Hi Glen—

it’s a good book, definitely. Serendipity is exciting, and not quite the same as “random,” is it? Randomness is like cheap serendipity. There are a few serendipitous things I’ve tried to build based on sections from Walter’s book. One of them is a screen saver that shows a grid of images from your source video. Ideally, that screen saver would hunt around, looking for frames you have spent a lot of time looking while scanning the footage. Or maybe find the least-looked at footage. Or both. Different images in the grid cells slowly fade in and out, creating a slowly evolving montage of still images that might spark one’s interest: “Hmmm, these three shots next to each other are interesting. Maybe I’ll try that in a sequence.” At which point you would touch one of the images in the grid and enter “editing” mode, whatever that would look like.

I proposed the idea at Apple but never gained any traction. It’s called Kuleshov. I then built the screensaver myself and installed it on all of our computers in 2011, during the last film I worked on with Walter. In some ways, this has a lot of overlap with Robert’s ideas about the "computers’ dream.” And to show a hint of it in action, you can actually see it momentarily disrupt a public talk Walter was giving…

There are other things too. I have been trying to build a video playback system that somehow blends all the frames together as you fast forward or rewind, kind of like how an actual film reel might function, compared to how digital normally works by simply skipping frames. I just dug up a cheap prototype which I screen captured (about 300 MB, so download may be best). It probably makes more sense to play with in person, like most things.

Looking forward to reading about Rampant when I have another moment…

Dave

On Oct 14, 2014, at 2:50 PM, Bret Victor wrote:

One approach to fostering an environment of serendipity (perhaps) is to make it really easy to appropriate (and build on) material from other people's designs.  If you like something in someone else's work ("I like this curved line in this drawing I found on the web"), you can easily lift it out, drop it in, and modify it to fit.  In this way, the creator isn't in "serendipity mode" only when in the creative tool, but can effectively be always receptive (and responsive) to new ideas, no matter where and when they come across them.

HyperCard (or at least the platonic ideal of HyperCard) is sort of this kind of environment -- any time you come across something that sparks, you can just copy-paste it into your own thing.

There's an idea I was idea-ing on many years ago called "Rampant" (a platform for rampant plagiarism of both art and tools), and I'll forward some notes about that.


On Oct 13, 2014, at 10:15 PM, Glen Chiacchieri wrote:

A friend happened to have Murch's book, "In the Blink of an Eye" and he let me borrow it. There are a lot of really exciting bits in it for me. Here are just two:

On why he likes working standing up:

Editing is a kind of surgery–and have you ever seen a surgeon sitting to perform an operation? Editing is also like cooking–and no one sits down at the stove to cook. But most of all, editing is a kind of dance–the finished film is a kind of crystallized dance–and when have you ever seen a dancer sitting down to dance?

And this:

Computerized digital editing and, strangely enough, good old-fashioned Moviola editing with an assistant, are both random-access, non-linear systems: You ask for something specific and what thing–that thing alone–is delivered to you as quickly as possible. You are only shown what you ask for. The Avid is faster at it than the Moviola, but the process is the same.That's a drawback for me because your choices can then only be as good as your requests, and sometimes that is not enough. There is a higher level that comes through /recognition/: You may not be able to articulate what you want, but you can recognize it when you see it. [...] If you have to articulate everything, as you do with a random-access system like video/computer or Moviola/assistant, you are limited by what and how much you can articulate and how good your original notes were. Whereas the advantage of the KEM's linear system is that I do not always have to be speaking to it–there are times when /it/ speaks to /me/. The system is constantly presenting things for consideration, and a sort of dialogue takes place. I might say, "I want to see that close-up of Teresa, number 317, in roll 45." But I'll put that roll on the machine, and as I spool down to number 317 (which may be hundreds of feet from the start), the machine shows me everything at high speed down to that point, saying in effect: "How about this instead? Or this?" And I find, more often than not, long before I get down to show 317, that I've had three other ideas triggered by the material that I have seen flashing by me. "Oh, this other shot is much better than the one I thought I wanted." As soon as I saw it, I recognized it as a possibility, whereas I couldn't articulate it as a choice.

It strikes me that a creative tool has two jobs: give creators exactly what they want as fast as possible and suggest possibilities when they don't know what they want. I wonder if there are "Magic Ink"-style low-interaction things one could do here. In fact, if some of the possibilities listed by this "designed serendipity" system were created using advanced tools in a software system, that might be a natural path for a deeper understanding of the tool. E.g. "oh I like this curved line photoshop suggested. how do I make that? Bezier? Oh huh, neat...[goes off and learns a little about beziers, hopefully with photoshop's help]" The creator now has a reason to find out about some of this other functionality.