RSS Feed
Ain’t no relationship without a bit of compromise… but there are some things that just step too far beyond the pale.
Back to the Moon
February 21st, 2011 
Clint There are 29 privately funded teams from 17 countries that beat the deadline and registered to compete in a race to build and transport an unmanned lander and rover to the moon – going after $30 million in prize money put up by the Google Lunar X Prize. There are also a few tens of millions in contracts that would come their way with that access to the surface (and beneath?) of the moon.
It saddens me that this gets so little attention from the media. I guess it is more important to know what vapid fame-mongering shenanigans the celebrities were up to last weekend than it is to notice humanities fledgling steps to creating a spacefaring civilization and the diaspora of life into the universe?
How is it that The Onion, that master of sarcasm and parody, is one of the few places that genuinely understands the magnitude of what happened back in 1969… even as they poke fun?
Hey, I probably watch more film and television than any two typical viewers out there… but how in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster can Charlie Sheen’s latest blow and hooker fuelled night of debauchery overshadow the fact that we are currently taking the first steps on the grandest and most important venture that it is possible for any life form to undertake?
We are doing this right now, not far back in history or at some unknown future date. Wrap your mind around this; right now there are a few hundred men and women who are working on the most impactful thing that we as a life form can ever undertake even if we were to survive for another billion years.
(End Rant Mode)
In this video from a few days ago, Peter Diamandis congratulates the teams that made the deadline for entering the Google Lunar X Prize race. It looks like some time in the next two years, one or more private organizations will land a spacecraft of the moon and try to teleoperate a rover over the surface of another world. I think this is worth a little attention between Lady Gaga’s most recent cry for attention and the debut of the next “how-much-will-you-debase-yourself-for-fame” reality shows.
Here is a list of the teams that link to their page on the Google Lunar X Prize website. Team Plan-B is actually based in Vancouver and while it is a long shot, it is nice to have a team in our back yard. Odyssey Moon, while it is based on the Isle of Man, is headed up by a Canadian and their prime contractor is BC’s MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates. Another Canadian had to head south to set up Moon Express in Silicon Valley because he didn’t think he could raise the capital in Canada (and there is a story that Canadian creatives can relate to).
Usage Based Billing?
February 17th, 2011 Clint 
I will start off by stating that I am a libertarian and that it is an infringement on the rights of the people running these companies when the government steps in to regulate how the Internet service providers bill us. The statists among us will insist that the ISPs need regulating because they have a quasi-monopoly on delivering this access… ignoring the fact that it was created for them, and is sustained for them, by the CRTC in the first place.
It is the usual Charley Foxtrot of the bureaucrats and politicians using problems they created as justification to step in and intervene even more. Like the financial mess in the US where they regulated themselves into a real estate bubble and then come to the rescue by “solving” the problem with… yet more regulations? These are perpetual job creation program for bureaucrats and a never ending source of vote purchasing for politicians. It also allows corporations to buy their way into protected and very profitable situations. This is never in the best interests of the population at large and often not in the corporations bet interests in the long run. I think this is one of those cases.
That said, I have no moral or philosophical objection to usage based billing. It seems eminently reasonable to pay for what you use. I do have a pragmatic objection to it as they are proposing to implement it here.
You see, their state protected position allows them to artificially throttle the usage and cripple access to the Internet in the name of short term profits. They set the baseline usage ridiculously low and then charge several orders of magnitude more than it costs for the inevitable overrun. This is bad for the customer but also damages the business in anything but the next few quarters.
IP is poised to take over our communication infrastructure, entertainment delivery and work via interaction with data in the cloud. Everything we exchange that can be reduced to bits will be and because of that, we can set a baseline of usage that encompasses everything we do now that falls under that umbrella.
Our protected ISP industry has held us back to a developing world level of Internet access- we’re lucky if we can get a 10Mbps feed and then they pretend that it is high speed Internet access. Uhhh no, 100Mbps is high speed Internet access; 10Mbps hasn’t been high speed since the last century and 1 Mbps being advertised as “High-Speed Lite” is actually insulting. To make matters worse, this advertised 10Mbps is small-printed as “up to”. This means they have covered their ass as long as, every once in a while, they manage to get up to 10Mbps. I have yet to meter out more than 7.5Mbps on an “up to 20Mbps” package.
If they were honest, they would advertise the minimum they hit rather than the maximum. It should be “no less than” not “up to”. The only use for listing a maximum theoretic limit is to deceive the customer. The only use.
So the first thing they need to do is drag themselves out of the dark ages. Make no mistake, this isn’t easy or cheap. Small countries with large populations have a distinct advantage in building out the infrastructure. It costs far less to do much more when you have a population density of South Korea at 487 people per square kilometres rather than our 3.4 people per square kilometre.
But it certainly isn’t a hundred times more expensive, much of our population lives in metropolitan centres located within a hundred kilometres of the Canada/US border. While rural homes may have to accept 10Mbps access for a while, the ISPs have some explaining to do about urban homes where they want to charge $150 for a hobbled “up to” 100Mbps package.
And we will need true high speed access if we want to fully utilize the Internet and stop falling further and further behind.
The big data hog is entertainment, television being the main culprit. Whatever form the broadcasters and cable networks take in the future, we will always watch a lot of television. What we won’t do is all watch the same television. The average home has three televisions and three people living in in so the Internet feed needs to handle three HD streams at once.
Good compression algorithms mean that an adequate image can be streamed for about 10Mbps… so you can see where an “Up To 10Mbps!” is some seriously weak sauce. The average peak television usage would be 30Mbps and would allow the Internet Service Providers to offer an acceptable base package starting at “No Less Than 50Mbps” that would meet demand and leave a comfortable buffer for the next decade or so.
There are a significant number of households that would require more than this. Some would simply have more people living in the household while others would be more intensive in their use of the Internet with multiple HD feeds going in the background along with several streaming radio and a self hosting website that consumes a few tens of megabits per second on its own. There are also going to be more and more people working with software and data that lives in the cloud – many of who will need tens of Mbps for that alone.
To service these higher usage households, the ISP would be remiss if it did not add one or two tiers above it- let’s just go with 75Mbps and 100Mbps. The pricing of these services should reflect what we are currently paying for Internet access as well as our cable bill and a land phone line- with a healthy discount for consolidation. It would be crass of them to take undue advantage of the situation to try and hide an increase inside that consolidation… so I fully expect them to try to do that very thing.
In a competitive market, the delivery of actual broadband services should making a healthy profit at $1 for 1Mbps. Practically every urban household in Canadian will be subscribing to Internet access and it would behove the ISP to try and deliver the best bang for buck to capture those millions of customers for decades of $50, $75 or $100 every damn month.
So now that we’ve spent several screens to establish how fast the data need to come into the house, we need to figure out how much data would be pulled down every month.
Going back to that three people per household and using the average of four hours of television watched per day- let’s round down from that and assume there is some overlap on what is watched and go with ten hours of distinct television per day. That is mostly for ease of use in the napkin math I am using here but I also think it is a reasonable metric to use.
Since we are using 10Megabits per second as the HD data rate, that works out to 1.25 Megabytes per second which is 75MB per minute for a total of 4.5 GB per hour. I know that using the better algorithms and lowering our quality demands can give us a compromised image for only 1.5GB or a little more. I really don’t want to watch an image full of compression artefacts and so I won’t use numbers that reflect the lowest common denominator when projecting forward.
So, using my quality standards and some napkin math and statistics gets us to 45GB per day on average for television alone. One of the three is streaming radio stations, another is playing a serious game online and the third is working from home complete with video conferencing and cloud computing… we can easily round that up to 50GB per day as a working basic usage rate.
So, in a household in a developed country- the Internet Service Providers should be looking at 1.5 Terabytes drawn down over a 50Mbps service as a working model for what they need to deliver monthly for not a great deal over $50. Right now, that 1.5TB would cost them between $30 and $40 to deliver and they would have to work on the economy of delivery as well as alternative revenue streams… but building a working business model based on the real world is their job. I am just pointing out the parameters to them.
Now, there are other households, with six or seven occupants who have a serious Netflix addiction and watch two or three movies in addition to the twenty hours of TV every day. So these people will be using closer to 5TB of data per month and so the ISPs will want to meter that and charge a reasonable rate. If it costs them two and a half cents to deliver a GB of data then we are looking at an additional cost to them of about $90. This household is a high usage should probably already be paying the $100 for the higher bandwidth and their usage would be partially covered by that higher rate… but the ISP would have to charge an additional $75 to $100 for the higher than average usage.
This household’s bill could easily hit $200 a month and I don’t have a problem with that- it is a reasonable usage based billing scenario.
The closest I could find to this hypothetical baseline service is the maximum service offer of SHAWS “Nitro” package. This advertises “Up to 100Mbps download speed” which realistically might be able to sustain a “No less than 50Mbps” data rate in the few places that it is offered. How does the rest of the package measure up? Well, they cap it at only 350 GB per month which is about 23% of a reasonable baseline and they want $150 which is about three times what it needs to be.
So in reality, they are not that far off what they should be delivering. Since it is actually closer to a true 50Mbps service than a true 100Mbps they need to charge a third of what they are charging and allow four times as much data transferred. These aren’t order of magnitude differences and should be reachable in a reasonable timeframe. We don’t have to live in a second rate information topology.
Now that we can see what they can and should deliver, what are they actually proposing?
The big telecom companies that built and operate the pipes for the Internet in Canada want to impose a 25GB per month cap and then charge for every GB you go over that. The CRTC was created to consolidate the bureaucracy into one-stop shopping for the telecom industry so they rubber stamped it and gave the companies $1.90 per GB in English Canada and $2.35 per GB in French Canada.
So let’s get this straight, they want to cap it at less than 2% of a reasonable base usage and then bill the customer $2,850 per month in overages to get the other 98%?
How about those poor ghettoized Quebecois who could then be charged $3,525 per month? Or that hypothetical high usage household above that would be dinged $9,500 or $11,750 respectively?
Obviously it would not be possible for Canadians join the developed world if they have to pay what the telecom/CRTC are asking for – and we will fall further and further behind the rest of the world as they build out for the future and Canada entrenches themselves in the 1990s.
So my message to the ISPs of Canada is to look out past the next few quarters of their bottom line and work toward a business plan that will make them competitive in the developed world and deliver what the customer needs rather than crippling them with last century’s data plans. If they are too blatant about the money grab and do to much harm to the customers- that leaves them vulnerable to politicians sacrificing them on the alter of votes.
I am pretty sure that I am yelling into the void on this one.
Thoughts on Egypt’s January 25 Revolution
February 12th, 2011 Clint I’ve given the situation a few weeks to settle out a little… I also needed time, once the movie I was working on (Gravity’s Pull) wrapped, to observe and analyze.
The key thing I’ve noted is that the media tends to treat Egypt’s political machine and Egypt’s Military machine as if they were two separate things. Like almost every person of power and influence in Egyptian politics, Mubarak came from the military- an officer in the Egyptian Air Force in his case.
His temporary replacement was Vice President Omar Suleiman who was director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate and before that he was an officer in the Military’s Intelligence branch.
Today, he let everyone know that they had passed all authority to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. In Egypt, the Sultan rules at the suffrage of the Mamluk.
I am sure that Mubarak wanted the military to crush the protestors but was politely turned down and convinced to accept an alternative proposal, that it was in Mubarak’s best interests to hand over the reins of power, probably with a guarantee that he, his family and his wealth will be kept from prosecution and repatriation. I am not so sure that they will follow through on that though, he has systematically stripped tens of billions of dollars from the Egyptian people through graft, kickbacks and flat out redirection of state resources; there will be much hue and cry to bring him and his family to justice. Not to mention that $50 plus billion will help repair some of the economic damage that these last few weeks have dealt the country.
Now, the real worry is for what elections will bring. Many in the west seem to think that a democratic election is all that is needed for a better political system when in reality, people can quite easily vote themselves into subjugation and crushing poverty. A free and democratic election is necessary for a political system that enhances freedom, but it is by no means sufficient.
The best case scenario is the military finds their own Atatürk who will found a secular government that ushers in social and market freedoms. If this person manages to win a clear majority of the votes in an election that is marred by no more charges of corruption than is usual in a fledgling democracy… Egypt will be markedly better off five years from now. I give this about a ten percent chance.
The more likely scenario is a candidate who promises to take Egypt down the vote purchasing path that is dragging most of the developed world economies to a standstill. Europe and North America have a century of economic growth from capitalism to feed off of while Egypt may try to go straight to the bankrupting debt and economy stifling interventionism that can buy the next election. They will promise to create jobs, build a welfare state and institute labour reform along with a free unicorn in every garage- while telling everyone that nationalizing major industry will pay for it all. This will leave them worse off by any measure except by the media yardstick of believing no ill of any political party that embraces social democratic rhetoric. This one I give something like a sixty percent chance.
The worst case scenario involves the ascendancy of a religious party backed by the Muslim Brotherhood that institutes Shariah law and drags Egypt back into the dark ages. They have been treading carefully, not trying to take too much credit for what has happened and saying that they will not field a candidate for the presidential race… but fielding a candidate and backing a puppet are much the same thing in deed if not word.
Though I am an atheist, this is most definitely not an attack on Islam as a religion. Make no mistake, I think Islam is every bit as dangerous and silly an idea as any other religion… it is just that in the case of politics, the danger stems from power mongers creating tyranny behind the shield of Islam. There is no worse enemy of Islam than the power hungry individuals who wrap themselves in religion as they use it to their own personal ends. If you care about your religion, keep it as far from the halls of politics as you can; for if the temple is the house of god on earth- the capital is the house of the devil. Voting for a religion based political party will give Egypt a crushed economy and a jackboot on their neck. I give this outcome about a thirty percent chance – and if they vote this way in their first free election it will be their last free election for a long time.
There is still a slim chance that things will get better for Egypt and I really hope that there are those with the foresight and will to make it so.
The Government Has No Obligation To Help Us
December 15th, 2010 Clint Dammit, it isn’t charity if you are using someone else’s money!
It is not the place of the government to help out the poor and downtrodden.
It is not the place of the government to help foreign countries when their socio-economic system collapses around them due to natural disasters exacerbating their gross mismanagement.
The very idea of positive rights is twisted and damaging since the only way to deliver them is to take from others by force.
It is not charity and it certainly isn’t benign when it is built on the threat of grossly disproportionate violence. The state wants to take from Peter so that they can give to Paul… and if Peter resists, the state will send heavily armed men who will imprison or kill Peter if he does not bow down to the confiscation.
Yes, the state considers it entirely reasonable to crucify Peter to redeem Paul- I do not.
It is not the government’s job to help those in need.
It is mine.
And it is yours if you want it.
Locally, I help my father with the community gardens where we plant potatoes, turnips, cabbages, carrots, peas and a few other staples that he then delivers to families that are in need, The Pines Care Home (a retirement home and hospice) as well to the local Food Bank. The picture below is one of two plots that a local physician, Dr. George Magee, donated the use of. There were several other pieces of land donated and my dad put a lot of time into the planting, weeding, watering and harvesting. If any locals are reading, he could use a lot more help with it next season.
I wasn’t in town much during the season but I still managed to put in a several days of weeding, watering and harvesting.
My dad also helped organize the local Tragedy Fund that helps people when they are hit with an unexpected emergencies. Examples being homes lost to fires or when someone needs to go to Vancouver for medical care and they don’t have the means for any family members to travel with them- the Tragedy Fund helps out.
Both of those are local and they do not have any web presence… I really should put something together for them, even if it is just a way for folks to organize their time so that the fields don’t go too long between weeding and watering.
Our families go to regional charity has been the BC Children’s Hospital.
Logically, it makes sense that if you take care of people while they’re young, that will reverberate throughout their life and therefore have a compounding effect in comparison to helping an adult… but I am self aware enough to know that the primary motivator is the strong protective instinct toward the young that evolution has instilled in me. I’m fine with that.
As for the world; there are many charities that have fallen victim to Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy and where all but a tiny fraction of the money ends up paying for “administration”.
There are a couple of organizations that I feel are at the top of the ROI heap.
Doctors Without Borders is one of the causes that I feel comfortable putting money into. They have a solid reputation of converting donations to results with the minimum loss to overhead. They do a hell of a lot of good and your money is well spent there.
The Red Cross has more… uhm… administration friction than Doctors Without Borders but by sheer dint of the amount of money that passes through them they are able to mobilize and get things done that few other charitable organizations can dream of doing.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t dozens of other worthy causes to invest your time and money in- these are just my picks. Embrace philanthropy and take it back from the state, it isn’t an onerous duty that you can foist off of the self serving power brokers and thugs. Nor is it the purview of the rich, if you can’t give money then try and give a little of your time.
And I want to make something clear. I do not do this because some sky bully tells me I have to if I want to get past the bouncer at his afterlife party. I do not do this because I feel an obligation or duty. I do not do this out of guilt for living a comfortable and safe life.
I do this because I see people in need and I think that the world will be a better place if I helped- not just for those I try to help but for myself and for those I care most about.
This is an element of rational self interest that Ayn Rand just couldn’t seem to grasp.
The Gap Between the Rich and the Poor is Irrelevant…
December 14th, 2010 Clint …and a stupid metric to base your world view on. You don’t run any faster by hobbling your team mates.
Complaining about the gap between the so called “haves” and “have-nots” is a gross distortion of reality, mean spirited and rooted in jealousy and greed. The prevailing attitude in this clique is that it isn’t about your lot in life, it is all about the fact that someone, somewhere, is doing better than you… and that should piss you off.
This is not a zero sum competition where Paul Allen having two mega yachts somehow means that the poor are the worse for it. It means that thousands of people worked for years to create the Octopus and the Tatoosh and another hundred or so people have full time employment on crewing and maintaining them. The quarter of a billion dollars that went into their construction and the million a week to keep them going is extravagant but that money is spreading out in a net to the rest of the world.
Besides which, Paul Allen is one of the early signatories to Bill Gates’ The Giving Pledge where he and a few dozen others have agreed to give away half of their wealth to philanthropic causes.
Don’t let the mind boggling luxury that some small percentage of the worlds population lives in blind you to the fact that almost everywhere else on the planet, people live significantly better lives than their parents or grandparents.
Technology, democracy and capitalism has lifted the health and wealth of the entire planet and only the very worst places today are as bad as the very best places of two hundred years ago.
There are places in the world right now where people live in abject poverty and suffer under an average life span of less than forty years… which was called “normal” for nearly everyone up until the industrial revolution. We should do our best to help the world’s poor embrace the technology, democracy and capitalism that has lifted the rest of the world out of that sorry condition.
The greed and envy that drives so many people to focus on the gap is not productive and it most certainly doesn’t help the poor and unhealthy of the world. The fact that Bill Gates can avail himself of the very best health care that the planet has to offer, and that he can live at a level of comfort and luxury that few people can even imagine does not make the harsh life of an orphan in Haiti any harsher.
But that wealth might allow the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to find a cure for malaria or cholera and make that orphan’s life a hell of a lot better.
Really, the needs and desires of the wealthy countries is the primary driving force for the increasing standard of living for the worlds poor- it is that very gap that is dragging the poorer countries up along with the wealthy countries. If the gap were bigger, the poor countries would be pulled along faster.
The socio-economic capital spent concentrating on that gap isn’t about helping the poor, it is about punishing the rich even if it is at the expense of the poor. I find that sentiment sad, bitter and empty.
The video embedded below shows that two hundred years ago the world lived with a much smaller gap between countries- we were all “have-nots” who lived in poverty- and then only for about forty years. We now have a much bigger spread between the rich and the poor… but the poor are almost all better off than even the very best from two hundred years ago.
It takes generations to move countries from the lower left to the upper right on this chart and it is admirable to help them as much as we can; but it is a nasty and irrational thing to attack any that have actually made it up and over.
We should celebrate our wealth and revel in our high standard of living while we do our best to help the developing world join us. Cheap energy is the only thing that will allow that and I am afraid most “green” energy is so expensive that it will stall billions of people in poverty for the next two generations.
Coal Powered Cars
December 10th, 2010 Clint Why don’t people look past the superficial marketing of an idea?
Above and below; two types of transportation separated by about a hundred years. What is the difference? One of these uses coal to create steam that spins turbines to generate electricity that is then sent over power lines to charge a battery- only then is it converted to mechanical energy. The other is more efficient since it skips the electrical generation altogether and uses the steam to directly generate the mechanical energy.
You can’t see the smokestacks from your heated leather seats but for most of the world they are right there in the display from your rear facing camera.
But people don’t want to think about that.
Many people need the world to be in danger and they need there to exist steps they can take to rescue it. Saving the world is the most important thing that they can imagine and it gives the greatest value to their lives.
They may not articulate it to themselves that way though it is the explanation that best fits their actions.
But they have a very big problem.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- the world is in magnificent shape and never in history has so high a portion of humanity lived as safely and comfortably and with as much freedom as they do today.
For the last hundred years our lot has been getting better at an astounding rate- not because of the self styled saviours of the world but because of the scientists, engineers and businessmen who have wrested knowledge from the universe and bent it to our needs and desires.
Democracy has fettered the politician’s innate desire to tyranny just as capitalism has loosened the masses’ economic bondage to the self same ruling class.
Admittedly it has not been a smooth and unremitting climb, but there is none such path in the real world. As long as we don’t cripple out economy too much in the next few decades, we will muddle through the hysteria and deal with climate change while simultaneously bringing a developed world standard of living to a few billion more people.
Even today, things are so much better than in the past that the saviours and martyrs need to create the crisis before they can save us from it. Since both the crisis and the solutions are illusory they can bear little scrutiny- hence the vitriol pointed at anyone who questions their axioms.
Yes, the world is warming up… and has been since the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago. The trend we have been in for the last half millennium is an increase of about a degree every century and the anthropogenic effect on climate change would reasonably be described as a rounding error.
Since any actions we can take are only relevant to computer models designed to find actions for us to take… they can not be expected to survive contact with reality.
So people ignore the fact that wind turbines do not efficiently or reliably produce electricity- while they are very good at killing tens of thousands of birds.
They ignore the fact that the electricity used in electric cars is a medium of transferring energy and, for much of the US, electric cars can best be described as coal powered cars that produce a carbon footprint closer to that of an out of tune Hummer than the much touted zero.
Sorry Elon but your Tesla cars need a satellite solar power infrastructure to get their impact down where everyone in the environmental movement thinks they are… so get on that okay?
It is image and intentions that matter most to the elites at the top of the environmental movement and the real world is an inconvenience that they ignore in favour of one level thinking and computer models designed to support their ideology. Their stories are exciting, engaging and a call to action that anyone can rally to with little real effort.
To truly effect the future requires decades of education and decades more of focused effort on complicated and difficult tasks… most people find it much easier and a lot more fun to party while holding placards and shouting slogans that rhyme with “Hey Ho-“.
What do I Think of Amazon Studios?
November 21st, 2010 Clint So, have you heard that Amazon wants to get into the movie making business? They’ve just opened up what they are calling Amazon Studios.
“Win money. Get noticed. Get your movie made.”
They are saying that when you upload a script, anyone can look it over and make any changes they want. That is a really bad idea, not because my words are precious and can’t be changed… but because 90% of the people who think they can write are very, very wrong.
Just because you can string together words coherently doesn’t make you a writer. It is like any craft or skill and it takes years of dedicated effort and a lot of innate talent to get truly good at it.
“Your first million words are crap” – I’m pretty sure that it was Robert Heinlein I first read this from but it has also been ascribed to many other writers.
While truly horrible writing could probably be raised up to the merely bad- any good writing will be dragged down to that level as well.
The chances that a good script will be “improved” by a million of these guys hammering on a million keyboards is so slim as to approach zero.
Mel Doesn’t Have a Hangover
October 27th, 2010 Clint 
I’m not surprised that they cut Mel from Hangover 2. Sure he is a substance abusing, loudmouthed bigot… but that isn’t why he is a pariah. Oliver Stone and Sean Penn aren’t any better but I got a feeling that most of the people who vehemently denounce Mel Gibson would trip over themselves to work with either of them.
Or Roman Polanski for that matter.
Mel Gibson is a Christian conservative (at least compared to most in Hollywood) and that is why he is ostracized… I say that as an atheist libertarian who disagrees with just about everything he holds most dear.
Yet, I would work with Mel Gibson before I would work with Oliver Stone or Sean Penn- it looks like Mel is only an asshole when he drinks too much while Oliver and Sean seem to carry that around with them always.
Actually, I would go further than that. If we could keep him sober, I would be happy to work with Mel Gibson on a serious film adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. I think that Mel Gibson would be about as good an Odysseus as you could ask for.
Rough Covers
September 11th, 2010 Clint There was a last minute need of graphics for the covers of four pitch documents to be taken to Toronto for TIFF. There wasn’t the weeks needed to get an actual graphic designer and go through the proper steps of establishing motif of the film, generate concepts to choose from and then iterate down to the best images to perfectly represent the story being pitched.
Instead, I had only a little better than a day to put these four together and there were severe constraints on what I could use. Even if I could have gathered the images of actors and acquired the rights to the photos, none are officially attached and so I couldn’t put them on the covers. I had to use my own photographs and manipulate them to be more abstract so they wouldn’t be easily recognized – or go with inanimate elements that could plausibly be representative of the feature’s themes.
One of the features, the one that I have the rough draft done for, is ‘Dead Man Switch’. It is an action/thriller with a hard sci-fi element and I wanted a cyborg, a female Secret Service Agent and a soldier to depict the primary elements of the script.
The cyborg on the left with the targeting eye is a picture of myself suitably abstracted, not because I wouldn’t give clearance but ‘cause I ain’t leading man pretty. The agent in the centre is a picture of a girl I met on a tour I was on in Europe back in 2002 with a pistol composited into her hand. She was abstracted so as not to be very recognizable, this time because I didn’t have a model release even though she was quite pretty. The soldier is actually a guard at a casino in Monaco from the same tour. The idea was to be archetypical but not specifically recognizable.
‘Monster Makers’ is a feature that I am outlining right now and is next for my keyboard once I have the rough draft of ‘Saving the Dead’ finished. For this one I had a picture of a machined plate of aluminum with another piece riveted to the upper corner (actually the inside of a door on the tug boat I worked on). I took a rough font and put it on a layer above the plate then distorted it to give the impression of a welder scoring the words into the plate. I then embossed a tagline along the bottom, trying to make it look like it had been milled out of the aluminum.
The faked welding turned out better than the fake machined tagline but it was three in the morning and I only had about an hour to put it together so I went with “good enough”.
Then there is the psychological drama ‘I Am Vengeance’. It is one that I may be hired to write based on the producer/director’s idea and so I am familiar with it but can’t talk about it. For this one, I needed the image of an angry girl and digging through my archives I found a picture I had taken at Christmas a few years back. It is of my cousin and she had smiled for the picture and then glared so I clicked the shutter again. Though she is a little younger here than the character, I think that it captures the feel of the script better than I had any right to expect for the few hours I had to put it together.
The fourth cover is for a horror film and it is another one that I am in line to write if development money is raised so I can’t talk about this story either. For this one, I used a picture I took of a Greek statue overlaid on another from almost the exact same angle that I took of an unwrapped Egyptian mummy. The layer effects build up an air of decay on the cold perfection of the marble.
I used a font that is more associated with a romance novel and then gave it the look of fresh spilled blood.
If you were to take the font effect off and delete the underlying picture of the mummy you are left with something that wouldn’t look terribly out of place on the shelf in the romance section. And it is sort of a romance… just not for everyone.
All told, they look like straight to video movies from the eighties but I can live with that since I am not trained as a graphic designer and I only had hours to create all four of them and I think they do look better than a blank sheet of paper with the title in the Papyrus font.