The Problem of the Century

Every once in awhile, I check on the latest news concerning a problem of the century. What is the problem, one might ask? Well, simply put, it is, "What is the artist's name of the adorable song in Funny Cats 3?" Honestly, I have no idea and have been pondering this for well over a year. I've showed it to artists of both classical and jazz, searched on almost every search engine, yet I cannot find the answer! Every time I look up this information on Google, there are more and more forum posts on sites all around asking the same question. Just for kicks, I will post the lyrics below, because they're so cute:

At the kitty cats' party, all the kitties will be there!
They'll be dressed up in their sunday best with flowers in their hair!
Wearing red and yellow ribbons and a tiny tinker bell!
There'll be kitties from the city and the country there as well!

Come on, little-little-little kitty cat!
Grab yourself a partner, and let's dance!
Come on, little-little-little kitty cat!
Grab yourself a partner, and let's dance!

When it is time to eat, meow! Meow!
Cans of salmon piled up to the sky!
Each one has his little bowl of milk,
For desert there's catnip pie!

With their little bellies full, and a smile upon their face,
They'll curl up in a corner by a cozy fireplace,
Just a-purring and a-purring until there is not a peep,
And before you know it all the kitty cats are fast asleep!

Come on, little-little-little kitty cat!
Grab yourself a partner, and let's dance!
Come on, little-little-little kitty cat!
Grab yourself a partner, and let's dance!

Funny Cats
|Funny Jokes at JibJab

Imperative Pricing Decreases

It took about a half dozen years longer than most of us expected, but most of the powerful visual technologies (such as digital video cameras and LCD displays) have become half the price compared to when they were first manufactured. There is a categorical "imperative" occurring in the world of visual arts and the merchandise used to create professional works. It's not completely impossible for students to obtain the equipmenht they need to learn how to do their future jobs properly. For instance, my roommate in freshman year of college needed a digital video camera of mid-professional quality. I don't know the exact details of the camera he purchased, however the quality was high enough that his final project for the semester looked like something that could be aired on MTV with ease. If he had attempted to purchase the same camera about two years earlier, it would have been even more expensive.

I noticed another strange difference, that even professional visual equipment has distinctly dropped in price so much that small companies like JibJab can purchase a professional grade digi-beta video camera through a retailer with a low budget and a credit card. Instead of having to rely upon making business deals, it's as simple as logging online, searching for the lowest price, and executing a very simple purchase plan through someone like me whom does all the company purchases. $45,000 cameras are rarely used anymore, and even reality television has changed. My roommate described to me the lack of need for camera assistants and runners these days, cutting down on costs for Production Assistants and film assemblers. It has almost come to the point that digital information is as high quality (or in some cases higher quality) than normal film. My father was a die-hard analogue fanatic up until two or three years ago, when he finally made the switch to digital photo cameras for his professional work. Somehow, digital captures the light in such a way that analogue can't, in addition to the lack of blemishes and dust particles.

Anyway, I won't get into the specific differences between digital and analogue. I've had the pleasure of growing up during a time when digital information has risen to a point that it may entirely replace the need for chemicals and meaningless, manual labor. What does this mean to the economy? This means that less people will be doing remedial tasks (such as running to get more film), and more people will probably end up employed at web companies like www.TigerDirect.com and www.CDW.com.

All this comes down to the availability of information, the simplification of technology, competitive drive between corporations, and dense volumes of products. I suppose this is more of a realization that companies like www.NewEgg.com and its competitor/linker www.PriceWatch.com are moving in on the manual labor industry.

Availability of information takes precedence, being that the move to digital storage was a necessary event to cause price decreases in very expensive technologies. Corporations - being the greedy money-machines they are - helped accelerate drops in values by releasing simpler, smaller, and better forms of technology that are cheaper to make in an effort to manipulate their outstanding gross incomes. Because of the ease and simplification, higher volumes of products can be released in bulk, therefore cutting down on the amount of labor required to distribute them. In the past, distributing these products through retail locations required shipping to a warehouse first, however the retail step has been replaced by direct re-location of products from warehouse to purchaser by means of the website.

My boss purchased an external Seagate hard drive (120 GB) for under $100 off NewEgg.com recently at around 3:00 PM PST. The next day, her hard drive arrived at 10:00 AM via FedEx (Ground shipping), and she started backing up her laptop without a single problem in under five minutes.

No need to drive to a store. No need to talk to representatives. No need to waste time and gas. No extra laborious tasks. Purchase online, process the purchase order, pull it off a shelf, and ship it. Bing, bang, boom, you're done.

Thank you, The Internet, for lowering the prices on products that are necessary for independent and small business artists to get their work done.

What is Postmodern Eclecticism?

In case some were wondering (ie: my only current reader, Joey Infortuno) what Postmodern Eclecticism means and why I am writing this blog, I shall explain in greater depth here. First, I would like to point to my involvement in the Interactive Arts. Having studied arduously at Emerson College, I wish to apply my new found love of Business Administration to the domain of postmodern interactive art, which thusly includes VFX, CGI, Design, business operations, and information-technology. As the world of technology becomes a more complex place, so will the promotion and use of entertainment mediums. What all this means is that it is far more difficult and complex to run an entertainment business (especially in the ever-expansive web)

I find it important to take note of postmodernist involvement in the running of businesses. Where art is concerned, postmodernism shall reign, even with the epitomizing futurist movement on the rise. Despite the metaweb ruled by poststructuralist tendencies, I cannot overlook the foregoing, retrospectiveness involved in this paradigm. The paradigm I refer to is the impossibility of knowing everything one should know in order to run a promising corporation today. A good CEO of an entertainment company will know enough information in all realms to hire a good CCO, CTO, COO, and CFO. For one, you should know enough about business to properly run it. This goes without saying, of course, however the true syntagm of a great business leader is prevalent when they understand the realms of art and technology as well operating and administrating over their business.

Where does postmodernism step in? Since it's so important to understand how your company's creative and technology departments work (more than financing, as without the former two, financing cannot exist), it's also important to understand the history of both, and the relationships between the oldest forms and the newest forms. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, however the development of all the different forms of mediums that carry your product is an important subject when it comes to entertaining audiences.

Why the eclecticism then? Because trying new mediums is terribly important to the success of your business. Eclecticism and eccentricism are two key fundamentals behind my blog, but I am most certainly not condoning walking blindly into syntagm and paradigm. If there is anything I learned from my media studies, it's that research is an important tool for any business to become a success.

I know I covered quite a bit of ground, however one certainly can't sum up Peter Drucker's books and apply his teachings to the entertainment realm in just one blog post.

Motion Graphics Blurdom and More

I've recently noticed a very strange trend in the VFX industry to use exquisite motion blur tactics through Adobe Photoshop. I am not the most savvy when it comes to motion blur in Maya or 3DS Max, but I have had some experience twinking it in Poser, Apple Motion, and especially Adobe After Effects. I've wondered why composition programs, like the internal software that companies like Sony Pictures Imageworks uses, are not more prominent in the small business realm. Is it because their costs are so inexplicably high?

The image I've uploaded here is a screen capture of a frame from the latest JibJab production called What We Call the News. When I first saw the video in its entirety, I was staring over the shoulder of our CCO, whom had finally completed the finishing touches on the video. This screen capture is from the ending and as soon as I saw that glorious 30 FPS motion blur that Evan slipped in there, I laughed manically. I said, "Oh my crap, that looks so cool. How did you do that?" His simple response was Photoshop. The trend of using Photoshop instead of a professional motion graphics composition software seems to have risen drastically over a short period of time. Somehow, people creating viral videos and other short pieces are willing to spend their time editing each frame on their own, rather than letting a computer program that can hanle millions of calculations per second do it on its own.

My assumption is that the trend has spawned from a sort of revolution that is not too disimilar from the still-recent, sporadic move away from analogue. There are still those artists out there whom refuse to embrace the digital realm of graphics and imaging, but most (esp. photographers, sketch artists, drawers, and storyboard artists) have accepted that their fate is to move with the rest of the world. Is this going to be a problem in the digital realm of visual effects as well? Some people still prefer frame-by-frame manipulation, rather than creating schemes and schisms that will apply their will to the art form for them. My hope is that they will embrace the vast and rapidly expanding realm of motion graphics before it is too late and they return to their dark rooms, hissing at any light that is not red.