Annotation and the Malleability of Software
All learning is self-learning, isn’t it? While teachers may<br>be effective guides through the landscape of knowledge, it comes down to<br>you at the end of the day to perceive, wrap your head around, and truly<br>learn and maintain this knowledge. If you learn to guide<br>yourself to navigate these landscapes and actively exercise your eye of<br>observation, you have the power to learn anything, I think.
I may have, in a way, accidentally created a new tool — one which<br>helps me in my own journey to become a filmmaker. Though to call it a<br>tool may be silly as really its just a collection of existing tools, I<br>guess perhaps workflow or just “flow” would be more apt. I was watching<br>a movie one day and was struck by the unique transitions between scenes.<br>To capture this moment I thought to pull in the snippeting tool<br>into my space with the video and used it to cut the last few seconds.<br>Then, grabbing the drawing tool I drew some rough lines of movement<br>leading into the transition and took notes to the side of what I liked<br>and why it worked so well. Then, putting all that aside, I continued<br>watching the movie.
Having done this once, I started becoming more observant. Soon<br>finding myself pausing movies frequently to take notes on the<br>cinematography, composition, lighting, sound effects, script, and even<br>moments where the movie was lacking — where if I was in the director’s<br>shoes I would’ve made a different decision.
As these annotated snippets started to pile up, I added to the flow<br>to get them sent automatically to a collection where I can go to browse<br>all the notes I’ve taken like this. Which turned out to be more useful<br>than I’d expected as the birds-eye perspective gave me a greater ability<br>to recognize patterns across many different scenes or directors, I could<br>now connect together different observations and meta-analyze my own<br>analysis. I could even make new notes and annotations on top of a set of<br>old ones in order for these patterns I notice to be recorded into my<br>library too.
After a couple of weeks with this flow, and watching my library grow<br>and grow, I mentioned it to a friend. She is also studying film and<br>immediately took to the idea, having previously only been taking notes<br>on films in physical notebooks. It seems she may then have told some of<br>her friends because one of them had the brilliant idea to<br>create a kind of shared library so that we can browse and learn from<br>each other’s annotations — or even compare our observations on a single<br>film.
Over time, more people were slowly added to our shared library — it<br>started to feel like a tiny little social network for us film nerds.<br>Through it I ended up meeting new friends and having so many fascinating<br>discussions enabled by the inadvertent side-effect of broadcasting to<br>the group what movies we’ve been recently watching.
I even received an email the other day from a guy in Lithuania who<br>had heard about our little community and started a little shared<br>collection of snippets with his own group of friends. It warms my heart<br>to hear that we’ve inspired others to follow in our footsteps.
I’m surprised, every day really, how the tiniest action has<br>snowballed into, well, all this! I didn’t do anything special, it<br>could’ve happened to anyone. Just one small impulse to note down an<br>observation and now we have a thriving community learning, improving<br>together, and even making films of their own. From a single scene of a<br>movie to a true scene (in the other sense of the word) of peers<br>and collaborators all over the world. It feels like magic.