autocratic for the people.

We All Work With Computers.

Apple's Final Cut Pro interview with Walter Murch inadvertently offers a fascinating example of how switching to new, electronic tools can alter the creative process in subtle but harmful ways. According to Murch, sound / film editor extraordinaire, film editing through purely digital means brings about a particularly interesting effect: it alters his work flow subconsciously.

“How much detail I see around the eyes of the characters subconsciously determines my [shot] choices,” he says. “The lower the resolution, the more I tend to use close-ups. With higher resolution, I feel confident using a wider shot, or a longer shot, because you can clearly see what a character’s eyes are doing, which is to say what the character is thinking.”

Ignoring the remarkable astuteness of this observation, this is a great example of how digitization can make non-obvious changes to users' behavior. Even if the editor's analog workflow was painstakingly deconstructed, analyzed, and replicated digitally, I would argue that a competent analysis of the shot selection process could fail to bring this criteria to light. It makes me nervous to see things like this, because common interaction analysis methods tend to gloss over the professional's actual thought processes in favor of more high-level goal-based models and artifact-based assumptions. We already know that digitization of traditional workflows can potentially be harmful; what we unfortunately don't yet know is how to quantify these sorts of subtle, harmful effects.

posted by avixe @ 5:22 PM