This is the result of the first prototype of a workshop I’m planning to call “Flashmob Filmmaking”. The idea is to get a large group of people together to make a film — from pre-production to post — in two hours. Writing the script, shooting the footage, and cutting it together, all in that short span of time.

When this idea hit me, I envisioned it as something to do at some kind of fandom convention — a place full of regular people who’d be interested in doing something creative. But I needed to make sure it worked first, so I tried it at a party.

As you can see, it definitely worked. For the most part. We did go slightly over two hours total, so I’ll need to refine the formula to keep things moving along.

And I need to figure out a better solution for shooting footage that can be edited right away, without wasting any time to capture, transfer, or transcode. We shot this on a camera hooked up to Adobe OnLocation on my MacBook, and carried the laptop around along with the camera. Then, I put it into Target Disk Mode and connected it to my larger and more capable iMac, and used ClipWrap to make the footage editable into Final Cut. Unfortunately, the process of Target Disking and ClipWrapping took up a good five minutes — which is fast compared to capture or transcoding, but still too long for this purpose. I’ll probably need to get a camera which shoots to SD cards in a QuickTime-native format (or maybe ClipWrappable, since that process only took about a minute; I can live with that).

Unrest is brewing in republics worldwide. As nations are ravaged by socioeconomic crises, the people no longer feel served by their elected officials. Is this a temporary hiccup, or an inevitable result of traditional representative democracy?

[...]
Corporatocracy in the US and out-of-touch reactions to social inequality in Europe are just symptoms of the real problem. How did it get to this point? Why don’t the people stop things like this before they happen?

Disconnection.

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

A banker offers you a loan so that you can buy a house located near your cushy new job. You sign, comfortable that your salary will allow you to afford the payments. Months later, your employer downsizes, and your job disappears. With no job, you can’t pay back your loan. But the banker’s not upset — in fact, he was hoping for this. As you miss payments, your interest rate goes up. You need a new job to pay your increasing debt, and conveniently enough, the banker is the only one in town hiring. This is the crux of the issue with the profit motive: those who profit can put harmful pressure on others.

At its core, profit is power. Whether it takes the form of having many coins, being owed many debts, or something else entirely, profit is a measure of one’s ability to get other people to do things. By giving a merchant money, I can get her to give me her product. By reminding my friend of all the favors I’ve done for him, I can get him to do me a very large one. I gain these abilities through profit.

As I’ve tried to drive home, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to desire, and a perfectly natural thing by which to be motivated. But today, sometimes profit enables us to make people do things that they don’t want to do. Is this a necessary evil, or just another fixable bug?

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

A salesman sells you a tube of toothpaste, claiming it will make your teeth whiter than they’ve ever been in just a week of use. It’s a bold claim, but he wins you over — for twice what you’d normally pay for toothpaste. A week later, your teeth are still yellow, and you’re tremendously ill. Not only was the toothpaste nothing special, but it was also contaminated with a nasty bacteria; apparently, it was cheaper not to sanitize the toothpaste factory equipment. Now your friends certainly won’t buy any of this not-so-miracle toothpaste, but the damage is done. You’re vomiting, and the salesman’s got your money. Herein lies the problem with the profit motive: bad behavior is profitable.
[...]
Fortunately, it isn’t insurmountable. It’s a bug in the system, and bugs can be fixed. To fix a bug, you often have to dig deep to find the root of the problem, deconstructing it — and the system it exists within — to its bare essentials.

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

A man in a big house on a hill asks you to tend his garden. In return, he’ll give you a great deal of shiny gold coins. It’s not like he’d miss them, because he has more shiny gold coins than anyone you know. But you don’t want to lift a finger for this man; everyone knows that he got all his shiny gold coins from lying, cheating, and stealing. Unfortunately, you’re starving and your rent is due — the only way to pay for food and shelter is with shiny gold coins, and Big Evil House Man is the only one with any to spare. This is another problem with the profit motive.

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

First, let me explain what the hell Your Face is a Saxophone actually is: it’s an animated comedy series about people working at an advertising agency. All of these people have inanimate objects instead of heads.

The title does not, however, come from the fact that people might have saxophones for heads. Here’s the character Blake O’Malley explaining it:

“Your Face is a Saxophone” is a statement that may not be true, and may not make sense, but it would definitely get your attention if plastered on a billboard. Thus, it is a metaphor for all of advertising.

Anyway, my plan was to release a pilot episode at the beginning of the year, and raise funds on Kickstarter for the rest of the season. The funds would be used to buy a computer that didn’t choke on this really, really simple animation, microphones that didn’t suck, register as an LLC or corporation or whatever, and other things. There are several reasons why this has not yet happened:

The cast and I recorded all the voice acting over the last weekend of January. After having animated the four-minute Goliath over the course of three days, I figured that I could animate a full 30-minute episode in a few weeks. However, I’d forgotten just how low-complexity Goliath actually was, as well as the fact that it took me about a week to recover from the sleep deprivation I’d inflicted upon myself to finish in three days.

In addition, it turned out that I actually did need some money. I bounced around between a bunch of jobs, which took up a great deal of my time. In hindsight, I would have been perfectly capable of working on Your Face is a Saxophone during my free time, but for the most part, I didn’t. Working for The Man burned me out, and I wanted nothing more than to be lazy. So I was.

It is now November. I am spectacularly displeased with myself, as I have not been able to get this one damn episode done for the entire year. So I declare now, to the entire Internet, for reals this time:

Animation for the pilot episode of Your Face is a Saxophone will be completed before the end of 2010.

There are a few methods I’m using to ensure this:

• I’m bringing David Lanz, who voices Blake, on as an environment artist. Evidently, Apple Motion has no idea how to handle both a 2.5D environment and moving characters at the same time without overloading a computer. I don’t think it even knows what a GPU is. In addition to distributing the labor, Dave’s skills with Cinema 4D (an actual 3D program) will cut out a tremendous amount of time lost to crashing, freezing, and exploding.
• Dave’s duties will also include becoming officially Very Disappointed In Me if I don’t achieve a minimum level of productivity on a given day.
• I’m going to write a blog post every day about progress, so that the entire Internet can also become Very Disappointed In Me if I’m lazy.
• No more taking odd jobs. For all intents and purposes, I am officially employed full-time at Plankhead. Speaking of which, I probably shouldn’t be writing any more blog posts at 3 in the morning.

Here goes nothing.

Herp derp.

A court has ruled that it is legal to remove works from the public domain and put them back under copyright in the United States.

Okay. That’s it. I can’t take these ridiculous decisions anymore. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, but now I’m just gonna come out and say it:

Intellectual property law in the United States no longer serves the public, and until it has been reformed to do so, it is to be ignored.

We the people of the United States of America have the right, and duty, to disregard and oppose these unconstitutional sections of the law. They no longer serves to, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The law in its current incarnation actively impedes the Progress of Science and the Arts, and the limited Times are now so lengthy so as to be effectively unlimited. Copyright, patent, and trademark law together not only no longer matches the description in I.8.8, but it in many cases violates the First Amendment.

I believe in the necessity for there to be laws which promote the progress of science and art, and grant the creative persons responsible for such advances the exclusive right to claim a reasonable level of authorial control for a limited time. The former need is not being met by the law at all, and the latter is incidentally met in an unsatisfactory way by the current overarching and easily-abused law. But by upholding the current useful portions of the law, we validate the entirety of it.

As a citizen of the United States, I hereby declare that I do not consent to governance by Intellectual Property law, including, but not limited to, the current laws pertaining to copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I encourage the like-minded people of the United States to join me in affirming our non-consent, and continuing to do so until the law once again serves the public good as outlined in our Constitution.

In regards to my own work, I would appreciate it if the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses I release them under were respected, but please do so out of goodwill, and not out of a false sense of legal obligation to do so.

To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void and the header image preceding it. This work is published from the United States. Not that any of this matters as of this writing, of course, because copyright is null and void; I’m just saying this for when one day it’s valid again.

Why, if such a remarkable thing were to exist, I could send Aunt Agnes a telegram from anywhere in the world simply by retrieving the machine from my jacket, keying in the message, and sending it on its way via radio broadcast. Perhaps she might even carry a similar machine of her own with which to receive my telegrams wherever she might be, whether seated in her parlor, or out in the country on a velocipede.

In fact, while we’re imagining such splendid ideas, perhaps this telegraph machine could be constructed in the shape of miniature typewriter, which I could operate with my thumbs. After all, this Morse code business is frightfully difficult to familiarize oneself with, and is furthermore rather slow, even once one has mastered it. I’m quite sure many gentlemen have already mused about composing and subsequently transmitting a telegram using a typewriter, so, Wilfred, just imagine, if you will, combining such a fantasy with mine of a miniature, pocket-sized telegraph.

Now that I’m considering it, the aforementioned difficulty with Morse code certainly extends to the interpretation of it. Those tones of varying length are endearingly droll, but they’re quite an ordeal to properly understand. Perhaps this miniature telegraph machine could interpret the Morse code all by itself, and write out the letters for me to read. Oh, but that might use an exorbitant amount of stationery over time. Hmm…eureka, Wilfred, I’ve got it! Perhaps a system could be devised to produce the letters with light, much in the same way those Lumière fellows from France display moving pictures of trains! I say, if such a machine could project letters onto a small portion of itself, the Morse code problem would be solved entirely!

Why, Wilfred, I reckon that before the passing of a century, some extraordinarily clever gentleman shall create such a machine! Of course, I’d surmise he might attempt to construct a radio-broadcasting telephone first; admittedly, the transmission of voice is quite a bit more impressive than doing the same with writing. By Jove, I do hope that he’d apply the resulting knowledge to building a mobile telegraph as well! There are several situations in which I would imagine the instant transmission of a short telegram to another person would be far more convenient than striking up a vocal conversation. But I do suppose that the capacity to either send a telegram or converse on the telephone from one single machine no larger than a pocketwatch would be a magnificent thing indeed. Perhaps it could even have a pocketwatch built into it, thus eliminating the need for one to carry multiple pieces of machinery to perform different tasks.

I say, Wilfred, such a machine would be rather sensational. Alas, it remains but a fanciful notion. Oh, good heavens; I’ve dropped my monocle in my tea.

For pictures or movies taken on film, it’s called film grain, and it’s determined by the physical structure of the photographic film. On a digital photo, it’s image noise, which is an often random pattern created by the circuitry of the camera’s sensor.

Grain usually has to be very, very extreme for our brains to immediately perceive it; at normal levels, we often don’t even notice it unless we’re looking closely. But our brains are generally quite skilled at perceiving small visual patterns — the pages of a closed book, the bumps of paint on a wall, etc. — so does the average case of grain or noise fail to register? Perhaps it’s because we’ve learned to ignore the noisy, grainy pattern that we’re constantly seeing all the time.

Yes, our eyes have a film grain of their own.

So is this grain caused by a physical texture in our eyes, like film grain, or by something in our circuitry, like image noise? A little of both, in fact.

Like a camera, the human eye has a lens in the front, which collects light and sends it into the photographic medium behind it. In a camera, it’s film or a digital image sensor; in an eye, it’s the retina. However, in between the lens and the retina is squishy gel called “vitreous humour“, and anything inside the vitreous humour gets in the way of the light passing through the eye. The blood vessels in the humour never change position, so our retina learns to disregard them soon after we’re born. However, there are always little bits of material that don’t stay still: floaters. These little deposits of protein and debris don’t stay in one place, so our retinas never figure out how to tune them out.

You’ve probably seen floaters in your eyes before; in most people they look like small, faint dots traveling down your field of vision from top to bottom. You can usually get a good look at them by rolling your eyes all over the place for a second and then staring at one spot for a while.

Floaters are only part of the patterns we see every day, though. The brain’s visual cortex, which interprets the information sent to it by the retina, isn’t 100% accurate. In fact, it’s constantly hallucinating.

Close your eyes, and then gently press on them both with your fists. After a few seconds, you should start to see a strange, kaleidoscopic pattern. This is a geometric visual hallucination, or form constant.

This pattern is generated by your visual cortex as a by-product of all the neural activity going on in and around it. It’s amplified by closing or pressing on your eyes, and even more by taking hallucinogenics (not that I’d know that from experience or anything), but it’s actually present all the time. Again, try staring at one spot for a while. It usually helps to stare at something very low saturation; mostly gray, white, or black. You’ll probably start to see a fainter version of that same geometric pattern you got from pressing on your eyes. If you close your eyes after staring for a while, you’ll still see it.

It’s interesting to know how much our vision has in common with the photos and videos we look at every day. Not only do we capture images the same way as cameras do, but the results are similarly imperfect and grainy.

Creative Commons-licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, modified by me.