AI and Factual Television 3: Innovation & Creativity

Drones in Forbidden Zones (Channel 4)

When drone technology emerged I commissioned a series for Channel 4 from the nascent Little Dot Studios eventually titled ‘Drones in Forbidden Zones‘. I had noticed that films of pure spectacle did well on YouTube, such as a camera simply attached to the front car of a new rollercoaster ride. So the brief was simple: POV spectacle films shot using drones – anything that could be shot from a helicopter or a Steadicam was not to be included. The flight itself should be a visceral delight in itself. The films were largely shot flying through narrow spaces in difficult to access places and higher than human height.

In other words, they used the new technology in ways that emphasised what could be done now that couldn’t be done before.

In 2009 I commissioned the multiplatform half of a Channel 4 series called ‘The Operation: Surgery Live‘ (Windfall Films: my co-commissioner (TV) was David Glover) – it was one of the first TV shows ever (possibly the first) to use Twitter as an integral part of the editorial. Budding surgeons have always learned by watching experienced doctors at work – that’s why it’s called an operating ‘theatre’. In these programmes the viewers were given the opportunity to learn by asking experienced surgeons about what they were doing live via Twitter. In the UK, Live TV is anything up to 15 minutes behind reality due to the demands of television regulation. For this series the delay was reduced to a minimal 8 seconds to enable viewers’ questions to be put to the surgeons – who were doing all sorts, from open-heart surgery to awake brain surgery – after a minimal delay. The show had to explain what a ‘hashtag’ was as Twiiter was so unmainstream then. Tweeters in the USA were asking what the heck this #SLive thing was.

In other words, it used the new technology in ways that emphasised what could be done now that couldn’t be done before.

That is where we need to be for AI. There is a lot of fear, anxiety, bullshit, hyperbole, depression, catastrophising and band-wagon-jumping going on right now around TV and AI. Making things cheaper and faster and with less people is of little interest to true filmmakers and creatives.

This is the time to ask what the new technology enables us to do in film, television, content, digital interactivity and media now that couldn’t be done before.

The Operation: Surgery Live (Channel 4)

Change, Chaos & Opportunity

“Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change.”

Philip Guston (1913-80)

These are the words of painter Philip Guston who operated mainly in L.A. and New York – he began his career as a figurative painter, very influenced by Picasso and the Surrealists; went on to embrace Abstract Expressionism in the 50s and 60s; then returned to figurative imagery but in a very different style (see below) for the remainder of his life. The themes that cut across these phases remained consistent: brutality, war and violence, sin and injustice, evil  and upheaval.

‘The Studio’ (1969) by Philip Guston :: Philip Guston photographed by Genevieve Hanson

If you live in or near London or can travel to Tate Modern, you can get to see a large solo show of his work until 25^th February – and it’s well worth the trip.

Picking up on the previous post about having the courage to try new things, the first work day of the year for many is a good moment to acknowledge the importance of innovation and change for growth, both personal and societal. On the day Channel 4 announced massive job cuts, after a year of commissioning very little, the disruption to the television industry since 2020 in particular, but with its roots still further back, bring to mind the words of that poster boy of the pithy quote, George Bernard Shaw:

“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

I remember being in a meeting with the Chief Creative Officer of Channel 4 the best part of a decade ago and saying to her that the dog of television and the tail of digital would flip over sooner than she thought and quicker than she thought. In changing the Channel 4 app from being called All4 to Channel 4 last year the channel finally acknowledged the observation – the tail had become the dog. (But it might have been too late.)

Change, even in the form of destruction and disorder, is essential to development and growth. When edifices crumble, the gaps between the ruins offer spaces to be filled again. Whether anyone actually reads cover to cover The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a moot point, but ol’ Sun can give GBS a good run for his money on the quotations front:

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”

2024 opens with chaos aplenty, so by extension opportunity aplenty…

 ‘Painting’ by Philip Guston (1956, Museum of Modern Art)

First day of the year

 

 

That back to school feeling never really fades. The first day back at work every year is a bit of a challenge however much you like your work. Despite the promise of new beginnings, fresh slates, new directions the contrast with hanging out with family and friends, enjoying entertainments, walks, sleeping in is never easy.

The Christmas holidays are synonymous for BAFTA voting members with the first round of the Film Awards voting. This year – a very good year – IMHO was crowned by the astonishing The Zone of Interest directed by Jonathan Glazer. Loosely based on a novel by Martin Amis, it tells the story of the Holocaust at Auschwitz through a domestic drama set in the commandant’s house just over the wall from the death camp. The acting is flawless, the sound design a revelation and the direction perfectly judged. It has clearly been a long time in the making as I spotted in the credits my lovely old Channel 4/Film 4 colleague Sue Bruce-Smith who very sadly passed away way too young in 2020 in Dublin.

Untimely death and the Holocaust both bring us back to a quotation from Anne Frank which for me gives a clue as to where to start the new year of work…

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

Anne Frank in Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex: A Collection of Her Short Stories, Fables and Lesser-known Writings

Given that, hidden in an Amsterdam attic with the threat of violence and death all around her, she was facing something far more challenging than a new year of work and making a living, her positive perspective is very striking and inspiring.

So the new work year is beginning for me today, by happy coincidence, with a documentary film about witnessing the Holocaust from close quarters through the barbed wire. I have been working on the project for a couple of years with journalist Martin Bright and it feels like this is its year. The release of The Zone of Interest can only help as the stories are very complementary.

For this project and others this year the other words I am going to keep in mind are these from the American author William Faulkner… 

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”

William Faulkner

Having the courage to try new things and realising that exciting new work which makes a real difference in the world can begin this second is my suggestion for where to begin…

Sandra Hüller, Jonathan Glazer, Christian Friedel – The Zone of Interest

Other thoughts on the best of cinema in 2023 can be found here

Creative Catalysts

The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London

It’s often uplifting to cross paths with people who act as creative catalysts, to observe how they oil the wheels of creative enterprise and inspire those around them.

A celebration of Simon Emmerson 15.12.23

This year (like most others) has seen some significant losses in the music world: Robbie Robertson, Sinead O’Connor, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Burt Bacharach, David Crosby, Jeff Beck, and the last while has taken a particularly heavy toll with Shane MacGowan going to the Great Gig in the Sky, as well as Denny Laine and Benjamin Zephaniah. Back in March we lost Simon Emmerson (aka Simon Booth) – his life, music and creativity were celebrated last night at The Roundhouse with a gathering of various bands and collectives he helped bring about and grow. There was a lot of love in the room.

The Imagined Village

The Imagined Village

First up, his folk iteration spearheaded by the exuberant Eliza Carthy with her father, elder statesman of English folk, Martin Carthy. Simon’s  connection with folk music (and nature) began as a child attending Forest School Camps in the holidays. He helped launch The Imagined Village modern folk collective in 2004, working with a broad range of folk/world musicians to create a contemporary, cross-cultural take on folk music. Their debut album was released on Peter Gabriel’s RealWorld label and included a track by recently departed Benjamin Zephaniah with Eliza Carthy. Another track was recorded by her with Billy Bragg (and Simon on guitar). Billy Bragg came on at this commemorative performance to play that track with Martin and Eliza and The Young Copper Family (a family of traditional, unaccompanied English folk song singers from Rottingdean (the next village down the Sussex coast from the ArkAngel Productions office)). Hard Times of Old England (Retold), as Martin pointed out, shows how the England of the 1820s was not unlike that of this decade, just substitute Rwanda for Australia in this tale of transportation. Billy, needless to say, added a new verse about the failure of Brexit and Johnson’s role in it.

Billy Bragg (vocals) & Martin Carthy (guitar & vocals)

The Imagined Village built up a driving tribal vibe punctuated by a rich mix of sounds from the technical modernity of a theremin to the ancient heritage of a sitar. In the recent feature documentary about Marc Bolan, AngelHeaded Hipster, Bolan made a very resonant observation – what a wonder it is that a piece of wood with strings – his guitar or this sitar – can move you to cry. Or lift you and make your heart beat faster as this dynamic folk outfit more than achieved on the night.

“There are people like Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page, if you like, whoever you relate to out of those sorts of people, that through the use of a guitar, which is a piece of wood with string on it, really, when you relate to it like that, made by man, that certain things can stir your emotions up out of a piece of carpentry. Or blowing a piece of steel pipe and making you cry, what happens, you know, within that pipe? It’s the spirit that comes. It’s when people deny spiritual factors, its very sad, because it’s everywhere around us.”

Marc Bolan

Afro Celt Sound System

Afro Celt Sound System

The next band/collective took up that baton and ran with it. Combining traditional Irish and Celtic instruments (low whistle, uilleann pipes, bodran, etc.) with an eclectic mix from Africa and beyond (including the 21-string kora from Mali and the driving beats of a traditional Punjabi drum) Afro Celt Sound System took the energy to the next level with a masterful performance fuelled by the special mission of the night.

Simon Emmerson’s guitar had to be substituted  by a very able replacement but his spirit still infused the band. He formed it in 1995 in the wake of working with Peter Gabriel at RealWorld on the OVO soundtrack for the turn-of-the-millennium show at the Millennium Dome in 2000. One of their highpoints was the track they recorded that year with Sinead O’Connor, Release, with which they opened their exemplary set. It was followed by their Malian singer (all in white in the photograph above) singing unaccompanied a song traditionally sung in his native land when somebody significant passes on.

Working Week with Juliet Roberts

Working Week

The final Simon Emmerson-infused act of a highly memorable evening was Working Week, playing together for the first time in over three decades. The son of the original Brazilian percussion player had to stand in for his dear departed father. Their set was introduced by DJ/Producer Gilles Peterson who knew Simon and his wife Karen well, lived in their basement at one time and ended up buying their house when they moved on. His Acid Jazz Records and Talkin’ Loud recordings were greatly influenced by Simon, who added a jazz sensibility to his soul roots. Resurrected Working Week opened with Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues.

Juliet Roberts added vocals to their brass-driven big(ish) band sound but what was interesting and evident from the physicality of the event was that the centre stage was rarely filled. Simon clearly was an instigator and nurturer of collective musical endeavours with no natural central figure. You could still feel his presence holding them together and firing them up.

Working Week grew out of the band Weekend, which Simon founded with Alison Statton after the break-up of her previous outfit, Young Marble Giants. Weekend made only one (excellent) studio album, La Variété, in 1982 on Rough Trade. They brought some jazz into the fertile territory of the UK Post-Punk scene, which was a  promising delight. He went under the pseudonym of Simon Booth on that record for some reason. The record sleeve was charming, offering a colourful contrast to Pornography (The Cure) and Combat Rock (The Clash), all in the shadow of Joy Division’s Closer (1980).

Variety is the essence of Simon Emmerson’s illustrious career in music. From jazz to world to modern folk, from initiating bands to producing (the likes of Baaba Maal and Manu Dibango), from DJing to playing various instruments made of wood and string (guitar, bouzouki and cittern), he had the rare ability to inspire and catalyse the creatives around him in a way which enabled them collectively, with no ego in centre stage. That’s pretty much the opposite of what a rock band is but very much the essence of the anonymous songs of folk, the circularity of Irish music and the turn-taking of jazz.

Hastings vs Frith Street: The birthplace of TV

One way or another I spent a lot of time around Soho last week, including at Bar Italia on Frith Street. Above it, not that obvious unless you happen to glance up, is the best Blue Plaque in London, epitomising British understatement. One of the most influential inventions of the 20th century and all it gets is one simple sentence of a dozen words. I took that sentence as gospel and have spent decades in the secure belief that telly came into being in that small room above what has been a classic London coffee bar since 1949, what was Logie Baird’s lab back in 1926. But that’s not really how invention and innovation works…

I went to Hastings a few days ago, to visit Hastings Contemporary art gallery (it turned out to be shut unusually due to staff shortage caused by the Covid pandemic). As you enter the town there is a mosaic road sign that says: “Hastings & St Leonards: the birthplace of television”. My world shook on its axis. I’ve spent my entire career in Television, I have a stake in it, I need to know the basics.

I also have a small stake in Logie Baird having delivered the John Logie Baird lecture at Birmingham University a good few years ago with Dr Christian Jessen of ‘Embarrassing Bodies’.

So what’s the connection between Logie Baird and Hastings? In short, before the Soho demo in 1926, Logie Baird (let’s call him JLB for convenience) experimented with the transmission of TV images in his house in Hastings. That was from 1923, three years before Frith Street.

21 Linton Crescent, Hastings, East Sussex

The house was at 21 Linton Crescent. It has a rival blue plaque from The Institute of Physics, made up of much the same words as the Soho one but in a different order. JLB came to live in the town early in 1923 while convalescing from illness and hoping to benefit from the sea air and more benign South Coast climate. Through to mid 1924 he carried out experiments that led to the transmission of the first television pictures. Similar to Edison’s famous thousand duff light bulbs, the 1926 Soho demo and the 1924 Hastings one both rested on extensive trials, tests and experiments. On failures Edison, responding to a reporter asking: “How did it feel to fail a thousand times?”, said: “I didn’t fail a thousand times. The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps.” Edison has a part in the history of the invention of TV as he speculated early about the possibility of telephone-like devices that could transmit and receive images as well as sounds.

So it was in Hastings that JLB created the first televisual image, a shadowy outline of a Maltese cross. The contraption he constructed to generate this image was made from a Heath Robinson collection of household objects including lenses from bicycle lights, scissors, a hat box, darning needles, a tea chest and sealing wax .

The first transmission of moving TV images took place in February 1924 above a shop in Queen’s Arcade, Hastings which JLB had rented for his workshop. In July that year JLB received a 1,200-volt electric shock, but got off lightly with just a burnt hand. In the wake of the incident he was asked to leave Queen’s Arcade by his landlord, Mr Tree. That’s when he went to London.

From 25th March 1925 over a period of three weeks JLB gave the first public demonstrations of moving TV images at Selfridges. On 26th January 1926 he gave that Soho demonstration, the world’s first of true television, to fifty scientists in the attic room above Bar Italia.

In 1929 yet another plaque enters the story – it was unveiled at a ceremony which Baird attended at Queen’s Arcade.

Rewinding just a little, in 1927 JLB demonstrated his television system over 438 miles of phone line between London and Glasgow. In the wake of that he formed the Baird Television Development Company (BTDC). The following year BTDC achieved the first transatlantic television transmission, successfully sending pictures between London and New York. Also in 1928 he pulled off the first transmission to a ship in mid-Atlantic. During his astounding career he also did the first demonstrations of both colour TV and stereoscopic television.

JLB eventually returned to East Sussex to live out his twilight years in Bexhill-on-Sea. Then he went dark and disappeared in a little dot.

Creativity & Ego

Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.

Marina Abramović, artist

Marina Abramović at “MARINA 70” – 2016 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York

Ego is very hard to combat but it takes us in false directions much of the time, distorts our decisions and brings lies/fakery into our creative endeavours. 

Something new under the sun: Creativity & Connections (quotation)

“Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

What’s most of interest in this quote is the two unrelated ideas coming together to make a great new idea. Connection is the beating heart of creativity. It relates directly to the André Breton quotation at the bottom of this very early post from Simple Pleasures Part 4.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000)

When coffee & convenience were the mothers of invention: the roots of the Webcam

Having spent a large chunk of the last three weeks on Zoom (shares up 30%), Skype and the like, whilst drinking lashings of coffee, it is interesting to reflect on the device that has made this all possible and its humble origins in my alma mater, Cambridge.

The inspiration for the world’s first webcam came from a coffee pot next to the Trojan Room in the old Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University. In 1991 the computer scientists working there rigged up an early form of webcam (in greyscale) so those further from the room could monitor the level of coffee in the pot and stop missing out on the black stuff. At first it was an internal system running at a low frame rate but after a while (Nov 1993) someone thought to connect it to the World Wide Web and it became something of an early internet star (the web equivalent of a silent movie star). People from round the globe checked out the coffee levels in the lab. Because they were on different time zones a lamp was introduced to cover the evening and night.

XCoffee was the client software written by QSF

The coffee pot was retired after a decade in 2001 (it was actually the fourth or fifth) and bought by a German magazine (Der Spiegel) at auction for a bit over three grand.

The original programmers were Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky. Daniel Gordon and Martin Johnson connected it to the WWW. Here is QSF’s account, beautifully titled ‘When convenience was the mother of invention’.

The way this humble invention has transformed our lives in the last month is as astonishing as the rest of this surreality. I have used my (flakey) webcam in these weeks to join my mum on her 80th birthday; participate in a seminar on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; help deliver a documentary-making workshop over three days (that were supposed to be in Copenhagen); last night, hang out with some friends, associates and strangers/new friends whilst sprawled on my bed in the semi-darkness; have a meeting which opened with a live song; start writing a book with a close colleague; work with some filmmakers in Prague and L.A. and Thailand; have our regular book group meeting (online for the first time). So big up to Quentin, Paul, Daniel and Martin – and Cambridge. And coffee.

The last shot: a hand switching off the server

P.S. For a great book on coffee and creativity, whilst you’ve got all this time on your hands, try Patti Smith’s M Train.

“In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.”

Keep creating [quotation]

“If anybody wants to keep creating, they have to be about change”

Miles Davis

Miles at Newport ’69

Adventures in the Writing Trade: Day 4

Friday ended up as a frustrating feeling day. A lot of loose ends. Nothing finished. Including my relatively short To Do list. Saturday (yesterday) by contrast finished with me hitting send as a fired over three useful documents to my co-writer, Doug Miller. A mark-up of his outline. A set of notes collating the helpful, considered responses to my online call-out. And a response to Doug’s initial thoughts on how best to collaborate in practice. A satisfying, rounded-off feeling to conclude the day.

It’s important to live with mess, loose ends, even chaos in the writing process, indeed in all creative endeavour. It’s getting over that hump, bringing back some order in the face of the most out-of-control prospect, which usually marks where the creative achievement lies.

View from the summit down to the harbour

After lunch we headed up to the summit I had visited the day before. This time it was as a group, led by our hostess who is one of the two prime-movers on the island. I had a lovely chat with her on the way up, quite deep for a modest walk. At the triangulation point on the top there was a real sense of a cohort, a group bonded across very different experiences, backgrounds and personalities. Two of the Americans asked me to explain what we were looking at so I pointed out Howth Head as the North end of Dublin Bay and the Wicklow Mountains as the Southern limit; Rush and Malahide opposite; the small islands of Skerries looking North, and at the limits of our view the Mourne Mountains, faint in the distance, where my Other Half comes from. The panorama was epic, a beautiful subtle palette of blues and greys and delicate purples in the autumnal sunshine.

View of Howth Head from Lambay

On returning to the white house we did our second writing workshop with Jonathan (Gosling) on Style. Clarity; Pace; Engagement were the factors we considered. I focused on the opening of my as yet unfinished book When Sparks Fly, on the creative rewards of openness and generosity – a subject closely allied, it turns out, to the book on Collaboration Doug approached me about (the focus of my efforts this week). It was a helpful exercise and I could see at least a couple of things to improve – too long sentences in a quest for fluency/flow and questionable assumptions about how Digital Culture is perceived by many people.

The day before our first workshop was on our relationship to Writing. By using two observers as we spoke concisely about writing’s role in our lives, one recording facts, the other emotions, we quickly got some real insights into our work and ambitions. A really useful technique I hope to deploy in some other context soon. Probably starting with the MDes course on Story-telling I am teaching at the end of the year at Ravensbourne university/film school.

After the workshop I made a bee-line to the harbour to take advantage of the strong late afternoon sun. Donning my new Finisterre swimming trunks I strode into the September sea and dived in. It was …fresh. Envigorating.

Commercial Break: Coincidence No. 477

I am out for a walk in St Agnes, Cornwall during my summer break a few weeks ago. It’s a bit rainy so I head up from the cliff top inland towards where I’ve been told (by Joya & Lucy of Surf Girls Jamaica, both locals, hence my choice of St Agnes to sojourn in) there is a small business estate where there’s the HQ of a great surf clothing retailer called Finisterre. I eventually come across it, go in and buy some swimming trunks, shirts and a lime green recycled plastic water bottle. As the shop assistant is wrapping up my stuff he explains a bit about the business, how well it is doing, where the branches are, there’s even one up in London. Oh, where’s that? Earlham Street.

I work at Red Bull at 42 Earlham Street. I’ve never noticed Finisterre.

I have the harbour to myself, except for sharing it for a few moments with a black Labrador. The tide is out, the sand is smooth, the water cold (colder than Donegal a couple of weeks ago) but bearable, soon really refreshing. After the swim I feel amazing. I chat to a couple of Dubs from Howth over for a nature walk day trip. The wife shows me on her phone a photo of their view of Lambay from Howth village.

I finish the day tying those loose ends on the lawn, my spot du choix. I also connect the lady-boss of the island to an old colleague & friend of mine who lives on the Isle of Eigg. Eigg has done an amazing job pioneering green energy & sustainable living, and my friend Lucy has been enthusiastically involved in driving those efforts. The Lambay Trust has similar ambitions. I’m glad I made the connection during our walk&talk.

Creativity, in my view, revolves around Connections. This includes the people connections offered by a writing retreat like this. And the factual/conceptual connections such as Lambay is a proto Eigg.

I bought myself a book from the island on Friday – it was my birthday present to myself. From my family, I asked for a new walk as a gift.  The book is In Praise of Walking by Shane O’Mara. Mara is Irish for sea. John of the Sea. It explores the science of walking and why it is good for us. I am convinced it is very good for Creativity, hence my early morning walks every day on Lambay. Here are a couple of quotations on Walking I recently gathered.

“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.”

Steven Wright (US comedian)