Sunday, September 16, 2007

the process of thought

It must intrigue you when you think you've come up with an original thought only to find somewhere someone a long distance away is revelling in the same mental break through.

It's no wonder most scientific discoveries involve some form of horse race to unravel what ever. I once remember watching that great dancer Gregory Hines talk about a new move he was proud to have invented only to find out watching black and white movies that Fred Astaire had executed the same sequence many years back.

Nothing is sacredly new.

On a much much smaller scale meeting the founder of visual editors, Robb Montgomery produced some of those moments.

Rob demonstrates on his blog today something I talk about called the IM6 approach - integrated multimedia.

He has a podcast, then with the same pod he adds pictures and then a third, he goes for video. Take your pic (er pun) really, but it is a version on the theme that CNN International may be responsible for: Kill what you can eat and don't spare anything.

Hollywood's done good at this approach in recent years. Make the film, make the making of the film, take the snaps, release audio for the radio stations, now produce killer sites and let you download the trailers.

It's a 4d quadrant approach. In a matrix sort of way it's like taking the vectors of the word "news" as applied to its regions: North, East, West and South and coming up with an imaginary (i) vector which we could quite simply call i for interactive.

News has a fifth vector but you have to work it. Robb also proves the other theory that "smart" people pick up things and work, re work them. You don't need to have been a broadcaster to be brilliant at being a broadcaster.

It's what the Harvard Business Review might call the Integrated approach, but simply it's about observing a paradigm an incorporating it into the body of your work in your way. There's such fluidity. I have already got onto Robb about some of the wonderful mash-ups he's behind.

This process of design, motion, video and obviously creative thought is behind my Phd which finally I have got round to applying and have been accepted.

If what we're doing now is considered revolutionary, how might we look in 10 years time?

Can we as a more networked, wired generation, shake of our antipathy to change as a threat, but as an enabler?

Can we trend extrapolate from the visceral and emotional qualities of story telling to get to a space where it becomes even more compelling. For instance, is there a designated size online, audio pass etc which triggers greater viewing pleasure?

And as someone joking said if everyone's publishing who's the viewer? That's an easier one.

I have come to love this saying now, It's about technique, not jus technology

1 comment:

joshua said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.