Happy Birthday Ella!
By Paul | July 28, 2010
Today, my little girl turns 1 year old! I don’t know where the time has gone. She’s grown so much and as though to celebrate her day, she’s started walking for more than just a couple of shaky steps.
Happy Birthday, Ella! I’m very lucky to be your daddy.
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Dirty Rotten
By Paul | July 26, 2010
With the summer, of course, comes the summer TV season, which becomes a bit more of a season every year. Usually, it’s a dumping ground to run out the contract on some series that the network ended up deciding they didn’t like enough for the regular season, or you get the back half of a coproduction deal, like the Friday Night Lights situation I wrote about last week. Fortunately, as studio executives tend to be somewhat dim, or more to the point, think that all audiences are quite dim (and the success of The Bachelor doesn’t exactly prove them wrong, does it?), we end up with some quality shows. As with the regular season, however, it’s not always the case.
To me, the This-Meets-That pitch is what has generally precipitated the death of creativity in modern popular culture. It’s an executive’s way of saying “give me the same but different”. Of course, what we end up with is a ton of writers, afraid to actually break new ground, stapling two generic clichés together into one, now doubly derivative premise. To be fair, they’re afraid to break new ground because they just want to make the sale. Either way, we end up with a lot of generic TV and movies that have me cursing some putz in an office who sat there saying “It’s Twilight meets Desperate Housewives” or “It’s Grey’s Anatomy in space/walking a cop’s beat/being something other than doctors.” It’s not innovation. It’s lazy.
Think about those two pitches. They both refer to actual series out there. In fact, the second refers to several series over the past couple of years. All these series of which I speak prove my point. The This Meets That pitch is where creativity goes to die.
The first, Twilight meets Desperate Housewives, refers to the new Sunday night series The Gates. A more derivative piece of schlock you’d be hard pressed to find. As with Desperate Housewives, it starts with a big secret. How secret, or indeed how big said secret may be is debatable. It’s set iin a neighborhood with perfectly manicured lawns and a slight over saturation to the colour pallette. First things first: anything with vampires is wholly unoriginal, especially now, with series on every network and every other movie coming out with a “cute” vampire premise. Second, once you have to describe what you’re doing only by comparing it to existing properties, you’ve already lost the originality battle.
TV has been fighting a losing battle for a few years now, between the erosion of ad dollars, PVRs, and the competition of things like video games and the Internet, they’ve become lazy, both on the executive side and on the creative side, as though they’re saying “nobody even cares what we’re creating anymore, so why bother trying?”
It shows.
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The Other Football Season
By Paul | June 19, 2010
Before I had any interest in football, I was a fan of Friday Night Lights. The book, the movie, I enjoyed them both. Then the TV series started, and I just wasn’t sure about it. I saw the first episode, and enjoyed that, and I’m not sure why I didn’t really continue watching it, though it started in my pre-PVR days (or, as I like to call them, The Dark Ages), so I’m guessing I missed a couple of episodes and just never really picked up the habit of watching it.
Fortunately, we live in the age of TV on DVD, so after seeing the first episode on a flight, I resolved to get caught up in time for season two. I figured I’d enjoy it.
I was wrong. I loved it!
It’s a mix of great writing, strong characters, beautifully subdued performances, and stunning camera work. Hell, even the opening theme gets me.
I’ve always been a fan of the standard inspirational sports movie. You know the ones I mean. They’re all pretty much the same, and the ones that don’t star Kevin Costner probably star Dennis Quaid. Either way, whether they’re based on a true story or not, the stories are pretty much identical, and they’re absolutely ridden with clichés. Not so in the case of Friday Night Lights. With the possible exception of the Tyra/Landry murder story, there hasn’t been a clunker in the bunch.
The show is run by Jason Katims (Peter Berg, who directed the movie version is also involved), who I recognize primarily as the guy that brought the Roswell books to TV several years ago. He’s also heading up the team on NBC’s Parenthood, another show I love, because, like Friday Night Lights, it’s all about the small moments. I generally loathe things that are remakes. It’s a real problem in popular culture lately, and to me, it shows a startling lack of originality. That’s not the case with either of these shows. They’ve found a voice that is new, and original, even as it lives on the framework of something that came before. A lot of people in Hollywood would do well to learn this lesson.
A couple of years ago NBC cut a deal that allowed the series to continue. It’s possibly the only smart move they’ve made in the last 5 years. It works like this. DirecTV foots a portion of the bill, and in return, they get to air the show first. Once the season is over, NBC starts airing the show.
What ends up happening, for me at least, is that when May hits and the show starts its run on NBC, I’m already kind of out of the habit of watching anything regularly. Truth be told, I don’t watch anything when it actually airs anymore, so those two circumstances conspire to have me realizing, in the middle of June, that I’ve accumulated 6 or 7 episodes. This leads to something I love, which is a Friday Night Lights marathon. That ends up being followed by the pain of having to wait for the last few episodes on a weekly basis, because by then, I’m hooked again.
Tonight was the first part of the marathon, and there’ll be another in a few days, and then the waiting will begin. I know that the show is coming back for a final season. I’ll miss it when it’s gone.
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Aw Yeah, Technology!
By Paul | June 15, 2010
This entry is coming to you via our new iPad. I figured this would be a cool little gadget, but in reality, I had no idea. I’m in full on nerd mode right now.
First impressions: While it’s not as easy to type as it appeared in Steve’s keynote back in January, it’s still infinitely better than the all-thumb mode of the iPhone. Pictures look great, video looks great. At the moment, I’m going through and determining which apps are iPad native, and which ones aren’t, and culling the herd with that in mind.
The Canadian iBooks is truly underwhelming. Clearly there was no real effort to have anything in place for launch, and that’s sadly fairly typical of Apple. Let’s keep in mind that it was quite some time before we got the iTunes music store, and quite some time after that that we got movies and tv shows.
Bottom line, I love the iPad, I just wish we weren’t once again left behind as to content!
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Egypt Me
By Paul | May 18, 2010
Our winning short film in the 2010 EdVideo 24 Hour Film Contest:
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Sidegrade
By Paul | May 5, 2010
I finally upgraded my MacBook to Snow Leopard. I’d held off on an OS upgrade for a couple of years. That was hard for me. I was an early adopter on Panther and Tiger, but I held off on Leopard and its snowy scion. The main reason was that the features weren’t enough to compel me to upgrade, or, more accurately, the things I would lose to do so.
First and foremost among these, was Final Cut Pro. I had an old version that I’d been running, and had picked up second hand several years ago, and so didn’t get hit with the price tag one sees with a new version of FCP. It turns out that this version had been orphaned by the post-Tiger versions of OSX, and so the new features in the operating system were not enough to outweigh the loss of an expensive tool, especially one with an even more expensive replacement cost.
With the impending release of the iPad (at least it’s still impending on this side of the 49th), and the fact that it requires Leopard or better, I became more compelled to upgrade. So, I set out in search of an alternate video editor. Premiere Pro works well, but I find it to be a little clunky, at least on my laptop, for editing HD video.
While I don’t loathe the revamped iMovie like many others do, it’s nowhere near as robust as I need, and even the previous edition, which I still have on my laptop and still has timeline based editing, doesn’t cut it for me.
In the end, I settled on Final Cut Express. It has pretty much the same interface as Pro, and some of the differences aren’t really a problem to me.
No multi-cam editing? No problem. I only use one camera anyway. No time remapping? No problem. I found a free script that accomplishes the same time remap features. For that matter, I tend to use After Effects to do most of my time remapping anyway.
The only thing I need to reconcile is EDL export. It’s not a huge deal, as I can swing over to EdVideo, open it up in FCP there, and export the EDL. Less than ideal, but maybe there’s another solution, and there’s something for me to look for, or to figure out.
Having a mission is always a good thing!
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Lazy Saturday
By Paul | April 17, 2010
It’s a weekend without plans. There’s nothing better than a weekend without plans. Life is all the sweeter when you’re not clinging to a schedule that chokes all spontaneity out of your day.
There’s so much I want to do. I want to go to the gym for a workout, I have a stack of books and magazines into which I’d like to make a significant dent, a couple of movies I’d like to watch.
Jan and I are also hoping to play some games. We got a new expansion set for Carcassonne a couple of weeks ago, so we’ll play that.
Oh, and the matting for the artwork we want to hang up has been cut, so we’ll pick that up.
We’re also going to take Ella for a swim this morning. She loves the pool. Hmm, that ends up being the perfect time for a workout right after. Okay, so swim at 9:45, workout at 10:30 to 12:00. Then we’ll pick up the matting and have lunch. Then back home for some games, play with Ella for a bit, take Charlie for a walk, then dinner.
After that, we’ll get Ella to bed, and I’ll read for half an hour while Jan nurses her down, then we can watch a movie before bed.
Yep, having no schedule is the way to go. Freewheeling, no rush to be anywhere.
Uh oh, swimming starts in 5 minutes. Gotta run or the whole day falls apart!
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Get Off My Lawn!
By Paul | April 11, 2010
Watching Saturday Night Live. Tina Fey’s hosting, so that’s a gimme. Her musical guest is Justin Bieber. I just don’t get it.
I’m not sure what the fuss is about this kid. Judging by the first half hour of the show, his singing is mediocre, and he can’t act. So in the complete absence of talent, how does this kid make it?!? Ah, well, at least I can just fast forward past the “musical performances”.
Perhaps I’m just practicing for when Ella gets older so that I can “not get her music”.
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Tempus Fugit
By Paul | January 13, 2010
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Spinning the Tens
By Paul | January 2, 2010
And so a new year begins!
2009 was quite a year of huge professional and personal successes for both of us.
We started the year with the challenge of a new pregnancy. Yes, I realize that this would normally be a very happy thing, but for us, with what we had been through in 2008, it was hard to just enjoy it and be excited without that twinge of terror running through every moment of it. We figured that we’d be fine once we passed the time frame at which we lost Rose. To be honest, it wasn’t until she sat there on the table in the delivery room that we finally believed our dream was actually coming true.
Now, Ella just turned 5 months old and couldn’t be more perfect. Her arrival has led to many great things in our lives, both economically (we carry no debt, save our mortgage) and healthwise (I’m down 55 pounds since just shortly before she was born. Time to start setting good examples).
I’d continue on, but it’s taken me forever to get this far, and I’ve likely bared soul enough for tonight.
Happy New Year! I hope it’s good for you and yours!
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