What Henry Rollins can teach us about “Character” in documentary editing.

Henry Rollins is a contradiction, the tough guy with a big heart. Watching this video this morning Henry Rollins - Man Test brought together for me a number of issues I’ve been facing in my recent documentary edits.

For the documentary editor, the way in which you reveal aspects of a subject’s personality is instrumental to their character in terms of storytelling.

I’ve recently been reading “Story” by Robert McKee - yes the writing guru from “Adaptation” who rescues Nicholas Cage’s character from a doomed screenplay.



My reason for reading “Story” was because documentary editing is very similar to screenwriting in many respects. In a documentary it is in the edit where your story structure is built, where your narrative arcs happen and where, as I mentioned, your characters are given shape. You may have a limited range of language (filmed material) at your disposal but the various possible treatments of that material can lead to anything from a shallow unengaging ramble, to a rich and meaningful world of people we love.

Regarding character development, McKee makes an important distinction between True Character and Characterisation. Characterisation is the outward expression of character, as projected by the character in terms of conscious behaviour. True Character on the other hand, is shown implicitly in how the character reacts to extreme circumstances, when push comes to shove, as it were.

Henry Rollins, a picture of masculinity with his comically strong jawline, thick neck and menacing eyebrows, projects a macho attitude towards the world’s issues. He literally shouts down the position of the mainstream viewpoint. And yet, as his “Man Test” reveals Rollins scores a 73% on Femininity as opposed to a 67% Masculinity score. While this is, of course, a subjective test based on self-reflection it does outline the contradictions inherent in real people’s own minds.

Similarly, the documentary I’m editing at present centers around two characters, a brother and a sister. The brother, is ostensibly a cold and objective scientist who is outwardly hostile and resentful of his sister. However, he turns out - when push comes to shove - to have a strong compulsion to care for his sister with her various ailments, which reflects a lifetime spent caring for the sick and founding charitable organisations.

In Rollins, it’s difficult to tell which persona is True Character and which is Characterisation. While his Characterisation is clearly macho, it is clear from his upbringing that the Characterisation comes from his father, a figure that Rollins despises. He says he hates the macho attitude of “knuckle dragging” meatheads, but seems to fall so naturally into this persona in his various creative outlets. This is what makes Rollins an intriguing character, his readiness to confront his internal contradictions is refreshing and makes him an ideal documentary subject.

But all documentary subjects have these contradictions. Why? Because all documentary subjects are human beings.

Human beings all have natural tendencies peculiar to them, some of which are unhealthy or contrary to what they actually want. For Rollins this is his tendency to thuggery and victimhood. He overcompensates for his feeling of victimhood by putting on a strong front physically and verbally, while he compensates for his tendency to thuggery by embracing intellectual subjects. Rather than his contradictory behaviours cancelling each other out into a bland brand of ordinary, Rollins becomes a dynamic balance of pendulum swings between the poles of his personality.

This is the reason building True Character vs Characterisation contradictions in fictional characters is so important, it makes the characters real.

In documentary editing it is important to look for and carefully delineate what is your subject’s True Character vs what is simply Characterisation. This enables the documentary editor to reveal those aspects of True Character and Characterisation effectively to achieve an engaging story that rings true.

A follow up on the Goff letter...

So I received a reply...


And my response...

Thank you Phil for your response

Unfortunately due to your poor grammar I was unable to understand your reply completely, for example, what does the following sentence mean?

"You need to see attendance at a meeting where the invitation came from Destiny as it actually was"

And when you said this "... democracy means people have the right to hear what we have to say" What were you referring to? Was it Shane Jones' comment that...

"based on what I've seen here... your movement will outlast me as a political player"?

Or was it his apology for the lack of religiosity in the Labour Party when he said this...

"... so don't for a minute feel, Bishop and Destiny members, that every member of the Labour Party is hostile to God."

This didn't sound to me like Labour communicating its principles, in fact it sounded more like Labour apologising for them. And no Phil, Destiny church members did not hear what Labour's views were on Destiny's policies of hate toward homosexuals because Shane Jones never mentioned them.

You see, a democracy only works if the voters can freely vote and if they have parties with clear principles they can vote for.

So Phil, you can feel free to be offended by my comments, but don't lecture me about democracy when you are the one failing to provide the clear principles you are responsible for providing in order for a democracy to work.

However, I appreciate your response,

Yours Sincerely,
James Brown

Final Cut Pro X mon amor...

Apple has recently released FCPX: a full overhaul of the editing system on which my livelihood is dependent. Eeek.

FCPX

What's more there's been a lot of yelling and screaming from “legacy” FCP users within a week of release, this, to my mind is not really enough time to tell whether a user interface is going to work effectively. There’s a panic over the loss of late edition features like multiclips and chapter markers as well as older pseudo-obsolete features like EDL (I can’t call it obsolete just yet, I just sent one off to Digipost)

The only worrying thing to me is the automated effects that pose to do colour-matching with a single click, this sounds highly amateurish to me but strangely I don’t hear anyone mentioning this.

No, what I’m looking for in a redesigned program are baseline features, like: utilization of the 64bit chip, utilization of all available RAM, background rendering, basic workflow features like background importing and file conversion with clip analysis none of which were available on FCP7 and were not even possible with its outdated architecture. Personally I like the move to forward-looking compatibility rather than back-compatibility, how many dinosaurs can a program support before it itself goes extinct. Version 1.0 (well, let's face it version 10.0 is actually a version 1.0) is about getting the architecture right, it’s not about whistles and bells (and all the bugs that come with them).

This is Apple’s model, start simple, get feedback, make improvements. Don’t try to do everything at once before you know what people want.



I think I just talked myself into buying it…








2 days later

So I bought it, I’ve been sitting down for an hour, and I love it. The audio controls are miles ahead of FCP7, the way they are visualized is helpful and efficient, when you raise the audio levels it actually changes the waveform (fancy that?) what’s more it shows peaking within visualization and it also has an audio compressor which a video person can actually understand rather than playing trial and error.

The flattened colour correction rectangle (as opposed to the colour wheel) is brilliant, it gives me what I’ve wanted for a long time, accurate keyboard control of colour correction rather than having to clumsily mouse a difficult to move pointer around a wheel – it also has saturation adjustments for blacks, mids and whites which was a major pitfall of FCP7′s 3-Way Colour Corrector.

And for the very small percentage of us who use the Dvorak keyboard layout, it is the first FCP that can use keyboard shortcuts in Dvorak since FCP 4.5. I think I just fell in love.

Though the magnetic timeline is new to me, I can see how it might be better than a track based timeline in many ways, but this will take longer to judge. Still don’t quite get the file management side of things but the amount of import options you have is very impressive.

I feel as though Final Cut Pro just stripped out everything I don't use and gave me everything I wanted.

I may be forced to eat my words once I actually start a proper project, but so far it’s very promising especially for a 1.0. And it hasn’t crashed yet.

Open Letter to Phil Goff

Dear Phil Goff

In your shameless attempt to gain the votes of 9000 Destiny Church members you have lost my vote.

When you have your minister attend an event such as The Destiny Church Conference you give further authority to a hate group and cult. I saw no reporting of criticism by your minister Shane Jones of their bigoted anti-homosexuality stance nor did I see any criticism of their systematic taxing of church members in return for... nothing. So I can only assume the Labour Party was attending this rally to gain votes.

I hope you find this to be a poor strategic move. There are surely more than 9000 homo-sexual people who will be highly offended by your support of a hate group that actively targets them. Not to mention all the other people like myself who are simply interested in standing up for human rights.

I come from a family of Labour voters and have voted for Labour every election. For the first time I will be casting an invalid vote this year as a statement of no confidence. I doubt very much Helen Clark would have had one of her ministers support such a "cult" (her wording). But then again, she had principles.

John Ward Knox

So I've been curating an exhibition for the US Ambassador, and have suddenly been thrown into a crash course in contemporary New Zealand art. In doing so I've (re) discovered the work of a friend of mine. Check out his well documented works on his blog, it will no doubt blow you away as it did me.
John Ward Knox

El Greco: Fresco-bomb

The tradition of photo-bombing goes back to El Greco, where he would paint himself into "historical" scenes looking sarcastically at the viewer, as if to say... "This never really happened"



My mate Andy and I decided this was perfect for captions.





Needless to say, you may come up with your own... let's make us a meme.

Caution

From Pharyngula

In Scotland, a football referee joked about the Pope on email. He apparently passed along this image


Someone complained, the ref was fired. Sigh.

So there's a call to inundate the Scottish Catholic Office with Pope jokes. I'm doing my small part by posting. Keep the meme alive, you don't get to have someone fired for criticizing pedophile priests and those that cover up for them (The Pope)... well not, at least, without it blowing up in your face.

Profound discoveries don't make any difference.

I had this idea when listening to a debate about morality. The religious proponent was suggesting that without God, moral chaos will ensue.



Immediately it is evident that this is not the case, otherwise there would be a section of our society; atheists, running around causing a world of trouble and we don't see this at all.

You would think that discovering that the world is not designed and controlled by a super-intelligent being would have massive implications for things here on the ground.

But it doesn't. Non-believers act just as morally as believers and seemingly without any extra strain or cognitive dissonance.

Look at other examples. The best example of profound discoveries making no difference would be the discovery that the world is not flat and that it travels around the Sun rather than the other way around. When Copernicus and Galileo fought to expose this truth there was a perception that this was going to literally turn the world on its head. But the same everyday forces of nature didn't change, of course they didn't, we didn't go flying into the sky, or fall off the face of the earth. Everything continued as usual.

Another example that really gets me is Quantum Theory. The strangeness of Quantum Theory is astounding and yet it has been demonstrated to be real and has been used to make predictions of extraordinary accuracy. The discoveries of Quantum Theory include seemingly paradoxical positions, for instance, that something can be in two places at once, that observation of an event can affect the outcome and that the activity of quanta is wholly indeterminable.



But does this suddenly mean that we can (as the makers of "What the Bleep do we Know?" would have you believe) live in parallel with multiple selves, that we can be in two places at once, and affect the outcome of events with our minds, like we're living in a video game?

No.

Sorry folks "The Secret" is no secret, it's bullshit. Quantum Physics is called "Quantum" Physics because it describes the nature of quanta and only has effects at this scale of the physical universe. What is astounding about Quantum Physics is how order arises out of the interactions of unpredictable units. Once there is a large enough body of these unpredictable units their actions as a group become predictable, they have to adhere to the general rules governing physics and then we have what we appreciate in our day to day lives as "reality".

There are numerous other examples, for instance, if we one day discover that we have no free will (some hold the position that we have already discovered this) will we stop making "choices"? If the world is determined, should we all sit around and do nothing? If consciousness is an illusion, will we immediately pass out?

No. Everything will continue as usual.

So why do profound discoveries make no difference?

The reason for this is because profound discoveries usually refer to foundational principles or properties of the world. But we don't build our knowledge from foundational principles or properties, we infer foundational principles from our everyday experience and immediate knowledge of the world.

So, what happens is, even if we have inferred an incorrect founding principle, and held it for centuries - that founding principle is based on our everyday experience and not the other way around. When that founding principle (or axiom) comes into conflict with our everyday experience, new complex amendments are made to the founding principle in order to accommodate the immediate reality of our experience.

I would posit that this is why our religions have so much content. Each contradiction begets a new caveat, so, instead of having one principle and a simple demonstration of its truth, we have, in the case of the Bible, a book of over a thousand pages, then we have hermeneutic frameworks to interpret those pages, eschatology, apologetics, theology, theodicy not to mention the thousands of different sects of Christianity which allow a circle of continuous contradiction and explanation to continue ad infinitum.

When one discovers that no God actually exists, they are left with everyday reality, the same everyday reality they were in before. They realise that biblical injunctions to love thy neighbour and not steal or lie have perfectly good everyday practical applications. After all it is because they have everyday practical applications that that they were written into the Bible in the first place.


Basically my point is that the baggage that surrounds our presuppositions about the way the world works misleads us when it comes to discovering a new foundational principle or property. It takes time, but the change of a foundational principle subtly changes the meaning of all the baggage that surrounds it, until it finds it's way back to reflecting our everyday experience of the world.

Anyway, that brings us full circle. I'd be keen to hear other examples of profound discoveries that don't change anything in the comments section.

I finished a painting, but I can't show it to anyone... I've been told by my dealer. But I'm going to live life on the edge and let you see this very small section of a cloak, just cos I like it and require constant recognition.

Animal Labour

It has taken some time but I expect to get a lot of mileage out of Darwin's new trick.

Has everyone met Ray?

He begins with his characteristic sleepy tone "well, by 2020 we'll have computers that are powerful enough to simulate the human brain..."

Conrad Wolfram.

I promise not to get too obsessed, but this talk was really good.

Ask Wolfram Alpha

I just asked Wolfram Alpha if God exists it answered...

"I'm sorry, but a poor computational knowledge engine, no matter how powerful, is not capable of providing a simple answer to that question."

Very diplomatic Wolfram, but we know what you really think!

The Fabricator

Check out this 48 hour film by the folks at the Electric Pink Company (otherwise known as a portion of the AV department at The Learning Connexion along with others.)

Another Arty Farty Post

I've vowed to draw for at least half an hour every day and am posting the results on Facebook

I thought I'd weigh in on the Pope's current issues with picture I drew

While I retain copyright you can feel free to distribute this picture where ever you like...

Open Letter to Willie Jackson concerning Brian Tamaki

This letter to the editor is concerning Willie Jackson's recent article in the North Shore Times "Preying on Tamaki" which I thought was pretty idiotic, as you will probably gather.


Willie,

If you are so ashamed by the New Zealand media (of which you are a part) why is it you are not investigating these "real crooks" yourself? Rather than becoming an apologist for Brian Tamaki under the assertion "he's not as bad as those other ..... guys"

Let's take the following statement:

"Clegg & Co finance director Brian Clegg was recently sentenced to a year’s home detention for providing false information to prospective investors .......... A year’s home detention for ripping off poor and vulnerable Kiwis to the tune of $15 million is a disgrace."

I can only imagine one logical conclusion is intended by this and that is that Clegg has been treated unfairly! Because there is another white collar criminal out there who "provides false information" to his "investors" every day and has ripped off the most "vulnerable Kiwis" in New Zealand "to the tune of" about ... "$15 million" (or at least with a personal income of 1 million a year is getting to that amount very quickly) and he hasn't been held to account at all, his name is Brian Tamaki.

But, though this would be the logical conclusion to draw from your statement and the facts, I don't think this is what you intended to say.

And I'm guessing also when you stated that:

"he’s turned around thousands – gang members, criminals and the worst of the worst in our society?"

... that you weren't meaning to support the notion that "Tamaki is a modern-day Adolf Hitler" who, of course, also turned around many street kids and gave them direction with the Hitler Youth and recruited gang members, criminals and other violent thugs to his service as well.

No, of course you were assuming that an ideologue recruiting thugs is a good, charitable and christian thing. Well, sorry Willie, history disagrees with you.

And this is the main reason Tamaki is newsworthy, because not only does he extort money from the poor and vulnerable but he does so with an ideology of divisiveness and separatism, in that he encourages Destiny's members to ignore and reject dissent or argument, intolerance, shown most evidently in it's homophobic, "enough is enough" campaign, and imperialism, in that he makes various claims of taking over New Zealand politics. His ideology also leads him to act in a ridiculous and often disturbing fashion which also makes for good news stories. So, he's not just a crook Willie, give him more credit than that, he's a white collar, bigoted, imperialist, messianic crook. That's what leads people to compare him to Hitler, that's what makes him a threat to society, that's what makes him interesting, not just the fact that he extorts money from the poor by lying to them.

But even if he was just a run of the mill white collar criminal, this is still no reason for you to make excuses for him.

Using the Dvorak keyboard layout with Final Cut Pro 6

Worst public announcement ever to follow...

I realise troubleshooting uber-geek program incompatibilities is not the coolest thing to be doing on New Years eve, but give me some time it's only lunch time. I plan to be off the computer by midnight!

I've been having an issue with shortcuts in Final Cut Pro 6 due to my Dvorak keyboard layout (this is an ergonomic keyboard layout for safe lightening speed typing available in your computer's operating system) for about a year. This is before I had a serious go at fixing the problem. Using the Dvorak-Qwerty language input I was incapable of using any of Final Cut Pro 6's keyboard shortcuts, making it impossible to edit and type using the same language. Some others on the net appear to have had the same problem (really, there are 6 billion people on earth, at least 10 other people have suffered from this exact problem), but no solutions...

The Solution:

Don't use the Dvorak-Qwerty language input, use the Dvorak (only) input. Quit FCP, and make sure Dvorak is selected when you open it again. The keyboard now types in dvorak and the keyboard shortcuts all function as you would expect. I have no idea why I didn't think of this sooner, nor do I have any idea why it was so difficult to find this solution on the internet, hence my reason for writing this blog.

Sorry to my regular readers... ha... regular readers... this is pure naval gazing, I don't have regular readers, not anymore anyway.

See you next week with more discoveries, like the exciting new development that I can now hide the names of audio tracks in my timeline to enable me to view the waveform correctly for multi-camera syncing... oooooh.

A very narrow target market might find this funny.

Darwin jumps through hoops