April 23, 2009
| Moving Furniture >>
Rats, I Ran Out of Words
Speaking of writing: I’ve been thinking about video, the grammar of video, video-as-writing, etc. a lot lately (as usual), and it really is crazy how lame and limited video editing is at this moment in history.
The analogy to writing (I know it’s a stretch): If writing today were like video editing today, you’d have to start by going out and hunting down all the words you wanted to use — finding them in other books, on posters, on billboards, and cutting them out. Then you’d sit down and paste them together in a different order. And if you ran out? Or realized you needed a word you didn’t have? Too bad!
This is why I’m excited for some sort of future “synthetic cinema” — a super-extrapolated version of machinima. If you’re at your video-writing desk at 2 a.m. and something amazing occurs to you, some wonderful turn of phrase (as it were), you’ll be able to simply… make it.
