Studies in Media

It is naive to think that you can hit upon the perfect research topic at the first go. Research can be a piece of cake, and you can have it, but you may not really be able to eat it! That's exactly why, instead of starting to work on the concept of a formula for a hit film, I decided straightaway to search for research done on the subject. That's why we do literature review anyway. And look what I found.... Instead of paraphrasing any of the texts that I found, I am directly going to copy-paste the relevant sentences and give links at the end of this post - Wikipedia style... Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood  films  released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical  pattern  that describes the human attention span. The pattern was derived by scientists at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1990s who stu

शोखियों में घोला जाये फूलों का शबाब उस में फिर मिलाई जाये थोड़ीसी शराब होगा यूँ नशा जो तैय्यार वो प्यार है Mix the radiance of flowers. Then add a small measure of liquor. The state of giddy stupor That you get from all the above Is what we call love. For a full and a beautiful translation of the whole song, you must visit   http://songtranslationsbyme.blogspot.in/2011/08/shokhiyon-mein-ghola-jaye-translated.html  by Shivani Mohan. Amazing translations of all those beautiful songs we are fond of) These are the lyrics of a song from the Hindi film, Prem Pujari. But then we know that love is not so simple as that, isn't it? But why am I talking about love? Well, if love could have a formula, why not films? Just suppose there was a formula like H2 + O = H2O everyone would make a hit film. No one would be worried about giving a flop and losing a lot of money. This is exactly what a guest, a complete system's man, said the other day in my office. He was completely conv

I used to do a lot of graphic designing and make films for various corporates. One day, I went to show the first cut of a film that I had made for an organization. I went with the film to the concerned brand manager, and when he asked me for a CD, and I said I didn't have one, he thought I was joking. I put my hand in the pocket and brought out my brand new pen-drive and said, that his film was in it. Most people in the office thought I had gone crazy, or I had probably hit my head on something. I made him pull out his computer and put the pen-drive in the USB port, and viola! We had the film copied on to his PC in a few minutes! They did not even know the USB port. Of course it was entirely new to everyone including me at that time. But more about pen-drives later. When we speak of storage devices, the first thing we think of is the hard disk drive or the HDD. As I said in my first post in this series, my first PC had a hard disk of a whopping 120 MB and the second one 1.2 GB.

From Consumers to Producers - The Indian Story - Part 2 I wrote about computers in my last post in this series. Let's look at another technology that evolved along with computers and changed the way we communicate. Still Cameras I remember, when I was in school, we had a box camera, with which we could take black and white photographs. I used it for a long time, at least till 1983. I still have some of those pictures. From 1979 to mid-1980's the price of silver shot up more than 10 times, making silver nitrate, an important ingredient in photographic film and processing very expensive. This in turn, shot up the price of film rolls and photography as a hobby, simply went out of reach of many people. The next camera (Rs.5000) I bought was for my wife the day my son, Tejas was born. December 01, 1994. This one also was a film based camera and by this time, we had colour film commonly available. The first photograph from this camera was of my son, taken by my wife, with me

This is in continuation with my earlier post on new and emerging media technologies. New and emerging technologies have changed the way we consume and produce content. The technology has become advanced, cheaper and accesible to us, the common public. This has to be looked at from several angles.   I bought my first computer in 1992 for Rs.35000/-. Many will be surprised by the configuration. It was a 40386 processor, meaning it had a processing power of 386 MHz, much lesser than many mobile phones available today. The computer had a whopping 120MB (Yes, no typo here. Its MB and not GB) and 4 MB of RAM! On that computer I could easily use CorelDraw and PageMaker for my DTP work. It was the best PC in the neighbourhood.   I also remember making my first video using a PC with a 533 MHz processor and 512 MB RAM. I can vouch for the fact that the video can hold its own against any video I have made recently. The only real difference is that it took very long to render the video the. It