To listen to the Terence and Philip Show, episode #68, where Terence Curren and Philip Hodgetts talk through the present and future of this industry along with what it means to preserve our present for the future, click the player below. A partial transcript of the episode is underneath the player.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:23 — 14.4MB)
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Gary Owens: When we last left our heroes, they were locked into a terribly important discussion. Let’s drop in on them again as they plot the future. Now, from the Top Dogs kennel in beautiful downtown Burbank, it’s the Terence and Philip Show!
Terence: And thank you, Gary. We miss you. I’m Terence Curren.
Philip: And I’m Philip Hodgetts.
Terence: And this is the Terence and Philip Show.
Philip: We’re going to have a look into the future.
Terence: Or the past. Philip and I were sitting here talking…
Philip: …we were talking after recording a different show, and then we realized we had another show so we thought we’d make it proper.
Terence: So we decided to make it a show. Philip has kind of been working on a project. Basically, he was recording family history back in Australia and he came back here and he started thinking about it and he realized…
Philip: …I realized I’ve got really, really good genetic stock. Thanks family! My maternal grandmother would live to 97, my mom is 85 and going strong. So I’ve got at least 30, and probably 40 more years ahead of me.
Terence: And that’s in Australia where every living thing wants to kill you.
Philip: Yes…although I’m hanging out in America where not every single living thing wants to kill you. (Laughs) And I realized that not only was a long-term family history project going to be a really good idea, because I had the time to record the stuff that exists in the past. As I said my mom is 85 so she has recollections of going to school in the 1930s. My as yet unborn 2nd and 3rd cousins will be going to school in the 2040’s. They’ll be in the early days of school in the 2040’s. So we’ll be able to compare, in some sort of interesting way, and probably for the family only, as most people in Australia are somewhat concerned about privacy, much more so than I am. But we’ll have this hundred years of history. And to me, that sounds like a really worthwhile project. And it can be one of the reasons to keep going back to Australia and keep visiting with my family. We have a regular family reunion every four years. They still organize that, but I think it’s time for that to pass down to the next generation to start organizing it.
Terence: I think it’s a fantastic thing. It’s great that you’re making the effort to do this. Most people don’t do that, and then all of that knowledge and history just disappears.
Philip: I know. And you don’t need much. That’s one of the reasons I’m buying the GoPros. I can get my kit even smaller than my iOgrapher which I brought on my last trip. But if you don’t have dedicated cameras, you don’t have to buy GoPros, you’ve got a phone. Almost every smart phone has good enough picture to record your parents, sibling, grandparents, and great-grand parents if you’re lucky enough to still have them. Get their stories because there are so many amazing stories to be told. You see, we’re not just technologists. We got into this because we want to tell stories, and even though my business now takes me way away from day to day production, I’ve really felt, ever since getting my feet wet again with Solar Odyssey, which didn’t actually lead anywhere, I found that I want to produce stuff. I’ve done some stuff in the meantime. This year it’s the family reunion video, a project called lunch with Philip and Greg. Another idea with semi-serious foodie…these are all production related things, like I don’t need anything more to do, but I want to tell stories and I want to find interesting stories. And my family is an interesting story. And after people have passed there are no longer concerns about their privacy there’s a anthropological document in there. Plus as a technologist I’m going to have to update the technology every five years, even if it’s just moving it to a new hard drive. From hard drives to an SSD to a new SSD that support LTO…
Terence: ..to the quartz crystal of the future.
Philip: Yes, the holographic crystals. Every five years I’ll be able to get at least one good article series or videos for “How to Migrate Your Library…Again.”
Terence: The thing that really caught me when you were talking about it…well, it’s two things. One is like I said, I think it’s great. This is kind of what inspired Spielberg to do the Shoah Foundation, where it’s recording all these people before they’re gone.
Philip: Yes, and there’s this amazing technology they’ve developed for that too. It was part of the recent Metadata Madness show.
Terence: The thing that really caught me, and it’s something you don’t think about normally, was the comparisons. The kind of things your mom did on her first day of school and what that looked like, they’re so different. I actually recorded my Dad singing a song on his 86th birthday that his grandmother, who was from Ireland, had sung to him when he was a kid, I had it on my phone. That’s what I had handy when he was doing it, so now I have that. Otherwise, it would be gone. Anyway, that’s off to the side. The turnover and how much exponentially faster things are changing got us talking about how in to 90’s, I had a beeper that I had to carry around to go to the payphone to call in to figure out who’s trying to get hold of me. That’s not that long ago, but in the 80’s I was buying my first computer. That was the beginning of this incredible sense of ownership around having a computer. That was really out there. Most people I knew didn’t have that.
Philip: This is the other side of that realization. I’m going to go back 30 or 40 years because I’ve got 30 or 40 more years ahead of me. I’ve got the good genetic stock, I caught onto the fitness in post trend before it was a trend and decided to renovate this body before it got beyond renovation. A couple years of renovation have worked and it’s good as new so I’m good to go I think. I don’t do any of the obvious bad life style things. My doctor says I drink a little more alcohol than I should.
Terence: Uhhh, guilty as charged.
Philip: I’m working on that too. (Laughs)
Terence: You can’t take all the fun out of it.
Philip: Exactly. But 30 years ago is so different to where we are now. It was pre-Internet, before pay-at-the-pump, you actually had to have a travel agent to book an airfare. You had to get a rental car when you were in a new destination. So much has changed, and I probably haven’t even begun to skim the surface of that. Final Cut Pro 1-7 came and went in that time. Media 100 came and went. I know Boris is keeping it alive, but it’s not got the momentum. There are dozens of other software packages and companies that have come and gone. We’ve experienced so much change, and the rate of change is going to become so much faster.
Terence: Continually faster and faster. It’s exponentially growing. It’s crazy.
Philip: The challenge for me is how am I going to adapt fast enough.
Terence: To stay ahead.
Philip: Yes, and not fall into the trap of people who allow themselves to fall into old age. It’s to stop being rigid and say, “that’s the way it’s done, that’s the way we make an edit, that’s how often we make an edit.” Yes, the time you make an edit might still be an intuitive thing, but we certainly do a lot more than we did for movies in the 50’s. Styles change, there’s a lot more glitz, a lot more glamour. Just to be able to do a straight cut anymore doesn’t cut it. Pun intended.
Terence: Ha!
Philip: Back in 2011 when Apple announced Final Cut Pro X at the SuperMeet, I realized about four weeks later that I was going to have to let go of, what was at that point, 10 years of very hard earned knowledge about Final Cut Pro, which I pretty much knew inside and out. I knew all the different workflows, where the dragons were, where you shouldn’t go, what it was good for, what it wasn’t necessarily good for…and it was just a very honest realization that everything I knew about Final Cut Pro 1-7 is now effectively obsolete. How do I do a flush and make that brain space available to use and learn about Final Cut Pro X, and Premiere Pro CC?
Terence: I wish there was a way to flush and make that space available! That would be good. You could do that with a lot of stuff.
Philip: And one of the most important skills going forward, and I forget who to give credit for the thinking, is the ability to unlearn. I could argue that the drinking is an active form of unlearning, but that’s probably just fooling myself. The ability to let go of stuff that you know to be true, except for that it’s no longer true. So you can start seeing things fresh again. It’s tough because we don’t like doing that. It’s the nature of human beings.
Terence: It’s against nature.
Philip: It’s not who we are. We like to be on the Polynesian island where food is plentiful and easy to get and there are plenty of coconuts…
Terence: Where is that?
Philip: Vanuatu when I was there is pretty like that.
Terence: I’ll see you later then.
Philip: What do they say about Hawaii? If you stay there for more than three weeks you end up moving there.
Terence: Trust me. If I could figure out a way…
Philip: So it is true.
Terence: It’s a state of mind.
Philip: One of the reasons I learned to sing in the last year was simply to keep my brain plastic. Learn something that’s completely new and completely different than what I’ve done in the past. One of the reasons we’re doing more production this year is to get skilled at being on camera and natural at being on camera. No particular reason. Just don’t want to be that way. Learning something new. Learning a new skill, learn a new software. I probably should learn Resolve, just for the hell of it.
Terence: It’s free.
Philip: So how do we keep our minds open to the change, but at the same time not grasping at every 3D and 4K trend that comes along.
Terence: Oh, don’t get me started.
That’s just a preview of what Terence and Philip discussed during the podcast. Hear the rest by downloading the podcast via the links below…