Desktop Media Production

Machines like the original Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument allowed individuals to be one man music production centers. Crafting sounds and making music with them. And I was involved with that near the start.

My own personnel involvement with DTP came from business related investigations into Multimedia and CD-ROM. I attended the San Jose CD-ROM conferences from the beginning and was investigating what you could do with it, and how to bring it to a wider audience, in the same way as people bought electronic music production systems, even as a hobby.
A lot of the early CD-ROM talks were on how you could get cheap typists in South East Asia to shovel text onto the disks. Note how you don't see many of those shovelware CD-ROMs around today. Issues of copyright and original content ownership came to the fore at these conferences too.
The Multimedia stuff I saw at the time was good enough for games and over the top presentations, but not for replacing traditional media or methods at the time.

The Prosumer

My early personnel focus was on how this technology could be applied, with the quality limitations it had, by an individual. Early research on the Prosumer (Consumer/Producer) with low end equipment. The market for high end systems is always too small.

I set out to try and do small Science Fiction & Fantasy with moving images and sound with these new multimedia tools. Starting with drawn animation, but soon found it far too time consuming, and moved to models and puppets. Early experiments used a PC tool called GRASP, and a Mac tool called Director and supporting paint applications. These applications could produce limited animation, text, interaction and play sounds, but the real work was in producing the content they manipulate, in the type of media I was interested in.

First steps in the early 1990s

At the time, a floppy disk or two were the available distribution media for the small projects I envisaged, and that ended up meaning I was to use 1 bit dithered pictures and only a few 8 bit audio files.

For capturing these images I used a slow video frame grabber. The result was something like a minimally animated slide show, with text captions. It was a lot of work for less than spectacular results, but it was encouraging and a good left brain, right brain mix. Around the time a few CD-ROM products such as Sinkha came out, and our aim was something equivalent.

Owning the properties, and not just working on others material on a time and materials basis was also becoming a key point in the field.

Desktop Production around 1995

With the passing years, better machines and tools allowed the production of small full color, synched sound quicktime movies that could be distributed on the internet. Adobe's Premier became the production tool, along with wave editors, animation tools and MIDI sound modules. Think MicroLogic, Elastic Reality, Photoshop, SoundEdit and Animation Master. A 4 channel mixer, Roland SC-55, D-110, PZM microphone and a guitar for sound generation. Like for this 60 second theme

stratos.mp3 (620kbyte).

It was still a lot of work, and the improving quality in image and sound required a greater refinement in the models, stop frame puppets, story, effects and soundtrack.

There is a lot of art produced and creative effort expended in the production of even small shorts. This art is of the same quality as required in general product development or a Hollywood production. Be it sculpting, model making, illustration or Industrial Design.

Downloading of small movies, shorts, proved to be too time consuming and the result, though interesting(?), didn't seem worth the wait.

Like for this 14 second Quicktime teaser

helios-160-120.mov (180x120 pixels 733 Kbytes). Here is the teaser

helios-208-106.wmv (208x106 pixels 455 Kbytes) in media player format.
A very short, small sample clip. Think Team America trailer without the attitude, but just as many explosions.
The first four frames of the movie are actually presentation like slides you are to read, then hit the next frame button. After the intro frames, your then told to press play. The MOV is the original Japanese, the wmv is a later trial in English.

Just using off the shelf applications and products wasn't the main interest though. Developing content libraries and allowing reuse of material was a key interest. Content management and version control were also high on the list of things to bring under control. Attempted to build a new type of production pipline......

How To

I wrote a dozen or so magazine articles for Australian and UK magazines on how I was doing this Science Fiction Fantasy Design & Implementation, and those How To articles were quite popular.

Lead to a TV segment too. They also pay for themselves in one way or another, unlike the shorts themselves.

What we learnt from this is that the market for How To material, is easier to become a part of, than the market for the productions themselves. Is getting into an Opinion Leader position the same for other fields? Probably, as the saying goes, "those that can not do it, teach it".

However, producing How To material was not my original goal..... but if I put the articles together as a book or three, then had supplementary instructional DVDs.... sorry, just joking.....

The How To Sculpt and How To Cast in Resin articles are still some of the most popular articles in these web pages. I haven't put up the How to do Stop Frame Puppet Animation in Adobe Premier and other similar articles, as no one has ever asked me about them.

Desktop Production 10 years later

Music albums made with DTP is the standard way to do contemporary productions. Pro Tools, Cubasis or Logic and a few plug-ins does it all. The distribution of music is currently changing with legitimate online MP3 stores and broadband. But has getting into these stores changed if your an up and coming Act? Note that getting signed to a label hasn't changed, and that just doing it yourself doesn't work without promotion.

We can produce DVDs and edit video, and so can anyone else. Short Film Festivals are popular. It isn't a difficult, expensive technical problem anymore. Ignoring the difficulty of actually writing a great Screenplay and other issues for the moment... But the problem of making and distributing worthwhile content and getting rewarded for it remains.
There is lots of talk in the media about new media opportunities, and business opportunities with the convergence of broadband internet, cable TV, Wireless and all that, but will that change anything? Could WidespreadBroadbandTV become a solution? Will people really watch TV on their iPod? Would it still be a solution for content for children?

A director was rejected three times trying to get work at Disney, but went onto greatness at Pixar. If there is just so much rubbish on TV, yet something that is great can get canceled, who can trust any traditional media filter imposed in WidespreadBroadbandTV? If the mass market doesn't care, why would this new media be any different from the old one? They will only hire those with experience in the field, right? Those that already know the right people, right? If the people in the industry actually knew what good content was, there would be more of it, right? If it was such a good idea, someone else would already be doing it, right?

The tools of Desktop Production and the computers to run them are now readily available, but I still haven't seen what I was working towards. I would say the movies made with real-time 3D game engines show promise, but I haven't seen the short or distribution system that proves it....

WebComics are currently experimenting with Internet distribution and micro payment schemes, but I am not aware of how successful they are. PodCasting, making an audio only program for downloading, is an interesting distribution system that is only feasable through the Internet. Chris Anderson at WIRED magazine wrote about The Long Tail for distribution, where just about anything can find an audience with the internet, but one big enough to cover expenses?

But, there are parallels with Desktop Publishing. It was thought by some that it would open up publishing, but ended up just reducing costs in traditional publishing houses. Blogs seem to have become what Desktop Publishing was going to do for individual expression, but using the Creator Pays model. And isn't that just Vanity Publishing? Is it enough for this technology to allow everyone to just get their 15 minutes of fame?

If the content is worthwhile (just humor me here), actually great, what stops it from being pirated and copied for free and spread around on Peer 2 Peer networks?

Some DRM would seem to be part of the solution, but in this age of Global Warming, it seems equivalent to saying that Nuclear Power is what we need instead of the safe coal powered plants we have. Would you prefer to die from Global Warming effects or a Nuclear accident? Neither, thank you very much.

New Business Model Required

I came to the conclusion, for the time being anyway, that unless working on a paying production in the traditional model, developing small shorts isn't worth while without also developing a new business model. This is something Paul Allen should be very interested in.

update: jan 21 2006
Google just introduced Google Video. How about that for a video distribution model?

update: sept 7 2006
YouTube is getting lots of publicity. It is the "Funniest Home Videos" of the internet, but that isn't what I'm talking about here, and isn't the solution I'm after.

A Storyboard

Something that doesn't take forever is a rough animatic, and that starts with a story idea....

In the image here, the 7 panels of storyboard are to the left (done in downward columns from the left), while image sketches of characters, the device and a cool spacecraft are on the right, as is reference dabs of the marker's colors. In this case it all fits on one A4 sheet of paper, but some of the image sketches were done on other paper then pasted in here.

An Animatic

The thumbnail storyboard sketches were scanned at 150 dpi on a flat bed scanner, then imported into Adobe Premier and background music, sound effects and dialogue added....

Here is a tiny 16:9 widescreen, animatic movie file

animatic.mov (140x80 pixel 401Kbytes). Here is

animatic.wmv ( 170 Kbytes) in a low res media player format.
Note that the images in the movie are the size they were drawn at. A bunch of very rough sketches is now a small movie, that could go on with further refinement.