for as long as i can remember, i’ve told stories to friends and conspired to find new ways to share these stories. as a kid, i created plays with puppets, then discovered the video camera, exchanging the makeshift stage for an actual location, i’ve used friends as actors, in order to fulfill an obsession with creating skits and short stories.
i eventually found my way into the film business and worked for many years as a production designer, most of them while living in copenhagen.
i invested a lot of energy into production designing, throwing myself into intense periods of research for the feature films that i designed. i viewed environments as characters, and just as a writer might create a back story for a character, i too created back stories for each environment.
in some ways, my approach to the work was like being a detective as well as a student of the human condition.
it shouldn’t have been surprising that i designed films that were steeped in psychology. from a professional point of view, the quiet intense thriller seemed to be the genre that suited me best.
during this time, i started to develop as a director, feeding my curiosity with stories that i created for my own projects. while working full-time as a production designer for commercials and feature films, i directed a number of short films and music videos on the side. much to my satisfaction, i discovered that there was an audience for these projects, as films that i directed were accepted into a number of international film festivals.
directing is a lot more fun that production designing. the types of collaborations are fundamentally different and i would discover that directing is a lot easier too.
while everybody who works on a film has an obligation to serve the ambitions of the script, a production designer has to juggle more responsibilities and obligations than a director. a production designer has more masters to serve in a working environment in which there is also a lot more ambiguity. i found that few decisions for a production designer were clear-cut. choices were often somewhere between painful and less painful. once the periods of research and pre-production are over, the production designer becomes a task master and a diplomat who manages a wide variety of personalities, while doing the best that one can to stave off disaster in the face of inevitable surprises and chaos.
a director is also a manager, but, in my experience, the choices have always been easier to make, even when there are constraints. as a director, the focus is entirely on the ideas put forth by the script as well as the collaborators. even though both the director and the production designer endeavor to find the best possible expression for the narrative, for some reason, it has always been easier for me to manage this as a director.
then came the move to los angeles, and with that, after thirteen years in the business, i saw an opportunity to shift my focus away from production design and onto directing.
while my directing projects in copenhagen have mostly been works of fiction, the projects that i would work on in california would all be documentary in nature.
i made a number of small films, while it took almost a year to land that first paid gig as a director here in the united states. i was asked to direct a documentary project as part of a team that was working on IBM’s smarter planet campaign. it was a very rich experience that lasted several months.
the project came to its natural conclusion and, shortly thereafter came the move to new york.
and since then, i’ve enjoyed the process of directing and collaborating so much that i’m always looking for new ways to continue this.
cake or death? is the iSlate really going to change things?
editors note (july 15, 2010): this article was written before the arrival of the iPad, when the product was being referred to, among other things, as the iSlate. thus, the iPad in this article is referred to as the iSlate as well. seems quaint and hopelessly out of tune right now.
for those of you who are anticipating the arrival of the iSlate, i have a few questions.
what is the islate trying to be? is it really going to bring about a new wave of innovation, as many predict?
is it an iphone on steroids? or is it a smaller, more useful version of the macbook air? or is it a kindle-crusher because it can do more?
from what i can tell, the islate will incorporate many aspects of the iphone, using a similarly designed interface and many of the iphone’s core functions. furthermore, it will look like a larger iphone but will boast the computing power of a macbook. it may have some additional functions, like being useful as a tablet (so that one can use a stylus on its interface – which i would welcome) and i’ve heard that it’s going to be useful for teleconferencing. great. built-in camera too. maybe it will be good for games as well – bigger screen than the iphone, feels more substantial… nice. and, i suppose, it will also be a nifty e-reader, which is one of its core selling points.
in terms of size, it will be thin like a kindle, and about ten inches across, right?
are people really going to carry around with them their iphone, their MBP and their islate? three devices that do many of the same things? that seems a bit silly. who would carry around all three, especially all the time? when you travel long haul, will you have all three with you? when you commute?
perhaps one takes it completely for granted that consumers will happily haul around all three but i’m not so sure.
does anyone today carry around a kindle, a laptop and a phone? anyone outside of the social media vortex?
if not, then which device gets fired? which one becomes less significant? it would seem like one of the three needs to go.
one can’t get rid of the iphone because it’s small and handy and works kinda nicely as a phone… if i ditched the iphone, would i carry around this tablet-device as a de facto phone, propping it on my shoulder like a boom box while i had voice conversations? (i mean, if i was walking and talking, where else would it go? i can’t hold it front of me and talk into it, i’d bump into things… so, i’d want the speaker by my ear… oh great, headphones)
i don’t know if i’d get rid of the laptop, because i’m used to sitting down at a desk, doing work with a keyboard and my stylus, and it’s pretty darn portable so that i can work anywhere… but not so portable that i’d take it out on the subway and work on something…. besides, isn’t the iphone there for just that kind of need?
so, where does that leave the islate?
it will be the third device that i leave at the office, and when i want to do a show and tell, i might grab it… and if i want to take notes in a meeting, i might grab it… maybe i’ll take it with me to lunch, which i wouldn’t do with the laptop (i’d read magazines just like in the mag+ video by the berg boys)…. but when i go home at night, i think i’d take the laptop over the islate… that’s my guess. i wouldn’t lug around all three…
i’d leave the islate behind because if i left the laptop behind, then what’s the use of keeping a laptop around? might as well get a desktop then.
now, if the islate can be set into a keyboard (like the old palm pilots were top mounted onto an external keyboard – which looked really funny but i loved them…) then, i suspect that it’s the laptop that becomes a bit clunky and less useful.
i might be overlooking something substantial, but the arrival of the islate reminds me a bit of that skit by eddie izzard in regards to the spanish inquisition. cake or death? nobody wants death, but choosing cake isn’t really getting to the heart of the issue.