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Something Old, Something New

By Dan Brodnitz
July 9, 2008 | Comments: 2

Hi,
My name's Dan and I'm the publisher for the Digital Media division here at O'Reilly. I'll be dropping by to join the conversation here and there, particularly on items related to that interesting point where creativity and technology meet and do a dance.

Lately I've been thinking of the ways old and new media can work together. In Pixar's WALL-E, for example, there's the powerful sweep of Louis Armstrong singing "La Vie en Rose" over eye-widening CGI, or all those lovely insets of Hello Dolly.

And then there's this stunning (Academy-Award Nominated) example, now making the rounds on YouTube:

The story behind this video's almost as neat as the video itself. In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan found his way into John Lennon's hotel room and wrangled an on-the-spot interview that he recorded on reel-to-reel. Nearly four decades later, Levitan produced I Met the Walrus, directed by Josh Raskin with art by James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina. I particularly love the idea that the grownup Levitan is at some level collaborating with his teen-self. Art so often involves freezing or reaching through time and this seems like a particularly acute example.

I've sort of tried this with text -- taking a recording of my grandfather telling the story of his journey to America and pulling out a bit of found poetry. But I haven't tried it yet with digital media. What about you? Have you experimented with mixing old content and new techniques? What kind of results have you gotten? I'd love to hear what you've learned along the way.

2 Comments

Dan said:

That's lovely. The kid aspect reminds me of another great example of old/new media mixing I came across recently -- a colorwars 2008 contest called youngmenowme in which folks reposed their childhood pictures....

http://colorwar2008.com/submissions/youngnow

I especially like how simple this one is -- no special technical skills required. And the idea of all these people being driven to reinhabit a childhood moment.

July 10, 2008 12:13 PM

David Battino said:

Some of my best digital media collaborations have been with kids. While my son’s first-grade class was learning to read, the kids “wrote” a story by dictating one sentence each to the teacher. She wrote their words on a flip chart, and then the kids took turns reading back their sentences.

I typed the whole thing into Tex-Edit Plus, the wonderful shareware word processor; installed a copy on the classroom computer; and set the speech synthesizer to read the story, highlighting each word. As the robovoice stumbled over pronunciation (the school name, “McAuliffe,” became “MC Olive”), the kids were delighted to discover that they were already better readers than the computer.

July 10, 2008 11:38 AM