Genius
Like pretty much everyone else I know, I am about half-way through Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.
There are many take-aways from the book, which I urge you to read, but one that really is sticking with me when it comes to the ‘video revolution’ is the Jobs was on the cutting edge of taking what had been an extremely small professional circle (software and programming) and made computers accessable and friendly to everyone.
Jobs was not a software engineer like Bill Gates or Wozniak. When Wozniak built the first Apple, and then the Apple II, he had massive rows with Jobs over the design of the machines. Â Wozniak wanted to build them for computer enthusiasts and engineers like himself. Â After all, there was no ‘personal computer’ – the idea simply did not even exist.
Wozniak thus wanted to make the codes, the software, the boards accessable to other enthusiasts who would want to play with the design and add their own widgets and software. Â This was how his world functioned.
Jobs was opposed, He wanted a closed system.
More importantly, he wanted to make the machines extremely simple and accessible to anyone. He was not building for professionals. He was building for everyone.
KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid.
Reading this, I was reminded of David Sarnoff who did for radio what Jobs did for computers. Â In 1923, owning a radio meant owning a transmitter and receiver and having a great massive antenna on top of your house.
Sarnoff had a vision of a radio as a simple appliance – a music box, he called it, that would have only two nobs – volume and frequence.
Like the Mac, he took what had been the purview of the radio enthusiast and engineer and turned it into something that the average American could embrace and use with almost no instruction.
And now we come to video and film production.
Up until now, this too has been the purview of the ‘professional’ or the ‘enthusiast’.
Jobs and Wozniak were members of the Homebrew Club – a gather place for like minded computer enthusiasts.
Many of the people who work for me are members of The Brooklyn Filmmaker’s Cooperative, something which reminds me of the Homebrew Club.
But as with computers, video and filmmaking is now moving from the purview of the enthusiast to evryone else. And what Jobs did better than anyone else was to make what had been a complex and complicated process into something remarkably easy.
This is what we must now do with video.
Essentially, we want to make shooting and producing great video as simple as opening and using an ap on your iPhone.
1 Comment
kenny November 05, 2011
I can sorta see where you’re going with this, but creating video is an art. Every other example you’ve posted here is about professionals making physical products simple for the untrained masses to use with little thought. However, learning how to create good video is akin to learning to draw or to sing. It’s a skill that can’t be marketed to people with easy design and simple “2 button” products.
Maybe with simple and inexpensive online web instruction through videos, blogs and forums, , but, c’mon, who is offering that?
😉