What started out as video editing for a couple of part-time gigs has turned more into video production, shooting, and—new for me—directing. In my day-to-day I’m pretty conflict-avoidant. I tend to people-please and keep my real opinions to myself, especially in new social situations.
But that doesn’t work in a shoot. I have to be clear about what I want. I can’t hesitate to stop in the middle of a take and ask to run it again because of a wrong (but important) line, because it only wastes my and clients’ time.
When we were in Georgia last weekend I met someone who’d opened their own bar. They said their personality had changed as a result of it, that became much more direct. You aren’t an asshole, but you also don’t let yourself get run over. I’ve noticed my directing work seeping into my off hours, in good ways. I notice more and more when I don’t speak up – and should.
I tell this to students all the time when I talk about my books, that your vocations are like masks. They’re like getting to try on new identities, different ways of being, of moving through the world. It’s through that trying on, that play acting, that you come to understand who you are – and who you want to be.
Last month we had a more directed Digital Mending Circle: the focus was photo organization. Despite trying out a few different tools to eliminate duplicates and clean up my archive, what ended up working the best for me was just going through everything manually. I did land on using Lightroom Classic as more of an inbox to process photos and videos, then offloading the processed media either to Apple Photos or an external drive. I’m still getting comfortable with the new system.
This month’s mending circle (Tuesday, July 8 at 7:30–9:00PM Eastern) will once again be open-ended. But I’m scheming to do more directed ones in the future. Come one come all to
a virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.
Hit reply if you don’t already have the Zoom link.
One of the precepts of modern urban planning is around something called induced demand, which says that if you build or widen roads to ease car traffic, the traffic only gets worse. There’s a fun discussion of it in the context of Robert Moses in this 99PI episode.
I think about induced demand whenever I hear someone talk about how AI will grant us more leisure time. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, calls it the plenty paradox:
In the richest countries in the world, we have more leisure time, more disposable income, more access to leisure goods than ever before. And as a result, we are all struggling to know what to do with all that extra time and money. And one would hope and think that we would be engaging in deep philosophical discussions, helping each other … But instead what we’re doing is spending a whole lot of time masturbating, shopping and watching other people do things online.
The solution to induced demand, at least when it comes to planning, is a balanced transport system. You don’t stop building roads, but you have mass transit too. So I wonder: What’s the balanced transport system for our digital lives? What alternative networks can we bolster that also make use of the same new lanes?
I’ve been off social media lately (save for Instagram), but I do find myself increasingly on YouTube and, once on YouTube, increasingly bombarded by recommendations for camera equipment. A video might be unsponsored, a creator might say, “I was sent X by Y company but it doesn’t affect my review of it, they’re seeing this when you’re seeing it,” etc. But don’t be fooled into thinking there’s that there isn’t an unspoken contract: the wish to keep the free goods flowing.
Or as Nilay Patel says in this Vergecast episode, access is poison.
I don’t want to put it all on individual creators, though. The real worms in this apple are affiliate links and influence marketing. My advice (and reminder to myself): Don’t let access dictate what you make in the first place.
Last month Julia and I rewatched the first six Mission Impossible movies (we need to line up a babysitter so we can catch Final Reckoning while it’s still theaters). Seeing the series in quick succession I was struck by a couple more technical bits: the jump from celluloid to digital in the JJ Abrams-directed third film, and the clearly-computerized camera movements in action sequences in later sequels. It might be the series that best demonstrates the changes in modern camera technology.
Speaking of Mission Impossible: Here’s David Cole with 20,000 words on Tom Cruise, Buster Keaton, and trains. (h/t Diana Kimball)
For one of the video gigs mentioned at the top of this issue, I came across Cueprompter and had a teleprompter rolling in a few seconds. They advertise app downloads but the website works just fine.
I wrote about Kelli Anderson’s pop up alphabet book in issue #432. Here’s a new(ish) preview video to get you excited, along with some examples of student work from Anderson’s paper engineering class at The Arm in Brookyn.
That’s right, paper engineering. Ten-year-old Jack’s dream job – if he’d known there was such a thing!
Jack