Twitter [2]

[davywavy]

I was watching The Bourne Supremacy the other night when something struck me. It’s a cracking film; an intelligent, fast moving script and some first-rate actors make it a standout in the crop of action thrillers. If it has a weakness, it’s the choreographing of action sequences.
Every fight scene is jumpcut into incoherence. You get cuts of no more than 0.02 seconds long of fists and people struggling and pained faces and maybe someone going “Ooyah!”, and it just gets tiresome after a while, especially when compared with the phenomenal skills of people like Tony Jaa or Jackie Chan. On the extras documentaries of the Lord of the Rings films, fight choreographer Bob Andrews (who also did the fight scenes for the Star Wars films and taught Errol Flynn to fence) says that every fight scene should tell a story and I think that is what the sequences in Bourne lack – any sense of narrative, development or meaning.
“My God”, I said to myself as I watched another meaningless, jumbled mishmash of fists, feet and blood spatters* whizz by on the screen. “This is the cinematic equivalent of Twitter.”

One of the major uses of LJ for me is to get rid of ideas. I often find the same idea rattling around my head like a pinball on a particularly forgiving table for days on end, and I’ve found a good way of getting rid of it and making space for other stuff is to write it down. This is particularly useful for things like work, as some days I might be writing a song on the train in to the office only for the tax auditors to appear on the doorstep like baleful wraiths and I don’t much want to be still trying to find the perfect rhyming couplet whilst being asked probing questions about my expenses claims.
Someone noted in the comments to my past last week that ideas gain increased value through consideration. Isaac Newton was once asked how he worked out the principles of gravitation, and he replied “By thinking on it constantly”. Similarly, Einstein spent the better part of the decade puzzling over general relativity before finally putting pen to paper.

I have to wonder how much creativity is lost as a result of the untold numbers of people blogging and twittering away their every thought and not taking time to develop a narrative or structured statement or idea. I suspect that if oysters could twitter, we’d get lots of messages like this:
Oyster01: Just swallowed a bit of grit. No use, so I spat it out again#
and not many actual pearls.
But am I right? Thankfully, using the miracle of David’s Making-it-up-o-vision, I can see through time and space and find out what the great minds of history would have done with their ideas if they’d had twenty seconds and a mobile phone to hand.

AlEinstein: Any1 any idea what riding on a beam of light looks like? Probly not important#
Oppenheimer: Am bcum deth, destroyer of wordlz lol#
Newtoni:Apple fell on head. Bummer lol.#
wamozart: Spent all day playing tunes with the keys on my handset!#
Dickensc: Quicker to let u know: little nell dies.#
Charliedarwin: All these birds look diffrent! Go figure.#
Aynrand: Atlas *hugged*#
Davy: That’s enough twitters. Get back to work#

^{*Some will say that this incoherence is more realistic and that real violence has no inner narrative and real fights don’t have any sort of structure. I suspect that the people who say things like that have never actually been in a real fight.}

Comments

re fights

[raggedyman.livejournal.com]

I think having a very short cutting style in fights *is* more realistic, as they do get across the rapidity and immediacy of them rather well (or at least as well as cinema can do). However it's similar to the filming in Transformers: it's technically clever, it does give the viewer a real sense of being there, and its bloody annoying after about the first 2 scenes.

Re: re fights

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I disagree; I think that scrappy street fights tend to be incoherent, but these aren't supposed to be that - they're fights between consumate professionals who've spent years practising. Watch any sort of professional fighter, from boxers to MMA to Tai Chi masters and you can tell what they're doing, even if it's stuff you couldn't do yourself.
I think that the jumpcut fighting scenes are lazy choreography rather than realistic.

Re: re fights

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

I just can't watch cut-cut-cut scenes, I lose where and what the hell is going on; I tend to think longer choreographed fight sections are harder to do as well, so I'm generally more impressed by them.

Yes, Transformers was pretty but the fight scenes, especially the final one, sucked big monkey balls.

Re: re fights

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Quantum of Solace? There's an action sequence at the Opera wherein I completely lost track of what was going on; people jumping out and shooting for no apparent reason and from nowhere. It was like a badly run D&D adventure ("Suddenly, a monster appears").

I haven't seen Transformers, and I don't plan to.

Re: re fights

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Not seen that one yet. Probably because Casino Royale was quite good (even if the heathen was using a UMP with a 9 mm magazine rather than .45 </gungeek>) but just wasn't a bond film as far as I was concerned, more an action flick. So I've not been inspired to see more.

Re: re fights

[(Anonymous)]

Most actors don't have the physical prowess to successfully do long action scenes, so they do them in little bits.

Re: re fights

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Maybe so, but I'd hope "little bits" would be more than half a second!
I mean, is five seconds of continuous action before a cut too much to ask for?

[hobbsthepenguin.livejournal.com]

Ah, Twitter...the egotistical belief that someone, somewhere cares about your profound 180 characters, 24/7.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It's like livejournal, only with less content or thought.

[hobbsthepenguin.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* I suppose that true to a certain extent. At least with LJ (when there's content) you can skim and sorta catch up with what's been going on in someone's life. Twitter? Mostly it's mundane tripe that gives little inside into what's going on, other than random annoyances in that person's life....or maybe that's only been the ones that I've seen...not many people on my FL seem to have it (thankfully).

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Twitter became so much more bearable when I worked out how to block it in LJ :)

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

How do you do that?

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

A helpful person linked this for me...

http://matgb.livejournal.com/354073.html (http://matgb.livejournal.com/354073.html)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grimtales_/]

Ah, but then how many good thoughts are lost when you have nowhere to offload them quickly and thus, never get followed up on because they slip your mind? Much like dream journals provide a lot of writers with inspiration. How many good ideas slip in and out of our minds all the time?

I think you misquoted Rand, IIRC it went more like:
Aynrand: Durrr durr durr i liek teh moneyz durr

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I carry a notebook with me pretty much all the time to jot stuff down. Well, actually, I carry three as I keep them in different bags and so on to make sure that I always have one with me as I'm notoroiusly forgetful. That way, when I have an idea I can record it in private space and maybe work it up into something else later. There's ideas in some of my notebooks years old which I really like but haven't found the right moment for yet. Maybe I never will. But if I ever do, you may rest assured they will be developed to the fullest I can manage.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grimtales_/]

Same principle.
Personally I spend almost every waking hour at the computer working on one thing or another, typically at least two things at once. Blogs/twitters work for me as an 'outboard braincell' and the best solution to that issue for me. Now I agree that as many people use is, exclusively, for 'I am going to poop now' inanity, others do use it more interestingly. It occupies a niche.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Disagree; different principle.
Notebooks are private space, twitter is an assumption that others are interested. If you're using twitter for the same reason I use notebooks, why is 90% of your public LJ content twitter these days?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grimtales_/]

Because I rarely have enough to throw into a full on blog post these days and it's important to keep a blog updated. Because - as a I call it - it's an outboard braincell and I place greater value than you do, it seems, in sharing and getting feedback, even on short form ideas. Interaction is all the rage old fellow, it's rather the point of the internet.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

There's different forms of interaction and feedback, and, once again, twitter is remarkably ill-formed to really be much use for the development or discussion of any complexity in ideas - for example, this exchange between us could not have been twittered. If I want interaction & feedback, I'll lay out a case and round it off with something like "I may be wrong - what do you lot think?", which usually gets debate going; I think that's something that longer content does well - inspires debate. It's difficult to debate:
I like cheese its nice,
which is pretty much all twitter allows you to do.

[(Anonymous)]

But I'd have said a dream journal is more like revision notes, a private shorthand that enables you, the writer, to recapture what to you might be quite a complex mental narrative, but doesn't mean much to another reader who doesn't have all the mental references lined up and in place.

There's a chapter in (I think) Godel Escher Bach where it is suggested that there is a maximum amount of information that a human can extract out of an aperiodic crystal structure (eg a language). That explains why translations in different languages tend to be the same length. Same quantity of information, different codes.

It's important in cryptography. If you're sending a coded message, there is an absolute maximum amount of information you can convey in 140 characters or whatever before your message compresses into incoherence, because the receiving mechanism, to which you are entrusting the decryption process, will be someone else's brain and not your own. So you can't rely beyond a certain point on any of the shorthand encryption mechanisms (i.e, your own private references and assumptions) being in place. Anyhow, that, I would have said, was the essential difference.

H