For the record, I’m totally over using Wikipedia as an example of anything except as an example of an overused example. Is a Wiki encyclopedia the only creative thing the internet has produced? Please pardon my digression.

What do the movies Ishtar and Rain Man have in common? They are the consecutive movies in 1987 and 1988 in which Dustin Hoffman starred. I’ve often wondered why an obviously great actor would choose a role in a notoriously bad movie. Couldn’t he see that Ishtar was going to suck? Did he know Rain Man was going to be great? Apparently not.

By now we must all know the secret is in doing, especially since Nike changed their tag line back in the ‘80’s. Take your shot. Be overly cautious and you’ll end up sitting on every idea you’ve ever had.

I’m never “all in” though; I have doubts. Well, don’t. Have no doubt about it, your idea will fail. Your concept at the start will not be the one you take to the goal.

As a photographer I “shoot around it”; my typical success rate is 100:1 if I’m being vaguely creative. If I close the ratio I’m going safe and less with creative instincts.

My new adventure is scripting stories for film – a newbie. In a short 6 months the best quote I’ve applied is that your film is shot 3 times: once in your head, once on film (or video), and once when editing. With each success, the effort that goes out with the trash should be considerable if you’re doing it right.

I guess we don’t know until we try; we’re not as good at predicting success as one might think. Truth is, innovators fail far more than those who aren’t. That’s not what it looks like on the surface. At quick glance, you’re innovative and I’m not. In reality, I’m not failing enough; I’m looking for that 1 in 100 before it happens.

According to Frans Johansson, research tells us that the single strongest correlation between innovator success is the number of ideas they try to make happen. Example: Einstein published 240 unreferenced papers. That’s 240:1.

The secret is in taking the smallest executable step to move your idea forward. What is the minimum investment you need that will convince you to take another step? The strategy is to convince yourself it can work.

Additionally, accept failure of your first step. Start walking northeast even though your final goal may be true north. Do it right and your goal moves, the idea changes as we conduct research, collect resources and create prototypes.

[via the99percent.com]
Frans Johansson is an entrepreneur and thought leader. He is also a consultant and the managing director for a hedge fund. Frans previously co-founded and managed two companies, a Boston-based software company and a medical device company operating out of Baltimore, Maryland and Stockholm, Sweden.

Raised in Sweden by his African-American and Cherokee mother and Swedish father, Frans earned an MBA at Harvard Business School and a BS in environmental science at Brown University.

A successful author, Frans has written on a variety of topics, from business management to healthcare to sport fishing to how to save our oceans. His bestselling book, The Medici Effect, has been translated into 17 languages and was named “One of the Ten Best Business Books of 2004″ by Amazon.com.

It’s the time of year that is filled with industry predictions.  No predictions from me this year, just realities.  One reality is that we are able to do much more with less.  What’s more, don’t anticipate clients abiding the same thing only better.  They will not be denied.

Technology and talent has proven itself worthy of turning micro budget into an artful result.  The key is to hold the line on what matters.  When money is tight, the line is paper thin between a film spot resembling a college project and a professional production.  Accept a bid and you’re committing to high expectations.

Friend to Permission to Suck, Director/DP David McCarty,  gave me a heads up on a low budget video spot he shot for Hamilton Jewelers.  Impressed, I asked if he would be interested in answering a few questions for a PTS post.  His response was so generous I reproduced it here along with stills and the finished spot.

Where Style Is Timeless: The Hamilton Jewelers

The inspiration behind the project was the current explosion of interest in the early 1960’s era; almost entirely due to the television show Mad Men. We wanted to stage a dinner theater in 1960 where it would be natural to have men and women very well dressed thus offering a vehicle to feature the client’s diamond jewelry.

The storyline is that of a newly engaged young couple. The scene shows everyone in the room involved with the music with the exception of our young couple who are more interested in each other.

This was a micro budget production, so the first obstacle was securing a cheap location that could play as a 60’s era dinner theatre. Second, it needed to look, more or less, dressed and ready to shoot. Third, we needed the run of the place, controlling everything for 10-12 hours.

We found just the location a short drive from our offices in New Jersey. The brother of one of our Senior VP’s just happened to own an Italian restaurant that had an upstairs dining room. He had designed it to look like the old dinner theaters of that era. It was perfect. He was not only closed on Mondays, but he could handle the catering for us as well.

The second task was talent. We were shooting in New Jersey, outside of Philadelphia, and needed good talent. Our usual suspects for styling, hair and makeup were all out of NYC anyway so we cast our principal talent there. We rented a van and drove our talent, stylists, hair and makeup artists down from NYC. The extras all came out of Philadelphia and provided their own transportation. I recruited my daughter and her fiancé to fill in as our third couple.

My Director of Photographer flew in from SF, and I acted as both Director and second camera operator. We both used our personal Canon 5DMII’s and ultra fast “L” lenses, but rented a Red Rock Micro Shoulder Mounted Rig and a SmallHD DP6 monitor. We also had pro sticks with high-end fluid heads on hand and I provided the 1m Glidetrack HD.

Our Producer handled the rest of the crew and the lighting order, which was small. Basically, we had a lighting truck from which we pulled a bare bones lighting package: A handful of Fresnel spots, a couple of Kinos, some flags, and enough board to block the light from the windows.

Our Gaffer and Key Grip was the same guy who rented us the lighting package. He came with an assistant.

We weren’t shooting with sound so we saved on the sound crew. Our intention was to show the idea of the musicians, a little hint to sell the story without being a focal point.  We anticipated plugging in a piece of stock music during post. Our Producer, who happened to be a musician himself, cast friends of his for the shoot.

I’d asked him to see if he could round up a stand up bass player and a horn player. We’d pay them out of our “extras” budget, which meant I’d have two less people in the audience. As it turned out, the producer’s friends were real pros, and they played while we shot them. I was so thrilled with the quality, that I asked the Producer to find out if they’d be willing to record an original piece of music together and license it to us to be used for the piece. In the end, that’s exactly what we did.

The lighting setup was designed to be pretty simple. A key light composed of a couple of fresnel spots bouncing off a wall, flagged to prevent spill. We had another fresnel bouncing off some broken mirrors to provide a little ambiance, and some hair light. The only light that ever moved all day was the hair light, which we used to provide the edge.

The DP shot almost entirely hand held using the Red Rock Micro rig, while I shot almost entirely off sticks, much of it locked off. We added a couple of “dolly moves” using the Glidetrack set on a couple of apple boxes.

Originally, we had no intention of having video playback for the clients. When you’re working on a micro-production, there are just things you don’t get. Video village is one of them. But the Producer and the AC had worked on some other DSLR shoots and had come up with a pretty effective system.

Using a Black Box video splitter with an aux. battery attached to the rig, we output the HDMI signal to a 17” monitor in the other room for the clients. It worked beautifully. The DP used the new SmallHD DP6 monitor, attached to the rig and fed into the splitter. I could either stand behind him to view, or watch playback through the camera after each shot. The client could watch both live and playback of all feeds, at least from camera A. She just had to trust me on camera B.

The room pretty much came as is; they even had the table lamps. Only problem was they were candle powered. We needed more light so we rented a dozen 40wt lamps and tied them into a dimmer. The restaurant provided the desserts, stemware, drinks and dishes.

We planned to handle hair, makeup and styling on the principals, while the extras were asked to show up ready to go. In the end, while we could get away with everything else, even the extras had their hair done. Our hair guy was a maniac; total overachiever.

Once the talent (both principals and extras) had gone through wardrobe, hair and makeup, we were ready to shoot. Except one last thing. The jewelry. The client actually had a small crew herself.  Together they got the correct jewelry on the correct people, keeping track of exactly who had what. This stuff was the real deal complete with security.

The DP and I had discussed the look we wanted at length, and while there were a few key shots we knew we needed, beyond that, we simply found our shots as we came to them. There were no storyboards, just a story. We work together a lot and had discussed the shoot at length. By the time we had the talent in place, we just went to town.

The shoot was based on a 10 hour day, with talent on a 12 hour day door to door from NYC.

The DP and I worked pretty hard to set the white balance to what we wanted before we started shooting and our cameras were calibrated to one another. We wanted to be a little warm, even to the extent that our whites were warm.

Since we couldn’t show people actually smoking, a smoke machine helped give us the needed atmosphere. The intention was to desaturate the footage slightly in post, but the added smoke pretty much took care of it for me. Therefore, there was almost no grading done in post.

Because of the limited 8 bit color depth on these cameras, you are pretty limited to how much you can manipulate the footage in post. It’s best to go old school and get it right in camera. This is by far the most important thing I’ve learned in several years of shooting with the 5DMII.

The shoot went off without a hitch and we finished on time. (Well almost without a hitch. The van with the talent showed up an hour late because of traffic. We still got it all done.)

The footage was backed up to several drives and that evening I transcoded all the 5DII video files into ProRes 422 (HQ) 1280×720.

The next day the DP, Producer and I all had to catch a flight to a location scout for another job, but when I got back a few days later, I was able to begin editing.

By then, our musicians had banged out a few options for me. They sounded great. Only one problem. The sound was too good. Since they had recorded in a studio, it didn’t feel right, so I imported them into Apple’s Soundtrack, added some room tone, ambient sound effects and even a little reverb to give it an authentic sound. It sounded great and I was ready to edit.

I edited in Final Cut Studio. Because we went to the trouble of getting the look we wanted in camera, I needed only a few slight adjustments here and there; nothing that couldn’t be handled in FCP’s 3-Way Color Corrector.

The voice over was originally done as a scratch track using the voice of an audio editor at our local production house. I loved his voice, a Gene Hackman sound alike, but the client wanted a more traditional VO, so we re-recorded it using non-union talent.

The beauty of creating video for the web is the story can be as long as you can maintain interest. No more :15’s or :30’s. Make it as long or as short as you want. In the end, the piece came out exactly how we wanted. It was a team effort including a trusting client. The client got extremely high value and we all got a nice piece of film.

There is no question that you can do amazing things with micro-production DSLR shoots, but if, and only if, client expectations are managed. You have to know what you can and cannot do being upfront and clear with the client. They also have to trust you. If they begin micromanaging the shoot, you will be lost. When you’re shooting a bare-bones production, there is no room for error.

One good idea, if you can swing it, is to have access to a larger lighting package than you think you’ll need. Something you can pull from, a la carte, if you have to. I’ve not needed the extra, but knowing it’s there is certainly a little added insurance.

Critical is your ability to think on your feet and take advantage of opportunities and the inevitable opportune mistakes. On micro-production jobs, you’re going to be more run and gun so you’ll need good instincts and be ready to make quick decisions.

I find another important aspect of successful micro-production is to have good ideas.  Everyone wants to be a part of something with quality. The budget is irrelevant. If you have a good concept and a good plan, you can get highly talented people to come along for the ride. If you’re a demanding asshole that’s trying to do too much with too little, you’ll create a catastrophe. Build a team of creative professionals and treat them like gold. They’ll break their humps for you and thank you for the opportunity to boot.

My final thought: be realistic. You can shoot a $500k film or something 1/10^th the budget. Either one can be great. They won’t be the same scope, but if you maximize what you have and do everything you can to bring every dollar on the screen, it can be great. The trick is to never try to shoot a $500k film for $50k.

I have a friend who asks at the end of a shoot, “Did you make art today?” “I think so” was my typical response because I’m never sure what I do with my camera will ever be considered art exactly.  Thinking back, it’s probably because I’ve assessed too many contact sheets and digital proofs filled with prosaic visual records.

Classically, visual attention can be registered in seconds when viewing photos. See it, scan details, like it (or not) – turn the page – on to the next. On the web we’ll hit the fwd button like a flip book. The occasional extraordinarily recorded event will slow this down. Let’s call that pace “significant attention”.

An extraordinary event brilliantly recorded will hold your attention for a minute or two. Art of the “fine” variety, however, must hold your significant attention everlastingly.

The last half of my photography life has been an obsession with reducing detail. Less is more but not always easy in commercial applications. If you’ve ever tried to get away with dead black shadows, blown highlights and partially obscured product you know from what I speak.

“Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy

I thought of this quote before discovering someone much more intelligent said it first.  I was at a show listening to bluegrass virtuosos play so fast that it was hard to discern a space between notes.  It made me realize that there was only one interpretation possible.  There were no spaces for me to think or feel anything but the energy of their content.”  – From a post dated – Dec. 17, 2009.

The objective is to gain significant attention as long as possible ahead of an inevitable boredom strike. Offer enough detail to entice an empathic exchange; leave room for interpretation for with no space between the notes boredom strikes fast.

Instinctively, owners of the iPhone Apps Hipstamatic and Swanko Lab know this.  Instant analog art automatically obscures enough detail to give your most pedestrian recording significant attention. It’s what’s behind the craze; easy, fast, shareable, instant art – sometimes of the fine variety.

Both Apps are grab bags of washed out highlights, muted blotchy colors, unpredictable tonal shifts, lens flair, dark edges, dust spots, scratches and numerous “add in” color effects; like shuffling through an old shoebox of treasured snaps 20 years premature.

Samples from the Hipstamatic Flickr Display:

Jess Lee - InVisage CEO

I’m geeking out on this one. Since everyone is a photographer and nearly everything is a camera, it may do the imagination good to understand where technology is going.  I always figured it inevitable that lens resolution would be the limiting factor with respect to image quality.  In some aspects it’s already the case, but I’m talking about what happens when the only way to improve imaging is to improve lens resolution.

How long will it take for your phone camera to be as good as many Digital SLRs?  a) Ten years?  b) Five years?  c) Less than two years?  Not only is “c” the correct answer but we are returning to film; quantum film made by embedding quantum dots into an emulation that coats a plate.

As you’d expect, anything named “quantum” is very small.  Each dot can be tuned to the light spectrum with early production showing a 4X increase in efficiency with significant cost savings as well.  This would mean that your 3 megapixel iPhone camera would be increased to 12 mp.

Interprelated to your high end digital camera, you can anticipate 80 megapixel quantum film cameras with a native ISO of 800 and greater bit depth (told you I’d geek out) means we’d be creating nearly unimaginable photographic detail with a hand held camera in very low light.  The race for technical quality will essentially end.  I’m guessing each photographic file created will be in the neighborhood of 500 megabytes per image as a tiff.

What does this mean for a profession already reeling from 6 years of crazy change?  Hard to know but I don’t see this post becoming irrelevant any time soon.

A more detailed explanation can be found HERE at dpreview.com

For more information, watch this short video in which InVisage CEO Jess Lee explains his company’s breakthrough:

Stargate Studios in South Pasadena CA is one of the current day electronic scenic painting and model making studios [via Gizmoto.com]:

Michael doesn’t consider himself creative. This isn’t a strange thing to hear, it’s a native thought to at least half the population. Maybe there’s something to it. After all, the average problem solver will adhere to formula and process. Is adding a+b to get “d” all that creative when your given both “a” and “b”? Question and answer – call and response – is the comfort in most zones.  When clients come to us with a photo layout, when an illustrator receives a rough sketch, or when musicians are handed a string chart, parameters are tight enough to apply something that looks and sounds creative enough to pass. Vibrancy resides in the problem not the solution. Solutions are sold as commodities. As well, we can find solutions waiting for problems, but who finds the problems? The tough creative challenge is defining a problem – finding the insight – inspiring the pen. Fact is, the solution may actually be in the problem once the discipline is found to define it. This is what Michael Bierut speaks of when he claims not to be creative. “I feel like I’m a Doctor and I can’t just practice medicine on myself, so I need patients that are sick, the sicker the better in fact.” Treatment in itself can be creative, yet the real nuggets remain in diagnosis. Without defining the problem we are doubtlessly treating the wrong ailment.

According to his online website Design Observer, “Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, graduating summa cum laude in 1980. Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm’s New York office, he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice president of graphic design.”

In this video from the idea centric website The 99%, Michael Bierut offers a peek at his design philosophy and examples of treated ailments. Regardless of the opening disclaimer about his creative nature, Bierut is a first-class problem finder.

I’ve seen time lapse before, who hasn’t?  Maybe it’s a shaky seedling sprouting from the ground or a street scene with jittery people.  Yet, there’s an emotion to Ben’s short films that I find unexpected.  Not only is the still frame that captures the motion well considered but the motion itself has a power beyond the usual “cool” of time compression.

The shapes and movement are the definition of organic power and fluidity.  The movement of nature contrasted by the immovable man made objects and the planes landing at LAX like alien space craft as nature stays still.  The feelings from the hours fills a single frame.

“It’s a pretty organic process.  I don’t have any specific work flow or rules that I follow.  I shoot all my own footage, and I shoot *a lot*.

When I’m doing a shot, I’m out there standing in the cold, or the heat, or the fog and it kind of embeds a feeling of a place that
carries on with you on into editing.  I don’t go into a reel with a
plan – I’ll often try lots of different music and quick edits until I
find something that feels “right” and then roll with that feeling.

When I watch my earlier work, “Montipora” for example, I find that I get bored.  I felt that way when I was editing it too, but figured it was unique enough that it wouldn’t matter – however, in hindsight, I should have just gone with instincts.  Now, the moment I feel like something isn’t up to par, or boring, or doesn’t go well with the rest of the film – I just delete it and never think about it again.  More than half of the stuff I shoot ends up on the cutting room floor.

When I go out shooting, often I’ll have a vision for what I want to
capture, but I’m never afraid to ditch my vision for something
unexpected or beautiful.

For example, for the Golden Gate Bridge shot where you see the moonlight on the water (in “Another Cloud Reel”), my vision was to get a telephoto shot of the moon rising behind the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge towers (similar to the moon shot in Koyaanisqatsi).

You can’t get shots the Golden Gate Bridge from every angle without a helicopter, so I had to plan it out so I was there when the moon was in the right spot and mostly full, etc…  I lug all this stuff up there, take one look at the bridge and the moonlight on the water, and I immediately ditched the moon behind the towers idea for something incredibly more beautiful.

Nature is always doing incredibly beautiful things – a lot can be said about being in the right place at the right time and being flexible.”

- Ben Wiggins

Go here for more of Ben’s work: Delrious on Vimeo

By my corporate experience, managers are taught that high productivity is found somewhere near the center of a fear > comfort spectrum. The good stuff lives in the middle and employee commitment is more desirable than compliance. The problem is that our instruction to engage employees is faulty. A one size fits all corporate strategy places individualism on a shelf. It’s naturally risk averse. This will be no more evident in the next year than in marketing case studies – marketing ROI is back with a vengeance – but please excuse my digression.

A fear inducing motivation slaughter was no clearer to me than when we experienced a 20% agency layoff. As painful as it was for everyone, it’s probably most painful for productivity because it died a horrible death only to revive slowly – after much nurturing – a couple weeks later. It turns out that fear of being next to go stopped folks in their tracks. Not surprising.

Conversely, those nearly tenured by position where – beyond a doubt – the lowest performers on average. Furthermore, common sense says that to give those folks a raise in reward would offer higher comfort and still lower performance. Comfort sent a strong message that our default state – doing what we know and following it through to customary success – was not worth a moment’s deviation.

Our default is to be risk reluctant and to think things through to a logical end with no deviation from task. We narrow our purpose and use our craftiness to get to the finish line as fast and as free from criticism as possible – we go with what we know when under pressure. Perform with all eyes on you and you’ll do what it takes not to fail, together with relying on a tested formula for success.

Thus is the world of carrots and sticks. Carrots (comfort) and sticks (fear) produce low motivation.

In his TED video presentation, Dan Pink gives an outstanding presentation – argument if you will – for what science asserts truly motivates us. Dan explains that there is a mismatch between what science shows and what business does. Business wants innovation, yet motivates us to be formulaic with a narrow view of problem solving.

Dan shows us that reward in the free economy dulls creative thinking. The if/then rewards program performs well with narrowed focus problems, yet broad creative thinking suffers as a result of conventional rewards. When we use our mechanical skills, higher rewards yield better performance.  However, even rudimentary cognitive skills suffer with even moderate rewards. The highest rewarded group of cognitive thinkers do worst of all.

Then what is our native motivation you may ask? Dan concludes by presenting three areas of motivation:

Autonomy: The urge to direct our own life.

Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters.

Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves.

In short:  “Do it because you like it”

Originate:

Remember to write down that dream in the middle of the night because you’ll forget it by morning.

Create:

Experience, Research, Think, Rest … Experience, Research, Think, Rest – Repeat as often as it takes.  More – Do it again.

Invent:

Hey – this is cool!  And I pulled this out of my butt.

Innovate:

Hey – this is cool and it’s going to be HUGE!