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Saturday, June 8, 2002
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Pseudo-Random Thoughts on Sheet Music and TV Scripts
Music is the seasonings of cultures and societies, around the world, and throughout history. Musical styles were limited in voice until radio started electro-magnetic mass distributions, and musical instruments became commodities. Now, there is a plethora of music available to us.
Good music, however, is harder to come by, but it is getting easier to find. Good music does NOT appeal to everyone, but only thru everyone having a chance to make and hear music, good or bad, does good music get made. Nowadays, the Internet takes electro-magnetic music distribution to a singularity around our globe. (Aside: We will all remember the big bang of musical expression in the explosion and implosion of Napster. How does good music find you?)
The same is true of books: when the printing press became a commodity, and libraries distributed them, the quantity, variety, and quality of books exploded. The Internet has probably saved books from the savages of time bestowed upon tables and scrolls.
I'd like to believe that "TV is the pop music of theater", the common people[base ']s participation in the art of storytelling.
It will soon be true for TV as it now is for music: TV will be described symbolically between content creators, like notes on a staff. Documented content begets more creators from the engaged audience, which begets more specific content, which begets a smaller but more focused audience, who share their experiences by describing them, which documents content, ad nauseam.
For example, there's a level of musicianship where reading sheet music is appreciated. And reading and writing books and math are acquired skills that our whole societies actively encourage all members to learn. Music is still seen as extra-curricular, but is nonetheless regarded in high esteem.
Nowadays, the diversity of TV shows is astonishing. Whole channels are dedicated to specific kinds of programming, be it science, history, or sports. We'll see the most impressive implementations of convergence when niche-market TV channels blue the distinction between broadcast and interactive content... the "uber-program=site". And the Internet has given new life to newspapers, the dinosaurs of content production efficiency.
Thoughts?
11:21:11 PM 
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CollectiveTV
Idea for a content website: code name CollectiveTV is a website that allows site members to collaborate on transcribing TV shows into TV scripts.
Analogy: OLGA is a site where you can find cheat-sheets for popular songs and bands (U2 being my favorite search term). And I also use a program called LyricTracker to quickly grab lyrics for popular songs.
CollectiveTV will do for TV what OLGA and LyricTracker do for music: describe a popular artform in a popular way. In this case, the popular artform is TV, the pop music of theater.
The trick will be to structure the site so that various members can contribute to a single TV show record: dialog, scene descriptions, costuming, sets, blocking, rendering, audio, sfx, etc. For that, we'll need to define an XML vocabulary (PTML anyone?). Since the job is so large, members can tackle specific chunks. What's more, since members are free to tackle any chunk, there can be different varieties of chunks to choose from, different director's cuts, if you will.
Version 1.0 of PTML will handle scenes and dialog. Each new version will add new layers: cast, sets, audio, etc.
Thoughts?
11:17:26 PM
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© Copyright 2002 deeje.
Last update: 7/17/02; 9:28:24 AM.
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