I’m on the second week of my recovery and looks like I need to wait a little longer before I can get back to work full time and take daring adventures on buses, or walk to the shops over the road. I’ve spent most of this week sitting down with my foot up, the only time that I’ve been out was to see a doctor.
On Tuesday I had a second x-ray which agreed with the first that my foot thankfully wasn’t broken when the table fell on it. There is still a severe hematoma and I was advised that heat pads rather than ice-packs might help, so I’ve continued to rest. It is still very painful when I stand or walk for more than a few seconds, it’s not easy to make a cup of tea, and making toast requires some courage and tests resilience.
I thought that I might be able to teach remotely, but it hasn’t been possible, I wouldn’t be able to sit for very long, even with my foot up, so I’ve stopped almost completely, just typing messages and writing canvas announcements for my students. My lovely colleagues have stepped in to help, I hope that I can lend my support if ever they need it, they are being very kind, they are busy people and it is very much appreciated.
I’m just going to have to play the waiting game I’m afraid, at least I can read, make notes and watch a few films and documentaries. The first week was incredibly frustrating and I really was quite naive about how long it would take to recover. And I really shouldn’t have flown to LA, I’ll tell you about it, but safe to say that the altitude and cabin pressure probably exacerbated the injury. It was a daft thing to do really…should have listened to myself.
We had some good food in LA, probably the best Green Chicken Curry from Ruen Pair in LA’s Thai Town, that I’ve had since South Africa about 10 years ago, and BBQ from Slab that was delicious. Of course, the extra price of the Uber made it more expensive than it should have been, but it was absolutely worth it.
Thank you for your lovely messages, it really means a lot and has helped keep my pecker up this week. I have been so busy lately with all this travel and work, sometimes you wonder if an injury comes along to tell you to stop. I don’t believe in Karma, or maybe I do, because I have definitely needed to rest and recover, physically and mentally.
This week I’ll give you a run down of some of the things I saw at the conference and a few other things that have come my way during the week of putting my foot up.
Stephan
Teaching and Learning
This was my first trip to the Infinity Festival which has been running for around five years, with a couple of remote editions during the pandemic. It is where “Silicon Valley meets Hollywood”, a sort of art-tech mashup where producers and content creators can swap stories about some of the new cool kit they’re trying out.
I took a group of students from my courses and those in the ETC (Entertainment Technology Center), and together we attended talks and demos, we presented a panel and sipped drinks at various networking events. I also recorded a podcast that you can watch and listen to here. (Facebook link). In fact, I had no idea it was being streamed, otherwise I would have sat up straight and taken my hoodie off.
Overall the sessions panned out nicely, there were a few sessions that I missed because my foot was hurting too much, but colleagues attended and reported back. One of the main takeaways was how hard everyone working to built modular assets, writing projects that are pre-designed to be stripped, repurposed, remixed and shared. You don’t just write a film script, now you make sure that every character can be franchised, the sets can be stripped and re-used, that props and digital assets can be sold as NFT’s, it’s like you’re picking the meat of each bone and serving it as its own dish.
Of course I find this bizarre, but my students are pretty plugged into this way of working, they are platform agnostic, and understand the affordances of each channel, whether it be social, immersive, audio, cinematic, theatrical or for exhibition. We see this model already in Star Wars or Marvel, so I suppose we’ve been doing this for a while, I just can’t get my head around it when it comes to more directorial content, but it’s not impossible I suppose.
Spaces to Connect
There were lots of AI sessions at Infinity Festival, everything from AI to fix issues in your footage, AI to work in the background to balance sound and learn your habits as you edit, predicting cuts and offering alternative options. It is very weird, the idea of having someone with you, almost like an engineer while you make big decisions. Is AI going to be something that is always with us, will an AI write this post and all I have to do is tweak it? It is already happening with images, video, scripts, a ton of stuff. Will collaboration mean that we can do more, or the same just with enhancement?
Take a look at this portfolio by Ashlee Martino-Tarr, who collaborates with AI on image development. The AI plays a vital role in the development of her work, imagining concepts, textures, colors, light and shadow, she experiments, swapping work from one AI into another. The workflows she shared were incredible. Who would have thought about using an AI to create a texture that can be used in a 3D render?
Also after Infinity, videos like this started popping into my feed. It is a bit technical, love the setup, but just wait (or skim through) for the end.
Life Lessons
I’ve deleted the Twitter app from my phone after a few weeks of terrible headlines, I’m not quite ready to dump the account, mostly because I don’t really want anyone taking the handle, but I suppose that doesn’t matter really either. I asked twitter for a zip file of my content and it was fun flicking through very old pictures, along with scans, grabs of slides and presentations, memes and videos. Apart from a few photos of the kids, there wasn’t much of any consequence.
When you download the archive, and I recommend you doing this on a desktop, you’ll see a folder and a file called Your archive.html and if you drag this into a browser will give you a dashboard and access to your tweets.
It’s a sad state of affairs, Twitter was great when it started, I’ve had an account for the past 15 years and at various times I tweeted a few times a day, and then less and less, until now hardly ever. I enjoyed meeting people at #LTHEchat which felt like a community. I have used Mastodon but not to post, and along with Slack and Discord I can still have online conversations, but I haven’t been able to engage for very long.
Instead my attention is being held by TikTok, which is wild because it is pretty nuts and the algorithm jumps around like a bucking bronco, measuring linger time (essentially the hundredths of seconds that you spent looking at a post, even if you think you scrolled through) and plastering your feed with similar content. Occasionally I think I’ve hit a sweet spot and like what I’m seeing, but it won’t last more than a few minutes. It is a free sweet shop and the owner left town and aliens have invaded. Totally nuts.
Lost and Found
I watched a few things, The Bear on Hulu is very good, it was over too quickly, little dishes of frantic, emotional drama, the acting is heavy metal and it seems realistic of working in a high stress kitchen environment. It also made me want to taste a traditional salt-beef sandwich, with onions and peppers all over it.
Also the second season of Reservation Dogs which is wonderful and heartbreaking, I just love these characters, it is about young native Americans growing up in Oklahoma, and the cast, including Gary Farmer (Jim Jarmusch’s Deadman) and Zahn McClarnon (Fargo). I think it found its pace and tone in S2, the humor wasn’t as inflected and the stories, especially when the community came together, felt richer and more intimate.
Thank you
It is a nervy week waiting for election results. The red wave didn’t materialize as predicted, so everything is in the balance although the chances of Democrats holding onto their slim majority has dissipated, at least at there have been gains at a local level. I’m not sure what to make of Fetterman’s win, maybe after all the negative campaigning there can be a return to actual policy. I find it staggering (and other words) that $9.3 billion has been spent on campaigning, and there will be more to come with Georgia’s runoff.
We hung our Vote flag out and wonder if one or two people might have seen it and been reminded to swing by the middle school and cast their ballot. Who knows. It is shameless, seeing how legislators are gaining seats through brazen gerrymandering, and the suppression of millions of voters amid every more complicated forms and even armed militia guarding drop boxes and intimidating those waiting in line. Thankfully more young people aged between 18-29 voted, which may explain how some of those seats were held. Immediately there were calls to raise the voting age to 21, to stop those brain-washed yoofs from ruining a perfectly good election.
We’ll see what the coming weeks will bring, probably stasis, the gears of government clogged up and serving nobody. I don’t feel particularly optimistic, again I’m just grateful for the community that I live in and the people that I have around me, we’ll see each other through.
Okay, pretty exhausted and my back is hurting sitting on the sofa writing this. I also need food. Take care of yourselves, see you next week.