[Sitting in for David Hague]

Next time you’re sitting in front of the proverbial “blank page” and trying to come up with something new, have a thought for the creative folk responsible for the more mundane things in our lives. They really do have to re-invent the perfectly good wheel.

How many blades are in razors these days? Once they’ve done the whole gamut of ergonomic handles and swiveling heads it’s back to the ol’ “let’s add another blade” idea to keep the razor blade genesis ticking over. The same applies to toothbrushes. You can only redesign the brush bit so many times, before we get a little suspicious (I know! A “tongue cleaner” on the back! Brilliant!)

I watched an episode of CSI the other night. I don’t know which one - New York, Miami, Widgemooltha… they all look kind of the same now. In fact, they always did. That’s the whole point of expanding on an existing, successful formula to make it more successful. Just a few tweaks here and there, such as a different location, will give the show a new look that’s enough to satisfy the fans while the other ingredients don’t really change. Actually, when it comes to bodies on morgue tables being tinkered with by eccentric doctors… well, Edgar Allan Poe was doing it a hundred and sixty years ago.

It seems there’s no new ideas. We just keep finding new “angles” on the old ones, sometimes not so well. At the recent Screen Producer’s Association of Australia (SPAA) it was lamented to the shock and horror of the audience that Australian films are, in the main, unwatchable failures that are dark and depressing. I have to agree. Is it because our film makers are just a gloomy lot? Nope, I reckon it’s simply because everyone is trying to emulate Wolf Creek or Saw these days - the latter which is inexplicably up to its fifth incarnation. Twenty years ago everyone wanted to copy Crocodile Dundee. Ten years later it was The Castle.

The music business isn’t much better. One chart-topping hit will spawn a dozen clones as everybody scrambles to cash in on the latest fad. Even book publishers aren’t beyond casting about for their own version of a best-selling author.

So not only is it difficult to come up with a new idea, it’s hard to get anyone to listen to it. They’d rather chase someone else’s tail. That’s why today a moment of genius inspiration isn’t enough. You have to come up with the whole package - the “pitch”, the marketing concepts, target audiences, advertising… the complete hard sell for your “idea” to break through barriers and convince someone - usually with the bankroll - to take a risk.

The good news is, it can happen. Add a large lump of persistence to the inspiration and clever ideas will see the light of day. Some people are out there looking for them and not only interested in adding extra blades and tongue cleaners.

There’s one kind of spam you can’t quite filter out. The emails your friends send. I guess it’s keeping us in touch… kind of.
So I got sent a photograph the other day. You might have seen it; it’s supposed to be a ghost picture. Five young women are having their picture snapped while a little girl cries loudly in protest, refusing to take part because “the little boy is scaring her”. Sure enough, look closer and you can see a spectral child peering from between the women’s legs.
The next day I got another email apologising that the photograph was apparently a fake. A friend-of-a-friend had seen it and declared it was “photo-shopped”, a new word creeping into our lexicon. Exactly how he could tell this from an emailed JPEG is a bigger mystery than the supernatural bit.
Here’s another story. Years ago I was researching a horror novel and came across a fascinating photograph. A young (childless) couple were driving to visit friends in their new house. Somewhere short of their destination they stopped at a phone booth to get exact directions. Thus when they arrived at their host’s home the friends were already waiting on the front lawn and took a picture of the occasion - the car pulling into the driveway. Days later, when they developed the film, a forlorn-looking girl can be clearly seen sitting in the back seat peering out the window. They had picked themselves up a ghostly hitchhiker. Trick photography had been around about a hundred years, but the likes of Photoshop weren’t even a gleam in Bill Gates’ eye. The chances of this particular photograph being genuine are quite high. It’s downright creepy.
I sit in my modest recording studio and help people who can’t hit a note sound like Christina Aguilera (who can sing) or John Farnham… it’s tough work. However, some singers I meet are exceptionally talented.
And last night I watched the latest Indiana Jones movie. Indy’s getting a bit tired, but you can’t fault the special effects.
Thanks to a plethora of digital software we now believe anything clever, impressive or impulsive must be a fake. It’s been photo-shopped, pitch-corrected or blue-screened. It’s a damned shame that many creative things that are truly impressive are assumed to be enhanced. That one-in-a-million photograph, the perfect vocal take, the video camera that, by careful planning, recorded history in the making. The best artistic endeavours are always judged guilty, before proven innocent of fakery.
All this new technology is supposed to be opening our minds, not closing them. No one likes to be deceived and it’s wise to be wary, but don’t be too quick to dismiss anything that’s remarkable either.
Personally I prefer to believe a ghostly young rascal wanted to sneak into someone’s snapshot. Stranger things have happened. Next time you’re out driving alone, be sure to check the back seat.

[Standing in for David Hague]

I’ve had six novels published in Australia, but my next manuscript could still wallow like many others in my virtual bottom drawer.

Four of my novels got some exposure in the UK, one crept momentarily onto the bookshelves in the US and is currently doing well in Germany and another was licensed to Readers Digest in Australia and the Netherlands. So theoretically I’ve got a rough idea about what I’m doing. However, the competition is still very tough and nothing is guaranteed, despite having a foot in the door at any publishers from simply having a track record.

One of the problems is the vast amount of manuscripts being created by enthusiastic novice writers that are swamping the system. In the good ol’ days the sheer effort required for writing 150,000 words was enough to discourage all but the most determined. Word processing software changed all that. While it still needs a serious level of dedication to “pen” a complete novel at least you no longer have to re-type the good bits of your manuscript anymore. The creative writing process has been significantly streamlined. Unfortunately for some.

At last count most popular publishers were receiving something like eight thousand unsolicited manuscripts a year- that’s novels they didn’t ask for. They just appear in the mail (or worse, in the email Intray). About 99% of them aren’t anywhere near good enough and some are truly awful. Still, every manuscript has to be given due - albeit often brief – consideration and clogs the works. More consideration, it would seem, than the authors bothered to apply.

I don’t normally read other people’s manuscripts anymore - it’s become too time-consuming and people get too easily offended by bad news. But a “friend of a friend” broke through the security cordon and I was faced with over 250,000 words of terrible prose. I’m not being harsh or snobbish here - it was a real mystery how someone could write so much material and not see its many, many flaws. Without a doubt, he had used his software’s thesaurus to painstakingly provide an alternative word for every adjective or verb and the result was an impossibly “wordy”, unreadable mess - a quarter of a million words long. Worse, I didn’t return the MS (standard procedure now- it’s cheaper for the author to reprint than to courier two kilos of printed paper back and forth) and got accused of attempting to steal his genius. Hmm…HH

Full marks for effort, a “fail” for story content and a visit to the headmaster and a big slap on the wrist for trying to make the software - the thesaurus - do all the hard work. Creativity begins and ends inside that word processor between our ears. The same applies to photography, film, music and to some extent art. You are the creative element, not the fantastic computer resources we have at our fingertips now. We are supposed to have the ideas, the inspirations, those “light bulb” moments that are the start of something great.

In other words - not chosen by my software’s thesaurus - don’t ever let your software do the thinking for you.

I have a dilemma this week.

You see, this time next week, I’ll be in Germany (or Italy or Austria) taking an 18 day driving holiday in a round trip from London via the aforementioned countries, Switzerland and France. I aim to take in the Nurburgring for a blast and also Top Gear’s “world best driving road” from Davos to Stelio. And of course a night in Monaco is mandatory just to walk that famous circuit.

So what’s my dilemma you lucky bastard I hear?

Well my friend, it’s not luck as I have been planning this for years, but that aside, airlines (in this case Emirates) have a limit of 22Kg of luggage. My camera case weighs that! So I have to decide what to keep and what to leave behind.

A tripod is out of the question, as much as I espouse their use. Instead, I’ll take a GorillaPod which is a flexible legged little beast that can be wound around branches, fence posts, mirrors or whatever is handy. But I won't sacrifice my Hague windscreen mount (no relation I hasten to add, made in the UK and used by Top Gear UK and Oz), nor my Azden wireless mic and Rode videomic. Likewise, a camera light is mandatory; I once didn’t take one to Norfolk Island and regret it ever since as we did a graveyard night tour and you cannot see a damn thing on the tape. And hi-def is notoriously bad in low light.

I would normally also carry a backup camera and a digital still, but one of those has to go – mostly likely the digital still as I have a high megapixel Canon SD based camcorder to test. The Cokin filter kit is a should I / shouldn’t I at this stage, as is my mini toolkit. I’ll keep the lens cleaning gear though and the dust brush. I’ll have to live with one battery/camera though.

One tip I did find, insuring this stuff just for travel is a con; it is far, far cheaper to declare it on your standard home policy as ‘transportable’ items and just let them know you are going overseas with them. $300 v $26. No brainer!

See you in three weeks!

One of the latest advances in cameras, is for d-SLR cameras to be enable recording in hi-def. Quite a few are very happy about this, but to the uninitiated, there are a few pitfalls when you dig a little deeper.

The first thing is the format that is being recorded is in the main, AVCHD, which in simple terms, is a form of the highly compressed MPEG format that uses GOP (Group of Pictures) technology. This means that unlike basic AVI which is frame-by-frame as used in DV camcorders, it records the differences between frames over a series. A ‘key’ frame as a marker is then fully written down for another sequence to start.

AVCHD is at this stage still notoriously hard to edit, and needs a computer with serious grunt, RAM and hard disk space. Also, is the matter of finding decent software to edit the format and to get something half-reasonable, is not inexpensive. There are a few cheap-and-cheerful packages around, but in reality, they don’t compare with higher end software costing from $800+. Because of GOP, the software has to ‘guess’ at what makes individual frames, and tries to recreate them. As such, an edit cut at a specific point may not be possible.

Next, is that due to file format and memory storage issues, the maximum you can record is around 12 minutes. Now directors/producers with experience will tell you that no scene (depending) should be longer than seconds, not even into larger percentages of a minute and this is true. But, scenes are cut from clips and takes and a scene or take(s) can easily take more than 12 minutes. Imagine a wedding ceremony; you dare not turn the recording off in case a magic moment occurs; the same applies to sport awaiting that money shot.

While Nikon are not playing in the market of camcorders, Canon and Sony certainly are and are arguably potentially the biggest players in this new hi-def d-SLR cameras. I for one don't think they’ll even consider cannabilising their huge hi-def camcorder camera market.

The maxim really still applies. If you want a decent still image, get a camera for the job. For decent video get a decent camcorder for the job.