Digging Down the Creative Strata

Digital artwork affords a perspective previously difficult in the creative arts. The ability to go "backward in time" through the stages of a finished piece, from its finished state back through to its earliest drafts. It's a really interesting process, even if you only just recently finished work.

For me it works like this. Each time we make revisions to a commercial, video, graphic design, etc. for a client we upload it to our servers. Each further revision is posted under the same name with the version number updated by one. Therefore, at any point after the project is complete you can go back and watch each previous version in reverse order, back to the earliest posting. It's a great way to get perspective on the finished video as you see it deconstruct itself one revision round at a time.

What strikes you often is just how different the final is from the initial conception. Changes are gradual, and often made by committee. So you have multiple viewpoints changing a single vision in a stutter-step fashion over time. Sometimes the only way you can truly appreciate the genesis of the final project is to watch it's creation in reverse. Many times it helps you recognize why the changes needed to be made, but just as often you find yourself lamenting excellence lost in the edit.

I'm glad I work in a medium that allows historical viewings. I like having that record of where a project came from. Sometimes I appreciate the final outcome all the more because of the path followed to get there.

The Student Becomes the Master

Everthing is entangled. Case in point. My younger cousin Ian went to film school. He's very much on his way to becoming a fairly well-known DP (Director of Photography). But before all that he was just a guy in college tinkering around with the notion of possibly exploring the potential or maybe pursuing a career in film.

Working on one of his first school films, he asked me for assistance. I can't remember anymore what it was he needed, but it was something that, in my capacity at Renegade, I was able to help him with, and Renegade allowed it.

Now, more than a decade later, Ian is an authority on the RED camera, a new form of digital camera that more closely approximates a film camera than any digital video camera ever has. In fact he's written a software package, called Crimson that interfaces with the RED's native files and performs useful operations on them. It's a popular package that many production houses that shoot with the RED camera purchase. Renegade, while it doesn't own a RED camera, rents one on occasion, and thus edits with RED's native video files. And so we've purchased and used Ian's software.

The student has become the master, and I couldn't be prouder of my cousin.

The Digital World

Yesterday I started working on SuNn's photos. Remember she's the up and coming female rap artist I took various city pictures of for her album, portfolio, website, etc. I asked her and her manager to pick their favorite pics and I would take those and Photoshop them. I'm really enjoying the process. In other words I'm enhancing them with a computer program called Adobe Photoshop. It's so funny since I came from a mindset of keeping film and photos organic. I used to hate the idea of digital video when film made the moving images raw and grainy, giving it texture and life. I loved going through the dark room process, developing your photos with a sense of artistry and wonder. It was hard work and involved a lot of strange chemical smells. I now really appreciate the digital world. Where mistakes can happen, since you have a memory cards fitting over 500 pictures on each one. You can take as many pictures as you want. Knowing that at least one out of every 30 or so will be stellar. Then you go home and load them into a computer. Going through and picking your favorites to manipulate creating unique masterpieces. Same with digital video, all the same steps apply and you don't have to send the film out to be processed. Time is not a factor anymore. It's amazing and I'm really enjoying learning all digital photography has to offer.