Hugh Garry

The best TED talk....EVER!

TED is one of my favourite sources of inspiration. TED takes my mind off the smell of piss during my many journeys from Manchester to London on Virgin Trains. TED joins me in the bath at the end of a long hard day at work when I feel I’ve just not taken enough out of the day. Much to my girlfriend’s annoyance TED even comes to bed with me some nights when I needs something other than 5Live to drift off to.

Until recently my favourite ever TED talk was J.J. Abrams’ Mystery Box, which I beg you all to watch at sometime. Whether you are a fan of Lost or not you can't fail to be gripped by his explanation of the value of the untouched and unseen contents of the cellophane wrapped box he holds in his hand.

Laurie Anderson famously once said ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’, which is why Benjamin Zander’s talk on why ‘we all love classical music, we just don’t know it yet’ is so special and has, for now, become my favourite TED talk.

By it’s very nature the idea of musicians taking one sound, putting it next to another and creating something quite beautiful and unique is an abstract concept. As a result a majority of the writing about music that does fill the pages of magazines and blogs usually falls into the ‘This is really good’ or ‘This is really crap’ camp.

As a talented conductor and genius storyteller Benjamin must have been taught architecture by Gene Kelly. He dances through the structure of his 20 minute talk with so much humour, passion and melancholy you’ll feel like you’ve waltzed around the cities of Rome, Vienna and Disneyland in one session. “The Job of the ‘B’ is to make the ‘C’ sound sad” he explains and as he gently hits the ‘B’ then the ‘C’ the audience erupt as if they were hearing music for the very first time. 

As someone who tries to inspire a team on a regular basis Benjamin hits a resonant chord with me towards the end as he explains how he sees his position within the orchestra, and life in general:

“The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound, he depends on his power to make other people powerful. My job is to awaken possibility in other people. If their eyes are shining you know you’re doing it.”

And from that high, the high of a ‘B’, Benjamin wraps the whole thing up with one giant ‘C’, which I won’t give away here. Needless to say his parallels between the power of music and the power of the spoken word left me more inspired than ever... or as he'd put it 'Shiney eyes'.

Get it here.

The Quite Wonderful Dr Horrible

 

I must say I've been loving Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and now it's gone I feel there is a hole in my life normally only felt when either the football season has ended or when the doors on the Big Brother house have closed one last time. In a week that sees the media hype for The Dark Knight hijack every pixel of screen space and every second of TV time put before us, it has been an absolute joy to watch this 3 act relatively low-budget 'made for the internet' superhero sing-along.

Dr Horrible is 'the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he's too shy to talk to'. Though it's called a blog, it's not. It's simply 3 acts in which the main character played by Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser/How I Met Your Mother) occasionally talks to the camera in a video blog kinda way. Act 1 went live last Monday and was down in hours due to the demand on the servers. Over the week acts 2 and 3 went up and are due to be taken down at midnight tonight (July 20th).

The whole thing came from the mind of Joss Whedon, a Hollywood writer and director who has previously written  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Toy Story, and Alien: Resurrection. He's also done quite a bit of comedy on TV including Roseanne and The Office (US). Apart from the great script, good songs and some decent one-lines what I really like about the project is that it came about as a result of the writers strike. I'll let Joss explain further...

"Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

"Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

"The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first."

If you're the kinda person that lives by the rule of always turning a negative into a positive then the success of this story will not come as a surprise. I've often found that my best work has come through such circumstances, or through being restricted in what I can do. Though it's been well documented that restrictions on cigarette advertising produced some of the most memorable print ads of the 70's and 80's, and Dr Horrible is excellent, I'll hold back judgment on the forthcoming StrikeTV (online channel filled with content written during the strike) having watched the trailer below...

www.strike.tv Teaser from StrikeTV on Vimeo.

Mobile Tricks

I'm making a film about festivals shot entirely on mobile phones and wanted to get some aerial shots of the crowd at T In The Park. I was going to go for helium balloons but couldn't find any for sale. However, I did stumble across a shop selling flags and flagpoles of various lengths.

I'm really pleased with the results. I filmed quite late in the evening so light isn't the best and I was quite windy at times too.  It was great lowering it towards the crowd and getting a reaction, they were all very amused by it.

One bloke was watching me cable tie this 16ft pole to my phone in real curiosity. He just stood there watching me in amazement. As I finished and started raising my pole he plucked up the courage to approach me. "Are you doing what I think you're doing?" he asked. "Are you trying to get a reception on your phone?"

The Cool Curve

I really enjoyed this 'work in progress' presentation by Toby James on The Cool Curve which I stumbled across on the Sizemoore blog, a must see for all creatives. It's about 20 minutes long, but it's 20 minutes worth of good wholesome brain nourishment.

Without giving too much away he talks about a 'Cool Curve' which is made up of 2 curves. The fist representing the comfort zone of the audience and the second being a halo around it. The halo represents the border of a safe area around the comfort zone in which the audience are prepared to go.

Successful people generally tend to create ideas that fit within that zone and he mentions luminaries such as Philippe Starck, Donna Karan and Madonna as people who tend to hit it everytime. Taking 'Hanky Panky' out of the equation he's on the button. Madge has always nailed herself to the 'of the moment' producer to push the expectations of her audience so that they never get too comfortable. From Shep Pettibone and Jellybean in the 80's to William Orbit and Mirwais in the 90's and more recently Stuart Price, Timbaland and Pharell.

It gets really interesting when he talks about how he dealt with the stroboscopic nature of his creative process and how only 1 idea in 200 are ever any good. That means we need 1000 ideas to come up 4 or 5 decent ones... Thats a lot of flip charts!

Bored? Stoned? Insomniac?

 

Then you've got to check Upl8 by Poke NY. I stumbled across this courtesy of Russell Davies' great post on Watching The Internet. As a 2-laptop-per-producer kinda guy I'm a shocker for having YouTube running on my mac as I work away on my PC. It's music player of choice these days. As a video player the ambient glance-able nature of Upl8 is what makes it so wonderful. I sent the link around to the team and many emailed my back saying they wished they could twist the knobs or push the buttons. I was shocked. If you want to push buttons try this or this. The real beauty of Upl8 for me is that you can't push the buttons... you just type in the url and let it flow - ambient nonsense till the cows come home. There is some functionality but you'll have to go to Iain Tait's Crackunit.com to find out how to load it with clips of kittens.

As anyone working in radio will tell you glance-able content will play a massive part in the future of radio, but there have been 2 occasions in the last few years that hammered home how important it is already, and has been for sometime. The first occurrence was in 2006 when I asked my teen son to cast an eye over the Radio 1 website and tell me what liked most. Expecting him to talk about the wealth of video, incredible event coverage or superb music content I was stunned when he pointed to the 'track now playing' feed at the top of the homepage. When I asked why he replied 'Because if a tune comes on I like I can switch off the music I'm playing and turn on the radio'. I assumed nobody would choose to listen to radio this way and put it down to him being a lovable crank.

I totally forgot about it until I did a 'meeting the public' session early 2007 where I talked to a couple of Radio 1 lovers about listening to radio via their TV. I was pretty pleased to find out that it was their favourite way of 'listening' to Radio 1 until they explained that listening via TV allowed them to turn off their own music and turn up the radio when they see a track they like appear on the 'track now playing feed' on screen.

I always thought the real value of tracklistings was aligned to music discovery or compiling your own playlists, something that would augment the experience of listening to the radio rather than a reminder to switch the radio on for the next 3 minutes.