way iTunes extra versions are set up means that the original movie file, which comes with two soundtracks, stereo and surround, is bundled into the package. For Apple to provide a director’s commentary, it would have to be included in the main movie file as an alternate soundtrack. Or they would have to bundle into the extras version a different movie file with a commentary included. However…

- that movie file would have become more attractive to pirates. Metadata like commentaries are key now in providing a richer experience away from piracy. Studios may be slow to release this increasingly valuable additional material, this may be a negotiation issue.

- there could also be a technical issue, stemming out of the overall structure of an iTunes extra file. For example, there would have to be some way of having a movie file play with one soundtrack and not another from a javascript instruction. I’m unaware of that being a possibility, perhaps at some point.

So you’ll see a lot of ‘introduced by the director’ pre-scenes as well as deleted scenes with extensive introductions and afterwords, certainly in the Wall-E iTunes Extras version. Apple are seeking to re-invent a little here, skirting around the missing commentary. I wonder what process the films which are included went through with the iTunes team, would be interesting to hear. Clearly a fuller, deeper look at how metadata and films are to be presented digitally is still a ways off.

And on the front line? Indie filmmakers know that, like musicians before them, it’s increasingly all about a direct relationship with the audience and building up a conversation with them. Compared to real time interaction, continuously developing material and new forms of cross platform material, the iTunes extras look a little dated, taking on some of the aspects of the DVD which they seek to replace.

San Francisco

Posted on | August 15, 2009 | No Comments

As any of our friends will tell you, we loved San Francisco which we explored during our screening of 32A at Mill Valley last year. Wel, two of my photos from my SF Flickr set have been included in the Schmapp guide to San Francisco. Which is pretty cool.

California Academy of Sciences

Transamerica Pyramid

Software as the key artform of the 21st Century

Posted on | August 14, 2009 | 1 Comment

Isn’t it time we stopped talking about media and returned to the term artform?

A medium is ultimately physical in our understanding of it, no matter how enhanced or extended it may be.

For me, one of the main achievements of the digital revolution is to have separated creative content from media. Now, no longer bound by the existing hardware models with all their limitations, we are free to explore our various artforms via software, a far more natural environment for creative material.

Technology has always impacted upon cultural development, in particular the arts. All you have to do is look at the Russian avant garde and the impact of the machine on art, or in the explosion of media in particular, from radio on up throughout the 20th century.

The rising tide of digital technology as the end of the 20th century which has matured at the start of this century, given the wide dispersal of computers and the emergence of broadband globally, gave birth to a new internet culture which has impacted hugely on existing media.

We’ve been distracted by how digital technology mimics a medium really well, how it extends them and combines them with other technologies. Those three steps are present in each of the creative fields, most clearly in music. There it took on the genre of music completely, extended the creative options for musicians and spearheaded the new distribution channels for music. These cultural forces, experienced as rapid changes to humanity, are almost alive in how unstoppable and progressive they are.

Not all existing media fare well out of this, television as a medium was in trouble long before digital culture emerged. The structure of television, top down, one to many, rigid control of content, only a few outlets per nation, had been incredibly limiting over the years, and it had ended up myopically examining itself as the last century closed with top ten shows focussed on television’s own inventory. If music had faced similar limitations it would have withered and died.

The net disbands completely these kinds of structure, they have no place there. The recent economic downturn and the shift away from advertising saw those old models crumble alarmingly quickly, it became clear that the boom and advertising were all that was holding up the existing ways of doing business.

This dispersal of content creation opens up the very basics of each artform for questioning. As a creator of course, It matters not whether it’s individuals or groups of individuals, active independent content producers or production companies, all bets are off. And ultimately one major question we all face is that of production finance. Who’ll finance these?

Our focus now, both on creative work and it’s dissemination should be on exploring developing software with a view to creating work and it’s expression and communication. The creators of software whether it’s new services online or applications, are the structuring limitation or future liberators, the new artists in our mix. If Film was the artform of the 20th century. Software is the key artform of the 21st.

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Earlier thoughts on software here and here.

Design decisions for iPhone

Posted on | April 26, 2009 | No Comments

I attended DevDays, a useful one-day conference for iPhone developers, enjoyed it thoroughly, had a good positive chat with the folks from Apple and enjoyed most of the presentations. The slideshare presentation below was from Des Traynor of Contrast. It was a good positive talk where the route to making your app was clearly outlined as a concrete series of steps, decisions that need to be made.

One Billion Apps

Posted on | April 24, 2009 | 2 Comments

A billion apps downloaded. In just nine months.

What does that tell us?

It tells me a lot. It tells me that people have a very different relationship with applications on the iPhone than they do anywhere else.

That really made me stop when I thought that.

Because that’s a big deal, that’s the game changer right there.

For decades now, installation, even choice of apps, has been the domain of the lone specialist. Groups, whether they be families or companies, trusted nerds to specify, source, install, train, maintain, upgrade, replace them when needed.

That’s all gone. Everyone does it now, all that’s gone on the iPhone.

I’ve been long fond of saying that Everyone’s A Nerd Now. That we all use computers and software to do whatever it is we do, but the reality is that most people used a trusted guide to structure that experience still. But here it’s clear that is over.

Why is this big for me? It’s big because it opens up the possibility of exploring that relationship. That people, individuals, will start to engage with software on the same level as they do with books, or songs, or film, other creative material. That it’s personal in a real way which it’s never actually been before, not shared, not mediated, not agreed or consulted about. But direct, immediate, intimate in a way.

Is this what Apple’s finally done after all these years? Ignited the personal in personal computing?

Choosing unpopular software

Posted on | January 26, 2009 | 4 Comments

You know I don’t know what it says about me… but… I always pick the underdog.

I don’t use MarsEdit. I use MacJournal.
I don’t use Yojimbo. I use Together.
I don’t use Tweetie. I use TwittelatorPro.
I don’t use Twitterific. I use Twhirl.
I don’t use Preview or Adobe Reader. I use Skim.
I don’t use OmniFocus. I use Things, and occassionally TaskPaper.

I used Mailsmith for years until it became clear that development was just not going to happen and all sorts of cool plugins became available for Mail.

I’ve stopped using MS Office a long time ago. I use Numbers and Keynote, keeping Pages for simple page layout. I do my wordprocessing in the really rather lovely Nisus Writer Pro.

I don’t know. It says something. I just can’t figure what.

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Obama – Man on Wire

Posted on | January 22, 2009 | No Comments

There’s been a lot said about this remarkable man, I’ve no intention of rehashing it.

I just have an observation… in Obama’s coolness, his calm handling of what is surely the largest burden going, I kept thinking of Man on Wire, and Petit’s incredible ease with his extraordinary act….

[youtube EIawNRm9NWM]

The key thing about Petit was his faith that it would be done, the sheer scale of his ambition and his willingness to risk.

He took a lot of strength from his support network. He brought people along a brave and risky path, and while they all made mistakes, they managed to achieve a truly remarkable act.

But also his strength came from his own devotion to just doing the work. And here he evokes our new President even more clearly.

I can see a difficult balancing act in Obama’s future, but like many people, I think he’s going to pull it off.

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32A in Cinemas

Posted on | July 27, 2008 | No Comments

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We’re finally in the cinemas in Ireiand with our feature, 32A. It’s been a long haul and the final step is one we have to take ourselves.

Independent cinema faces a lot of new challenges. On the one side, there’s competition for audience eyeballs from the internet and computer gaming. And on the other, filmmakers encounter increasing distributor nervousness. The studios are pumping out bigger and bigger tentpole movies, pretty soon you won’t be able to pick out the big movies in the cinema, they’ll all be big. And those smaller films find it harder and harder to get a release. We’ve forged some relationships with exhibitors and are putting the film out in Ireland ourselves. So a risk, but hopefully with a good outcome. We’re going with our gut, hey, it’s got us this far.

As a filmmaker, exhibition is very necessary phase. The film only becomes real when you sit with the audience and you feel and hear them respond. It’s almost physical, the sense of an audience going with a film. I’d say the other side is true also, losing them can be as painful as it gets. We’ve been very fortunate however, and had really great audience response and feedback in screenings at festivals so far. I can’t wait until I pick a random screening and pop in to see how it plays.

Dublin: IFI Cinemas
Booking office: 01.679.5744 Book Online

Carrick on Shannon: Cineplex
Booking office: 071.967.2000 Book Online

Sligo: Gaiety Cinema
Booking office: 071.917.4001

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Spam King Makes Prison Escape!

Posted on | July 24, 2008 | No Comments

Scrabble sues Scrabulous. Why not buy them? Facebook opening the architecture for others to take advantage of its system. Google activates KNOL, its Wikipedia clone. The Northern Lights are actually explosions. Intel gets serious about SOC – systems on a chip – AGAIN. Sony modernizes its e-book reader. Alien formats now work. Yahoo announced a rollout of Zimbra e-mail consolidation software. Spammer walks out of jail and is now an escaped convict.

Click to listen:

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