Multimedia Theory (1)

There is no grand unified theory for MM yet, but there are some well-accepted sub-theories that seem to hang together pretty well, and which could offer some practical advice for the multimedia designer.

Cognitive Load Theory is one such sub theory, established in the late '90's. Based on the metaphor of a computer's processing limitations as applied to the brain, the theory predicts that when humans are overloaded, their ability to process new information (learn)is impaired. The so-called split-attention effect was cited as evidence for the theory (a decrease in learning efficiency when exhibits carry redundant information). This choking down of our mental processes is more than just a matter of taking in too much information over time, like water slowing as it moves through a narrowed pipe. The brain is not a passive container, but an active processor in learning; we don't learn what we perceive, but what we construct out of what we perceive. This active process of building up new mental models, then relating them to our previous knowledge takes up mental resources. Any redundancy or overloading that inhibits this internalizing process defeats its own educational objectives.

Learning is not a result of being exposed to an exhibit, or simply recalling a memory, it is work, and takes energy and resources. "Exhibit minimalism" is the best practice. Hence, "cogntive load" suggests the following MM rules of thumb:

Don't put animation, narration and text on the screen at the same time. This provides distraction and makes learning harder.

Don't add extraneous visual or auditory details to an explanation. Same as above.

Don't place on screen (or page) text apart from the visuals you are trying to describe. "Working memory" is limited too, so the less one has to carry around the exhibit in recall, the better off they are.

Likewise, don't separate such explanatory items in time.

Applying the Frame Story

According to Wikipedia, the frame story (also frame tale, frame narrative, etc.) ..."employs a narrative technique whereby an introductory main story is composed, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage for a fictive narrative or organizing a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story. The frame story leads readers from the first story into the smaller one within it."

This is a trope that can be useful in making an appeal piece (for an Olympic bid, for instance). Each story conveys a moral or principle embedded within a specific narrative. One story tells all, each story supports the others. This approach has variety, simplicity, and memorability going for it.

The ultimate frame story may be Boccacio's "Decameron",  re-mixed a bit by Chaucer in "Canterbury Tales", but there are many modern examples from cinema, such as "New York Stories" (1989), "Thirty-two Short Films about Glen Gould" and Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" (both in 1993). The recent film "Crash" while, like a frame piece has distinctive sub-story arcs and protagonists, so jumbles the orders of presentation and occurrence as to make it another thing altogether (see the article in Wikipedia on Fabula and Sujet for more).

Before we get too academic here, for the story-teller who wants to keep and audience attentive, the frame story lets us make a big one out of lots of little ones. (more to come)

A National Block Party

A really cool multimedia site on this happy day.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/18/us/politics/20090119-city-block.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Using FaceBook

How can our non-profit leverage the action in online social media?
As a part of our ongoing effort to keep up with the rapid developments in the digital world, our Management proposes a non-profit site at Facebook. This is just one of a series of ventures that can help build our brand and facilitate member activity at the local level. When added to our web publications and our recently introduced private Social Networking application, we think engagement with a number of publicly accessible social computing applications can advance the Scouting movement.

What is Facebook?
Facebook is a popular, free-access social networking website. It is privately owned and supported by advertising. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, or any other affinity grouping to connect and interact with other people. Here, they introduce themselves: name, interests, activities, and biographical information. Users can identify others as “friends”, send them messages, and update a personal profile page. The site also allows posting of photos and video and has extensive (if not perfect) privacy features built in.

Why is Facebook important to us?
In a word, it’s huge. It currently boasts 36 million users in the US and a world user base of 136 million, and is rapidly growing. Web page ranking expert Alexia now rates Facebook as the 5th most popular web site in the world. Though the U.S. base is smaller than that of competitor MySpace, Facebook does not permit anonymous postings—one’s corporate or personal identity is central to one’s site. Users can let their profiles be fully public, or they can restrict viewing of their profile data and content to “friends” or users from the same affinity group.

Although usage is spreading into other demographics, Facebook has been most popular among younger adults and teens (the minimum age is 13). Although it can be used in a variety of ways, Facebook typically allows families and friends to maintain awareness and connection with one another when beyond reach physically or by telephone. The potential for use byour adult members and those over 13 could be substantial.

The fact is, we are already there. Our recent search of the site found 482 self-proclaimed members and several groups.

What will our presence on Facebook look like and what can it do?
Facebook has a free program that permits non-profit organizations to present themselves on self-branded sites to proclaim their mission, carry on discussions, and link back to their home websites, just as individual users can. This option has already been adopted by a wide range of organizations to build awareness and engagement with audiences that might not otherwise have located them on the web. Livestrong (cancer survivors) and National Public Radio are just two prominent users. Each tout their mission, invite interested Facebook users to become “friends” and link them over to their respective home sites. We’ve put together an initial presence of our own under the same program. While we won’t be opening the site to discussion, we can offer story content and links over to our public website, but perhaps most importantly, help visitors find others of our membership within the Facebook universe.

How can this help build the brand?
Clearly, a tie into Facebook is a tie into a new universe of users in what is for us a key demographic of youth and young parents, and the “network effect” is increased when we cross connect Facebook users with You Tube, and Twitter, increasing potential referrals to our recruiting sites and www.scouting.org. This more than just tweaking our “image”. Facebook pages allow users to "become a fan" of the individual, product, service, or concept presented. Pages are integrated with Facebook's advertising system, allowing page owners to easily advertise to Facebook's users. Owners can send updates to their fans, which shows up on their news feeds. They also have access to insights and analytics of their fan base. Virtual world activity can result in real-world socializing and results. Witness how the field of political organizing and fund-raising have be revolutionized by online media. Our members can experience the same effect.

Don’t we already have a social networking application?
Our own Social Networking, based on our Community Server license, is very flexible and offers a high level of security for communications among existing members. A Facebook presence does not compete, but complements it. Our own Facebook presence could very well lead members and organization employees to use this service if they wish. We assume however, that for most people, ours is just one of many dimensions of a full life. Most active members have non-member friends, family, and church and school affiliations. They support political parties, join sports teams, give to charities and play many other roles, all of which combine to create a complete social identity. A tool that includes us , but does not exclude these other realms allows them to communicate through a much richer interface. No man is an island, and none of our members can exhaust all of his or her social needs through our program alone.

How can this help our members?
Anything that lets members connect in the virtual world can help them coordinate their actual association activities. Facebook, along with these other burgeoning social applications can help our people connect this experience with the rest of their lives. It can help users share their experiences to others, supporting peer recruiting and peer-based (viral) public relations messaging. It could play a messaging role in local council campaigns, like popcorn sales or capital development, where non-members are involved, and could coordinate district and unit activities.

What’s Next?
We’ve decided to initiate the Facebook presence discreetly at first. Later, a higher-profile blast may be in order. We’ll monitor activity and learn from it. We’ve been studying a number of the more popular social applications to extend the network effect event further. We’ve identified two that we would like to establish presences as we move forward: You Tube (video sharing) and Twitter (micro-blogging and messaging). The web is a dynamic place these days. We’ll do our best to stay on top of it, confident that more opportunities will present themselves over time.

Working with Social Media (1)

As a part of my ongoing study of online social media, I've been looking at YouTube (YT). I think there are some significant opportunities here for my organization (a major not-for-profit) to tap into a burgeoning communications phenomenon and build our brand significantly.

Most of what we see and hear of YT consists of independently uploaded videos from users to the YT home site. This is how hundreds (if not thousands) of organizationally-related pieces have already been posted on the YT site. There are other options for us, however.


1. We can integrate You Tube controls (widgets) into our own site(s) in an embedded player. This would bring some of the brand power of YT to our own advantage, giving visitors a familiar means of searching and playing back video. YT freely distributes the proprietary code (API) to make this possible. We'd use it to add a YT link and button to our public-facing site. This code can be applied to authenticated sites as well--allowing us to YT brand our video on the MyBSA site. In this option, we would upload our own videos to our own YT account. Their API also enables commenting and rating, which would add powerfully to the value of both our authenticated and public sites.

2. We may be able to establish a BSA-branded site under YouTube itself. Here, we could build the BSA brand by exploiting the YT brand even more fully. YT has a program for qualifying non-profits that allows them a self-branded spot on the You Tube Channel. The page would offer full YT functionality and content under our own control. There are additional options: taking donations (through am affordance in the Google API). And of course, offering a place to submit registration inquiries. A fine example of a non-profit adoption of this is the World Bank Channel ( http://www.youtube.com/user/WorldBank). This option needs to be applied for, and we have not done that as yet.

Considerations:
Both of these options allow us to leverage YT and our own sites to cross-plug one another. In the first option, we'd make our site somewhat more "mainstream" looking and functional. In the second, we'd use our YT video description field and branded banner URL to drive users to our public website, and link them back from there to our branded YouTube channel, all the while encouraging users to comment on what they see. All of this content would reside on the YT server.

Even though the YT component is "free", adopting either option will call for more intensive management of our online video assets than we currently afford ourselves. Aside from the work required to build the API into our site design, we'd be entering a post-broadcast use of video in which user feedback is encouraged and reported. We'd need to be very selective about what we post on our behalf, and we'd have to keep it fresh. The good news is that there is a lot of perfectly wholesome video out there, already being posted by our members and friends. Establishment of a YT window for video can help us project a positive image, coming not just from our professional ranks but from members. That’s what “movements” look like.

We have a similar opportunity at Flickr, for still images, and at FaceBook, to extend our reach via a popular online brand. In future papers, I’ll look at opportunities these and related social apps can provide.

An underlying assumption here is that our brand will benefit from collaboration with these widely used sites. Not only do YouTube and FaceBook reach a far broader audience than anything official coming out of our HQ, they tap into a very favorable demographic for recruiting among youth and young families. Appearing here can do a lot to shape our image among heavy online users.

But we will have to do more than just publish here. We’ll need to interact. Aside from an occasional press release our organization has little public voice. The CSE's Blog is the closest we’ve come to an ongoing presentation of ideas and interpretation of events. To date, we’ve chosen to limit this content to an internal professional audience. Why not re-tune the idea and enter into the public space with it? Why not add the occasional editorial from the President, or other prominent internal spokespersont? One concern that will be raised of course is the “ lightning rod” effect. Won’t this expose us to more criticism? Sure it will. But occasional criticism is the price of gaining public attention. We can’t run from that and expect to be considered part of “mainstream” American culture.

The big ideas

Every year, I think it would be a good idea to drag these out and see if they still apply. Then, tell a story abut how each idea has occured in my experience.

The next big deal in cameras?

Canon and Nikon now offer cameras that combine HD Video capture with high-end stills in a 35MM SLR form factor. The Canon EOS 5D MKII and the Nikon D90 cost 2900 and 1000 dollars respectively. More models are sure to come from others as well as the two camera biggies in the next few months.

Could these be the beginning of a new generation of hybrid tools suited to the photojournalistic and documentary missions? It's hard not to overstate the promise here: a tool that costs under a grand (the Nikon, anyway) but offers production values unheard of at over twenty times that price just a few years ago.

The first widely-seen work on this new device is a thrill to look at:

http://vincentlaforet.smugmug.com/gallery/6042742_wZKiA#377930419_dgxvY-A-LB

The audio capability is very limited on the Nikon camera, but better with the Canon. There's a rudimentary on-body mic on the former, but no provision for external input from your higher-end audio gear, forcing one to use a dual system record setup for now. That's gonna change.

I know my "tipping point" to a purchase: the next Nikon DSLR +HD Cam that comes along with pro audio hookups and >30minute clip limit.

The question is, who will use these and how?

Thoughts on leaving "management"

Well, it's time for me to leave this job and pick up another. I'll be an "individual contributor" for a while, maybe for good. I will miss the people on my team. I will wonder how they will do under new leadership. I will wonder what we have each learned from one another during mine.

It took me a long time, but I think have finally learned something about leadership and teamwork.
Leadership is what it takes to produce teamwork. Teamwork is essential to real productivity. So how do you succeed at being a manager of people?

I've given this a lot of thought over 18 years of people-management. I've finally learned that you don't "manage" people, in any direct sense and you certainly do not create a team by issuing instructions. Many factors go into the "team" behavior of a given group: setting, history, individual drive and capability, external challenges, and sheer accident: they all come down to something very simple: trust.

You do that by working with yourself first. The burden of proof will always work against you.

Behavior trumps claims. You cannot merely ask to be trusted. You must act so that others learn you can be trusted.

Paradoxically, you have to place trust others, even when you have insufficient evidence to do so.

When you let others down, expect to work a good while to re-gain their trust. When people let you down, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

As the leader, you create the atmosphere for trust to be learned. Eventually, most people will live up to your example.

No matter what you do, not everyone will strive to be trust-able to the rest of the team. The hardest part of being a manager is to know when it's time to take a person off the team. When that determination is made, it's essential to act decisively.

This simple but nearly useless bit of wisdom is all I can manage.

Appreciating Obama's Speech Style

We've got a new super-communicator on the political scene. Like him or not (I do), Barack Obama and his cadre of young speechwriters are treating us to some of the finest examples of oratory we've seen in years. So, as a communications buff, I'd like to reflect a bit on the Obama style. Below is the full text of his June 4th speech:

Tonight, after fifty-four hard-fought contests, our primary season has finally come to an end.

Sixteen months have passed since we first stood together on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. Thousands of miles have been traveled. Millions of voices have been heard. And because of what you said – because you decided that change must come to Washington; because you believed that this year must be different than all the rest; because you chose to listen not to your doubts or your fears but to your greatest hopes and highest aspirations, tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another – a journey that will bring a new and better day to America. Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

Note the hallmarks of this style:
repetition, parallel construction
at the phrase and sentence level
(in classical rhetoric, "Anaphora") and alliteration.

A "journey" figure is established
placing the candidate in history.

I want to thank every American who stood with us over the course of this campaign – through the good days and the bad; from the snows of Cedar Rapids to the sunshine of Sioux Falls. And tonight I also want to thank the men and woman who took this journey with me as fellow candidates for President.

Alliteration again in the "s" consonants
and a vivid image suggesting seasonal change.
The "journey" figure is restated,
now referring to his fellow candidates.

At this defining moment for our nation, we should be proud that our party put forth one of the most talented, qualified field of individuals ever to run for this office. I have not just competed with them as rivals, I have learned from them as friends, as public servants, and as patriots who love America and are willing to work tirelessly to make this country better. They are leaders of this party, and leaders that America will turn to for years to come.

He praises his competitors, an act of humility.

That is particularly true for the candidate who has traveled further on this journey than anyone else. Senator Hillary Clinton has made history in this campaign not just because she’s a woman who has done what no woman has done before, but because she’s a leader who inspires millions of Americans with her strength, her courage, and her commitment to the causes that brought us here tonight.

"Journey" and "history" are repeated, reinforcing
the importance of all of these events.
He's building a context for something
even more portentious.

We’ve certainly had our differences over the last sixteen months. But as someone who’s shared a stage with her many times, I can tell you that what gets Hillary Clinton up in the morning – even in the face of tough odds – is exactly what sent her and Bill Clinton to sign up for their first campaign in Texas all those years ago; what sent her to work at the Children’s Defense Fund and made her fight for health care as First Lady; what led her to the United States Senate and fueled her barrier-breaking campaign for the presidency – an unyielding desire to improve the lives of ordinary Americans, no matter how difficult the fight may be. And you can rest assured that when we finally win the battle for universal health care in this country, she will be central to that victory. When we transform our energy policy and lift our children out of poverty, it will be because she worked to help make it happen. Our party and our country are better off because of her, and I am a better candidate for having had the honor to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There are those who say that this primary has somehow left us weaker and more divided. Well I say that because of this primary, there are millions of Americans who have cast their ballot for the very first time. There are Independents and Republicans who understand that this election isn’t just about the party in charge of Washington, it’s about the need to change Washington. There are young people, and African-Americans, and Latinos, and women of all ages who have voted in numbers that have broken records and inspired a nation.

All of you chose to support a candidate you believe in deeply. But at the end of the day, we aren’t the reason you came out and waited in lines that stretched block after block to make your voice heard. You didn’t do that because of me or Senator Clinton or anyone else. You did it because you know in your hearts that at this moment – a moment that will define a generation – we cannot afford to keep doing what we’ve been doing. We owe our children a better future. We owe our country a better future. And for all those who dream of that future tonight, I say – let us begin the work together. Let us unite in common effort to chart a new course for America.

In just a few short months, the Republican Party will arrive in St. Paul with a very different agenda. They will come here to nominate John McCain, a man who has served this country heroically. I honor that service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine. My differences with him are not personal; they are with the policies he has proposed in this campaign.

Because while John McCain can legitimately tout moments of independence from his party in the past, such independence has not been the hallmark of his presidential campaign.

It’s not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush ninety-five percent of the time, as he did in the Senate last year.

It’s not change when he offers four more years of Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs, or insure our workers, or help Americans afford the skyrocketing cost of college – policies that have lowered the real incomes of the average American family, widened the gap between Wall Street and Main Street, and left our children with a mountain of debt.

And it’s not change when he promises to continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians – a policy where all we look for are reasons to stay in Iraq, while we spend billions of dollars a month on a war that isn’t making the American people any safer.

So I’ll say this – there are many words to describe John McCain’s attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush’s policies as bipartisan and new. But change is not one of them.

Change is a foreign policy that doesn’t begin and end with a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged. I won’t stand here and pretend that there are many good options left in Iraq, but what’s not an option is leaving our troops in that country for the next hundred years – especially at a time when our military is overstretched, our nation is isolated, and nearly every other threat to America is being ignored.

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future. It’s time to rebuild our military and give our veterans the care they need and the benefits they deserve when they come home. It’s time to refocus our efforts on al Qaeda’s leadership and Afghanistan, and rally the world against the common threats of the 21st century – terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That’s what change is.

Change is realizing that meeting today’s threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy – tough, direct diplomacy where the President of the United States isn’t afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for. We must once again have the courage and conviction to lead the free world. That is the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy. That’s what the American people want. That’s what change is.

Change is building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but the work and workers who created it. It’s understanding that the struggles facing working families can’t be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs, but by giving a the middle-class a tax break, and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, and transforming how we use energy, and improving our schools, and renewing our commitment to science and innovation. It’s understanding that fiscal responsibility and shared prosperity can go hand-in-hand, as they did when Bill Clinton was President.

John McCain has spent a lot of time talking about trips to Iraq in the last few weeks, but maybe if he spent some time taking trips to the cities and towns that have been hardest hit by this economy – cities in Michigan, and Ohio, and right here in Minnesota – he’d understand the kind of change that people are looking for.

Maybe if he went to Iowa and met the student who works the night shift after a full day of class and still can’t pay the medical bills for a sister who’s ill, he’d understand that she can’t afford four more years of a health care plan that only takes care of the healthy and wealthy. She needs us to pass health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it and brings down premiums for every family who needs it. That’s the change we need.

Maybe if he went to Pennsylvania and met the man who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one, he’d understand that we can’t afford four more years of our addiction to oil from dictators. That man needs us to pass an energy policy that works with automakers to raise fuel standards, and makes corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future – an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. That’s the change we need.

And maybe if he spent some time in the schools of South Carolina or St. Paul or where he spoke tonight in New Orleans, he’d understand that we can’t afford to leave the money behind for No Child Left Behind; that we owe it to our children to invest in early childhood education; to recruit an army of new teachers and give them better pay and more support; to finally decide that in this global economy, the chance to get a college education should not be a privilege for the wealthy few, but the birthright of every American. That’s the change we need in America. That’s why I’m running for President.

The other side will come here in September and offer a very different set of policies and positions, and that is a debate I look forward to. It is a debate the American people deserve. But what you don’t deserve is another election that’s governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won’t hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon – that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first.

Despite what the good Senator from Arizona said tonight, I have seen people of differing views and opinions find common cause many times during my two decades in public life, and I have brought many together myself. I’ve walked arm-in-arm with community leaders on the South Side of Chicago and watched tensions fade as black, white, and Latino fought together for good jobs and good schools. I’ve sat across the table from law enforcement and civil rights advocates to reform a criminal justice system that sent thirteen innocent people to death row. And I’ve worked with friends in the other party to provide more children with health insurance and more working families with a tax break; to curb the spread of nuclear weapons and ensure that the American people know where their tax dollars are being spent; and to reduce the influence of lobbyists who have all too often set the agenda in Washington.

In our country, I have found that this cooperation happens not because we agree on everything, but because behind all the labels and false divisions and categories that define us; beyond all the petty bickering and point-scoring in Washington, Americans are a decent, generous, compassionate people, united by common challenges and common hopes. And every so often, there are moments which call on that fundamental goodness to make this country great again.

So it was for that band of patriots who declared in a Philadelphia hall the formation of a more perfect union; and for all those who gave on the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam their last full measure of devotion to save that same union.

So it was for the Greatest Generation that conquered fear itself, and liberated a continent from tyranny, and made this country home to untold opportunity and prosperity.

So it was for the workers who stood out on the picket lines; the women who shattered glass ceilings; the children who braved a Selma bridge for freedom’s cause.

So it has been for every generation that faced down the greatest challenges and the most improbable odds to leave their children a world that’s better, and kinder, and more just.

And so it must be for us.

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

Audience to Actience (2)

(Today;'s NYT heralds another wrinkle in the emergence of actiences: the Wii exercise machine:)

"Women, parents, even nursing-home residents have been drawn to the Wii’s simple evocations of games such as tennis and bowling. The Wii has become the best-selling game machine of the current generation, selling more than 25 million worldwide, and remains scarce on store shelves across the nation.

Now Nintendo’s latest brainchild, Wii Fit, could send similar ripples through the home-fitness market. Scheduled to be released in North America next week, Wii Fit is not meant to replace a gym. But in a world of $3,000 elliptical machines and $150-an-hour personal trainers, it has at least a chance of becoming a global, affordable, mass-market interactive home-fitness system. (On its overseas debut last month, it became one of the fastest-selling games ever in Britain.)

Exercising with Wii Fit is like having a Bob Harper or a Denise Austin who talks back — gently cajoling you through exercises, praising, nudging, even reminding you to eat a banana once in a while. It also lets you see how you stack up against friends or family members; each user creates a cartoony avatar called a “Mii.”

Audiences to actiences

I’ve been thinking a lot about audiences lately. We've all tended to think of audiences as passive, enthralled by us, totally attending to our presentation. But this old engraving suggests a more knowing reality.

Our audiences may be present, sitting politely in their chairs, but who knows what they are thinking? The artist seems to say, "Yes, there are some enjoying the show, but there are other things that may be more immediate and interesting to the audience, like each other.”

They aren't really an audience if they aren't listening. So you really haven't counted what “counts” if you count the bodies or the "eyeballs" in the online world.

Suppose I get up and speak for 5 minutes. If there are 100 people in the room, more or less listening to me, I figure I'll get 500 minutes of net attention. That’s just about 8 hours. Not bad for one ordinary person.

But the big audiences have changed. In 1956, when we had just 3 national television channels, 81% of all American TV sets were tuned in to see the “Lucy Goes to the Hospital”episode. Multiplying that audience by the 30 minutes it was on the air, I figure Lucy got 22 million hours of net attention. Makes my 8 hours look pretty pathetic.

The fact is of course that the share of audience was much better (when there were three major networks and no cable ) than anybody gets these days. Those were the glory days of audiences.
But audiences are getting harder to come by. Attention is now scarce too. Both attention and audience are getting expensive, and choosy.

In 2008 for instance, a long-haired fellow of modest talents, a Mr. Jason Castro, appears on American Idol for weekly appearances over a few months. Multiply the show's rated audience of 27 million and, giving Jason say, four minutes of airtime, he gets 18million hours of attention. Almost as much as Lucy, albeit with a much smaller share (31% of television homes) of a much bigger pie. Not incidentally, Jason is there because this audience votes on the continued presence of the would-be "idols".

A voting audience has more skin in the game, no?

Niko Bellic is the antihero of Grand Theft Auto IV. This new video game is selling like crazy. Industry watchers predict that GTA IV could sell over 12 million units in its first year. This is a game of course, not a linear presentation, although it looks more like a realistically animated movie thn a game. The producers claim that there is 60 hours of total story arc to be explored within the numerous choice points embedded in the action.

Now we have to re-appraise our net attention measure. Multiplying the expected sales of 12 million units times 60 hours nets a whopping 460 million hours of attention--beating Lucy and the American Idols by an order of magnitude. GTA users say that this interactive experience is "compelling" and "addictive". You really can’t call these users an "audience" in the old-fashioned passive sense.

The users of such multimedia entertainments are now making hundreds of choices, driving the action forward. They have become actors (in the broadest sense of the word). And here's a final HUGE point: Unlike TV or movies, (and more like books) nothing happens unless the users are attending and acting.

Attention is the game. How do contemporary media get it?
Next time you pass through an airport, stop at the magazine rack. The eye-stopping images appeal to our basic drives: food, sex and shelter. No changes in subject matter from month to month, just the images. This may grab us but holding attention takes a bit more work.

Just as we are hardwired to look at nubile human beings, our attention is drawn to what’s shiny and moves (reptilian brain). What psychologists call the “orienting reflex” draws our attention to movement in our visual field. We evolved this way so we could see our dinner before it saw us. Even six-month old babies will sit and stare at a televison.

It’s hard for any adult NOT to watch a car chase. But movement alone only goes so far. We get drawn into the magazines (or movies, or TV shows) with STORY. Lucy, GTA IV and even untalented Jason all hook us with STORY. The next step up in the media battle for our minds is to draw us into the ACTION. Idol does a this with audience voting; onlime media get us clicking, putting us into action even more immediately.

Play is the next level of involvement. GTA does it by letting us cheat, steal and bang away at the characters. We have a growing “playdience” of those who game online and on computers. The numbers for gaming are staggering. Over the course of the first quarter, total hardware sales absolutely ballooned 94 percent to $1.3 billion, with console hardware again comprising most of that total—$958 million (a 129 percent increase).

They say that GTA is a rush. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, but it may tell us something about the future of media. Maybe the old notion of audience needs to be replaced with what you might call a growing actience.

You coud define actience as any group of media users who, simultaneously or independently, attend to and actively engage in a media object, changing it's eventual performance. Those media objects that enable actiences have mechansims that enable play, choice, design, or other elicted behavior whic arise from outside the media object itself. More straightforwardly: an actience exerts control of the presentation in some way.

To the extent that the online users of today are shopping, buying, donating to candidates and causes, mapping, designing, commenting, arguing, and voting they are actiences. They are also blogging or, shooting their own video and photos, and in many cases are creating their own applications.

For those of us who consider ourselves communicators, we need to leave "audiences" behind and create actiences. (more to come)

Augmented Reality

A notable development involves three technologies; a spatially-referenced database, GPS, and position-sensitive head-mounted display to superimpose mediated content over the visual field. Thus, an installer at Boeing follows the prescribed wiring diagram projected over the interior fuselage of a 777, a student at Columbia University sees long-since demolished buildings along with texts for a historically-enriched walk about the campus, and computer games can be projected and played beyond the screen, across the neighborhood. The military is working on AR applications to the battlespace, allowing soldiers to "see" through walls and underground.

In an early post here, we looked at the potential of the computer to let us experience the world as text. We may soon get locationally-driven messages in the form of advertisements that link our interests to the proximity of resources and services. Just as the audio guides we mentioned earlier can enrich our walk through an historic neighborhood, we may be headed to a whole new level of interpreted experience as media tied to space and our view of it changes.

The modern city already is a text. It wears the intentional commentary of its inhabitants; in signs, advertising, and graffiti, just as it wears the unintentional signs of use, wear, and movement. The rise of AR may allow us to become new flaneurs, taking in a world where unlimited annotation is visible in the moment.

http://www.temple.edu/ispr/examples/ex03_01_20a.html

The Engine of Story

What is a story?

We begin with a fact, an event:
1. A woman died.

This is not a story. To have a story we must have at least a second event.
2. A woman died. Her husband died soon after.

This is starting to sound like a story. But we still need a definite link, a causal connection between the two events:

3. A woman died. Her husband died of grief soon after.

That is a story. Something happened, to someone or something, or someone or something took an action as a result. The addition of the explanation “died of grief” is what does the trick. From there on, it’s just embellishment. For example:

4. A beautiful young woman died suddenly of a strange illness. Her lover,mad with grief, took his own life soon after.

That still may fall short of the classical ideal of story. Aristotle would have said that we may have a beginning and an end, but we still need a “middle” for our story. He would have liked to see a bit more struggle-- a third element that charges the causal link with a bit of suspense. In a word: drama. We might amend our simple story this way:

5. A beautiful young woman died suddenly of a strange illness. Her lover collapsed into grief and considered suicide. In a profound dream, the woman appeared to him and begged him to go on living for them both, assuring him that in the hereafter they would be reunited. When he woke, the young man realized his loss and was sad again. Yet, as he went about his day, he was repeatedly reminded of the girl in the dream and of her admonition. He began to see the world in a new light, filled with possibility. He decided to enter medical school, to learn to eradicate the very disease that took his lover from him.

That may seem a bit hokey to some, but in the hands of a good presenter it could make a powerful impression. The middle of the story is any element that throws the outcome, at least for a while, up for grabs. There are endless other possible outcomes to our little story stem, where the initiating event (her death) is responded to with a man possessing a different kind of character and might lead to a different outcome. The middle of any story is a free space for action driven by the first fact, and which lead to a plausible conclusion.

So that is story: a generative event, followed by one or more actions selected by a character, which lead inevitably to a concluding event.

This approach to story is based on structure.

Can a perfectly good story be laid out like a child’s castle of building blocks, later to be decorated and extended over a movie- or novel-length arc? Or is there some mysterious process in which a premise need only be imagined for a given character, and then allowed to spin itself out, almost of its own design, onto the page? Clearly it is easier to explain story analytically, and easier for the novice storyteller to apply it according to a classic pattern. The experienced or more gifted storyteller may rely on his subconscious to follow the same underlying rules.

It may be that both obtain; that a universal structure will always appear under analysis of any good story, whether the process of creation was a deliberate or spontaneous one.

What constitutes drama?

So much for story. Is that synonymous with drama? Drama is a kind of story that has a compelling quality, a story which, once we are engaged in it, it is impossible to not want to learn the outcome. For a story to be dramatic, it most be based, according to Aristotle, on conflict. For Lajos Egri, it must be based on a premise, a fundamental argument that lies behind the story and for which the story is an execution. A premise contains an event or driving fact just as a story does. But depends equally on another component, that of character.

Let's go back to our discussuon of the root story above. In my trite little story line, I implied, but did not fully explicate the character of the man, the lover who became despondent. What might have been premise that lay there in story version 2 ?

A beautiful young woman died suddenly of a strange illness. Her lover,mad with grief, took his own life soon after.

The premise is that the nature of their love was exclusive and that for him anyway, life without her would not be worth living. When she dies, the premise is tested. So too is the young man's character. The dramatic quality comes when we are caused to wonder what the young man will do. A conflict is set up within him; "must I end life or grasp it?". To the extent we can identify with the character, we will sufffer in suspense until he makes his decision.

The little play we began to develop with few linked events here finally enters the realm of drama. In addition to the raw elements of story, there is a moral quality that arises in the actions of characters confronting events. The premise is like an engine, working deep under the story arc. If the premise is a sound one, it can be drawn out for play or film of great length and complexity.

For Egri, as for Aristotle, there is a determinism underneath even the most suspenseful story. The outcome must be implied in the premise established in the beginning. In Aristotle's day, when plays were a religious rite, it was the will of the gods, carried out by the Fates, that determined the ending of ther play. In modern drama, we are most satisfied when the character's vices or virtues play themselves out in the struggle, and yet prevail.

The audience's satisfaction with a story can be attributed to many factors; performance, detail, atmosphere, even "effects". But without the fundamentals of story (linked events) stacked upon the driving element of premise (character in conflict) you won't raise the emotional response required to bring them inside the story, making it their own.

A Different Kind of Road Movie

I know one man filled with stories. He's my cab driver, the same guy we've called now for years to pick us up and take us to the airport for business trips and vacations. We use him exclusively (let's call him Cyrus) because he's reliable, polite, and a great conversationalist. Cyrus is from Iran, or "Persia" as he prefers to call his homeland. He's Azeri, a proud northerner, and takes a secularist point of view in describing his old home. He's well-informed in political affairs in general and we have a great time smashing the current administration's dreadful campaign in Cyrus' part of the world.

I may go for months without seeing him, but whenever I find myself back in his cab, we return to our discussion, picking up much the same subject matter, adding what's new or just re-entering his past for another story. Over time, I have acquired a layered, nuanced experience of this man's life. The cab rides become not so much a series of discrete events as a room to be entered, a study for thought and reflection: "We're back in the cab now, time to go to Persia."

Cyrus, like any of the many foreign born cabbies in our town, would be a great subject for a documentary. I'd break away from the conceit of HBO's Taxi Stories, that focus on the eccentric passengers, and find a way to string together a series of stories told by the driver. The cabbies' tale might be a new take on the "road movie", one where a continuity of narrative replaces a physical destination. The line of retelling, the recalled event, is laid out across the driver's perpetual looping through the city. Real time would be cut up and rearranged to suit the story line.

How could this develop from here? How would one make it artful and entertaining? How much can we get from the cab-as-camera obscura? Would we focus on one or more of Cyrus's tales, or string a series of cabbie philosophers together, flying in some kind of parallel formation? Do we have any hope of a dramatic structure? Or will this be more like Calvino's Invisible Cities, a spiralling and open-ended series of riffs on a theme?

Personal Storytelling as Therapy

Narrative may be an art form (as I've approached it here so far) , but it is very deeply wired into our human nature. It appears now that our self-told stories reveal a lot about us and may predict how well we will deal with what life brings. An item in the NYT today recounts research done by Dan P. McAdams (" The Redemptive Self"-2006) proves that indeed, stories matter.

As people tell their life stories, they may include universal forms: accidental beginnings, turning points, epiphanies, climaxes, defeats, and victories. As Americans we may include more culturally specific themes: atonement, conversion, emancipation, advancement, second chances, salvation and so forth. This is the stuff of Joseph Campbell ("Hero of A Thousand Faces") and the story-structuralists. It lies beneath the surface in dramatic structure and is exploited in the art of story-telling. What's new here is that story telling is not just a means to constructing our past, but how we interpret the present and shape our futures.

McAdams studied people who were in talking therapy, working through emotional trauma striving to effect some behavioral change. What he found was that those who were able to cast and replay their histories in the third-person were more likely to move ahead than those who continued to view past experiences only in a first-person. In a sense, the more succssful strategy is to make a movie of your life, and describe it as if from the outside. One one level this makes sense; getting some distance from the pain and trauma often does help us see things in perspective. That's why telling someone else (especially a relative stranger) about a difficult subject can feel so liberating. On another, it seems to veer toward a kind of dissociative state--the ultimate escape from pain being creation of an entirely new persona with no conscious awareness of the preceeding one.

This new research supports the work of Robert Fisher, whose "narrative paradigm" maintains that people are essentially storytellers and that history, biography, culture, and character determine what stories we take for truth. This model of the world is mediated by "narrative rationality"; the truth is known via the coherence and fidelity of our stories, which in turn, we are constantly re-adjusting to fit experience.

Wanna change? Re-write your back story.

The Communications Audit

I wrote up this piece for in-house use some years ago and reprised it here for WIW. Audits are a potentially powerful tool we corporate communciators too often overlook, perhaps because they are so often used polemically, or to get business. I drew heavily (though not I trust plagaristically) on PRSA white papers, as well as other online sources.

1. What is a communications audit?
Essentially, it’s a strategic estimate of any organization’s communications function. Audits look at structures (people, how they are linked, and what they do) as well as content. They look at how an organization spends money and profits(or loses) as a result of communication activity. According to a white paper from PRSA: “…..It is a complete analysis of an organization's communications, and effort to "take a picture" of communication needs, policies, practices and capabilities, and to uncover necessary data to allow management to make informed, rational decisions about future communications programs and resources. An audit should also lead to a series of recommendations.”

2. What is the scope of an audit?
The audit is distinguished from a project’s “creative” or “development” phase in that it is more comprehensive and refrains from defining executional questions. Instead, audits help define communications priorities and assign resources to address them. Audits can be very focused or very broad. “The scope can range from very specific attention to a single topic to a comprehensive review of an entire organization’s communications operations. Audits can measure the effectiveness of programs throughout an entire organization, in a single division or department, or within a specific employee group. It can examine communications on a particular subject or communications via individual media; it can uncover misunderstandings, information barriers and bottlenecks, as well as opportunities. It can help measure cost effectiveness, evaluate ongoing programs, confirm hunches, clarify questions, and, in some instances, reorient concepts among senior management”.

3. What does the communications audit provide?
An audit should be grounded in some objective material and be delivered from a detached point-of-view. Audits may use opinion surveys, statistical data, web traffic, independent observations or journal entries for empirical input. They should interpret data with rigorous analytical methods, such as those commonly accepted among professional management, finance, or the social sciences. An audit should… “provide meaningful information to members of management concerned with efficiency, credibility, and economy of their communications policies, practices, and programs. It also provides valuable data for developing or restructuring communications functions, guidelines, and budgets, as well as recommendations for action tailored to an organization's particular situation as uncovered by an analysis of the collected data.”

5. What subjects are covered in an audit?

• Communications philosophy
• Objectives and goals
• Current organization, tasking and staffing
• Existing communication programs and techniques
• Existing media used
• Personal communications
• Attitudes toward existing communications
• Needs and expectations
• Specific areas of concern


An Audit Method
1. Hold a planning meeting.
Determine the audit's scope and objectives. Identify question areas, plan an approach, and develop a schedule. Determine research questions and methodology (interviews, surveys, focus groups, statistical reports and analyses). Develop a budget and submit it for management approval.

2. Look for impact data.
What objective evidence for the effectiveness of current communications exists? Do we know how well current efforts are working? If not, we may need to design research to find out.

3. Talk to management.
Broad audits should first determine management's attitudes and beliefs about communications in general, as well as to pinpoint their particular views on the program, campaign or operations under study. More focused audits should find and tap key players’ background knowledge and experiences on the specific topic being audited. Management beliefs about communications’ relative effectiveness, value, cost and ROI are crucial to gathering resources for new communications initiatives.

4. Inventory and analyze existing communication material.
Gather samples of all existing communication vehicles and programs. Review them in light of the needs identified in the interviews and questionnaires. Map out the material against the desired communications objectives to identify strengths and weaknesses and gaps in the organization's current communications.

5. Conduct employee or end-user interviews.
Interviews are held with focus groups of employees (in the case of internal communications audits) or users (for external) who discuss the organization’s communications under the guidance of a consultant trained as a group facilitator. These sessions may probe issues and weaknesses identified in existing communications analyses or other impact data. They create soft data auditors can sift in order to find nuances, themes, attitudes and language that can be applied in later communications.

6. Gather additional impact data as required.
Survey data, among internal or external audiences may still be required. Auditors would draft and administer a questionnaire deriving items identified in earlier steps of the process.

7. Prepare a Final Report
Auditors gather all the data and write to the initial questions of the audit. They should make some determination of weaknesses and or gaps in current communications operations/campaigns/topics and arrive at a suggested strategy for correcting them in light of overall corporate objectives. The report should also make allocative recommendations, suggesting the appropriate staffing, tasking and media mix reflected in future communications pieces.

Walking Tour Guides

There are several outfits out there now doing audio narratives that have leapt from the museum-gallery trope into walking guides for actual neighborhoods and historic locations. I've found some interesting ideas at work in this evolving part of the audio creative spectrum. More will surely come, as iPods abound, production costs are low (you just need a digital recorder and some decent walking shoes) and one does not need to get releases to enter and talk about a location.

The firms iJourneys, Soundwalk, and Audissey seem prominent at this writing. iJouneys producer Elyse Weiner, who got a nice little write-up in the NYT last month, has created some concise and simply produced walking tours of the major tourist locations in Europe (the Forum in Rome, The west bank neighborhood in Paris, etc.) The .mp3 files done by AudisseyGuides are more "produced", even to the point of adding background music and the sounds of footsteps as you walk about the location. They've covered the touristy parts of six or so American cities. Titles by Soundwalk (also marketed on the web by Audible.com) are also highly produced, like movie soundtracks. They have covered 14 neighborhoods in NYC alone, and even have a Louvre-based talk using extensive clips from the DaVinci Code movie. As the user walks from one "station" to the next, they get the narration spoon-fed to them. Objects, views and stories are strung along the walk. I find the latter two product lines to be way over-produced, to my taste anyway. After all, if you are "there", you ought to be able to hear what's really going on around you, not some dopey music score.

These guides are typically downloaded right off the internet and retail for 14 to 20 dollars. Given the low production & distribution cost, this may be a decent way for well-traveled producers to make a buck. There are a zillion locations that could be aided by this technology; think of all the state parks and minor historic locations out there that could be opened up by informative or even dramatic narratives. Of course .mp3 players are inherently individual--at least for now.

The medium is well suited to the flaneur, but what about the touring couple or the small group? Later, we may see some way of cueing local .mp3 players to synch up from station to station on a tour, so a group of walkers could take it in together. In an earlier posting, I mused about place-sensitive media, triggered by GPS cues that could pace the narrative to the walker's random moves. Could get interesting.

This meme could find its way to industrial producers. Why not do an audio tour of the company's headquarters facility for new employees, or a more detailed tour of the production line to orient the workers to specifics of their new jobs?

The Most Intimate Medium

It is three o'clock in the morning. I'm laying awake, calculating the hours left before I might reasonably rise, and the options I have to get myself back to sleep. After laying there a few minutes, the detritus of the day running through my increasingly wakeful head, I reach for my iPod and dial up one of those wonderful Radiolab episodes I've been catching lately.

Within a few moments, I've got Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich talking, the stereo earbuds creating the illusion of sound emerging from the inside of my head. This episode happens to be about the deep neurology of moral choice; about the nature of morality itself, or at least the moral feelings we experience and where they might come from. It's a particularly thoughtful program, produced in a layered, conversational style with occasional sound effects to underscore the material.

Laying there, it occurs to me, this is perhaps the deepest penetration of something externally created one can experience...

Sawatsky on the interview

How should we interview? As a corporate producer, I've always been a soft-baller, learning to gently tease content out of my subjects, usually for the sake of promoting the company line. Unlike investigative journalists who need to perennially critical of their subject's responses, we corporate communicators don't get paid to look under the rug for scandal, or prompting our interview subjects into making iconoclastic revelations. The premise for quizzing our bosses, employees, customers, or consultants on camera, is an ostensibly friendly one (even though it could be considered an exploitive one as well).We're just happy with coherent statements. If we can get a genuine emotion, or a story, neatly told, we are elated.

But maybe we can learn a thing or two from our meat-eating cousins in the broadcast media. Canadian investigative reporter John Sawatsky thinks most journalists have got interviewing all wrong. It's not about the question, he claims, but the answer. In an age when politicos and corporate flacks get coaching on how to duck unwanted questions, side step negatives and spin their way along a desired "message track", Sawatsky has taken us back to the basics. We got away from that, he says, when interviewers became stars and tried to be part of the story themselves. He likes to harpoon show-off interviewers who try long-winded, stunt questions only to get a "yes" or "no" answer from the subject. Instead, he says, dump the "dialogue" and get back to interrogation.

Sawatsky's technique is akin to non-directive counseling. The point is to get to what the subject knows and feels, not to have a conversation in the tradional sense. Disciplined questions make for better and more illuminating answers, even when the relationship between the subject and interviewer is potentially hostile. The less interpretive and additive the questioning, the less opportunity you give to the respondent to spin. Sawatsky's gotten some street cred for his efforts. He's been hired by ESPN to train their reporters to work less at being "stars" themselves and harder at getting the story.

No problem there, we very humble corporate communicators are already all about answers, right? Don't we typically edit the final program entirely from subjects answers anyway, with our stuff winding up on the "cutting room floor"? What can we learn from this guy?

For one, I think we can learn to be more spirited in our questioning, and more genuinely curious. In the corporate world, we are conditioned not to ask too much; we learn not to dig for motive, seek clarification, or pull out subtleties in people's thinking. We tend to take statements at face value. Anything but conflict, hunh? Being a tad more investigative need not be a bad thing. Perhaps we can do that without being unfriendly, or even un-conversational.

Perhaps too, corporate communicators can be more than merely the trigger for prepared "comments". Maybe we can start getting our subjects to think and feel more spontaneously about the subject matter. The fact is that most people don't know what they are going to say about anything until they are asked. That's why the method of conversation can sometimes yield unexpected treasures of feeling and even a fresh insight, even if it is about the company's extended leave policy or the performance envelope of that new plane we are selling to the Chinese. So ask, and ask better.

Here's a quick Sawatsky primer on how to ask better questions:

• Know your stuff. Prepare questions in advance. This does not mean knowing what the subject will say, it means stoking your curiosity.
  
  
• Ask open-ended questions. Frame them to get facts and content back. Sawatsky urges us to be "inputters", saying as little as possible to get the subject to say as much as possible.
  
  
• Don't stack up questions into two or three-parters. This is where preparedness helps. Ask one item at a time.
  
  
• Don't grandstand your opinions or try to impress the subject with YOUR expertise. It's about her(him).
  
  
• Keep the questions neutral in tone. Don't presume what your subject might say or how she might feel. The "friendly" interviewer can communicate warmth and curiousity
  without anticipating with or agreeing with everyhting the subject says. respectful interest is enough. Don't patronize the subject by "rewarding" good answers.
  
  
• Transcribe your next interview and look it over. What's the ratio of your talk to the subjects? The steeper the ratio in the subject's favor the better.
  
  JEC

Shallow DOF

Lately I've noticed a lot of commercial and even journalistic photography using extremely shallow depth-of-field, in many cases, intentionally placing large areas of subject matter outside of crirical focus. It is a powerful technique for separating the figure and ground, thus controlling the attention of the audience. It reminds us that depth of field (DoF) has had a bumpy history.

To begin with, WE have shallow depth-of field imagers, called EYES. Our foveal (sharp image) area is only within about 4 degrees of the center of the visual field. It's up to our brains, and the rapidly-scanning saccadic movements of the eyes to put together the visual experience of a virtually unlimited DoF. In this regard, you might say our "stills" are shallow, but our "movies" are deep.

Of course, room-sized camera obscura, the grandaddies of all photography, rendered extremely deep-focus images, because image field was so huge compared to aperture. The problem with the camera obscura was that it had no way to capture the image (...this reminds us too that the camera obscura (hidden room) was a movie).

Once we learned how to capture a slice of visual time and feeze it chemically, we inherited shallow DoF again along with the technology. Before film, images were captured on large format plates. These early emulsions were relatively slow, so camera designs required either unbearably long exposure times or huge aperatures and huge lenses that could gather a lot of light fast. Perhaps the the most famous Daguerrotype of all showed about 1/4 inch of Abe Lincoln's nose in tight focus, with his ears way out there in blurryville. As film arrived in large medium formats, lens and emulsion technology made deeper DoF possible, when we wanted it.

The irony is that the "arty" look once imposed by the limitations of technology is hard to come by with today's super-deep focus digital cameras. These too, carry limitations imposed by the technology: the small size of the imaging area relative to aperture. Now folk seem to be adding the "old" look in post, with Photoshop.

One cute new DoF device for the digital still camera is the lensbabies device . It's been compared to the super-cheap Holga medium format camera, known for unpredictable accidents in camera, only without the "accident" part.

On the motion side, we are still a long way from the shallow DoF or "35 mm" look, mainly because of the imaging area available on a 1/3 inch chip. Even the top-end cameras like the Cine Alta and the Viper have only 2/3" imaging areas. HD movies, such as Collateral (2004) made the most of the deep focus and high light sensitivity capabilities of the digital camera.

But artists will still prefer the film-like, "soft" image aesthetic for many projects. We are already seeing a lot of DoF play in post-work, in movies as well as stills alluded to above. The upcoming Red camera's mysterium chip will boast an imaging field larger than that of a 35 mm film camera, so we may see the blurry background look arrive in digital movies at last.