Sat, July 29, 2006

I recently posted a link that discussed (among other things) a rapidly growing phenomenon in which we allow technology to take over a lot of the tasks for which our brains were previously used. The example I gave in another recent tangent was the use of the spell-check function instead of just learning decent grammar, but other examples abound: you don't know your friends' phone numbers, because they're stored on your cell; you can forget facts and figures, because they're just a Google search away; etc.

This is a troubling development, to be sure, but in other ways it's a good thing. The theory being, maybe we can use our brains for more important stuff, now that technology is taking care of some of the menial tasks. (Of course, the trade-off is a certain level of self-sufficiency. Depend on technology too much, and you wake up in the Matrix.)

Anyway, it's interesting how synchronicity works. Just while all this is swimming in my mind, I stumble upon a link to Back to the Future: The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance Revisited. Someone has edited together the complementary footage from Back to the Future and Back to the Future, Part II to illustrate how the pieces fit together when Marty returns to the same scene in the sequel. Which is another example of relying on the Internet to supply something, because here's an idea we've all had, a fascinating experiment, but something that we think, "Well, that might be a bit time consuming." Can't someone else do it? Well, yes. Someone on the Internet.

(Now, yes, perhaps we haven't all actually thought of doing this specific thing. I can't even say for certain that I have. But it sounds exactly like the sort of thing I would think of to do, and you have to admit it's unfathomably enticing once you hear that all you have to do is click on a link and you can watch it.)

Pretty incredible. I remember having the same feeling when I was searching for Maya tutorials and information. People are so generous about creating characters or textures or other plug-ins and add-ons and then providing them for free. I thought, "I must be sure to give something back; people should be able to save themselves a little time by downloading some simple little doodad from onebee, the same way they're saving me so much time now." I just have to figure out what that doodad might be.

In the meantime, for God's sake watch the video, before Universal makes Google take it down. It's fantastically well executed and it not only shows how often Zemeckis & Co. managed to line up the timing exactly right (surprisingly often, although of course there are necessary changes), it also shows how meticulously they lined up the same action when they added shots in the sequel which showed action from the original film in the background. Down to individual extras' costumes and minor Michael J. Fox gestures. Groundhog Day did the same thing when they were repeating background action from day to day, and it's the kind of thing I find very impressive. In the case of Groundhog Day, maybe it's more obvious since the scenes often repeat back-to-back; in the case of Back to the Future, nobody would really be able to notice the subtle details without doing a video project exactly like this. But the filmmakers put that detail in there anyway. That's what you call "caring about your audience," as opposed to treating your audience the way, say, The Lake House does.

And it's also what it means to be a pro.