We’ve all heard the expression – necessity is the mother of invention. It’s true. But what about mistakes? 
You’ve seen those commercials where chocolate collides with peanut butter, resulting in Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. That may be a little hard to ‘swallow‘, but you have to admit that mistakes are responsible for a fair amount of innovation as well.
Today’s post is the first of three examples of how mistakes have saved time and money and – in at least one case – they have actually defined a new style in video production and post production.
Before the technology was there to manipulate high resolution images in Final Cut, After Effects, Motion and other applications, 3Rings Media operated a Motion Control (MoCon) camera stand. These stands were also known as: Animation Stands, Oxberrys, Warren Smiths, The Manipulator, and went by other names as well. They were fairly sophisticated electromechanical devices, usually having a boom, which supported a camera. The camera pointed straight down at a tabletop, on which was positioned photographs, magazines, newspapers, artwork, models and other items you wanted to capture to video, while manipulating their positioning and other parameters. The tabletop was controlled by joysticks, with a computer storing the X, Y and rotational axes as well as the camera’s zoom and focus controls, as key ‘frames’, which it would then play back over programmable time. If you’ve seen Ken Burns’ documentary work on subjects such as the American Civil War, Jazz, Baseball and others, you have seen a MoCon camera stand in action.
A client approached us once, asking if there was some way to shoot the oil paintings of a noted South American abstract painter under our stand, while panning, tilting and zooming. “Yes,” is our answer to everything, so of course we said we could do it. Then he added a twist. “We would like to be able to add continuous organic distortion to the images – sort of a wavy distortion – while you are moving them around and we will need it done by the end of the week.”
Our initial reaction was to rack our brains in trying to figure out which software package would best apply for adding the organic distortion required by our client. Which software package would render the cleanest images and within the time frame? What if the client wanted to revise the organic distortion after rendering the effect? Would we have enough time to re-render? While these questions were bouncing around in our brains, a second client came in to do a ‘quickie’ one-hour MoCon project.
After placing the second client’s subject – a newspaper – under the camera, I went to the MoCon’s control panel to position it. Using the joy sticks, I moved the tabletop all the way to the right to see what ‘headroom’ I had in terms of left/right positioning. When doing so, the tabletop inadvertently bumped a flexible piece of light and highly reflective sheet metal, which was leaning against the MoCon stand. The sheet metal fell over and landed at an angle under the camera. When looking at the camera output on the monitor, I noticed that the piece of sheet metal reflected the newspaper and that, because it was flexible, it was actually bouncing and adding a bouncy/wavy kind of distortion to the reflection of the second client’s newspaper. This made me consider the first client’s desires from a more basic perspective and it gave me an idea.
After finishing the second client’s ‘quickie project’, I went to our kitchen, filled a large, clear, glass beaker with water and brought it into the MoCon room. I placed a colorful magazine cover under the camera and looked at the camera output on the monitor. Very nice. Then, with one of our interns holding the beaker of water under the lens of the camera, I rapped the outside of the beaker with a screwdriver as I watched the monitor. The effect was outstanding. The light, reflecting off the image of the magazine cover, refracted continuously and organically and right into the camera lens – IN REAL TIME. After dragging the client in from another room to get his opinion he was astounded. “This is AWESOME,” he said.
The effect was everything he was looking for. The amount of distortion was controlled only by the force with which I rapped the side of the beaker with the screwdriver, but the client was even more impressed with the innovation we showed than he was with the result – although that looked pretty damn good too. Plus he (and we) had a good story to tell.
We learn from mistakes. What I learned, in this instance, was not to over-think things. Sometimes the best way to achieve a goal can be the easiest approach, too.