Bearing Standards

Posted on December 31, 2008

I used to be a staunch critic of certain conservative academic philosophies. A certain university in Texas had a reputation for not allowing underclass students to work in production courses until they had fulfilled a large number of prerequisites. These classes were unpopular because they dealt wholly in theory.  Back then, you could get away with that kind of approach. Equipment was still expensive and complicated. It wasn’t ubiquitous on every laptop, like today. I can’t picture them having the same curriculum these days, with every incoming freshman with hundreds of hours of content on their own Youtube account. (The university that I was attending in north Texas had a steady stream, an impressive exodus, of disenfranchised production majors from the other university in Texas.)

There’s something to be said for giving your customers what they want. College is the place to make mistakes. You, as the student, are the executive producer, you’re paying for the production, you should get to succeed or fail on your own terms. That’s what you’re in college for, to screw up. You do it there so you don’t do it in the field. Your own mistakes are the most valuable of lessons. I know I’ll never professionally repeat the disasters I was responsible in school.

But, you can’t know how to break aesthetic and technical standards until you’ve first mastered them.

That’s the question: aesthetic and technical standards vs. creative license.

Conversely, I’ve known too many artists who won’t take any chances.

My favorite discovery is mixed colors for three-point lighting. The producer I was working for just didn’t get it. We had a 2k broad hung as a cyc-light left over from a previous shoot. We turned it around in an attempt to use it as a back light. It was too strong. The technical backlight-to-key ratio exceeded the 2:1 aesthetic standard for industrial videos. It happened to be hung in the grid on a dimmable circuit, so I suggested dropping it’s power ten to twenty percent to back the harsh edge off. That’s when the producer contributed the only technical input he was aware off: “That will warm up the color temperature!” He protested. (I avoided getting into a semantics argument over the difference between the aesthetic definitions of warm vs. cool lighting that contradict with the technical spectrum wavelength terms defined by kelvin temperature measurements.) I did point out two issues: Where is it written that the key, fill, back, and background lights all have to be the came color? You identify daytime indoor lighting near a window by the bright blue wash. It gets harsher and more golden closer to dusk or dawn. Furthermore, as the client/talent was in makeup and due on set any moment, we don’t have time to rehang that light. Could anybody pass the Pepsi challenge to identfiy the one to two hundred degrees lower Kelvin color temperatures that the ten to twenty percent drop in voltage the dimmer would produce? No? Then shut up if you don’t have anything productive to contribute.

Sometimes you just have to do the opposite of convention. Just for a change, just to see if it will work, because sometimes it does. It just does. And you’ve succeeded in channeling inspiration and achieved artistic creativity. You’re a hero, an artistic god.

And when it don’t work, then it’s something to remember. A bar tale for the ages. America loves a spectacular failure just as much as a heroic success. Everyone still remembers Vinko Bogataj’s agony of defeat. That could be you.

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