Video has become such a prevalent medium. I can’t think of a time when it hasn’t been around for me to either consume or create. Much of my world seems to have been recorded or presented frame by frame.

The “frames per second” way of storing images started with photographic film, at much lower speeds and lower resolutions. In the 50s and 60s, my grandfather shot silent home movies on standard 8 colour film, which he’d mail-off to Kodak or drop off somewhere downtown to get processed. There was never any instant playback or instant gratification when you used film.

The usual frame rate for Standard 8 motion picture film was 16 frames per second, and there was no sound at all. So although the images were in colour, your 1950s home movies were silent movies with slightly jerky motion, kind of like a colourized Charlie Chaplin flick.

By the 60s, film students and auteurs could shoot on 16mm film with mono sound, at 24 fps. Since the 1940s, most big Hollywood movies were shot on 35mm film (or bigger) with stereo sound.

I don’t think my Dad ever touched film very much at all. He was an Electronics and RF technician by training. For him, everything was based on a broadcast signal and the electro-magnetic spectrum, not an electro-chemical process.

In 1954, my Dad worked at CHEK-TV in Victoria, BC (where he met my mother). Broadcast TV in western Canada was still a relatively new and evolving medium. The frame rate was 30 fps and resolution was measured in vertical lines, instead of film grain.

Early TV sets were relatively expensive appliances, often designed along the lines of the large radio sets that families would still have in their living rooms, in polished wooden enclosures that resembled nice furniture. By the 60s, tubes were getting replaced with transistors and all electronic devices were becoming smaller, cooler, and more power-efficient. Wood and Bakelite casings were replaced by plastic, and sets became smaller, lighter, and more affordable.

Even with the changes in form factor, the standard video resolution for broadcast TV in North America had stayed at 525 lines from the inception of the NTSC standard in the 1940s until January 2009, when High Definition became the new broadcast TV standard.

My Dad was a television engineer from the mid-50s through the late 60s, through the transition from black and white TV to full colour, and he’d left television for radio by the time that satellite transmissions began driving broader access to TV signals across the country.

Where my grandpa had been a hobbyist film photographer, my Dad had been an RF technician, steeped in what analog transmissions could achieve. Between them, some kind of media was always around us. Growing up, it had never occurred to me how their interests may have impacted me. Creativity, entertainment, and personal storytelling had been all around me growing up. Nobody ever talked about it – it was just everywhere.

By the time I started shooting and editing my own small videos at art college, the new video tape format sounded familiar: 8mm. Sony had released some cool analog video cameras and miniature editing suites for the 8mm and Hi-8 video formats.

For my generation, the digitization of video happened along with the merging of broadcasting and computing technologies. I learned about theories of converging media, and about some of the principles of media theory from the writings of academics like Marshall McLuhan. Consumer cameras and microcomputers were becoming compatible, allowing the processing of analog video signals in digital systems, for things like image processing, colorization, titling, and special effects. Dad called devices that did analog to digital conversion “Codecs” (COder/DECoder). I knew the idea through devices called “digitizers” or “framestores”.

In the late 1980s, around the same time that I was editing my own experimental videos on Hi-8 video, I rediscovered my grandfather’s old Standard 8mm films. You can’t say that technologists aren’t sentimental.

In the last thirty years since Sony’s Hi-8 video went the way of the Dodo bird, film has completely given way to video for the vast majority of consumers. In the realm of large-scale entertainment, theatres project movies on high definition digital video. On a personal consumer level, the access and gratification challenges our parents and grandparents faced are things of the distant past. Young school kids can instantly shoot video at thousands of lines of resolution on their smartphones, just by pushing a button on a whim.

The thing that the current generation still has in common with all their image-making predecessors is the need and desire to communicate and share their stories. Regardless of the technical quality or the capabilities of the tools or the media, that desire is a big part of where art and passion reveals itself.

What Makes a Teacher Special?

Who are (or have been) the most important teachers in your life?

Any category, any reason. Think about it.

Growing Up Years

Growing up through to my teens, my heroes were the adults I admired, and the school teachers from whom I took my lessons, both directly and indirectly.

My Dad

My Dad taught me about fairness, courage, cowardice, respect, and how to work hard for a living.

Dad was both a positive and a negative role model, and I’ve already written about him at length in numerous articles. By his living example, Dad taught me a lot about regret, fear, and the dangers of not dealing with your demons. Dad was suspicious of religions. His faith rested in science, many of the values of the modern world, and his simple series of edicts: Respect the rights of others. Do it right or don’t do it at all. Stand up to bullies.

Maybe nobody else holds a more central position in my psyche than my Dad. Young lessons at his side were set early, and some of them took a long time to reverse. Fathers raise you right in the fray of life. Their hands tend to get dirty.

Directly and indirectly, my Dad taught me how to survive.

My Grandfather

The next role model/teacher would have to be my Mother’s father. We called him Poppy. He led by example, was a gentleman, and he bore his losses and burdens with dignity and grace. I still hold my head up high thinking of Poppy.

Poppy also painted landscapes in oil (taught himself, I think), and I found it interesting to look through his Walter Foster art books and see how perspective worked or how to model a form with cross hatching.

Grandparents tend to have more distance from the centre of your life, giving them a wider perspective and often, a wiser view.

My Art Teachers

Tom Hudson

Dr. Tom Hudson was an internationally-recognized Master Art Educator, and a key proponent of the revolution of the Basic Design programs in the UK in the 1960s. Tom and his colleagues adapted modernist values from Herbert Read and from the practical patterns and programs of the Bauhaus, trying to transform and update art and design teaching across the UK. [View the VADS UK Basic Design online collection.]

As Dean of Education at Emily Carr College of Art + Design (ECCAD), Tom was directly responsible for the structure and evolution of the Foundation (1st year) program that I waded into in 1985. I was so inspired by his passionate lectures on Colour, Drawing, and Modern Art that I soon volunteered for his summer, out-of-class art projects. I remained a student and assistant of his at ECCAD until 1991.

Tom Hudson has been described as pursuing his goals with “missionary zeal”. That was very true of him. He remains the central figure in my training as a visual designer. I still hear his voice when I’m hacking away at some creative challenge, and I continue to find inspiration from his early lessons. Through his art and design tutelage, Tom taught me how to see and understand the big, revolutionary changes in art and design history, how to relate them to current movements and ideas, and how to pursue my own explorations.

Neil Prinsen

Mr. Prinsen was my art class and home room teacher throughout high school in East Vancouver.

He was a practical, direct man with a friendly face and a confident yet sympathetic nature. He had some idea of the challenges my sister and I faced in our difficult home life, and he let me know that he cared.

He was a talented painter who gave me my first lectures in painting and art history. Art was always my favourite subject in school, and in Mr. Prinsen’s class, I learned about the Impressionists, I fell in love with Claude Monet, and I frantically tried to emulate Seraut using felt pens.

In our senior year, Mr. Prinsen gave me and a few of my classmates art books describing the artists and genres that we each had responded to the most. He gave me a book about the Impressionists, and I devoured it and studied it over and over.

Mr. Prinsen was passionate about art – he loved it and he truly understood it. He was a great high-school teacher and a nice man.

My Grown-up Years

My CEOs and Bosses

For years after leaving the art college, I worked for a succession of small private high-tech companies. Most often, I was the resident graphic designer, documentation writer, and creative dog’s body.

Running a small company and taking responsibility for your employees is stressful, and I don’t think I could do it. From my best bosses and coworkers, I’ve seen warmth, humane behavior, responsiveness, compassionate support, and well-reasoned decision making. All bosses ought to exhibit those values.

Unfortunately, on the other side of the scale I’ve also witnessed yelling, nepotism, loud profanity, lying, massive egos, laziness, weaselly sucking up, manic eyes with little flecks of foam at the mouth, and straight-up dumbfuckery of all sorts.

I’m convinced that some of the people who exhibited the worst of these behaviours were really borderline sociopaths. Often they were in Sales. Others were just bullies and made the Worst. Bosses. Ever.

Overall, the best and worst of my bosses taught me to trust my own judgment and to stand firm in my sense of integrity.

Favourite Teachers Whom I’ll Never Meet

These are writers, Philosophers, and searchers whose work I’ve really enjoyed, and whose voices have really gotten under my skin. Their expertise cuts across a vast range of subjects, but in each case, their voices resonated with me very strongly.

The Dalai Lama

His Holiness became an inspiration to me years ago, when I began reading his books. Two of his best books, IMHO, are “The Art of Happiness” and “The Universe in a Single Atom”.

My wife and I saw The Dalai Lama speak at GM Place, when he came to our hometown of Vancouver. The crowds were massive, but very joyful.

The international importance of this man’s living example of loving kindness and compassion simply cannot be overstated.

Albert Einstein

After reading Stephen Hawking’s book, “A Brief History of Time”, I decided that I needed more background in physics, so I bought a small book called “Relativity: The Special and General Theory“, written by Albert Einstein.

It turns out that Albert Einstein is an excellent explainer of his own theories. I followed his detailed yet easy to comprehend discourse from his initial “man on a train/observer on an embankment” examples, straight through to the Lorenz Transformation. I even limped through the calculus far enough to see the final derivation of his famous equation e=MC². I had to read this book twice, but it was all there, relatively well-said.

I grew so fond of hearing his voice in my head as I progressed through that book, that I began to warmly regard Albert Einstein as “Uncle Albert”. Even more than 50 years after his death, I believe that he still has a vast multitude of adoring adopted nephews and nieces who feel the same as me.

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong’s book “History of God” did more to help me consolidate my thoughts and feelings about religion and spirituality than almost any other author, with one exception (above).

Her little book on the life of the Buddha was a thing of beauty, at once both humanizing and elevating the character of Siddharta Gautama for me.

In “History of God”, her description of “The Axial Age”, covering the major personalities and eras around which all three monotheistic religions rotated, stuck with me very strongly.

Groucho Marx

Another adopted Uncle – a Great Uncle, I think. He’s a complex and contradictory figure: bitter yet sweet, biting yet gentle. I picture an older Groucho, way past his prime, skewering some rich upper crust fat cat at a dinner party, and then going home to strum his guitar and bang out an angry letter to the editor about how his own money is subject to too much income tax.

I love watching videos of Groucho on the Dick Cavett show, showing his intelligence and his quieter, more serious side. Stefen Kanfer wrote an amazing biography of Groucho, but best of all, I love dear old Groucho’s own private little autobiography of sorts, called “Memoirs Of A Mangy Lover“. Let him tell his own story in his own surprisingly self-deprecating style, I say. I can read between the lines, hearing his sad regrets, while he seems to be trying to make me laugh at him, as well as with him.

Other Artists, Philosophers, and Thinkers

Here are other significant people whose ideas and values have resonated with me through their writings:

Emily Carr: In her autobiographical books (like “The House of All Sorts”), Carr described her challenges as an artist and a woman in 19th and 20th century Victoria, BC, her deep friendships and painful resentments, and her lifelong love of her many pets. She struck me as a strong, determined woman who had to grow a very tough hide to protect her sensitive heart.
Jack Shadbolt: In 1985, BC painter Jack Shadbolt presented a lecture to my first-year art program, and in class, I studied his creative process through a video showing him working in his studio. A recent book about him (“In His Words”) is revealing more to me about his upbringing in Victoria, BC, and his inner world of experimental symbolism as an abstractionist. The lines he’s drawn seem woven from ancient archetypes, threading their way through generations of his art students.
Stephen Hawking: To me, as a layman, Hawking is a better popularizer of physics principles and theories than Einstein, but culturally, he’s the important connective tissue between Newtonian classiciasm, Relativity, and the Quantum era.
Wilhelm Worringer: His book “Abstraction and Empathy” brought forth a historical connection between ancient and modern kinds of symbolism, and connecting abstract visual communication to human culture and psychology.

True Life

Category Archives: visual

Life, one frame at a time.

Inspired by Teachers, Symbolic or Real