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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 24 2018, @08:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the film-at-11 dept.

I regularly read the Knowing and Doing blog of Eugene Wallingford who is Associate Professor and Head, Department of Computer Science at the University of Northern Iowa. In a sequence of blog posts, he artfully raises some concepts of film editing to a much wider application than just films.

We start with a blog post 95:1 that introduces a book he is currently reading:

This morning, I read the first few pages of In the Blink of an Eye, an essay on film editing by Walter Murch. He starts by talking about his work on Apocalypse Now, which took well over a year in large part because of the massive amount of film Coppola shot: 1,250,000 linear feet, enough for 230 hours of running time. The movie ended up being about two hours and twenty-five minutes, so Murch and his colleagues culled 95 minutes of footage for every minute that made it into the final product. A more typical project, Murch says, has a ratio of 20:1.

He continues this thread with a later entry The Cut:

Walter Murch, in In the Blink of an Eye:

A vast amount of preparation, really, to arrive at the innocuously brief moment of decisive act: the cut -- the moment of transition from one shot to the next -- something that, appropriately enough, should look almost self-evidently simple and effortless, if it is even noticed at all.

[...] Reading Murch has given me a new vocabulary for thinking about transitions visually. In particular, I've been thinking about two basic types of transition:

  • one that signals motion within a context
  • one that signals a change of context

These are a natural part of any writer's job, but I've found it helpful to think about them more explicitly as I worked on class this week.

And, more recently, Footnotes, expands on that concept and by noting:

While discussing the effective use of discontinuities in film, both motion within a context versus change of context, Walter Murch tells a story about... bees:

A beehive can apparently be moved two inches each night without disorienting the bees the next morning. Surprisingly, if it is moved two miles, the bees also have no problem: They are forced by the total displacement of their environment to re-orient their sense of direction, which they can do easily enough. But if the hive is moved two yards, the bees become fatally confused. The environment does not seem different to them, so they do not re-orient themselves, and as a result, they will not recognize their own hive when they return from foraging, hovering instead in the empty space where the hive used to be, while the hive itself sits just two yards away.

This is fascinating, as well being a really cool analogy for the choices movies editors face when telling a story on film. Either change so little that viewers recognize the motion as natural, or change enough that they re-orient their perspective. Don't stop in the middle.

I am still digesting this, but it leads me to wonder if the applications with which I've had the most difficulty might be guilty of failing to properly handle these transitions. In some cases the "language" is verb, noun (e.g. Open, File...) and in other cases it is Noun, Verb (e.g. Select text, Italicize). Have you run into this? What are the best/worst examples you have encountered?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday January 24 2018, @08:54PM (4 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday January 24 2018, @08:54PM (#627366) Journal

    wonder if the applications with which I've had the most difficulty might be guilty of failing to properly handle these transitions.

    Someone said that the key to user interface design was the application of the Principle of Least Astonishment. Sudden and large changes of presentation, organization, and work flow hindered adoption and learning.

    In systems my company wrote, we found that adding one or two explanatory or "confirming screens" between a selected choices and the subsequent action resulted in a lot fewer user questions and mistakes.

    TurboTax does this (perhaps to excess). It tells you what its going to do, does that process, then tells you what it just did.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:27PM

    by requerdanos (5997) on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:27PM (#627390) Journal

    Like Gimp?

    In the 90's, I had to learn Adobe Photoshop for a job [archive.org]. Initially Photoshop version 3 (note: not "CS3" which is Photoshop version 10), and then, excitingly, the Photoshop 4 beta codenamed "Big electric cat." My graphics experience up to that point had been MacPaint (the 1984 black and white edition), PC Paintbrush, and Windows Paint (the 3.1x/95 version).

    I recall that learning "the Photoshop Way" of doing things didn't reuse a whole lot of what I had previously learned from earlier software I had used, and that many operations I initially found insanely convoluted until I had done them enough times to make them seem natural.

    After I moved on from that job, circa-late-90's, I found Photoshop prohibitively expensive and so moved on to the Gimp that you mention. I bought the book "Grokking the Gimp," dead tree edition, and sat down and learned to use it.

    I recall that learning "GIMP's Way" of doing things didn't reuse as much of what I had previously learned than I would have expected, and that many operations I initially found insanely convoluted until I had done them enough times to make them seem natural.

    I have looked also at things like Krita (Just slightly different enough to seem alien to me), and later Photoshop versions (some experience with CS1, CS2, and CS4 for various jobs). My experiences are spotty, not comprehensive, but I don't think that the "motion and context" of a raster drawing and processing program that would make it feel natural has been found yet; I don't think it's just GIMP. I would love it to be proven wrong here.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MostCynical on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:41PM (2 children)

    by MostCynical (2589) on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:41PM (#627402) Journal

    The reversing camera in my car turns off when you drive over a certain speed. I am not sure what speed, as I have not been looking at the screen or the camera when it has happened - it was reported by my passenger.

    I can imagine someone who was using the camera would be quite likely to be shocked, and react badly when the screen went blank. If they also turned slightly, the results could be catastrophic, yet it is unlikely the designers would be held in any way responsible. Yet, a sign that popped up on the dash saying "boo" would be considered bad.

    In car Ui land, if you cancel a detour, should the confirmation options be "cancel" and "okay"?

    Also, in web UI,why do web forms get made on monster screens, but not get checked for use on "ordinary" (non-designer) screens, so the next button you need to press ends up below the visible screen, and scrolling is often difficult (pop up *must* be top-left locked!)?

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    • (Score: 3, Funny) by frojack on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:09AM (1 child)

      by frojack (1554) on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:09AM (#627473) Journal

      The reversing camera in my car turns off when you drive over a certain speed. I am not sure what speed, as I have not been looking at the screen or the camera when it has happened - it was reported by my passenger.

      Your reversing camera should go off when you take the car out of reverse gear.

      OTOH If you actually are going THAT fast in reverse, this may simply be your car's inclusion of the "Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive filters" [wikia.com] package free of charge in your particular model.

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      • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:47AM

        by MostCynical (2589) on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:47AM (#627508) Journal

        Likely around 15-20km/h, (9-12mph) possibly even as low as 10km/h

        No one was shouting "Aaargh"

        --
        "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex