Let's talk about Craft.

[Robert Frank]

Skill is knowing how to do something. Craft is knowing what to do, and when and why to do it.

 

[David Battistella]

It's hard to speak about technique and tools in the abstract because they are supposed to solve particular problems or to achieve particular creative ideas in the service of a particular project/story.

Isn't that craftsmanship? Making every one an original. Then the tools matter according to the situation?

David

 

[MichaelHalsell]

Skill is knowing how to do something. Craft is knowing what to do, and when and why to do it.

Robert I will have to agree with on that point. A seasoned professional is that guy that sniff out a set of problems quickly and offer a set of agreeable solutions. Solutions that work!

 

[Bill Anderson]

Your head is your most important tool. Give your craft a voice. Fight the memes. Say no to cliche. Craft or otherwise, the world of cinema and image making in general is hooked on cliche. Prepare to starve before you succumb to the rewards of cliche. No surrender. Be the individual that wishes to express his/her unique position in the world. Consider yourself as art's Axis Mundi. See the best as only a beginning. Merge the cognitive with the intellect. Reveal.

 

[rod bradley]

Your head is your most important tool. ETC

Well, put. And to the degree and depth the heart/soul/life experience is connected to/contained in the head, all the better.

 

[Anson Fogel]

democratization changes everything, but not quality

democratization changes everything, but not quality

the rapid, massive democratization of the tools - the means of production, literally, in this case :sifone: means many things, I think one being a much increased focus on the tools themselves, as they largely are the change. democratization has happened in distribution as well, with all of those resultant impacts. Suddenly exponentially more individuals producing exponentially more media seen exponentially faster by exponentially more people with exponentially more choices. Its pretty unbelievable how fast it has happened and how fast it keeps moving. The effects are so wide ranging one could write books and books and books....and people will and are.

But quality, art, still matters, I would submit maybe more than ever. Is this the same as craft? Sure. While we now have the tools to create content in the hands of millions of people instead of hundreds or thousands, the % of those people that will decide to seriously learn the craft, and have the discipline and/or talent to create content that people are moved by and want to see is still rather low. Even if only 1% of people with the tools do something we consider "great" and get it out there, that would still mean a lot more great stuff than before.

I see one interesting effect - as we become ever more skeptical of our institutions - corporations, government - we have directed a lot of our trust and faith towards some aspects of technology change - iphones, DSLR's - and I think many people, certainly many of my clients - have developed the idea that the tool is the key, not the craft. We expect change to happen so fast, and worship the tool so much as a culture at times, that we HAVE forgotten that the craftsman still matters, and that hard work still makes things happen, not iphones and magic pixie dust. But I digress.

Quality content that can get an audience, however niche, still matters, period. The tool has no more or less of an ability to do that than it did before. Access has changed. And as we know, the mechanism to experience the content has changed/expanded - so an iphone might be a perfectly practical tool for a web piece. Fine, if its good, and people watch it, in ways that fulfill the creator, great.

 

[Aaron Bernakevitch]

Craft is why I think we are all here, but we need to know and understand the tools in order to improve and grow as artists. I could care less whether I am using my Red or a DVX for a job, as long as it is the right tool. There is a right tool for every job and I feel that my red is not always the correct pick. The key with being a craftsman is the ability to make the right choice about the tool, which is why it is so important to understand it.

 

[Bill Anderson]

When I first began to practice photography I spent a great deal
of time learning and perfecting the craft. Day and night, year
after year I was consumed by a passion for the art, and no
obstacle in craft would be allowed to get in the way of the message.
What that message should be, I was much less sure of. So, with a
sound grasp of craft, I got down to discovering what was worth saying.
At first I emulated those whose works I admired. I did such a decent
job of it that I soon began to believe I was adding to the canon.
I would visit Yosemite to, quite naively, try and find what Joseph Conrad
once called "a bit of one's own". Even though Ansel Adams had
done a masterful job of portraying the place over the course of his life,
surely Yosemite had a few secrets left to be revealed. But little changed.
Many years later, after a few fairly successful gallery and museum
exhibitions, and having matured a little, I decided to move from
black and white analog, to digital color. I knew if I was to make
anything worth showing I would have to deny my past instincts
regarding the landscape, no matter how exotic the location and no
matter how beautiful the light. It took four years of denying what
was in my blood. Then, one day, I saw a boating sign: a black square
set in a white field, and I thought of Kasimir Malevich's black square
paintings and his Suprematist manifesto, and everything related,
from non objectivity and abstract expressionism, to Kandinsky's
Theosophist musings, and I pondered how an object might hold the
essence of non objectivity. If this wasn't an entirely unique position,
I was convinced it was far from being a cliche. I finally made the image
and juxtaposed the black square with a background of industrial
architecture that suggested, through brilliant light and fog and
muted color, a classical style painting. It was a good beginning.
Last year, during a road trip through the South Western United States,
I decided to visit Yosemite. On one of the stops near the crest of
Tioga Pass, I saw a large metal container sitting by the side of the road,
it was painted white and had a symmetrical patch, like an abstract
painting, ground into its face. And all of Yosemite's late afternoon
grandeur lay behind it. In the resulting photograph (a 48X24 inch panorama)
the two dimensional facade of the container takes up half of the image,
and it seems to me like a sliding door ready to shut out Half Dome and the twilight.

 

[Jamatido]

Does it still matter?
YES THE CAMERA STILL MATTER:

Is there anything being done that has not already been done?
RED HAS DONE THAT

Have the tools become more important than how we use them?
YES FOR SOME RED1 IS ONE

 

[Rob Ruffo]

Does it still matter?
YES THE CAMERA STILL MATTER:

Is there anything being done that has not already been done?
RED HAS DONE THAT

Have the tools become more important than how we use them?
YES FOR SOME RED1 IS ONE

Grow up Jamatido.

As to everyone else: Great thread. Great, deep comments.

I would add this: Choosing the right tool, and making judicious choices about how to spend an always limited budget of time and money (no matter how big, a budget is always finite) is part of the craft itself.

Sometimes a set is a big Tetris puzzle with lost of wires going into different plugs and lots of different egos and levels of commitment and time ticking - if when making you crew and equipment list you foresaw that Tetris moment and foresaw exactly who/what you would need you will get that shot before time is up. Otherwise you might not.

A film/video set is not really like walking around with a Leica and a 50mm lens by yourself and being inspired by the moment - the 'walking around with a Leica" paradigm only allows very limited types of shooting. There are many types of narratives where that simply could not work. A set is, as has often been said, like a military invasion. Lots of people-management math and planning and diagrams and - yes - clever gear choices.