I posted another Backspaces story today, and because WordPress.com does not allow me to embed it, here it is as a screen capture.
Backspaces: The golden ratio
My social media is getting out of hand
I recently joined the AMPt Community. “the premier resource for mobile photography/artistry… period.” Interesting site that I hope to get a lot from. This latest addition makes me wonder if my social media is getting out of hand.
I have two sites, this one and LessBeauty // MoreBrains.
Most of the posts on here are to do with my writing. I use it as a journal, a way of working through ideas about whatever story I am working on.
LessBeauty is home to the constant stream of digigraphs I take. I post these to the site from Flickr, because Flickr let me post directly to WordPress from my mobile. Although the free version of Flickr only displays the most recent two hundred images it still displays all the digigraphs posted to LessBeauty going back to the first post, five hundred images and counting.
Both sites automatically feed LinkedIn and Twitter, which in turn feeds Facebook. I never contribute directly to Facebook, I only have an account because everyone else does.
Daisy-chaining two WordPress sites, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook means I can post to two sites while distributing across six.
As well as the above mentioned platforms, I also have accounts with Instagram, EyeEm, Backspaces, and now AMPt Community.
A big reason for LessBeauty is Instagram. It started the digigraph ball rolling for me. The desire to post digigraphs made me go out and take more digigraphs.
The recent uproar over Instagram’s amended terms of service prompted me to set up an EyeEm account. Same content different place. It involves a fair amount of reposting but not unmanageable. Additionally I have also started posting stories on Backspaces.
Backspaces is new platform that is, from a content point of view, a combination of images and words. This is something completely separate from Instagram and EyeEm. It forces me to think in new ways about what I’m doing. That on it’s own is worth sticking with it for the time being.
On top of all that I recently joined AMPt Community.
Each platform reaches a slightly different audiance but because it reverses the daisy-chaining principle I employed with my main sites it is becoming increasingly time consuming to keep up with.
Not sure what I will do but I’m giving serious consideration to sliming down the portfolio of social media. What I need is a social media hub. A site that distributes my content across all the other platforms.
Backspaces
A while ago references to a new app started appearing on Instagram. Curious I downloaded Backspaces.
It sat on my phone for weeks while I struggled to work out how to use it. Functionally it’s not complicated. You string together digigraphs and words to tell a story, visualise a poem, whatever you can think of.
I just couldn’t find a way to put it into practice.
There’s nothing unique about the sequential juxtaposition of words and images. It’s something I do all the time when writing screenplays, but for some reason I couldn’t put a Backspaces story together.
In the end I just pulled some images from my camera roll and started writing.
Unfortunately WordPress.com doesn’t allow me to embed these stories. So here’s the next best thing, an image capture of the stories.
Every digigraph tells a story
I take a lot of digital photographs or as I like to call them digigraphs. I create them exclusively with my iPhone and the vast array of apps it supports.
I distinguish these images from the photochemical reality created by photography. While analogue and digital photography share a vast array of similarities, there’s something specific, unique, about the images generated digitally.
The digital image is infinitely malleable, giving it a deeply subjective reality. The mobile-computer-camera combination allows us all to capture and shape our perception of the world, and distribute that vision immediately.
These images would not’ve been creating if not for the iPhone. It’s always with me, ubiquitous, allowing me to capture candid moments without the intrusion brought by traditional equipment.
I shoot almost every day, usually walking the streets while trying to keep the sun at my back. I rarely have the camera at eye level, preferring instead to hold it low while keeping a tangental eye on the screen. I cut the earbuds off the supplied headphones to make a digital shutter release so I can capture a scene with a click of the volume button.
I distribute these images across several platforms, first to my digigrah stream LessBeauty // MoreBrains then to Instagram, EyeEm and most recently AMPt Community.
Another digigraph blog
I have been posting a lot digital photographs recently. There have been so many “digigraphs” of late that I have decided to set up a second web site LessBeauty // MoreBrains. The stream started when I joined Instagram, and while I liked the various quirky Polaroid-like frames they offer, it feels less like a way of creating interesting images, and more like a way of connecting with people, a sort of visual Twitter.
I know it’s obvious but it took me a while to clock that. For me Instagram didn’t really become interesting until I started using Hipstamatic.
Hipstamatic is a digital photography application that shoots square photographs, perfect for posting on Instagram. It also offers a number of software filters to make the image look as though they were taken with an antique film camera. The filters are added in the form of interchangeable lenses and films that can be used in combination to give different photographic qualities to your shot. What can I say it appeals to the geek in me.
At present I like to combine Hipstamatic’s US176 and BlacKey films with a John S. or Lucifer VI lens, but there are a dozen more lenses and films I haven’t even tried yet.
Shortly after discovering Hipstamatic I also came across the idea of app stacking, putting a digigraph through several apps to generate a plethora of interesting results. The example above “Spider” was created by stacking an image taken in Hipstamatic through FrameMagic. I then layered the two images I produced in Blender with a background created in SketchTime. Finally I posted the stacked image on Insagram using the Toaster frame.
I’m not entirely sure what these digigraphs are, other than to say they’re sketches for something as yet to be defined. Instead of posting digigraphs here, all of my digigraph efforts will take up space on LessBeauty // MoreBrains.
Director seeks feature film script
I am confounded by an advert typical of those posted on mandy.com.
Director seeks feature film script, drama or thriller only. Low budget. Salary min wage. Apply to: Julian.
Why would anyone reply to an advert like this?
Would Julian reply to an advert like this?
Why would anyone work with someone who shows so little respect for your efforts as a writer?
Collaboration adverts
Doing that thing again. I see adverts posted on mandy, read them with some interest, then discard them as a waste of time.
The problem is I keep going back for another look. I know they’ll be a waste of time, and I will achieve nothing by pursuing them, but I still find myself thinking about applying.
Has anyone ever got anything other than a headache by replying to “collaboration” adverts?
Snared by Facebook
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about not being on Facebook. A couple of days ago I created a profile.
Not sure why I took the plunge, but I’m still not one hundred percent sold on it. I think I like my privacy too much, and Facebook ultimately seems a little too intimate.
I think it might actually end up being a bit like my encounters with both LoveFilm and Blockbuster’s DVD postal services.
Their business model is built on the premise that they offer a more flexible renting solution. The reality is that you let some monkey in a warehouse choose the films you watch over the weekend.
Just as the LoveFilm’s of the world have found a way of providing a poorer service and making it seem like a benefit, Facebook promises the ability to connect to lots of people, some of them you might actually know. In return you are prompted to give away a massive chunk of your privacy.
Ultimately “the entry fee might not be worth it”.
You’ll know for sure what side of the line I fall if my Facebook profile suddenly disappears.
Fear of facebook
I’m not on facebook. People keep telling me I should create a profile but I’ve resisted. There’s something about the whole thing that makes me very uncomfortable.
I know it’s a completely irrational prejudice, fuelled by something I read, claiming that among other things, an investment company set up by the CIA owns shares. A bunch of multinationals like Coca Cola also have shares.
Facebook is essentially a massive marketing tool, allowing companies to harvest information about its patrons, and target them with direct marketing, or use the information as free market research, or keep tabs on them in some Big Brother kind of way.
Putting the paranoid conspiracy theory away for a second, what company doesn’t harvest information about individuals likes and dislikes. I posted on twitter recently about my frustrations with EDF Energy. I’d been overcharged, and wanted a refund. EDF contacted me through twitter offering to help. I didn’t reply, I didn’t trust that it was EDF, so ignored their repeated advances.
This highlights something for me. While Twitter is a very public arena it feels very private, I hadn’t given much thought to the notion that a company like EDF would be monitoring the twitter timeline. Truthfully I felt a little stalked, and I think that’s another of the things that makes me feel uncomfortable with facebook.
While facebook is a great tool for connecting people, it also gives access to those who you would rather not have in your life. We all have them, that work colleague you’d rather not talk to, or the long lost friend who is better staying lost.
Social networking sites like facebook allow the kind of personal access I’m reluctant to give to anyone but those closest to me. At some point I know I am going to have to hand them my details, join the club, for professional reasons as much as anything, but for now I think I will stay clear of the microscopic spotlight that facebook exposes you to.
Reluctant to reply
I see a lot of adverts on websites like mandy.com requesting screenplays. I read them with optimism. Go back to them looking for a glimmer of possibility, ultimately rejecting them as more trouble than they’re worth.
Am I cutting my nose off to spite my face?
I don’t know. I do know the promised credit, festival submission, and copy of the film, is not enough. If you want my work, I want to be paid, even for a short. Getting paid means ou mean business.
I’m also suspicious of would-be directors who have no writing skill at all, because it seems to me, if they have no writing skill, they have no understanding of how hard it is to actually write something.
How do I know this?
Because every time I have given a director a project screenplay, they’ve requested changes, massive changes, the kind that change the story. If you don’t like the story pass. As if I hadn’t thought about every aspect of the story, every word on the page, and made a conscious decision to write it that way. It seems to me the directors job is to tell the story, as written, not the other way round.
Perhaps I will regret writing this, because it’ll probably alienate potential collaborators, but that’s what I am looking for, collaborators, people who respect what I have done, enough to tell that story, as written.
The posters of these adverts could write the screenplays themselves. That’s why I started writing, I had stories I wanted to direct. Failing that, if they have stories they want to tell, and are unable to put it on paper, they could hire me to write it for them, not take what I’ve written and turn it inside out.
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