audiodesigndan

Discussing audio and its integration into advertising and new media.

[audiodesigndan]

"I'm Younger Than That Now"

I was handed a PDA, earbuds and a sheet of paper with printed lyrics. The file opened on the PDA listed two songs, "My Back Pages" by The Byrds and "Blue In Green" by Miles Davis. The paper just had Bob Dylan's words.

He wanted me to listen to both of them. For the entire lesson. Read the lyrics. What are they about? What do they represent?

I didn't get it at first. He insisted. Bob Dylan may have started out as a Guthrie clone, but he went on to become the greatest songwriter of the 20th century. And Miles Davis? You had to keep listening until you got it.

I still cherish both of those recordings. Certainly not Dylan's best song, but The Byrds' version is the greatest Dylan cover ever recorded.

"My guard stood hard when abstract threats Too noble to neglect Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect"

The meaning was elusive but the imagery was true. And it's stayed with me ever since.

This all came from the man who was one of the greatest influences on my intellectual development throughout my teens. An intelligent man who always seemed odd but it was obvious to me that he saw things differently to everyone else. He saw the bigger picture.

We tried to reconcile our love of the American arts with our disliking for American imperialism. "The greatest defenders of democracy are its sternest critics," he always told me.

This was a man who embodied everything I came to love about education and knowledge. Who introduced to me Capra-idealism and insisted Henry Fonda's virtue in Arthur Millers' "12 Angry Men" is one of the greatest and noblest recordings of the ideas of justice in history.

I stayed in close contact with him for several years after graduating and always mentioned him whenever the quality of education came up in conversation. Here was the greatest educator in the Queensland public service.

And now he's been charged with participating in the most vile exploitation of human capital. It's a tragedy when someone's sexuality has been distorted enough for this to occur. And I now question the value of his input into my development. I don't know where I can lay claim to the foundation of my adulthood.

If it is an open trial I am considering attending. Not for support. Not because I want him to see who he has failed and disappointed.

Because it should be documented by those that loved him too.

[saila]

The Globe and MaiI's feature story on the “Wealth Paradox” is another great example of digital news storytelling, mixing video, text, infographics, and polls into one cohesive narrative. 

Yes, I do work at The Globe, but I also believe these art-directed article experiments (like Snowfall) teach newsrooms how the online medium can be used to tell complex stories. The pieces force journalists to break with their traditional print or video story-telling biases, and the resulting lessons are quickly transferred to every other story they will work on. 

[audiodesigndan]

Visit Original Link

When I first got Pro Tools in 2009, this was one of my first practice recordings. I like the slide for someone who can't really play it. Don't like much else but it was fun!

[audiodesigndan]

Easily my favourite filmmaker.

[audiodesigndan]

Still thinking about The Master.

Daniel Dewar

Connect with Daniel on Google+

  I remember finding this after seeing the film and thought it was one of the better articles about it. The biggest question for me was "What is Freddy Quell? How do you define him? What are his needs? Is it coincidence that the man he fights with in the department store looks similar to Dodd?"

I've always thought of it as the last of the post-modern masterpieces as we now head into that movement's response. I think we go to films looking to find a part of us. What Paul Thomas Anderson has done is craft a film where we can't find it. Any chance of understanding is edited and acted into incomprehension. We are left with a film that does not reflect but shows us what is.

[audiodesigndan]

The White Ribbon: Haneke and Composition

by Daniel Dewar.

Connect with Daniel on Google+

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is one of those films that I fell in love with from the opening shot, much like his earlier film Cache (Hidden). Bonus points for being in black and white, the strength of this film comes from its visual compositions - you could watch it silently and still work out what the film is trying to say.

Set in rural Germany before World War I, we are introduced to the townspeople through a series of accidents. The Doctor gets caught up in tripwire on his horse. A child is hung upside down and tortured. A barn is burned. Then another child is almost blinded. Haneke presents most of these incidents beneath narration, either as an attempt to soften their impact or because they are not what the film is about.

The events of the film are told to us by narration, many years after they have taken place. Narrated by the schoolteacher, we see what he sees and know what he knows. Haneke uses traditional detective-story devices to make us think about who did it but this is, as Jim Emerson explains, Haneke's MacGuffin.

His biggest statement seems to be on the influence of generations of authoritarian and patriarchal rule. In the following shot we see the schoolteacher come to the house of the midwife to ask her parent's permission to marry her. Without dialogue and without needing to cut to another shot, Haneke tells us everything in this single composition.

The schoolteacher is blocked by the father, his head lowered and eyes uncertain. The father is addressing the schoolteacher but his body is open, controlling the room. The mother watches him, knowing its not her place to speak. And then we have the midwife, haloed in light and what might as well be a mile from the others, not even invited to take part in the conversation.

Once the women leave the room Haneke introduces a second shot and we see the same dynamics at play. The father's body language is strong and the schoolteacher is not even in focus anymore.

After this scene we are told of another brutal incident and witness the pastor publicly humiliate his daughter. That the pastor's daughter plays a large role in the closing of the film further suggests The White Ribbon is patriarchal criticism.

As a man driven by education, the schoolteacher tries to work through the who's and why's. We learn very little about those answers. At the end of the film, the schoolteacher confronts the pastor with his conclusions.

This is the first shot in the entire film that is framed from above head height. In shallow focus, logic and reason is swallowed by the room.

Although taking place at an important time in history, we are rarely given a sense that the town is aware of events beyond their borders. After the confrontation, we are then presented with a series of static shots of the town and are told that Archduke Ferdinand has been assassinated. 

The church fills the screen bathed in light, phallic and alone above the town.

We are shown the emptiness of the church's surrounds.

The town and church is now lost to the world. Going back to the first shot, was the world being allowed in or was it being held back?

That one of the maimed children was mentally handicapped has drawn the suggestion that this film is about the birth of Nazism. Perhaps not Nazism specifically, but I think Haneke wants us to think is that if it wasn't Nazism it may have been something else.

[audiodesigndan]

Chill out with Four Tet for an hour or two.

[infoneer-pulse]

Reading is one of the few distinctively human activities that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. As many scholars have noted, and Paul too mentions in her piece, reading, unlike spoken language, does not come naturally to human beings. It must be taught. Because it goes beyond mere biology, there is something profoundly spiritual — however one understands that word — about the human ability, and impulse, to read. In fact, even the various senses in which we use the word captures this: to “read” means not only to decipher a given and learned set of symbols in a mechanistic way, but it also suggests that very human act of finding meaning, of “interpreting” in the sense of “reading” a person or situation. To read in this sense might be considered one of the most spiritual of all human activities.

How Reading Makes Us More Human - Karen Swallow Prior - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse)

[audiodesigndan]

Looking for some inspiration? Quintessential New Yorker and all-round good guy Dave T has some great playlists to explore.

[audiodesigndan]

Just a lot of angles

[celluloidshadows-deactivated201]

[audiodesigndan]

Digital Strategic

It's worrying there are so many businesses not considering digital strategy and advertising. It doesn't matter what industry - most consumers are getting their information via digital media. Work with a communications agency and go to your customers. Pre-empt the consumer. www.audiodesignstudios.com

[audiodesigndan]

VIDEO0003.mp4 from Daniel Dewar on Vimeo.

[journo-geekery]

Rendering performance is critical to users enjoying your application, and you should always aim to keep your paint workload under 16ms. To help you do that, you should integrate using DevTools throughout your development process to identify and fix bottlenecks as they arise.

Inadvertent interactions, particularly on paint-heavy elements, can be very costly and will kill rendering performance.

[journo-geekery]

Via HTML5Weekly.

[audiodesigndan]

Any.do task manager reminds me of the work ahead. Need to keep writing.

[marksbirch]

“What It Takes to Create a Start-Up Community” via The New York Times

What, no Nome, Alaska?  But seriously, while I cannot quibble too much with this map as that is where much of the VC activity occurs, there are plenty of whitespaces where startup are happening in a big way.

For example, where is Utah which has had an active tech scene for a couple of decades?  Why no representation south of the Mason-Dixon line?  There are plenty of startups in Atlanta and Raleigh, while areas around UVA and VT are perking up.  Michigan, once dominated by the auto industry, is experiencing a startup innovation Renaissance in Detroit and Ann Arbor.  Even places you may not think of as tech hotspots like Des Moines and Montana are showing an uptick in tech startup activity.

As I maintained before, it does not matter where you start.  New York may be hot, Silicon Valley might be king, Boston may be the old stalwart, but there is no requirement to move yourself to one of these locales.  You can make it happen anywhere.

[audiodesigndan]

thom and nigel be dancing