It’s all changing – but not how you think

I recently read two books about the way the Net is changing the world: The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen, and Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. They represent two polarised views of the future.

The Cult of the Amateur is a polemic against non-professionals, and bemoans the advent of a world in which blogs, podcasts and home-made content replaces mainstream news and traditional music publishing. Keen predicts a world in which we’re all doomed to mediocrity, and in which true creatives are drowned in a sea of pirate-driven YouTube mashups and sub-Z-list celebrities who are famous for even less than 15 minutes. Worse than that, we’ll all get engulfed in a tide of filth as the Net gets filled with the verbal effluvia of a billion unrestrained proles, and as ordinary people feel the need to bombard us with too much information about their humdrum everyday lives.

On the other hand, Wikinomics enthuses wildly about a utopian world in which amateurs do everything, disparate, yet altruistic communities all pitch in to do pretty much anything that’s needed, and governments, corporations and individuals all benefit beyond our wildest dreams. Open source will become the de facto standard for everything, and we’ll all get used to having anything we need absolutely free and making donations for those things we consider worthwhile.

Of course, these visions of the future, no matter how convincingly presented, are both utter bollocks.

Keen manages to take a load of interesting facts and then turn them into an unsustainable argument. He has some fair points to make: as we start to read blogs over newspapers, news organisations are under threat. We may say good riddance to the big news media, but let’s not forget that ultimately they are the source that bloggers rely on, and if they disappear, all the bedroom journalists have nothing to draw on. And yes, it is easier than ever before for kids to get their hands on porn and all sorts of unsuitable material. And it’s true, the Long Tail theory doesn’t mean that anyone who fancies themselves as creator can make a living at it, because most people aren’t actually good enough to be worth paying for. But that doesn’t mean that all amateur content is worthless, or that there is no value in repurposed news.

Meanwhile, Tapscott & Williams do a great job of whisking you aloft on a magic carpet of rhetoric until you realise that their argument just doesn’t hang together in the real world. They give an example of an oil company who released all their survey data and then crowd-sourced the prospecting. They found they had a load more oil than they thought and got rich, and a few amateur prospectors got rich. Which all sounds great, but they don’t mention the many amateurs who worked for the oil company for free and got nothing. And while software designed and built by unpaid casual labour is fine, up to a point, would you really want to fly in an aircraft designed by a loose group of aircraft enthusiasts, each contributing to some little part of the blueprint, and released to the public as soon as there’s an early beta?

The absurdity of both positions is amply demonstrated by the recent announcements by Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wikipedia is, of course, the poster child of the devotees of the amateur. Keen derides Wikipedia, asking how ordinary people can compare with peer-reviewed Nobel prize-winners. We now know that Wikipedia not only has far more content than the Britannica, but also, incredibly, the same level of accuracy, and it’s free. But in the last couple of weeks, Wikipedia has started talking about wanting peer reviews, and going back on its policy of open editing. And meanwhile, the Britannica, long regarded as the ultimate authority on everything, is now moving towards the position of allowing readers to edit its hallowed entries.

In other words, neither extreme is right. Professional and amateurs need to live together in symbiosis, each professing to despise but completely dependent on the other. We need professionals to provide the core, to set the standards, and to provide the driving force and resources for projects that are too large to do any other way. And meanwhile amateurs, each contributing a little in their areas of interest and expertise, can mobilise a quantity of labour that would otherwise be inconceivable without slave labour or totalitarianism. In the creative world, the vast array of amateurs are the background from which professionals emerge, and in turn, those few professionals are the inspiration for thousands more amateurs.

Which, believe it or not, is the way it always has been, and the way it very probably always will be. Technology makes it easier for amateurs to connect with their audiences, but that’s not a sign that the professionals will be swept aside, because the same technology also makes it easier for professionals to connect with their audiences. What it does mean is that it’s now possible for people to be professional in new ways. Old business models may be changing, and some of the oldest companies may be threatened, but the basic concept that structures our society will remain the same.

There are some people who are good enough and dedicated enough to get paid for doing certain things, and others who just do it for the hell of it. Put those people together and you’ll be amazed what can be achieved.

You can't grab my shirt!

It's easy to blow up a city in 3D, but it's hard for a character to grab another character's shirt.

Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille

In the January version of Imagine magazine, there's a great article by Saint John Walker of FDMX which touches on one of the biggest issues facing machinima. There are some things that you just can't do well using low-end real-time animation and a home computer, no matter how hard you try. And, frustratingly, some of these are the sort of things that are trivial with a camera and actors.

Going right back to the dawn of film, one of the first Lumiere shorts, L'Arroseur Arrose (Lumiere number 99, often regarded as the first comedy, made way back in 1895), features a gardener watering the garden. A boy enters the shot, steps on the hose and the water stops. As the bemused gardener looks into the hose to see what's wrong, the boy takes his foot off, and the gardener gets a jet of water in his face as the boy sniggers. (Ho, ho ho!) Then the gardener, now annoyed, grabs the young scamp and pulls him around, then squirts the water at him. All very simple, and it was made with the most rudimentary equipment.



Now try doing that in machinima. Getting the facial expressions is hard enough, but we're just about cracking that now. Getting the water to look right is just about do-able in modern game engines, but getting the splashing isn't there yet. But pulling the shirt is just not possible in machinima yet. It's right on the edge of what top-end 3D animation can do. More from Brad Bird:

One character touching another character's hair? "Aaah! No! Isn't there anything else you could do?" I mean, I had to budget shirt-grabs.

And if it's hard for Pixar to do shirt grabs, then, realistically, can you expect machinima to do it well? Nope. You can get a hand pretty near a shirt, but don't expect to see cloth being pulled about. And when you run your hand through someone's hair, expect to see hair poking through the hand and not moving right. Taking clothes on and off is a 3D animator's nightmare. You just don't do it, not unless you have Pixar's budget and a lot of patience.

There are, of course, the three usual film-maker's solutions:

1. Write a story that doesn't need shirt grabs, hair ruffles, or the like.
2. Shoot it off-screen and edit the sequence so that the audience thinks they've seen something they haven't.
3. Shoot something close enough, don't worry about the visual glitches, and assume your audience will forgive you because it's machinima.

This isn't to say that machinima is crap because it can't do something that simple. Machinima is still a very powerful tool which enables to you to make all sorts of movies. And, as it says in the opening quote, some things are unbelievably easy in comparison to any other method of making films. What's important is that you have to accept the limitations of the medium, and learn to work within them. Machinima just can't do some of the things that other media can do, so live with it. If shirt-grabbing and hair-pulling are central to your film, and you absolutely need to show them on screen, looking realistic, then don't expect machinima to work for you. Use a real camera, or learn to animate and do it all by hand in 2D.

The original Lumiere cine camera can still create images that 21st century computers find difficult.

But, as Mike Joyce is so fond of pointing out every time we speak, limitations are what provide artistic challenges.

Actually - there's a challenge. How close can you get to that movie in machinima?

Dawn, Cambridge

Dawn, Cambridge
Originally uploaded by Matt Kelland

I often wonder why the hell I stay in this country. Then I see sights like this in my own back yard, and remember how damn beautiful England can be.

Sunset off St Martins Scilly Isles

Img 1661 Sunset off St Martins Scilly Isles
Originally uploaded by Bryan26

That does it. I'm going back to St Martin's. I went there a few years ago with a group of friends, and we had a great time. I always said I wanted to visit it again. Looking at this picture has made my mind up. Time to start putting those 5p pieces into the piggy bank...

Armageddon Begins at Home

Another in the "lyrics from the archives" selection.

Armageddon Begins at Home

The clown puts on his painted smile and drops his baggy pants
The dancers stamp their calloused feet
The swaying fireglow makes their faces gods
The lion twists in firecracker lines, and the dragon runs in fear
I peel back the corner of the world and look inside

A human can, but you may not escape this crushing kiss
Hell on earth, the politicians tell us this is bliss
There is no simple answer when you don't know what to ask
And I lie like a frightened child screaming in the dark

Even-handed sadists passing judgment on us all
You grasp the coal, you feel the pain, and like the rest, you fall
Not worthy, says the judge, and sentence is pronounced
Your cries for mercy go unheard, your torment is ignored
The winnowing goes on.

Is all of life to be reduced to a simple yes or no?
All the good things wiped away with a single misplaced thought?
There is no room for "tried my best" or "Johnny could go far"
Just saved or damned with nothing in between.

The clown puts on his painted smile and sobs into his bottle
The dancers grunt in locked embrace,
The children watch their antics unconcerned
The lion lies in dusty cupboards, and the dragon in his box
I peel back the corner of the world and look inside

Autumn Equinox 1991



Armageddon Begins at Home by Matt Kelland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Feel free to make something of them. Just be courteous and let me know.

It's too simple

This is probably the funniest thing I've seen from The Onion in ages. If you haven't seen it, watch it before reading the rest of this post.



Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

There is, however, a serious point here about user interface design. This is something that's on my mind every day, as we grapple with the complexities of making it easy to create movies. What everybody's after is "add more features, and make it simpler". Which sounds logical and sensible, but it ain't.

A simple user interface sounds like an obvious solution, but as the video demonstrates (by reductio ad absurdum, admittedly) it doesn't work that way. Some things are sufficiently complex that you need a certain complexity of user interface to make them work. By reducing the number of controls in the user interface, you make it appear simple, but at the cost of burying functions too deeply.

It's just maths. Let's say you have 27 functions you want to perform. At one extreme, you could have 27 buttons, each of which performs the desired function. The end result is an aircraft cockpit, which looks scary and intimidating.



At the other, you could have 3 buttons. You could get to each of those 27 functions with just 3 clicks. Which is obviously better, right? Wrong. It's fine once you learn the menu sequence (press 1 to get menu 1, then press 2 to get submenu 1-2, then press 2 again to get function 5). But the only way to get familiar with the device is to go through all three main menus and all nine sub-menus, and remember what's on each and how to get there.

You could do the same with a single button, but you could activate it in three ways. Short press, long press, and double-tap. Now to get function 5 you'd press, hold, press. One button has to be even easier, right? You get where I'm going. Yes, it would be a beautifully clean interface, but completely unusable. You laugh. But isn't that what we so often do with icons on our interfaces? Left-click, right-click, double-click, middle-click, hover over, drag, CTRL-drag, SHIFT-drag, CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-right-click...? (And yes, I'm guilty of that particular UI design sin too.)

The fact is, some tasks are fundamentally complex, and you need an interface with sufficient complexity to do what you need to do. You simplify the interface by simplifying the task, either by removing features or automating them. I mean, it's great that we no longer have manual advance/retard levers or manual chokes on cars. We've automated those functions pretty well perfectly, and so that's two controls we don't need. And let's face it, who really needs a rev counter on an automatic? All well and good. My mum's Nissan is a triumph of simplicity.

But, of course, this may not be what the user wants, or needs. Take this blog, for example. It has basic word-processing functions, but I can't put a table in it. (Yeah, I could probably write one in raw HTML, but I can't do what I can do in Word or OpenOffice.) It won't let me select the icon I want for a bulleted list. It's restricted the functionality in favour of ease of use.

To be fair, 99% of the time, it's perfectly adequate, so I have no real complaints. All I really want to do on my blog is write words, and intersperse them with pictures and videos, and add in the occasional link. I can express myself quite adequately. But when it comes to a task as complex as making a movie, the basic functionality required to create something close to what I want is enormous. The medium is so rich that it requires a lot of user input, and that requires a rich user interface. And that, I suggest, means a relatively complex user interface.

Fundamentally, the user needs to learn the task. On something as simple as an iPod, the task can more or less be broken down to "select some music" and "play it". On a mobile phone, there may be many tasks, but they're all mostly simple, atomic tasks, and the main design challenge is to make it easy for the user to find how to get to them. But making a movie is a huge mess of complex, interrelated tasks, and no matter how simple you make the user interface, unless you understand what those tasks are, and what's involved in them, and how to get the results you want, you'll never understand what you're supposed to do.


It's what they call "necessary complexity". One of the things that killed Google Lively was that it was so simple it didn't work. Even though they did what all the design gurus said was sensible, they ended up with something that was harder to control than WoW and less fun. As it says in that article (do read it, it's good):

So, ideally the interaction interface needs to be of an order of complexity that is coupled to the order of complexity of the number and type of possible tasks. If it rises above that or falls below that, performing tasks becomes harder. Performing tasks with an oversimplified interaction-interface is like trying to make coffee with one hand tied behind your back.

Getting the balance right is hard. Damn hard. With Moviestorm, we find that some people find it trivially easy, while others find it really hard. Some find it so feature-rich it's bewildering, others complain it doesn't do what they want. The middle ground risks satisfying nobody. Powerful, complex tools risk being usable only by the few. But simple isn't always the right answer either. As the Macbook Wheel shows, "simple" can easily end up meaning "hard to use", "unsatisfying", and "inadequate". "Simple" is not the Holy Grail. It's really not.

"Clear and well structured" - now that's a whole different paradigm.

Loving the ghost

I wrote these lyrics nearly 20 years ago, and found them today while going through old stuff. Here they are exactly as written. I wouldn't write them that way now. I think I had a sort of Yes-ish, Wakeman-ish feel in mind, with just a soupcon of Marillion and Lamb Lies Down era Genesis.

Loving the Ghost

Drawn into a secret world of only two lost souls
There they live among the forests and the stars.
Eternal once upon a time, they have a past that lasts for ever
Still life in an amber frozen moment.

Loving the ghost of a life that never dies
Loving the ghost of a life that never dies
Loving the ghost

He looks at her as if to say, I need to know
Is that a tear of happiness or pain upon your cheek?
She starts to reply, but the answer needs no words.
A touch from her hand says so much more.

Loving the ghost...

"The invisible abyss that hides you from me
Grows stronger as the time creeps ever onward.
Will you cross and be with me, for I dare not,
Though we both can see what lies beyond our sight?"

Loving the ghost...

Every line of their faces reaches out into the past,
As if to rediscover their final tender kiss.
But suddenly they return to their separate cold words
Where all is as it is, not as it could be.

Summer Solstice 1991

Loving the Ghost by Matt Kelland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Feel free to make something of them. Just be courteous and let me know.