analog me, baby

it's like the bombs were dropping.

this stage three power alert has been a really strange thing to be experiencing. i imagine it must be like the chaos that broke out during the gas crisis in the 70's. i can only dimly remember tv news reports showing giant gas-guzzling car/boat monstrosities lined up one after another, drinking the fuel pumps dry at stations nationwide.

we got a call from pg&e at work the other day. we were being warned that our campus was going to lose electricity at 4:30 and that everyone should be prepared. an announcement came over the paging system warning all hands to save their work and to leave the buildings before the power went out. before the magnetically locked doors would trap people inside the prison they call work.

the facilities department was shutting down all the hall lights in d building. every time i went to go deliver film from my edit bench to the screening room, i would walk out into the courtyard from my building and then enter the dark, quiet hallways of d. it made me think of the huge floods we had in palo alto when i worked at pacific data images and it knocked out all of our power. gigantic, uhaul sized generators were brought in to keep the computers running, but there wasn't enough power to run the heat or lighting. we all walked through darkened, cold hallways wearing parkas and watching our breath as we talked. i kept imagining that this must be what it's like at those research stations up near the arctic. dark, cold, quiet - nothing to look at except the flickering computer monitors telling you what to do and when to do it.

fortunately, it hasn't been raining, though. these stage three power panics have arrived during a particularly mild winter here in california. we haven't had any torrential rainstorms - actually, suspiciously enough, we've had barely any cloud cover at all this winter.

when we were informed of the power shutdown, the producers, production assistants and coordinators jumped onto the paging system and frantically called out names and extensions in a panicked frenzy. work must be completed before the shutdown! there are movies we have to make here, people! animation has to be rendered, spreadsheets have to be updated, avids need to capture media... what one earth can be done to stop this horrific power outage? planets must explode!

while the animators fretted about their renders and their frames, my cow-orkers and i powered ahead on our own, working on film. film doesn't require monitors or keyboards or cables snaking into the wall. we just need a good set of rewinds, a synchronizer, a splicing block and maybe a flashlight. our technology has been around for over 50 years and a little power outage isn't really considered too much of a crisis. i know it's such a luddite thing for me to say, but i'm going to say it anyway. i love film. i love that it's just plastic with layers of chemicals lying atop it. magenta, cyan, yellow transforming itself into red, blue green - silver crystals permeating emulsified gelatin to create an image that can be seen with the naked eye. like tinkerbell waving her wand, all you need are a little bit of photons and there you go - still and motion pictures. sure, i love my nikon coolpix 990 and my sony trv-900, but there's something very warm and wonderful about my 1969 nikon f and my 1956 kodak cine special. they're made of cast iron and they're heavy as a truck, but they're solid. they're based in tangible, tactile world that i find sexy. i'm glad to be reminded that analog is a beautiful thing.

as it turned out, i stuck around the office cutting and splicing away at my bench after everyone had already left to go home. i looked out at them through my window and watched them sitting in their cars, stuck in traffic because the signal light had gone out.

cut.

<01.20.01>

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