Tag Archives: Director

To get to this point, I need to take you on a little tour into my (optionally devious) mind. In the mid to late 80’s I had an idea. An idea any horny man in his twenties will have. In this setting (I was an amateur photographer) I was talking to Claudia Schiffer, convincing her to pose for me naked for one picture. We would then edit the image to show the bikini she would pose for and that one picture would ensure hundreds of bikini shots and she would get a royalty for every photograph produced. Yes, you laugh now, but in those days Photoshop was merely a whisper, the editing options we now take for granted did not even exist in those days. It was a slightly delusional idea and guess what, it never happened (big surprise). That was the premise that happened a long time ago, decades even. Today I had another daydream, I dozed off and I lost a competition, my consolation price was taking a picture of Mischa Barton (no idea how she got into the mix), she was wearing a very transparent top (extremely transparent) and I had to make a handbag picture. So I had her hold it in front of her face, her arms hid the nipples and the byline was ‘I do not use my face to promote a product’. You are laughing now, but there is a lot more to this. You see, in the early 90’s I tested a product from Macromedia called Director. 

The product had things that were beyond imagination (in those days). That image is needed, as it sets the stage for the now. You see when we consider that old program, it had options for presentations that many have forgotten about. What was the case is that you could set a stage, complete with people and objects and it would get us the setting like below (now in full 3d).

The 3d model optionally starts naked, but can be dressed like a barbie, we add the elements, accessories, the lights and the image starts to shape. The rectangle is what the camera sees and when we are happy a 24 bit image is created from scratch. You think this is a joke, it is not. Consider that there are 75,000,000 professional photographers in the world, the amateur photographer group is at least 4 times bigger, so we now have an optional population that is closer to half a billion. Consider that a photo model costs $200 upwards to $15000 an hour, and it does not need to include people, there are plenty of photographers that go for food, cars, luxury items and now we get a entirely new stage. It is not merely the photographer. It becomes a prototyping scene for what some call AI (which does not yet exist), but the deeper machine learning systems rely on data and now we have a system that offers creation whilst that data feeds the learning machines, and besides that, it becomes a 24 bit photographic prototyping system, something that doesn’t even exist at present. All these students can work deep into the night without worrying about the $200 an hour taximeter called the photo model. I think that this all escalated when I was thumped to death by these ‘free slot machine’ advertisements. We all think it is a scam, but this seems to be about free slots and that makes no sense, unless an operator like Las Vegas wants to test a prototype new slot machines and tweak it to be the most efficient one until it is release to the money feeding audience in Las Vegas. A free slot machine system makes a lot more sense now, does it not? You can feed the revenue beast all you like, but until you find the angle that does not cost you money, optionally making you money in the process the endeavour is nothing more than a money pit. And in comes the hungry gamers who will never go to Las Vegas in the first place, now there is an optional need. 

Director was a brilliant idea, especially in an age when certain graphical options were not available (neither was computing power) and it set a new tone. It also gave us a new direction to consider and even as Director was a multimedia application authoring platform created by Macromedia and managed by Adobe Systems until its discontinuation ten years ago, it was a great idea in an age when there was nothing. It is now surpassed, but I do not think that the concept should be forgotten. For this we could look at the 1991 comedy ‘Others peoples money’ with Danny deVito. It was about the New England Wire & Cable Company and how one man’s need for greed takes it to the slaughter. The nice evolution was that the lawyer (Penelope Ann Miller) searches for a solution and finds it in a Japanese automaker that wants to hire New England Wire & Cable to manufacture stainless steel wire cloth for making automobile airbags, something which will make the company profitable again on a new expanding industrial product.  That is where we are, finding alternative uses for good products because Director was that. I merely wonder if anyone considered making it a two sided solution one one side a photographic prototyping tool, on the other side a system to teach deeper machine learning solutions a way to learn graphical sides to an artsy problem, one that requires containers loads of data, if not a load more than that. 

Well that was my Monday being creative, have a nice day.