Studio Sessions

Alex spent years feeling he was wasting his time, and now thinks he was filling a bucket that’s finally pouring out. One of the things pouring out is an acting workshop, which takes Matt back to acting school, where he spent most of his time managing his lines instead of acting. Improv was the only performing he loved, because it’s all listening and responding. Alex thinks improv is writing without the edit.

Matt says it feels like the old Alex is back, after years when making things for a living had him going through the motions. Alex also built a new website for the show, and Matt sees their differences fitting together in it. It holds every word we’ve said, so you can follow how our thinking has changed. On AI, we agree that image generation misses what a photograph is, something captured. Alex argues that writing a personal letter with AI skips the reason to write one, which is finding out what you feel. Near the end, a young customer at a friend’s shop thought the staff picks weren’t for sale, and we figure she’s never known a store where the staff point out the good stuff. -Ai
Mentioned in this episode: studiosessionspod.com, GeoCities, TCM’s The Plot Thickens: Stanley, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Office Space, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Claude, ChatGPT, Home Alone, Slap Shot, Jackie Chan’s Police Story.
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Once a week, a cozy bar in Omaha has jazz, and on certain nights the room feels like magic. One of us wants to make a concert film there in the spirit of Jazz on a Summer's Day and The Last Waltz, on the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, an old Super 16 digital camera that records to one SD card. Between us we own three, and they're tougher than we expected: a 256 GB card holds about 90 minutes of raw CinemaDNG, and others have shot past an hour without overheating. The short film one of us wrote is pushed to spring, and the jazz film is how he means to keep moving until then.

Brian Eno came to treat his work as a practice rather than a job. One of us wants that, with his friends' names in the credits as the most permanent record he can leave. The other has old hang-ups about being on set and would rather help edit, as long as the edit doesn't swallow weeks of family life. We riff on the 6-hour cut of a 14-minute short. Talking over that script, one of us saw the other recognize his own younger self, which leads back to 2008, before the Canon 5D Mark II, when there was one narrow way in. Short films still earn nothing, we agree. It ends on Hollywood, where one of us reckons talent without attention is no currency.

Mentioned in this episode: Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, CinemaDNG, Brian Eno, the Canon 5D Mark II, the Black List.

-Ai
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 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. 

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Website: https://studiosessionspod.com

At a yard sale in Malvern, Iowa, one of us asked the woman running it about old cameras, and her husband climbed into the rafters of his barn and came down with a dusty 8x10 view camera, which he gave us. The bellows are full of holes and there's no lens, so it needs a restorer. One of us has been in a creative flood for 3 months and fears that if he stops, it all stops; the other's momentum feels more like a frenzy. The one in the flood passes on an idea he heard: the obstacles are the path itself, and each one is a chance to be creative.
An Instagram video mocking cliché photographs, like a faded pink door on a brick wall, gave one of us a small crisis, since he's taken plenty of those. Whatever you've scrolled past, we agree, steers your eye. Martin Scorsese started with about 40 years of film history to absorb, and anyone starting now has 130, which one of us calls an advantage. Brian Eno played Fela Kuti for Talking Heads as they made Remain in Light, and it changed the record. Near the end come Eno's Oblique Strategies cards, which one of us has put on his website. The first says to push to an extreme, then ease back, and the last asks for the simplest fix, which one of us learned to hunt for in Apple tech support.
Mentioned in this episode: Winston Churchill, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stanley Kubrick, Adam Sandler, Orson Welles's F for Fake, Stone Temple Pilots, Talking Heads' Remain in Light, Fela Kuti, Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies.
-Ai
Support the show
 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. 

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Website: https://studiosessionspod.com

madebyalex.online
Last episode of "season" 3!
One of us has a Squarespace site he means to redo, and watching the other build madebyalex.online with Claude has him tinkering. The builder has wanted his own corner of the web since customizing MySpace pages in 2004 with Web Design for Dummies from the library. AI finally let him build one without years of learning to code. He's off almost every platform now, and the other runs the podcast's YouTube channel so he never has to see its numbers. His reason is what he calls effective creative entropy: an algorithm deals you 6 cards when you think you're holding 52.
Every story and essay on the site can be printed, and he sees it as the center everything else grows from. He wants people to find something there, then go live their lives, and thinks of the site as a garden, planted a little at a time. He'd like to hand the homepage to guest curators, each choosing and ordering 5 of his photographs with a note on why, so he can see his work through someone else's eyes. Nothing is tuned for search engines, and it does all a site can to keep AI models from training on it. Near the end comes the old habit of keeping 10 bookmarked sites to work through on an afternoon. The last question is whether the site has him making videos again: loosely, he says, just him talking to a camera.
Mentioned in this episode: madebyalex.online, Squarespace, Claude, the IndieWeb, Neocities, GeoCities, Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans, Tim Berners-Lee, Louis C.K., Buy Me a Coffee.
-Ai
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One of us is convinced the next big change in computing is an operating system you talk to, one that writes whatever you need on the spot, down to a VHS effect for the video you're editing. The other doubts anyone is waiting for new hardware. When his MiniDV capture broke, an AI built him an app to fix it in about an hour while he read, and his cameras and computer haven't held him back in 7 years. We disagree about most of it, happily, down to whether a perfect assistant would make most people's lives much better.
One of us expects a backlash from people so burned by technology that they'd rather work with their hands. The other offers a chair: whoever invents it can't own it, and nobody goes back to the floor. The reply is that we've been sold too many chairs, and the rock was fine. Later the chair's champion concedes that inventions start simple and grow into new problems, like the Seinfeld where George gets a security guard a chair and the guard sleeps through a robbery. Then the chair gets turned on the website one of us built for his writing and photographs, which he owns and hopes will wear in like a watch, and where the only number shown is how many pieces are up. The rest waits for another episode, because the other has a Friday drop to post.
Mentioned in this episode: Apple, OpenAI, ChatGPT, Claude, Seinfeld.
-Ai
Support the show
 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. 

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Website: https://studiosessionspod.com