Ketchup

Some time has gone by since my last post. The kids had Spring Break, so we get in a few days of end-of-season skiing at Boreal, a smallish ski resort just off the 80 at Donner Pass. Now my older son just turned 12 and started going to middle school in-person four half-days a week, as opposed to four full days at home per week. My younger son is also partially back in school in person; but this is all just an interim step and does not represent much of a change for me in terms of getting my life back or anything. There’s actually more work now, in the sense that I have to make two half hour round trips to the middle school each day before 1 PM. The rest of the time, when they are not technically “in” class on Zoom, is devoted to nagging the kids to stop just watching YouTube and get some of their schoolwork done.

I’ve managed to do a few other things, here and there. Skiing, as I mentioned, and a day of snow play at one of the Truckee area’s snow parks. I’ve done a modicum of video editing, gratis, for an elementary school fundraiser. A little reading, a lot of movie watching, little to no writing. I’m getting back to that right now. I also experimented with blu-ray burning software by making a blu-ray mix disc, with several movies on it along with some fun trailers and other bits and pieces.

About the latter, the process is, of course, considerably more esoteric than making a mixtape or mix CD ever was; or even just dubbing a bunch of shit to VHS. No one really wants anyone to do this kind of thing anymore, so it’s punishingly difficult at times, but I was happy with the results, although it was much simpler than I wanted. I should specify that I use Apple products; this difficult process is even tougher on a Mac, since Apple never really got behind the blu-ray medium. I actually downloaded Toast, software I haven’t even considered in about 10 or 15 years. It’s still being made and has some blu-ray capacity but, considering it’s one of the only games in town for burning anything but the simplest blu-rays on a Mac, Toast is astonishingly terrible to use. I had to use Chinese software called DVDFab to create a BDMV file (which is basically a package file for blu-ray content) that I could then burn using Toast; neither of these applications would do the other half of the process well enough to use all the way through. Toast can’t even reliably figure out how big a file is that you want to burn, leading to a lot of frustrating trial and error; DVDFab allows you to treat the file size exactly as is, or resize it in quality to fill up the disc, but then does a shit job of the actual burning. I wanted to have fun with menus, too, but gave up on that pretty early on when I saw how hard it was all going to be.

I mentioned a little bit of editing. Recently, I discovered a subreddit called r/PraiseTheCameraMan. It’s a fun little group that posts video clips for which the camera (person) did a great job in one way or another, usually following some tricky unplanned action on the fly. I noticed that many, though not all, of the videos on the sub are shot in portrait mode. This is how smartphone videos look when you hold the camera normally, as opposed to turning it 90 degrees for a widescreen view, officially called landscape mode. Landscape, which has a much wider view but is less tall than portrait mode, is the way all films and TV shows and home videos have been shot, forever, but now, because it’s possible, a lot of people film with their phones in this other way. I have to work a little bit to not simply be disgusted by this; it’s not necessarily a terrible idea in every case to use this format. It’s what’s used on TikTok, which is where that example came from, and it generally works better for selfies, so it feels obvious and natural to a lot of people, even though it violates the basics of moving image composition as they’ve existed for almost 130 years.

But I am always (for some reason) flabbergasted that adults whose awareness of cameras and filmed things go beyond selfies and TikTok would film things in this way. I struggle to understand it. I don’t expect anyone to know anything about composition and framing, let alone any filmmaking basics, because no one knows anything about filmmaking unless they’ve deliberately tried to learn, but even given the usual ignorance this boggles my mind. Can’t the person filming this shot see that there’s a huge amount of wasted space in this image? Are they familiar with basic shapes, enough to know that rectangles can be oriented a couple different ways?

This material is going to be edited into a video to be shown at a Zoom event, where it would take up approximately a third of the screen space if displayed this way. Luckily, unbeknownst to the camera operator, their phone shoots in 4K, so I can crop out most of this image and display it in landscape view without losing detail if I render everything out at lower resolution. But is it so difficult to turn the phone 90 degrees? Ok, end of rant.

Related to this, which honestly just makes me chuckle and shake my head more than anything, is the fact that we have had the moving image medium for more than 120 years without ever considering whether a basic education in its fundamentals might be a good idea for everyone. Never mind that films have been used to trick people since the very beginning and that most people, even today, are almost completely illiterate when it comes to how easily they can be manipulated by video—it’s still not a priority of any kind, or even considered outside of a video class here and there, or an isolated class project on occasion. Luckily, the youngest generation has taken it upon themselves to learn all about moving image media—even TikTokers who only shoot in portrait mode are learning all about editing; YouTubers have figured a lot out on their own.