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A Million New Spielbergs (1/26/01)
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You know how Apple's been setting the stage for the next great computing revolution to rival the impact of desktop publishing? The first step was iMovie, that marvelous application that turns a digital camcorder and a FireWire-equipped Mac into an inexpensive, easy, and fun video-editing studio. And iMovie was just the beginning; to make the "desktop video" revolution stick, Apple is following through with the SuperDrive and iDVD, so that people can throw their finished iMovies onto a professional-looking DVD that'll work in any consumer player. It'll take a while for the cost of the equipment to drop and the technology to filter down into the mainstream, but hey, when iMovie first came out, digital camcorders were pretty scarce among average consumers, but these days they're cheaper and more available than ever.
So there it is: desktop video, the Next Big Thing™ according to Apple. Will the Macintosh lead millions of "regular people" to write and produce their own movies, just as the advent of the LaserWriter launched a zillion homebrew magazines, newsletters, and poorly-designed garage sale flyers? We'll find out in a few years, but in the meantime, Katie (AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae) stumbled upon a good sign in a recent Sun Times column by Roger Ebert. It seems that Richard Linklater (that guy who did Slacker) made a big splash at the last Sundance Film Festival with his latest project, Waking Life.
Waking Life was "originally shot on digital video" and then the footage was transformed into animation via the use of custom software running on-- you guessed it-- standard Macs instead of "expensive workstations." The buzz about this film is very solid, and if it gets as much good press as Ebert seems to think it will, Waking Life may be the latest success that inspires legions of aspiring filmmakers to grab a camera and a Mac and go to town. Sure, The Blair Witch Project may have been a more visible call to arms, but we think Linklater's flick just might show people that they can make a movie with digital video and a Mac without it needing to look like unedited camcorder footage. Now excuse us, but we have a script rewrite to get through-- we're losing the light, people!
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SceneLink (2825)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 1/26/01 episode: January 26, 2001: Uncle Steve has another intimate tête-à-tête with... er... all 7,000 Apple employees. Meanwhile, Microsoft's sites go down again, this time due to a denial-of-service attack, and a hot new film at Sundance was produced entirely with digital camcorders and Macs...
Other scenes from that episode: 2823: "Delays? What Delays?" (1/26/01) Maybe it's just us, but we're starting to suspect that whenever Steve Jobs "rallies the troops" for a company-wide meeting, it's less about disseminating information to the staff than it is about leaking additional spin control to the press... 2824: "Cosmic Rays" Is Taken, Too (1/26/01) Originally we figured that the comedy of errors known publicly as the Microsoft web site outage was a simple movie of the week, but no-- evidently it's a multi-part miniseries instead. Yesterday we told you how Microsoft copped to the fact that a "staff error" brought the family of Microsoft web sites to its virtual knees for nearly a full twenty-four-hour period, which must have been incredibly embarrassing for the company that most less-educated mortals probably consider to be the Supreme Ruler of the high-tech universe...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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