When I first
embarked on this blogging adventure in February of 2010, I'll admit I was a
novice at it in more ways than one. Learning to let my freak flag fly, for one
thing, figuring out how to stand toe to toe with (and sometimes head and
shoulders above) the millions of other movie blogs out there, by offering up a
different spin on the basics of filmcraft - technique, trivia, retrospectives,
reviews - than you're probably used to. Or struggling to stay relevant, by paying
respect to the films of the present (which, let's be honest, is all people
really want to hear about) and also to the films of the past (which, let's face
it, is where all modern motion pictures get their ideas). Also learning that you can't
be everything to everyone all of the time; sure, people love their Comic Book Movies and their MacGuffin With Egg, but try blogging a quiz or two (or three,
or eight), and readers will have nothing to do with it. (It took me too long,
perhaps, to realize that once one person responds with the answers, it's pretty
much pointless for everyone else.)
Still, the thing
that's disappointed me the most is that I haven't been able to build up an audience to the
degree I'd initially hoped for. I have my core readership, of course, to whom
I'm eternally grateful. Ultimately, though, the responsibility of bringing
traffic to the site rests entirely on me, and only me, and I've been slow in
making that happen. Never one to toot my own horn, I was uncomfortable at first
posting updates to Facebook, or anywhere else for that matter, expecting, I
guess, to succeed on the strength of my words alone. But it takes a certain
amount of shameless self-promotion to make it anywhere in this world, a fact
I've only started warming up to, and now that I've started posting to Twitter
and Medium.com, we'll see what that does for the site. (Special thanks to Ether
Ling for crafting a marketing plan to help bolster the blog.)
Part of the fun
about blogging, particularly for a narcissistic perfectionist such as myself,
is that I'm able read past posts and edit them as I see fit: a spelling
correction here, a redundancy there, a grammatical error or forgotten factoid
there. (By the time you read this sentence, I'll have gone back and re-edited
it 4-7 times.) This may not be the most honest way of representing myself, but
whatever; generations from now, people will read FTWW and marvel at just how
streamlined and articulated it actually is. That's the dream, anyway.
Pictures, too, have
been getting an upgrade. The reasons for this are twofold: One, because when I
first started the blog, I uploaded all my screencaps in JPEG format, which has
a nasty habit of degrading in quality over time. This is especially true if the
images are cropped or edited - the compression rate for JPEG is so high that
bits of "data" are lost each time the file is saved, like making a
copy of a copy of a copy. So a photo that initially looks like this...
...will eventually
look like this:
Was anyone else
aware of this? I may not be the most tech savvy person in the world, but I have
to say even this important fact took me by surprise. To the untrained eye, of
course, the difference may be negligible. Try posting this same photo to a site
like Medium, however, which allows for much larger image space than Blogger
currently does, and the difference can be downright embarrassing. Needless to
say I've been updating random posts throughout the site, this time in lossless
PNG format, and will continue to do so as the moment strikes me.
My second reason for
upgrading FTWW's photo cache is more of a personal one, and it feels
hypocritical that I've been ignoring it for so long. Allow me to explain. Even
at an early age I was well aware of widescreen aspect ratios - how, for
instance, a rectangular image in the theater didn't fit too well on a square
television at home. On plain old pan & scan VHS, that meant up to half a
film's image could be missing at any given moment, taking the artistry right
out of the thing. (By now you're probably well-versed in the whole widescreen
versus pan & scan debate. If not, you can check out this link here.) So
when movie studios finally started embracing the letterbox format (on
videotape, then later on DVD and Blu ray; laserdisc was always too rich for my
blood), I made it my mission to point out the difference to everyone who would
listen - trying to explain that those pesky black bars at the top and bottom of
the screen gave you more of the picture, not less. Just as the filmmakers
intended.
Why, then, would I
intentionally crop my photos for the blog? Had I retained nothing from my
formative film-going years? What was the point in defending my beloved
letterboxing if I turned around and presented you with images altered from
their original format? Even from the beginning I was doing this. Consider March 2010's post on Spike Jonze's live-action Where
The Wild Things Are, a movie I still feel is better to look at than to
actually listen to. The film's Academy ratio is actually fairly wide, at
2.40:1, like this:
For the initial
post, though, I cropped the image down to this, presumably so I could bring Max
and his buddy Carol front and center:
Not much of a
difference, you might think, since the area I discarded is basically empty
space to begin with. The image in its entirety says a lot about the alienation
of the characters, however, isolated from everything and everyone (at least
that's what I think it says; the movie is plagued with so many Meaningful
Silences my mind has a tendency to wander), and lopping the information off the
sides eliminates all integrity of the shot. Somehow I doubt even Maurice Sendak
would approve.
Granted, not all
films are shot so equally wide. The Batman
films of the 90s, for example, shot in a "matted" 1.85:1 ratio:
Cropping this same
image for the blog, the difference, again, is somewhat negligible:
Still, professional
courtesy dictates that I stay true to the filmmakers' original vision. Call it
busy work or just plain obsessiveness, my aim is to make FTWW as uniform as
possible, and to provide you guys with the most comprehensive cinema-going
experience you can possibly imagine.
As I continue to
post to Twitter and Medium over the next year, figuring out simultaneously how
to expand the blog and make it more accessible to non-readers, you can expect
to see more consistency in terms of regular updates to the site. I think, as
well, that my lackadaisical approach to blogging prevents people from checking
back on a regular basis, so a weekly post every Friday, say, might help to
remedy that in the long run. Also expect to see a continuation of series we've
run in the past (i.e., more Franchise Face-Offs, Details You Probably Never Noticed, Unsung Heroes and the like) as well as some new ones I intend to
introduce in the coming months, which I hope will lead to plenty of
conversations about the nature of film and the many ways we take it for
granted. We're quickly closing in on the 5th Anniversary of the site, with no
signs of slowing down in the future, and I hope to see you back here, bringing
your friends along with you, happy and hungry for more.
Until then, we'll see you around the blog-o-sphere!
Until then, we'll see you around the blog-o-sphere!
I learned a lot from this post! It is hard to keep up with all the great blogs, and I wish I could read more of them, more often. But for your marketing plans, I can tell you that I now use FB as a clearinghouse. If it shows up in my FB feed and it interests me, I'm likely to read it. If it doesnt' show up, I'll probably never find it. I once would have updates on blogs I followed sent to my inbox, but with the mess that is my inbox these days, that isn't feasible. I have signed up for services that collect all the blog updates and enable me to go to one site to see them all. But I don't end up doing it. I'm impressed with your diligence in keeping your blog going so long, and I'm often intrigued by your topics and your writing. So, keep it up! I'll try to read more often.
ReplyDeleteAh, Trinyan. It's comments like this that help keep the ol' creative juices flowing.
ReplyDeleteBest Corporate Video Production Company in Bangalore and top Explainer Video Company in Bangalore , 3d, 2d Animation Video Makers in Chennai
ReplyDeleteAwesome article. good read blog. Thanks for sharing