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Mar 18

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The Sandwich Manifesto

scanwich

Things are going to be a little quiet through next week as I’m starting production on something for a few days. In the meantime, amuse yourself with scans of delicious sandwiches.

Food for thought (or comments, hint, hint). In this day and age of “gourmet” sandwich ingredients, is the concept of the sandwich itself obsolete? There’s a great local bakery which makes a roasted vegetable sandwich with five types of hand-roasted vegetables, smoked provolone, and a home made garlic aoli on thick fresh-baked bread. When I eat each element individually they are truly epicurean delights. When I eat the sandwich? I taste yams and lettuce, the two largest ingredients (by taste intensity and surface area respectively).

Yet, by prying my sandwich into it’s component parts it’s hardly a sandwich, it’s a salad with some bread on the side. The sandwich was borne of an era with ingredients of middling quality, where it’s delivery mechanism alone was unique. I certainly don’t think the sandwich is done, there’s still nothing to beat a pile of smoked meat on rye (maybe a little sauerkraut), but a graph correlating increasing number, or quality, of ingredients against “overall sandwich enjoyability” would be interesting. What is the critical mass of a sandwich?

I won’t be getting on that any time soon.

Discuss, and I’ll see y’all in a couple of days.

Mar 13

1 Comment

Mental Sorbet: Ricky Gervais and Elmo

That’s a lot of heavy depressing media reading for one week isn’t it? So, like a fine sorbet for your weekend, here’s Ricky Gervais and Elmo utterly losing their minds…

(h/t to the Associated Press… because this is the Internet… and the Internet is becoming increasingly schizophrenic).

Mar 13

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Hey Film and Television Friends, Are You Affected By The New CTF Rulings?

Here’s a great form letter I got today that does a very good job of detailing exactly why the CTF announcement should have everyone working in film and television extremely nervous. I’m trying to find the original author for attribution, although since it’s a “pass it on”, I’m sure they won’t mind my re-post. I left the content as-is, but did some re-formatting. Full post is after the jump, along with my $0.02 at the end. Read more

Mar 11

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Have you ever wondered what a trillion dollars looks like?

trillion

The phrase gets bandied about a lot but I think this CGI mock-up of a trillion dollars (stacked on pallets in a warehouse) blew. my. mind.

(h/t Gizmodo)

Mar 11

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CTF Snap Judgement

There was a big announcement by heritage minister James Moore this week about “streamlining the Canadian Television Fund and Canadian New Media Fund into a new “super-fund” in 2010.

I haven’t posted on it, as I haven’t had a lot of time to dig into the details, but my “snap judgement” is that the move is problematic (to say the least) on a number of fronts.

At it’s core, I think the concept of streamlining and consolodating Canada’s media and entertainment sector funding is not necesarrily a bad idea, but I think this move opens a number of really troubling areas:

1) The jury is out on how exactly the “smaller independant” board will be constituted, but it seems safe at this time that broadcasters will have a much larger voice in that board, which is almost entirely the opposite of what those lobbying for an “independant” board wanted, for obvious reasons.

2) Opening the fund up to broadcaster-owned producers is a really sticky wicket. I don’t mean this to be rude, or a muckraker, or impugn the excellent work done by many of my friends and co-workers – but the goal of a large segment of broadcaster owned production is to fill as many content hours as cheaply as possible. Developing programming from that goal is almost diametrically at odds with what the fund was created to do, which was foster high quality content with large economic impact, high visibility, and export potential. Just the increase in volume alone is troubling givin the vast oversubscription to the old CTF.

and the big one

3) From the article: “The fund will favour projects produced in high-definition and require applicants to design their projects across a minimum of two distribution platforms, including television.”

(Sigh)

I will get into this at length another day but the increase in popularity of “new media”, and the rise of “digital convergence” does not mean that you re-purpose material across several platforms. If we have learned anything about the changing media landscape in the past decade it’s that consumers consume different types of material in different ways across platforms. The material I watch on my iPod (and how and when I watch it) is not the same as the material I watch on my tv, nor in a movie theatre, nor on my computer. When you require producers to attempt to leverage their productions across multiple platforms, you are nearly guaranteeing that they will fail in one (and possibly both) of them. Requiring that applicants to a new media fund also be working their project in film or television, makes about as much sense as requiring applicants to a book publishing fund to have recorded a hit single, or applicants to an arts grant being able to run a 4-minute mile. Tying everything together does not foster excellence anywhere – it makes it more likely that projects will fail, and it mandates mediocrity (and underperformance) across the board.

Mar 10

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ISP’s, and the art of the double-sided CRTC arguments

Classic ad for Corbin suits found via Styleforum

I got an e-mail today referring to this article about Rogers and Shaw’s CRTC presentations. In specific the e-mail asked whether the quote, “ISPs are pipes, not broadcasters,” by Ken Engelhart, Rogers’ head of regulatory affairs – meant that ISP’s were conceding that net neutrality was, in fact, the preferred practise for ISP’s in this country.

I think there’s two important things to remember here:

1. Everything being said at the current CRTC hearings has been in respect to the issue of promoting Canadian new media content. In particular the CRTC is investigating whether (amongst other things) an ISP levy should be used to encourage Canadian new media growth the same way Canadian broadcasters pay a levy to go into a fund to support the production of Canadian television, or radio stations pay into a fund to support the production of Canadian music. In this theatre the ISP’s absolutely don’t want to be seen as “broadcasters” because they then have a president obligation to promote the development of Canadian content – it’s in their advantage to play the “we’re just a utility” card.

2. “But Brad” you ask, “how can they then turn around in several days, at the upcoming Net Neutrality hearings, and argue the exact opposite?” The important thing to remember in that, epxected, outcome is that Bell’s argument for traffic manipulation in that case is to “protect the network”. It’s not necessarily that the ISP’s want prioritize some content over others – they’re arguing that the strain on their networks is significantly more than capacity and they must have the right to defend it. It’s mere coincidence that the only tool they have to do that, is to prioritize some content over others.

Even if their logic was 100% verifiable fact (and I’ve pointed out elsewhere in my posts about these arguments that there’s much bigger network issues than BitTorrent traffic, or the so-called “high volume users”) my core argument has been that it doesn’t matter what the reasoning is. The moment you allow any traffic prejudice for any reason, the fight is lost, because you’ll never have network transparency again. And that’s simply too much power to hand over to anyone, no matter how noble their rationale is (or isn’t). “Net Neutrality” is a bubble – once it’s punctured it can’t be reconstructed. You can’t just violate it “to protect network integrity” and assume that it will stand for content priority, or end-user access, or equal access against ISP-affiliated services – it really is an all or nothing deal.

Mar 5

1 Comment

Enter, Julius Genachowski

julius genachowski

As has been presumed since January, Julius Genachowski, has been nominated to head the Federal Communications Commission in the US.

While Genachowski is considered by many a strong advocate of Network Neutrality (being the first FCC head to come from a former life in Sillicon Valey, as opposed to the usual broadcast executive route to the job) – some are asking questions why neutrality pledges haven’t been a bigger part of his appointment.

My pragmatic opinion is just the reality that there are a number of interests that the Obama administration must court, and if your biggest complaint to date about Genachowski is that he’s someone who clearly understands the issues, the importance of the issues, and has vocally supported the cause in the past… but is less vocal now that he’s been appointed to a high-level government position… that’s still a pretty good day in Washington.

[Edit - in a weird "snake eating it's own tail" loop, Laura at Derivative Work (who referenced this post) has done a great overview of Mr. Genachowski's background and previous work with her usual impeccable detail and thorough research. Highly recommended as a primer on the new FCC head. ]

Mar 3

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One last Coraline note…

coraline

One last, for now, note on the on-going saga of Coraline’s Box-Office. While (as I predicted) Coraline did overtake “Friday the 13th” this week, it not only wasn’t by the large measure I had expected – but it dropped a whopping 54% to 5.3M, which was significantly more than I expected.

Thankfully BoxOfficeMojo set me straight by pointing out that the film lost over 700 3D screens to the opening of the new Jonas Brothers movie. (Interestingly I notice that the Jonas brothers per-screen average was actually lower than the “Coraline” per screen average last week. Wouldn’t it be a kick if ‘line managed to outlast them?

I promise to not harp on this any further… at least as relates to the importance of box-office openings.

…

Okay, just one more – Dear “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li“, I know I said that opening-weekend box-office is generally indicative of nothing. However, that whole “getting bested on your opening weekend by a month-old stop-motion animation which was made with a smaller budget” thing? Not a good indicator.

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