Crikey on the Aboriginal Affairs stuff

This is the last throw of the dice for John Howard. He is doing one big favour for the mining industry which he has faithfully served in public life for the past 30 years by rolling back Aboriginal ownership of their tribal lands. Cynically, cruelly but utterly predictably, he’s doing it under the hypocritical colours of humanitarianism. (Very similar to the invasion and occupation of Iraq sold as “spreading democracy”). In his four terms as PM, he has starved indigenous health, education and housing of funds, abolished ATSIC and pointedly marginalised the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio. This particular pre-election pitch is aimed at Lateline viewers, readers of The Age and The SMH and ABC stalwarts, the demographic that constitutes Australian (small “l”) liberalism. These are the feeble-brained, hand-wringers who are congenitally incapable of separating the wood from the trees. They are types currently heard sobbing: “I’m no fan of Mr Howard, but at least he’s DOING SOMETHING!” Yes, he is: he’s giving the mining giants the leg-up they need to start exploring, digging and quarrying in indigenous lands in the Northern Territory and then elsewhere. He is being aided and abetted by Kevin Rudd’s craven behaviour. Instead of falling into line with Howard’s agenda, he should have demanded complete details of the plan, the highest-level briefing, sought face-to-face meetings with Aboriginal leaders, state premiers, police and army officers and taken the lead in a national debate. Instead, he mouthed pieties such as “I’m taking Mr Howard at his word” and “I believe the Prime Minister when he says he is responding to a national crisis” etc etc. Has anyone realised that these are almost the same words used by Kim Beazley when he backed Howard during the Tampa scam? By his pusillanimous approach, Rudd has vacated leadership on the tragic issue of rescuing Aboriginal communities and given Howard the opportunity to play his sickening Father of the Nation role. Paul Keating, you were right about the Rudd team of fixers, hucksters, flyweights and spineless opportunists.

-- Alex Mitchell

Ambient Intimacy

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.

[...]

Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.

-- Leisa Reichelt on Ambient Intimacy

Just thought I should blog it because ambient intimacy and ambient communication are two phrases which I've been using a lot recently. Ambient intimacy is a form of ambient communication -- but I'll expand on ambient communication later.

Varicam vs Cinealta: 2 years on.

Sredwine asked in response to an old post on the Varicam vs the CineAlta:

Did you decide on varicam or cinealta? I am in the same decision making process at the moment as well, love to hear how you made up your mind -

The short answer is that we didn't end up doing the clip. It was a mutual agreement that we didn't have the money to do it justice.... meaning spending money on all the bits we'd stick in front of the lens. Y'know, the stuff the audience watches.

With two years hindsight, its easy to see where I went wrong: Your Camera Does Not Matter*.

Most low budget projects fail visually because of their lucklustre art direction, uninspired lighting, and confused converage. I'd take well art directed & well lit mini-DV over badly executed HD... and y'know what? If you've made the choice to work with MiniDV or HDV, then I reckon you're going to work harder to make those images pop cause you ain't got anywhere to hide.

Assuming, however, you got your technique down:

I'd shoot Varicam. You gotta work it hard in the camera cause the image falls down surprisingly easily. But y'know, you can work off firewire, and the cinegamma is nice, and being able to over/undercrank is damn useful.

Res is res is res.

Only use the cinealta if you can bring it in uncompressed at full frame. Otherwise you're just butchering the image.

*Which is not strictly true. Your camera matters the more your realise how little it matters and the more you understand why it matters. Which is all paradoxical but I'm not really interested in being sycophantic anymore. See also Ken Rockwell talking about this same issue with stills photography.

I hold this true of the Red camera too. Its going to be great for those who are ready to take the leap into high quality image quality. Everyone else is going to produce badly lit, badly framed, badly designed, high res crap.

Fan Fiction

After briefly talking about Jekyll, the conversation turned to Moffat and the simplicity of last week’s Blink. He was still taken aback that I had enjoyed it. Why do Moffat’s Doctor Who scripts work? Having connections to people on the inside, pal related that Moffat’s the only one that actually stands up to RTD. Moffat, after all, had a career beforehand and will certainly have a career afterwards. He doesn’t need to write overwrought fan fiction.

-- Good Dog on The Shock of [his] Life

Be warned, there are spoilers in there afoot.

But I think his diagnosis is completely correct. At its worse (and there's a lot of worse) the New Who is competent fan fiction. Maybe thats why I superficially enjoy it while also lamenting how lame it really is. It could be so good -- as Moffat shows us time and time again -- but it doesn't try. Honestly, I could write much better than most of what's shown!