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Saturday, June 30, 2007

Bomb Schmomb

Two cars containing "bombs" were discovered here in London yesterday. The fact that they employed gasoline/petrol as an explosive device clearly points to a Middle Eastern connection - because the Middle East is where all the gasoline comes from. It also points to an idiocy connection, because as any self-respecting terrorist knows, liquid gasoline makes for a lousy explosive.

Now if you can get that gasoline vaporized first ... YEEHAW!!!

But based on information so far available, there was no means to do this in either car.

I know you're used to seeing cars roll down hills and burst into flame in movies. Or people shouting "Run! Run! This whole place is gonna blow!" as a fuel drum is threatened by a growing fire. But that's the movies.

In the movies bad guys wear black and good guys wear white so you know who to root for. This happens on television too. But this doesn't happen in real life. In real life you have to watch the news to know who to root for.

I don't know who Al Qaeda is - I don't think anybody really does - but unless they've been starved for recruits over the past few years - and are employing bottom-of-the-barrel flunkies on their highest-priority jobs - this parking violation gone awry can be ruled out as their attempted attack on one of crusader capitals.

I wish it was Al Qaeda. Because the alternative is far more frightening - a bunch of uneducated idiots driving around the country hoarding gasoline and taking up the best parking spots.

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Friday, June 29, 2007

CSI: Hell Creek

CSI: HELL CREEK

Cracked bones – long shanks – emerge from rust-strapped earth
like a revelation by Nemesis,
recalling hasty-covered violence.

Who witnessed the killer
slamming home through the ribcage,
shoveling the four tonne turkey
up and over
bloody tumbling
talons kicking sky
meat-cleaving jaw clashing a sirocco agony?

Who saw the killer figure eight its horns
loosening the armored neck,
for a locomotive coup de grace?


For more "Paleo-Poems" go to:

http://www.nealromanek.com/poetry

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Falun Dafa vs. Chinese Embassy


falun gong
"Falun Dafa" demonstrators this week across the street from the Chinese Embassy, London, UK.

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

War On War On War On War

Dear Neal

Thanks for the piece, but I think a bit of a misunderstanding - none of our collections are in danger of being lost through lack of conservation. The problem is one of access (which is something very different) and is common to most archives - especially the public funded ones - throughout the world (including the US of A). We are still collecting and conserving and the current impetus to convert material into a digital format is in order to make it as widely accessible as possible. It is in this area that money is limited. In the future, people from all over will be able to access the material deposited with us, albeit in limited amounts, but the safe-keeping of the entire collection is paramount and would not be jeopardised. Hence, people can continue to deposit material with us knowing that it will be in safe hands.
... said the email from Paul Sargent (yes, "Sargent" is his real name) of the Imperial War Museum's film & image archive in response to my post of last week, "Broadcast Live 2007 - War On War On War".

So, yes, let's be clear that its not the preservation of the material itself that is at stake. It's true that with a greater influx of cash, the Imperial War Museum archive would be able to augment its existing preservation program. You can always use one more refrigerated vault. But the concern which inspired me to write the post was that all of the institution's money is spent on preservation - and occasionally restoration - of materials from the early 20th century. And wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if there was a place that could teach the public about the conflicts the country is currently experiencing. The Natural History Museum, for example, attempts to bring the latest scientific information to the fore.

And, well ... alright, let me level with you.

What I want - what I really, really want - is for the Imperial War Museum to tell me why British troops are being maimed and killed in Afghanistan.

Now that's not much to ask is it?

Now that I think about it though, the War Museum does have a superb World War I collection. World War I was "The Great War" - aka "The War to End All Wars". And an awful lot of people thought that WWI was a very, very good idea - even the doomed teenagers on all sides - enlisting en masse with grins on their faces. Kids deployed by old men in quiet rooms were sent to fight other kids deployed by other men in other quiet rooms. Of course WWI did create lots of new and wonderful things - like high-tech weapons, Adolph Hitler, and a whole slew of interesting new countries with names like "Syria" and so forth.

Hmmm. Maybe the Imperial War Museum CAN tell me why British troops are being maimed and killed in Afghanistan.

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Friday, June 22, 2007

Broadcast Live 2007 - TV Island

"I have always known that Britian is an island, but I see today how much that it is an island in every sense. It is truly cut off from what is happening in the rest of the world."

So observed Haroon Leghari, of Karachi-based Geo TV, from the audience of a Broadcast Live panel called "Commercial Opportunities For Converged Content" (which sounds a bit like the name of a panel at NAB, circa 1999).

Mr. Leghari avoided the usual protocol of a questions & answers section - expounding his own views, avoiding asking a genuine question of the four panelists - but I am always willing to allow someone a diatribe provided their opinions agree with my own. And in the case of Mr. Leghari - after the panel was over I introduced myself, and thanked him.

The panel had been a lively and insightful discussion of the ways traditional tv broadcasters must change in order to turn a profit in the new multi-platform world of media content. The panelists were intelligent, experienced, wise, but still I couldn't shake - as I couldn't throughout the entire 3 days of the trade show - that this "tv industry" they were talking about - the one that was in danger if it didn't go with the flow of media change - actually was well dead and on its way to being buried.

The very name Broadcast Live suggests the origins of the conference - an event that serves the needs of companies that distribute regular moving picture content via electromagnetic transmissions which are picked up by receivers in homes and watched according to the broadcaster's schedule. And while the US-based NAB has a similar origin, Broadcast Live hasn't shaken off those 20th century beginnings.

There was a lot of talk about alternative distribution over the three days of Broadcast Live. A lot of talk. I don't think dvd's were ever mentioned, but there was constant chatter about something called "IPTV" - which is, as near as I can tell, a carefully developed marketing buzzword for streaming video.

At the "Commercial Opportunities" panel, Mr. Leghari's commentary was tempered with an observation by Tiscali's abrasive but brilliant managing director, Jonathan Sykes: Britain is an island with regard to broadcasting in several key ways that are important to understand if you operate within the British industry. Government funded institutions like the BBC guarantee the continuing existence of a twentieth century style of content creation and distribution. Subsidized channels are not forced to change, in the same way entirely self-supporting ones must. The creation of such stable institutions is a boon to the entire British culture, of course, and in some respects a model for other governments to follow - the flip=side being the wretchedly castrated PBS of the USA. But in the case of the UK, this paradigm appears to have been wholly swallowed as the norm rather than the exception.

Other mega-corporations with gigantic media arms ought to be regarded in the same way. Their size and wealth will give them some longevity. But they are unlikely to be leaders and innovators. And they will eventually make way like post-comet dinosaurs.

Mr. Leghari further noted that in the current media world, your audience doesn't necessarily live in the same city/country/continent as you. Your audience is a young boy in Venezuela who wants to watch video and audio content that is produced in Alaska, and he wants to watch it whenever and however he likes and in his own language - and, preferably, for free. If your service can't provide him this, he will immediately abandon you and find a service who can.

My wife and I have been watching a very popular German tv show in its second season. Broadcasters have their own plans for how the show should be distributed and marketed. The show is officially unavailable to viewers outside Germany. But in the meantime, my wife and I - and thousands of other fans - are watching the shows as soon as they air, thanks to a German enthusiast who uploads the episodes of the show onto one of the many streaming video community sites - after subtitling it in Engliahs, and occasionally adding her own amusing subtitled comments.

20 years ago MTV launched with its famous "I want my MTV" slogan. The slogan suggested a generation that wanted its entertainment immediately, in quantity, and on its own terms. MTV never quite fulfilled that. But any media producer or distributor that wants to survive in the long term today absolutely must.

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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Broadcast Live 2007 - War On War On War

Yesterday, operating on about 3 hours sleep in three days (we've just had a baby, you see), I attended my first Broadcast Live trade exhibition, here in London, City Of Mighty Talents & Regrettable Teeth.

So what do I do at a show like Broadcast Live? Well, I mix and I mingle and I schmooze - all in hope that I will find that someone who will be happy to give me lots of money. In the course of this mixing and mingling and schmoozing, I find myself accidentally saying things like "Wow, that's really interesting. Could you please tell me more?" or "So what is your personal background and training?" or even "Well, I think that exact same thing you are saying. What do you think should be done about it?"

Somewhere along the way, in spite of myself, I wind up learning a great deal about a great deal - not just about products and services and robust solutions, but - and this is a headache no entrepreneur needs - about people. And once you start learning about people and what they want and need ... well then it's all over, isn't it? Because then you start thinking about THEM instead of yourself. Horrifying. Utterly horrifying.

I once worked at the Motion Picture Academy's Photography Archive in L.A., so I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday hobnobbing with various stock footage and photography archives - of which there were many. More images - stills and motion picture - are being produced now than ever before. In fact the most recent statistic that comes to mind is that now more images are generated in a day around the world than were generated over a year in our parents' time. I have no way of knowing whether or not this statistic is true, because I have just now made it up out of my imagination. But it certainly sounds like the kind of thing that could be true, doesn't it?

Apparently there is a war going on - the nature of it is obscure, and will stay obscure for a long time. Staggering amounts of money are being spent and made every day that the war continues. So I found it fascinating, during my frank discussion with representatives of the Image Archive of the Imperial War Museum, to hear that, due to lack of funding, they are frantically struggling to process, archive, and maintain pictorial materials from WWII, and that preserving the history of recent military conflicts is not even on the horizon. This is entirely due to a lack of financial resources - and the Imperial War Museum is considered to be well-funded as compared to most other public education institutions.

So if you are a veteran of the Falklands War, or a British soldier presently dodging Iraqi resistance bullets in Basra, or a helicopter pilot patrolling the skies over the poppy fields in Afghanistan, you might be out of luck if you want your grandchildren to get an accurate picture of your war experience.

Instead, what is likely to happen is that your children will sort through your personal mementos and correspondence and photography after your death. If they don't put them away in an attic, they could possibly donate these materials to the Imperial War Museum - assuming the institution still exists - and then, all things remaining equal, those materials will sit in storage - if there is space available - for yet another 75 years before they can finally be processed and made available to researchers. Then based on that age-worn data, fragmented, diluted by decades of mythologizing, books will be written purporting to tell what it was really like in Basra, in Kabul, in Mogadishu. And you will shout from your grave that it was not like that at all! But no one will hear you.

I realize the study of war is a peculiar thing - inextricably bound up with the deepest human fears and with the necessity to bend large groups of people to the will of a few. In this context, it is clearly undesirable to objectively study a conflict in detail. News media coverage may be voluminous and is in fact the foundation for much research. But news media, in all wars and all civilizations, is a propaganda tool first and foremost, and objective study of conflicts based on media sources, however much may be made available, will rarely yield a truthful account of a war, it causes, its effects, its reason for being. If we want to learn about ethnic cleansing in WWII, for example, we read Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel before we look to the Saturday Evening Post.

But if the Imperial War Museum were given enough means to preserve for study the war experience not only of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but of our daughters & sisters, sons & brothers, husbands & wives, and our children ... well, that would be revolutionary. And would, most importantly, help us to see and feel clearly that war is not history.

---

From the IWM's website:
The Imperial War Museum has an incomparable collection covering all aspects of twentieth and twenty-first century conflict involving Britain and the Commonwealth.

Collections Online provides unprecedented access to large parts of this rich resource and is continually updated.

Web users can now access over 6,000 highlights from the collection, including photographs, works of art, audio extracts, aircraft and vehicles, documents and library material as well as detailed catalogue information on over 160,000 items.

Also included are short essays on major historical themes that lead you to selected highlights from the collections.

The Collections encompass a wealth of material:

* 19,000 painting, drawings and sculptures
* 15,000 posters
* 120 million feet of cine film
* 10,000 hours of videotape
* 36,000 hours of historical sound recordings
* 6 million photographs, negatives and transparencies
* 270,000 items in the national library

The Imperial War Museum is also a major national art gallery, a national records archive and a research centre.

Much is on display but the Museum is unique in the degree of access it offers to its reserve collections. Professional and private visitors are welcome to study 'behind the scenes' and the Museum deals with over 80,000 enquiries each year. Over 120 people work in the Collections Division, helping to acquire, catalogue, conserve and correctly store or display the items.

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Monday, June 18, 2007

Broadcast Live 2007

You just can't keep me away from a good media technology trade show.

If you're this side of the Atlantic this week, feel free to join me at Broadcast Live 2007, starting tomorrow at Earl's Court 2. Broadcast Live is one of the bigger tv & video technology conventions in the UK. It runs this Tuesday through Thursday, June 19-21, and it is really going to be the shizzle! Why, I tell you, everyone from Apple to Avid will be there!

Keep an eye peeled for me. I'll be the shifty one in the over-mannered spectacles, bloating up on Press Room coffee and biscuits.

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Day One

The first day of the rest of her life:

veloci-tot



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Saturday, June 16, 2007

N Romanek Bio Update

I have updated my Bio page at NealRomanek.com.

The final line on the page, which used to read:

"Neal Romanek ... currently lives in London, England with his wife and three extremely dangerous cats"

now reads:

"Neal Romanek ... currently lives in London, England with his wife, his DAUGHTER, and three extremely dangerous cats"

Please make a note of it.

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007

1000 Crow


3 crows flying

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Interview With Brother Cory Three Blanco

(excerpt of an interview with
Master Brother Corey Aurem Three Banca CSE,
of the 3rd Order Of Lemsas-At-Dakka, Subsecretary of Public Mind,
Faculty of The Cyclopedia Of Worlds)


INTERVIEWER: So this picture. What is it? It's a planet.

BROTHER CORY AUREM THREE BANCA: This is an image captured of the world called Aeminal. It is a planet which is blessed in being the ceremonial residence of The Great Supreme Eminence Who Cannot Be Named. The Residence is on a chain of islands off the south-east coast of the large sea that is visible there in the image.

INTERVIEWER: Okie, dokie. And exactly what is the Great Supreme Eminence?

BROTHER BANCA: It is the Supreme Eminence who declared the The Cyclopedia Of Worlds should be made available. It is to Him that all gratitude and allegiance is due.

INTERVIEWER: Hmm. Is he some kind of cult leader?

BROTHER BANCA: (laughing) The Eminence leads nothing, the Eminence is followed by no one. To Him we offer up our gratitude. And our gratitude He reflects back to us. But these are matters of little import truly. May we keep the discussion to the availability of The Cyclopedia Of Worlds?

INTERVIEWER: Uhhh. I guess. If you want.

BROTHER BANCA: Many thanks. I would very much like to if it would be convenient and agreeable to you also.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. Sure. Um. So what is this Enyclopedia Of Worlds?

BROTHER BANCA: The Cyclopedia Of Worlds is a work commissioned by the Supreme Eminence in which all of natural and social history of the New Era - a span of roughly 500 years - the period since humans left behind their planet Earth - all that time is available for study. For study by scholars and laymen of all the developed worlds across all of the Tres Magna.

INTERVIEWER: Across all of the what?

BROTHER BANCA: The Tres Magna. Or "The Big Three" as they were once called. These are the Three Agencies who have represented the bulk of human social and commercial structures in the New Era. After the War Period, after the Ascension of the Supreme Eminence, the power of the Three Agencies has been reduced to ... well to mere aesthetics really. They continue to operate, but their impact is largely symbolic. This is not apparent to many. But it is the truth.

INTERVIEWER: No. It's not apparent to me either.

BROTHER BANCA: (laughter) No. No. Of course not. This is one of the reasons the Supreme Eminence has commissioned the Cyclopedia. There are so many, many - most - men and women and so many worlds that do not know how their own immediate circumstances operate. And so much less the majestic and complex histories of the New Era. (laughter) Ah, it is funny that we call it the New Era. It is 550 years old and we still say we are living in the New Era!

INTERVIEWER: Who can view this Cyclopedia Of Planets?

BROTHER BANCA: The Cyclopedia Of Worlds is available to anyone who can hear or read you and me right now. Immediately. They can go to the Cyclopedia now. And I urge them to do so and to look and read at their leisure. "Let them study as much as may give them pleasure, and never so much as they may become tired. The student must be continually at play. When he applies himself to study as to toil, then will it take him seven times longer to learn seven times less."

INTERVIEWER: And who said that?

BROTHER BANCA: Sanard Mimo Mimas. In one of the monographs the great man wrote when he was imprisoned on Aphrophine.

INTERVIEWER: And - should I even ask? - what is ... Aphrophine?

(Brother Cory Aurem Three Banca laughs and applauds)

INTERVIEWER: Alright. Uhh ... we have to go now.

BROTHER BANCA: Good. Many thanks to you. Many thanks to you. Many thanks.

(end)


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Saturday, June 09, 2007

Paul Bamborough & Codex

Paul Bamborough & Codex:

The Man Who Developed Lightworks
Brings Us
The iPod Of Professional Video Capture


by Neal Romanek

(as printed in TVBEurope, Europe's television technology business magazine)


I recently had the privilege of getting an hour with post-production pioneer Paul Bamborough at the Soho, London offices of Codex Digital.

Paul Bamborough was the key developer of the Lightworks editing system. Though Avid eventually became the industry standard, in a "Beta vs. VHS" style argument, some still maintain that Lightworks was the better system.

With a Sci-Tech Oscar on his mantle, Paul left the film and video hardware development business for good, leaving behind one "if". If Lightworks developer Delwyn Holroyd had a project in mind, Paul would back it. Holroyd was a key engineer at Lightworks and had developed the company's Newsworks product.

A few years ago, Delwyn left his job as a senior developer at 5D Solutions Ltd. and made the call.

The Project? Design a reliable digital recording system that really worked, across all formats, that was easy to use, and virtually indestructible inside and out. And also why not make it able to record and replay uncompressed 4K video at the touch of a button.

Multiple companies had accomplished any one or two of these goals, but the whole, unified package had yet to come about.

The fruit of their labors is Codex – a shock-mounted RAID-based portable digital recorder with a simple intuitive interface. The name "Codex" sounds high-tech, but the word literally refers to the earliest books, which during the centuries of the Roman Empire, replaced scrolls as the dominant mode of storing the written word.

It was a foregone conclusion to Paul and the Codex developers that hard disks would replace film and tape - sooner rather than later.

"People will shoot everything digitally," Paul said "And it's going to happen quicker than most people think, just in the way it happened in still photography. And when it does happen, I think it'll happen fairly quickly."

In fact, David Fincher shot the feature film "Zodiac" capturing all his footage to a JBOD digital recorder made by Codex competitor, S-Two.

There are echoes of the 1990's transition to non-linear editing systems – déjà vu for Paul. When he first introduced Lightworks to tape and film editors, everyone agreed that it was the future of post-production, and that it was coming down the pike quickly. Still, most editors or post-production companies were unwilling to take the plunge.

Technological adaptation often takes on a herd mentality, which can be smart strategy in an industry where millions of dollars are at stake. A herd provides safety. Decisions are made slowly, risk is diluted among a large number of participants. But when changes come, they are often sudden and absolute. It can become a matter of submitting to the change or getting trampled.

Paul said of those early days at Lightworks: "There was a six to nine month period in which we sold about five machines, but what we did during that period is kept talking to people and we trained a lot of young people who could absolutely see that digital editing was their future. Then quite suddenly people said 'maybe it's time to do this'. We went, overnight almost, from having sold 5 machines to selling 100."

Though Codex has been meticulously designed, piece by piece, from the ground up, the technology itself is not revolutionary. "It's putting a bunch of stuff together which, on its own, is fairly familiar. There's nothing particularly new in this, it's just very careful engineering of well-known things."

Inside, the Codex contains a fairly straightforward RAID 3, but it operates at one gigabyte per second bandwidth and is built to withstand extreme conditions of shock and temperature. "We can record just about anything built, and usually at considerably more than 24 frames a second. We can record them at 60 frames a second. We can record two cameras at once. We want to be able to handle whatever is thrown at us. We don't want to be the limiting factor."

I had seen Codex at work at the Axis Films HD camera tests in February, and told Paul that my initial impression was that the Codex box seemed like the iPod of digital disk recorders. The machine seemed simple, intuitive, slick.

"Making it slick is very non-trivial," Paul explained, "Delwyn is just about the best engineer we've worked with. He is very good at making certain things actually work. There's an awful lot of stuff out there that sort of works, but we're trying very, very hard to make what we do actually work in such a way that nobody has to mess with it."

Paul believes the iPod's development is not a bad analog for the Codex story:

"There were a lot of mp3 players around in the late nineties. And they were competing with each other to add more and more and more features, which is exactly the wrong thing to do. What you wanted was to play your music, and it was just this side of impossible to get any of those machines to do it. Then Apple comes along and says: 'Okay, we're just going to make THIS. It's much simpler, it only does one thing. And also we're going to make it simple to operate.' And everybody looked at it and said, 'Yeah! That's what we wanted!' It's not a bad thing to emulate – attempt to find what people actually want to do and make certain you do exactly that."

Once video is captured on Codex it is, literally, immediately ready for post-production. The recorder's ability to output uncompressed video, allows a production team to instantly see its footage in real time, which brings multiple advantages.

Paul illustrated with the story of a recent motion control shoot which recorded its footage to Codex. Several production decisions were made halfway through the shoot which called into question the usability of all the motion control footage previously shot. Faced with the nightmare of having to reshoot everything, it was remembered that a crew member had After Effects on his laptop. A cable from Codex to the laptop allowed a few test composites, at full resolution, and it was confirmed within 15 minutes that indeed the production could go forward. Shooting to any other medium would have demanded reshoots, for safety's sake. "You never need leave a set without knowing whether or not you got what you came to get."

But Codex has no hope of becoming an industry standard until producers, executives, and insurance companies are convinced. It looks as if Codex might be the hard disk recorder of choice for at least two major tent-pole feature films this year, so it is beginning to prove itself on studio lots. How it will work on a location shoot in India, or on the ski slopes of Alps, will be known before too long.

With the changeover to a completely digital workflow, if it isn't Codex that is going to the job, it will be another recorder like it. Though, in truth, even that isn't a certainty.

Paul says, "On the whole, in this new world, very few people know what they're doing. But even more interestingly, they know that they don't know. They will admit it."

Paul Bamborough may be one of the few exceptions to that very rule.


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Friday, June 08, 2007

Sorry, Your Filmic Majesty

Alright, I apologize for saying that Britain has no film industry. I realize that must have been very hurtful to Britain. And, let's face it, it's my own arrogance and intolerance of Others that brought me to my mispokenness and unrashness of mispeechisms.

Britain has a lot going for it movie industry-wise! I mean, it's got Madonna barefoot and pregnant. What more could a film industry ask for?

Truthfully, many - if not most - of my favorite (or favourite) directors have been British. In fact, this may have contributed to my lack of A-List Superstardom in the L.A.-based industry. It's not that they don't revere British talent in the US, it's just that they would prefer you say in your pitch "It's going to be like a Tony Scott movie", rather than "It's going to be like a Tony Richardson movie". One simple reason being that most studio employees have never heard of Tony Richardson, and regard Tony Scott as one of the old masters.

So, yeah, sorry 'bout all that, mate.

Let's just do a Top 10 List and sing "Kum Bay Yah" ...

Neal's Top 10 Favorite (or Favourite) British Directors
  1. John Boorman
  2. Kenneth Branagh
  3. Alfred Hitchcock
  4. David Lean
  5. Lawrence Olivier
  6. Michael Powell
  7. Richard Lester
  8. Mike Leigh
  9. Carol Reed
  10. Ridley Scott

Apologies too to Tony Richardson, who did not make the list.

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Friday, June 01, 2007

Britain Shoots Itself

Why doesn't Britain have a film industry?

"Oh, it has a film industry!" you say, "What about Danny Boyle and that other guy and Helen Mirren?"

Remember when David Puttnam said "The British are coming!" after winning the Oscar for "Chariots Of Fire" (1981)? The British never really came, did they?

Well, they came in the sense that Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Alan Parker, Roland Joffe, and Adrian Lyne left Britain to come make movies in the US.

The UK is stuffed full of some of the most talented people in the world. This I firmly believe.

But most of those people work in post-rooms and hydraulics factories and exercise their talent down the pub on a Friday at Trivia Quiz Night.

Why this is I can't say for certain.

I theorize three possibilities:
  • 1.) Excellence is simply not a thing highly prized in British society.
  • 2.) Excellence has so often been crushed in British society that no one risks trying for it anymore.
  • 3.) Britain is saturated with so many security cameras, staring at you all day long, that any kind of inspiration is quickly drowned in self-consciousness and performance anxiety.
Maybe it's number 3. Maybe the security camera system IS the British motion picture industry. I mean if you could gauge a motion picture industry by the number of frames a second turning at any time of day, Britain would certainly be the world's front-runner. In fact, maybe the British film industry has actually attained a state of Zen perfection in observing itself so thoroughly and continuously. Millions of British cameras pointing at British people being watched on British monitors by other British people in tea-stained rooms filled with monitors and empty bags of snacks. No interpretation, no spin, no story, no character arc. Just Britain watching Britain being Britain.

Wow. I guess Britain does have film industry.

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