film is superior to video.
December 31st, 2008i was taught this in college and throughout college, i was one of the few who they never fully convinced. you can’t teach me video methods that were new two years ago, and then say something like “film is superior to video” and expect me to believe you.
after famed director Robert Rodriguez spoke at a panel specifically about how film is dead (referring to the digital revolution), people on a forum laughed and posted the thing i’ve been hearing for a decade: film is superior to video. which is definitely not true today, btw- and in the pure sense of the word “superior”, not even true when i was in college.
throughout college it was my thesis and ultimately my college career goal to prove that popular theory wrong and i succeeded, which nobody cared about cuz my movies all suck (there’s a deeper lesson in that). what did i do? i spent those years studying what people perceive as ‘film’, what made it different from video, and then attempt to blur the line between the two.
all i did for three years after that was try to make video look like film… and it was working. people were confused. they didn’t know if i had shot in 8mm or 8-tape. and what was the method? degradation. i degraded 8-tape to look like 8mm. degraded DVC to look like 16mm. and degrade HD to look like 35mm. the result was you can make video look like film without turning it into film- but you can’t make film look like video unless you turned it into video. shrug. the mechanical conclusion was of course video is superior. the financial conclusion was video is superior. and the environmental conclusion- duh, video is superior.
sure, film looks good- and to get video to how film looks, you had to do a considerable amount of post-production work. but it’s possible, and that amount of work is getting smaller and smaller now that digital video is the standard. gone are the days of using tape, everything’s on harddrives with 1’s and 0’s. with 2k and 4k formats now approaching, some even wonder if HD is going to be here for long at all.
so exactly what are scoffers scoffing about? why the snootiness? when video camcorders were invented, film enthusiasts scoffed. instead of embracing the advantages video had to offer, they picked out all the short-comings. it’s a tradition that’s plagued humankind throughout the industrial revolution. calligraphers scoffed at printers. painters scoffed at photographers. and now even when film technology is on its knees- millions of HD camcorders are sold every day- there are still a few film buffs that ignorantly scoff.
maybe it does take the literal death of film to open their minds to new possibilities. and film will die. if not today, then tomorrow. when an HD cam costs $50 bucks and all the companies that make film start making harddrives. good. its confusing when people are so enthralled with a medium they forget why it exists in the first place. the digital revolution will really bring the point back in focus.
incredibly strange dream.
December 29th, 2008last night i had the weirdest dream. i dreamed there was a family and friends gathering and in front of people i was talking about a business transaction and mentioned the phrase “i charged ****, ****, and **** [three girls]” and suddenly the conversation became awkward. for some reason people were upset at me so i asked someone what’s going on and they said “you said you charged three girls?”
and i said “yeah so? is that bad?”
“do you know what charged means?”
“if it’s bad then no i don’t know what it means”
“to fill? to impregnate?”
“oh. well i didn’t know that”
lol. strange that everyone in the dream seemed to have taken the word out of context. the awkward feeling didn’t go away so i woke up- it’s 4 am. i’m lying in bed thinking “that was pretty weird” then i thought “hmm there’s no way ‘charge’ means that. picking up the iphone, i looked up the definition of charge on the internet. one of the meanings was:
v
a. To load to capacity; fill
b. To saturate; impregnate
O_o… what still haunts me is the order of the girl’s definition in the dream matches exactly with what i looked up. now you can say that in my deepest of subconsciousness, i already knew the alternative definitions of ‘charge’ but i can say to you confidently that i didn’t until that happened. at least, not in that exact order. and i know the way ‘charge’ is defined here, it actually doesn’t have any sexual connotation at all. which is why it’s all the more scarier that ‘fill’ and ‘impregnate’ are just hanging onto the ends quite coincidentially.