Ken's Blog

Somebody told me today that the SEC is now permitting crowd-fund contributors to receive stock ownership in return for their investments. This is a very different model from the traditional kickstarter campaign.

This sort of highly granular ownership participation opens the door to completely different ways of thinking about the money flow around things like novels, plays, independent films and other art projects. The person who puts down $20 now so that you can write your next book will own a small piece of the profits if your project is a success.

Those microinvestors will be motivated to start talking up the work to their friends, family and colleagues. Creating a buzz to build a successful market will turn into a highly distributed enterprise, greatly aided by modern forms of social media.

If this model of small scale enterprise works out, the long tail may be poised to become a lot more interesting.

The next thing she remembered, she was in a warm and protected place. There was food here, and sunlight.

In the distance shapes were moving, large and strangely colored. Curious, she moved toward them, but soon encountered some sort of invisible barrier. Although the barrier was not detectable at all to her dorsal ocelli, it felt hard and unyielding, and she knew there would be no more movement in this direction.

She was about to turn and explore the rest of the space, when she sensed one of the large shapes moving toward her from the far side of the barrier. She should have been frightened, ready to seek shelter, but some instinct told her that there was no danger from this being.

She felt a sense of massive bulk as it leaned forward, looming over her. And then, to her surprise, a pleasant shiver of recognition, as she sensed some sort of greeting. And it was definitely a friendly greeting. Perhaps this giant creature was one of her own kind?

She emitted a friendly greeting in return.

I was having a great discussion yesterday with a colleague on a wide range of topics, and the subject eventually came around to what motivates people to get things done. Of course the answer to this question is not simple. People are motivated by many things.

Sometimes people are driven by ambition, other times by passion or love of what they are doing.

But the one thing, we agreed, that always get people going, is the fear that something they love will be taken away from them. Maybe it’s their home, or their pride, or their place in their particular tribe. But fear of losing something near and dear can be a more potent motivator than just about anything else.

At that point I had a revelation. “Hillary Clinton was wrong,” I said.

My colleague asked what I meant.

“She once said ‘It takes a village.’ But the real motivation,” I explained, “comes when somebody is just about take away your village. So it would probably be more accurate to say ‘It takes a pillage.’

Think about this: Brilliant thinker/artist works with a large commercial production company. They create something amazing together. But the artist feels compromised by the result, and distances himself from the project.

This has happened so many times that it seems to be a sort of pattern, destined to repeat throughout history. Here are just a few examples of many.

Oskar Fischinger and Fantasia: One of the greatest abstract animators in the history of the medium, Fischinger was invited by Walt Disney to California to work on Fantasia, a project that was an outgrowth of conversations between Fischinger and conductor Leopold Stokowski. While the team at Disney Studios was exposed to Fischinger’s breathtaking visual ideas, and those ideas greatly influenced their thinking, he himself was sorely mistreated by the studio, and in mid-production ended up quitting in frustration and disgust.

The final result — mostly in the opening Toccata and Fugue — is only a pale and highly watered down echo of Fischinger’s full vision. Yet even in its compromised form, the beautiful abstract ideas hinted at in the Toccata and Fugure were powerful enough to convince me to enter the field of computer animation.

Harlan Ellison and Star Trek: The City On the Edge of Forever is widely acclaimed as the best episode of the first series. Yet so many changes were made to Harlan Ellison’s original script that he distanced himself from the production, and in fact wrote a book years later, describing in detail his falling out with Gene Roddenberry and the studio over the episode.

In particular, he objected to the plot twist, added in later rewrites, in which Edith Keeler’s pacifist activism leads to Hitler winning WWII. This was in 1967, and Ellison was highly vocal in his opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Interestingly, it was Ellison’s original screenplay, not the revised version shown on television, that won the coveted Writers Guild of America Award for best dramatic hour-long script that year. So he had the last laugh.

Alan Kay and TRON: Bonnie MacBird did the heavy lifting on the script for the original TRON (with co-creator Steven Lisberger contributing visual ideas and notes). One of the first things she did was interview top computer scientists, and she ended up finding Alan Kay (she named the character of Alan Bradley after him).

Alan was the originator of the concept of the “personal computer”, as well as the leader of the team at Xerox PARC which developed object oriented programming, graphical user interfaces, and many other ground breaking innovations that were eventually, um, “borrowed” by Apple Computer and Microsoft. He also originated the saying “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Bonnie’s original script had many more ideas that tied the human drama together with ideas from computer science. Her version would have resulted in a much deeper and more thoughtful film. But Steven Lisberger insisted on shifting the focus to visuals and a sort of sci-fi pirate adventure. And after seeing his ideas become watered down, Alan distanced himself from the movie.

Visually, the film is still stunning, and enough of Alan’s ideas remain to make TRON a landmark in the depiction of virtual reality. And that’s not the only happy ending. One year after the movie came out, Bonnie and Alan fell in love and got married. And they’ve been happily married ever since.

How’s that for inventing the future!

.

“Daniel, will you please come into the house and wash up for dinner? It’s getting dark.”

Daniel did his best to ignore his mother’s voice. This was the third warning, and he knew that any moment his father would be sent out to fetch him. Which means he needed to work fast.

“Here you go, easy girl,” he said. He didn’t know how he was so sure this was a female. He just was. He held the jar near, and gently prodding the caterpillar with a Q-tip, but she made no response.

He frowned and looked more closely. She was definitely alive. Possibly stunned unconscious after falling from the tree.

“You are an odd little thing,” he said. She looked a bit like Papilio machaon, and a bit like Danaus plexippus, but not really like either. Maybe something new! He felt a wave of excitement.

Daniel heard his father’s footsteps coming up the path. Delicately he picked up the caterpillar between thumb and forefinger and placed her gently in the jar.

“Hey sport,” his father said, trying to sound jovial, but Daniel wasn’t fooled. He could smell the beer on his dad’s breath, and he knew what that meant.

“Dad, I think she might be a new species.”

“A bug isn’t a she, it’s an it. Anyway, it can’t be,” his father said, “there are no new species. Just species we haven’t named yet. You’ll need to know that if you want to be an etymologist.”

“Entomologist, dad, not etymologist.” Daniel looked thoughtful for a moment. “But yes, that’s something an etymologist would need to know too.”

He was about to explain the difference, but just in time he saw the frown cloud his father’s face, and decided this might not be the best time. “Thanks for coming to get me. I’ll go in and wash up.”

Last night I had a very pleasant experience spending time with my father. Which is odd, because my father passed away some years ago.

Of course it was a dream. I suspect that many of you who have lost someone have had a similar experience.

What makes this particular experience somewhat unusual is that at one point my father turned to me and said “We need to plan for my retirement.” The moment he said that, I looked at him, looking all fit and full of life, and remembered that he was, in fact, no longer alive.

Which of course clued me in that this was a dream.

My next thought was that this was my dad’s way of telling me that this was a dream, so that I would realize what was going on. And I’m glad that he did, because otherwise I probably would have forgotten the entire experience by the time I woke up.

But because he said that, I thought to myself — all while still being asleep and in the middle of this dream day with my dad — that I will need to remember this when I am awake.

And sure enough, when I woke up this morning, the entire virtual time with my dad, so alive and as delightful to be with as ever, was vivid in my memory.

Which is a good thing, because memories of time with my dad, even in a dream, are more precious to me than diamonds.

Her first impression was of a hazy and indistinct light, and a feeling of great hunger. Her mind was filled only with the urge to feed. This need, so raw, so immediate, overpowered all else.

She picked up a scent, and she knew, without knowing how she knew, the way to follow. Slowly, ponderously, she made her way, step by deliberate step, feeling clumsy, heavy in her body, aware of the terrible slowness of every movement. And through it all, the hunger.

At last she reached her goal, a bed of glorious green. Here there was food, so much food, everywhere, all at once. Greedily she began to feed, and a rush of sudden energy surged through her body, flooding her senses with exquisite pleasure.

She was too absorbed by this pleasure to notice when the surface beneath her began to move, to sway, the force gathering, swirling, gathering momentum. Until suddenly she was thrown loose, and then she was falling, falling downward, ever downward, the cold air rushing by, seemingly forever.

The ground, when it finally arrived, came up fast, impossibly fast. And then, nothingness.

Speaking of Inside Out, my friend Athomas pointed out to me the other day that when he discusses that movie with his 14 year old daughter, the entire conversation sounds like psychological introspection, right out of the Freudian playbook. But of course they are not actually engaged in psychological introspection. They are just talking about a work of entertainment.

And that got me thinking, would it be possible to design a popular film from the ground up using the jargon of a particular technical field, with the goal of introducing that field’s language into the popular culture? The measure of “success” would be that anybody overheard talking about the film afterward would sound like they were discussing that technical topic. But of course they wouldn’t be — they would actually just be talking about a fun movie they had seen.

What fields could this sort of thing work well for? Government? Carpentry? Computer graphics? Particle physics? Are there certain fields that lend themselves to this sort of game, and others for which it would be impossible?

And then the follow-up question: If you have seen a film that gets you talking in the language of some technical field, and therefore has placed certain ideas in your head, would you find it easier to learn the real thing? Would somebody who watches Inside Out find it easier to learn advanced concepts from the field of psychology?

I’m guessing the answer is yes. After all, anybody who has seen the Cohn brothers’ film A Serious Man, and was really paying attention, is much more likely to truly appreciate the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat, and therefore the concept of quantum superposition.

I wish somebody would do the following mash-up of Inside Out and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask:

Our scene is set in New York City. Young Riley is now all grown up, and she’s enrolled as a student at NYU.

Who should she be on a first date with, but that guy from the 1972 Woody Allen movie. Inside Riley’s mind are Joy, Sadness, and the usual gang. Inside the young man’s mind are the crew from ’72: Burt Reynolds as Switchboard, Tony Randall as The Operator, Stanley Adams as Stomach Operator, Oscar Beregi as Brain Control, and of course Norman Alden as Brain Technician.

If you really want to see this film, do not watch the Woody Allen movie first, because it totally gives away how the evening will end.

But other than that, what kind of movie would it be? Personally, I think it should just be handed over to Pete Docter and Woody Allen to co-direct. Let them duke it out.

We had this wildly ambitious plan for our demo in Vancouver. So many features that were nearly working. Then at the last minute, about 70% of those features fell apart.

But we stil had 30% of the features working. And here’s the cool thing: The people who came to see the demo didn’t know about that other 70%. All they knew was what we showed them.

So we built an entire presentation around the 30% that worked, and scaffolded that demo with interesting and relevant context. It was all very entertaining and fun, and everybody had a great time.

I’m sure there is a moral here somewhere. 🙂