2D Cinema vs 3D

The 2D vs 3D cinema debate rumbles on, though the studios seem committed to the new technology.

In the old days of cinema, before polarising glasses, I never used to sit irritated in the dark thinking - this is far too flat for me. Why? Because through the art of the cinematographer, the image projected onto the 2D screen had 3D depth.

It is a trick of the mind and the eye so subtle that I was never even aware of it until I started to make films myself. The subject - the thing on the screen which the film maker wanted to direct my eye to - was in perfect focus. Other things, closer to the camera or further away, were softened. The slightest of out-of-focus blur.

This so closely maps onto the way we experience depth of field in everyday life that in watching a 2D movie, the mind tells us some things are further away and other things closer. A flat screen becomes 3D.

But in the old days those three dimensions were trapped behind the screen. Modern 3D extends out into the space between the screen and the audience. It offers that spooky moment when the Cheshire Cat hovers in the air just in front of you and speaks in Stephen Fry's voice.


For that moment of magic however, a payment is required. A thirty percent loss in colour. The hassle of having a pair of uncomfortable glasses pressing down on your nose - over your own glasses if you are short sighted like me. And a substantially more expensive cinema ticket.

There is also a strange mismatch between the old and the new systems of indicating depth. The subject is still in focus, the background and foreground are out of focus. But now some of those out of focus things are floating around in the air just in front of you. I find my eye is no longer pulled only to the thing I should be looking at, but jumps between things at different depths. They remain out of focus, which my brain finds hard to accept. The experience is disorientating and mildly unpleasant.

Perhaps we are in an age similar to the end of the silent era, when cinematographers were experimenting with the new technology and hadn't quite got it right. Or perhaps this is an unneeded technology. Time will tell. But for now, given the option, I'll be going for 2D screenings.

And here, for your enjoyment, is Mark Kermode and Simon Miller's revolutionary invention - glasses that allow you to see 3D screenings in spectacular, immersive 2D.

Dyslexia, Memory, Socrates and Smartphones

Socrates disapproved of writing. It was not an aid to memory he said, but a replacement. If people could use symbols on a sheet of paper to record information, why would they bother to develop the latent power of their minds?

Socrates was right. As literacy spread, the use of memorization techniques dwindled. The art of memorization used to be part of the foundation of learning. But from the time I entered primary school to the day I graduated from university, only one teacher bothered to tell me how to remember things.

Even he only mentioned memory two times (as far as I can recall). Once to let us know that there was a difference between short, medium and long term memory. And once, after using a particularly entertaining simile, when he told us that the ruder the imagery we connect to a memory, the easier it would be to hold on to. (Alas I cannot repeat the image that he shared with us that day because it would never get through adult web content filters.)

Few today would say that the exchange of literacy for memorization technique was not a trade worth making. But for dyslexics, who may have particular difficulty with short term memory, memorization techniques can still be very useful. The loci system, for example, which has become a powerful tool for me, turning an area of weakness into a strength.


But if writing was an anathema to Socrates, what would he have said about the information revolution?

Followers of this blog will know that I recently bought a Dell Streak smartphone/tablet to help me with organization. I've had it a week now and have discovered that it is helping me to remember things in a way I had not anticipated.

How long until the parking expires? When should I head in to town to the Writers' Club meeting? When will I need to collect my wife from the train station on Wednesday? Two dyslexic issues converge on questions such as these: short term memory and tracking the flow of time. But by using the calendar alarm on the Dell Streak, I now don't need to remember. This may sound trivial, but it removes the layer of background anxiety that goes with struggling to do something one is congenitally poor at.

What would Socrates say? He'd probably tell me to work on the memory rather than using an external solution. But perhaps by removing the anxiety associated with remembering times, the smartphone will give me the space to do just that.

We will see.

Dyslexia the Dell Streak and Organization

Microsoft Word turned this dyslexic into a writer. Might the Dell Streak or some other smatrphone/tablet computer enable me to be super-organized?

I'm not one to harp on about the problems of dyslexia, as I am far more interested in the significant and often overlooked strengths. But here we do need to state the fact: dyslexics often have problems with organization. Find a really successful dyslexic and you will usually find a highly effective PA or partner standing close by.

Why is organization a problem? Because of a deficit in short term memory and problems tracking time/date combined an intense, creative tendency to make more lateral jumps than logical ones. I'm not going to show a photograph of my office to illustrate this. Even I blush sometimes. If you want to picture it in your mind, just meditate on the phrase 'creative chaos'.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have my brain wired any other way. But this is a non-dyslexic world and I want to fit in if possible, so I'm always on the lookout for coping strategies.

Might the smartphone be the answer? Or perhaps a netbook computer? This is the question that has been tumbling in a pleasantly chaotic way around inside my head for the past year. My problem was that the netbook is just too big to carry round with me all the time - and thus would not work as a portable calendar. And the smartphone seemed just too small to read documents from with ease as well as some of the other features I was looking for. In short, I wanted something just in between these two classes of devices and nothing was on the market.

Enter the Dell Streak. Is it a tablet computer or a smartphone? A bit of both. In other words, it was exactly the class of device I was looking for.


It is a calendar, an alarm clock, a note taking device, a camera to take photos of receipts etc, a voice recorder, access to the Internet and e-mails, lists of contacts, names of people, documents I would no longer need to carry, an infinite supply of maps and it would tell me where I am when I get lost. Oh, and it makes phone calls too.

I believe this kind of technology will make a huge difference for many adult dyslexics, liberating them to integrate more effectively with the non-dyslexic world. As to whether the Dell Streak will be THE landmark device in this respect - there was only one way for me to find out.

So two days ago I went out and bought one. Or rather, the Carphone Warehouse gave me one and I agreed to pay a £35 contract every month for the next two years. Was it worth it? I'll report on my progress over the coming months.

Baha'i leaders sentenced in Iran

I'm reposting the text of an article from Iran Press Watch. I don't usually repost other people's material, but this report covers such an outrageous breach of human rights that I feel compelled to share it as widely as possible. You can find the original article here.

A total of 140 years of prison for the seven Baha’i directors

August 9th, 2010

Hrana News – Each of the 7 former leaders of the Baha’i community has been sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment.

As reported by the Committee of Reporters on Human Rights, this sentence comes after more than 2 years that they had been detained in prison, with repeated illegal orders. Previously, many times the court sessions had been postponed but in recent months, after holding several court sessions, finally the 20 year sentence of imprisonment has been handed down to their lawyers.

Six of the seven Baha’i citizens who were responsible for attending to the affairs of Baha’is in Iran have been detained since 25 Ordibehesht 1387, following coordinated attacks by the security forces of their homes. The seventh, Mrs Mahvash Sabet had been arrested in Mashad previously, on 15 Esfand 1386.”

The hidden benefits of Dyslexia

The term 'dyslexia' was first coined over a hundred and twenty years ago to describe students who had no deficit in intelligence but were nevertheless having difficulty acquiring literacy. It seemed a logical name. Dys-lexia. A problem with words.

Since that time, studies of dyslexia have naturally focused on helping dyslexic children lean to read and write. No surprise there. Get 100 dyslexics together and you will indeed have a crowd of people who have experienced difficulty with aspects of literacy. But look more closely and other quirky characteristics are revealed.

For example, many of the 100 dyslexics will have difficulty naming their left and right sides. Some may have problems reading the time from an analogue clock. Tracking the flow of time, short term memory and remembering names could also be an issue. Over the years researchers have been able to identify a cluster of such non-literacy-related problems.

But if you do get that group of dyslexics together and give them time to talk and compare notes, other commonalities start to emerge. For example, dyslexics are often very creative. They are lateral thinkers and problem solvers. Given a complex set of interrelationships, they easily see the whole picture and get to the root of issues. Many are able to read other people's emotions with stunning clarity.


No surprise then that so many successful people from the world of creative arts and the world of entrepreneurial business turn out to be dyslexic. Enhanced ability to think in three dimensions is another common attribute. Thus the ranks of top architects are also rich in dyslexics.

If we were to ask our group of 100 dyslexics whether they would like to be 'cured' of dyslexia - having the problems AND the advantages simultaneously removed by swallowing a pill - what would they say? What would you say? For me it would be an emphatic NO.

Not so much a learning disability, then. More a learning difference that manifests as disability in some situations (particularly in school) and manifests as a prodigious ability in others.

The difference between Story and Reality

What is the difference between story and reality? According to Mark Twain: "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."

Tom Clancy made a similar observation: "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." However, he also commented on the overlap between the two: "I've made up stuff that's turned out to be real, that's the spooky part."

In his superb filmmaking masterclass last month, Chris Jones said: "The brain cannot tell the difference between a story and reality." That is why we cry watching a sad movie and scream watching horror. He also said: "Stories are about communicating truths not facts."

My take on it is this: Reality is a tangled knot made from an infinite number of threads. The full blinding complexity and intensity of it is available for us to experience in the 'now'. But as soon as events have past and we look back on what has happened, we start to order our memories into a narrative. From the tangle, we extract a single thread. That becomes the reality of our past.

As storytellers we do the same thing - extracting one thread from the mass of possibilities, cutting it to make a beginning and cutting it again to make an end. Then we present that to our audience.

Podcast extract from Vintage by Maxine Linnell

I recently had the pleasure of recording Maxine Linnell reading an extract from her new time-swap novel 'Vintage', in which a contemporary teenager swaps places with a counterpart from 1962.

I'm podcasting the recording here, partly to recommend the novel (which is excellent) and partly to experiment with embedding audio files in blogger - which I hope to do much more of in the coming months.

For those of you interested in the recent technical discussion of microphones and field recorders, this recording was made on my Sony Z1 camera, and not with the Marantz PMD661 - which I hadn't bought at the time of recording.

Note: As I write this additional note, the podcast link has stopped working. The audio file hosting site seems to be down - so that is probably the reason. I will clearly have to look for other solutions.

New Microphone

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the Marantz PMD 661 field recorder. I'm still extremely pleased with the way it works with my Rode shotgun microphone. That covers my film making needs. But I do intend to use the recorder for audio interviews in the near future, and realised that a different kind of microphone is necessary for that.

For that usage I need an omnidirectional rather than a shotgun microphone. I also need it to have shielding to prevent all that nasty handling noise. I don't have a background in audio technology, so need to rely on reviews to guide my choice of equipment. This was fairly easy with the field recorders - which are extensively reviewed on the Internet. But with microphones I had a harder time. It seems that very few people choose to review microphones. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised to discover that.

I eventually decided on the AKG D230. I managed to buy a second hand one on Ebay - which should arrive sometime in the next couple of weeks. When it does I will offer my own very inexpert review.

As for the question of what audio interviews am I intending to conduct - it is connected to my interest in dyslexia. I'll say more about that in a future blog post.

The Poster Test

I'm still digesting all the information from Chris Jones's amazing film making masterclass. When I wrote about it a few days ago, I promised to write more regarding lessons that novelists could take from the class.

One of the things in Chris's course that struck me most forcefully was a test he used in deciding whether/how to proceed with a film making project based on the title, strapline and poster image.

Does the title alone tell the potential audience what sort of story to expect? Or does it mislead? Does it imply a story or not? What about the strapline - does that help? And the same question goes for the poster image. Unless you have a HUGE advertising budget, your potential audience will make their decision to part with money or not based on this information alone: title, strapline and poster image.

How about these for movie titles that imply a story:

Home Alone
Snakes on a Plane
Star Wars

And for a perfect strapline:

Alien - in space no one can hear you scream

And a poster that tells the audience all they need to know about the kind of film to expect:

Chris described how he had designed three posters for one film project but couldn't get any of them quite right. Thus the film remains unmade. The poster test was revealing a flaw that would have come back to bite him at the point of trying to sell the movie - an ambiguity in genre and audience.

Perhaps novelists think they are above such base commercialism. But it seems to me that we have a lot to learn from filmakers. Even if money doesn't matter to you as a writer, surely having readers matters hugely. And in this game, one equates to the other.

So how about it? Before getting stuck into a long writing project, choose a title, a strapline and a cover image. Who is going to buy that book? Where will it be sold? And if you are really happy with your answers to those questions - why not write the back-blurb? Fifty words of hard sell. Do a mock-up of the book cover. Ask twenty friends what they think of it. Better still, ask twenty strangers.

Even if we don't like to think of our work in these terms, be sure that editors and agents have to.

Marantz PMD661 field recorder

Excitement yesterday as a parcel containing my new Marantz PMD661 field recorder arrived at the door. Having a new toy does tend to throw my day out of equilibrium. Instead of writing two thousand words of novel, I unpacked the box and started to explore a new world of high quality sound recording.


My choice of the Marantz over other field recorders came from an extensive survey of reviews on the Internet - reviews penned by people who know more about sound recording than I ever will. Without getting too technical here, I'll say that I needed a recorder that would take an external microphone input via balanced XLR connectors. I wanted it to record onto memory cards, have reasonable battery life and as good a quality preamplifier as I could afford.

Of all the review sites, the most helpful was the one at Wingfield Audio - with its superb table of sound samples from different machines. And I eventually found the best UK price at Pink Noise Systems, who were so helpful that I will certainly be checking their website if I need more audio kit in future.

So - now it is out of the box and I've had 24 hours to play with it, I have to report that I love everything about the Marantz PMD661. The look and feel of the machine are very satisfying. Plugging in a good microphone and a set of reasonable headphones is like having bionic hearing. I don't know where to take it that is quiet enough to find out how good the preamp really is - but so far so good. Yesterday I thought I detected a slight hum - but then realised I was hearing the fan in my laptop some distance away.

If I can figure out how to embed audio into this blog, I'll share some recordings in the near future.

Guerilla Filmmakers Masterclass

The Guerilla Filmmakers Masterclass by Chris Jones is a huge journey crammed into 2 intense days. It is film making from story conception through screenwriting, production, post-production and premier all the way to film sales and beyond to the development of your career in film.

Thanks to the work of Hive Films, Creative Leicestershire, Phoenix Square and of course Chris Jones himself, this workshop was brought to Leicester. And thus for the last two days I have been sitting, absorbing what felt like gigabytes of information. Some of it I knew before. Much of it was new to me. It was by stages uplifting, fascinating and frankly terrifying. In short, it was reality.

All the information I might have been able to dig up from books and the Internet. But nowhere could I have had the whole package served in one go. The effect of this was quite startling. Going through the journey of the filmmaker in two days from start to finish gives a sense of perspective. It lets you see the whole thing - every stage in its place.

And having seen the big picture, I can now go and learn more about the individual parts of the process and understand where they fit into the whole. Short of having done it - having made a feature film and taken it to market - short of that I can't imagine a better way to get perspective on the process.

If you are thinking of making your first feature film I strongly advise you to attend this excellent course. It'll be the best money you spend on your project.

I'll write more about one or two specifics in a later post - particularly some lessons that I will be taking from this into my novel writing.

Miss Garnet's Angel

To have closure or not to have closure is a question all storytellers must face. Does the protagonist definitely achieve or definitely not achieve the victory? Are all the secondary plots neatly tied up? Is every single thread accounted for?

Perhaps it is not a question of closure or lack of it, but the degree of neatness.
These were questions that tumbled around in my head last Thursday evening on driving home after an excellent talk by the bestselling novelist Salley Vickers.

Salley does not plot out her novels, she told us. She writes without knowing where she is going, prompted presumably by the unconscious mind. Although her books are not autobiographical, she weaves in threads from her own experience. This became clear as she wove the narrative of her talk, dipping into life experiences and into her novels with such lightness of touch that it was easy to become confused as to which was which.

These things struck me about the writing process as she described it: she reads her work out aloud to herself as she edits it, she walks when she needs to resolve issues and she never reads her own books once they are published. She is also fascinated by the workings of memory and the process of natural selection on ancient stories that survive today. These things struck me because in those respects I am exactly the same. She also visits art galleries when looking for answers, something I have not done but am now resolved to try.

But back to those tumbling thoughts. Have you ever wondered why some stories cling on to the mind after you have finished with them? Some talks too. I was so intrigued by her talk that I bought a copy of her novel Miss Garnet’s Angel.



My one regret about dyslexia is that it is a barrier to my reading more. Reading takes the work of my whole mind. In order to read a whole novel I need to set aside a chunk of time. You can judge then, how much Salley’s talk had clung to my mind, when I say that on getting home I started reading her novel. And that I pressed on to the end three and a half days later.

The story is tumbling right now in my head. I have the feeling that it will still be there tomorrow. Such is the quality of narratives which do not travel directly from A to B, but meander and bifurcate and recombine, beguiling the logical mind. Perhaps it is a quality of stories that are written with the unconscious mind in the driving seat. And perhaps it is a quality also of stories where all the threads are not quite so neatly tied back together at the end.

They say Miss Garnet’s Angel was a word of mouth bestseller. Having read it, I am not surprised. It is as delightful as was her talk.

The making of the making of

When one is making a movie about the making of a movie, all seen through the cameras of a 'The Making Of' camera crew, things can become confusing. When shooting footage to be the making of the making of, it gets more confusing still.

Perhaps this video will make it clearer. Or perhaps not.

Duck Speaks To Chicken

When I was learning Mandarin Chinese several years ago, I found particular joy in some of the four word sayings that I was being taught. Among these were 'Horse Horse Tiger Tiger' - meaning neither good nor bad. 'Chicken Egg Crack Stone' - meaning a thing is impossible. And my absolute favourite 'Duck Speaks to Chicken' - a phrase describing the situation where two people talk but, coming from vastly different starting points, completely fail to understand each other.

Well, Duck Speaks to Chicken is the perfect phrase to describe an argument (debate seems to imply too much reason) presently raging between the communications union BECTU and individuals desiring to protect the new wave of low-to-no budget independent film making.

On the side of the union are people who believe it is wrong for anyone to offer their work or free. On the side of the independent film makers are people who believe that any form of regulation is an unjustified imposition. And lying heavily between these two groups is the Minimum Wage.

The argument is a fire which has generated lots of smoke but little light. Though I have followed it carefully for a week or so, I still feel unable to offer a summary, such are the claims and counter claims flying about.

The tragedy, of course, is that there are good, well-meaning people on both sides, who do not seem to be able or willing to understand each other's passion. Duck speaks to chicken.

There is undoubtedly exploitation going on, which needs to be stamped down on. But there is also the terrible possibility that whatever quasi-legal framework emerges from this debate it will unintentionally result in the stifling of a new creative movement.

I love the idea that an individual can shoot a film on a cheap camera, edit it on her/his own laptop, broadcast it for free on YouTube or Vimeo, have it viewed by millions and potentially even generate an income from it - without ever having to go to film school or become another brick in the huge edifice of a monolithic studio. It would be a deeply ironic tragic if a well-meaning union inadvertently turned film-making back into the special preserve of the very wealthy.

Have a look at the debate on Chris Jones's website. Or look at the BECTU article on this, entitled 'High on Creativity Low on Ethics? Indi-Film Making in the Frame'