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> a filmmaker can use a camera to make great films without understanding in detail how to build the camera, and there is probably not much of a predictable rela

> a filmmaker can use a camera to make great films without understanding in detail how to build the camera, and there is probably not much of a predictable relationship between knowledge of how the camera works and quality of the resulting film. This sentence conflates two different things to support a single point. One is true but the second is not. It's correct that a filmmaker does not need to know "how to build a camera" to make great films. However, a filmmaker certainly needs to know "how a camera works" to make a great film. And not just in the pedantic sense of where the Record button is but in the sense of a great violinist needing to know how their violin works (but not how to make a violin). The camera is the artistic instrument of cinema and using it well requires understanding how to leverage lens selection, aperture, shutter speed, exposure, focal plane, lighting, framing, etc to achieve the desired artistic outcome. Another possible confusion in this sentence is the catch-all term "filmmaker" when the actual example is more narrowly focused on operation of the camera. Deciding how to apply a camera toward making a motion picture is generally the responsibility of the cinematographer. Sometimes uniquely skilled directors can also act as their own cinematographer but the roles and skill sets are as divergent as composer and violinist.

abtinf 1y ago
For anyone confused by this point perhaps watch some of the “why [movie] still looks like a billion bucks” videos on YouTube by Wolfcrow. The idea that a film artist doesn’t need to know how a camera works is laughable. And not just the camera, but different film stock, processing methods, lenses, lighting, and the interaction of all those as well as the subject being shot. The level of attention to detail in great films is wild.
- rented_mule 1y ago
  I once heard a great question to illustrate this... When you are inspired by a painting, is this your first thought: "I need to figure out what brand of paints and brushes this painter used so I can paint like this." Of course not! It's the painter that determines the quality of the painting and not the maker of the tools. A great painter (or filmmaker or cook or software engineer or ...) will understand the unique attributes of the tools available and leverage those to do great work, whether that's in oil or water, black & white or color, Python or Rust. A difference between experts and non-experts is that experts will find opportunity in the constraints of the tools they have available, and not only frustration. I believe this extends to engineering managers. I want managers who are good at spotting the unique advantages of each person on the team and are good at structuring the roadmap and individual projects to let the team get the most out of those advantages. And I want them to spot where advantages and disadvantages can be paired to enable learning. All this helps teams see how valuable their teammates can be and how much they can learn from each other. I've seen it result in teams achieving remarkable outcomes while having a ton of fun doing it. Scaling this up further... I want senior management that is in tune with the unique advantages of different parts of the org, and who then use that knowledge to make better decisions about direction. We can go in direction A, B, or C... that group over there is great at A, so let's pick that and give it to that group. Some see Conway's Law as a sort of "doom", but I've seen it used to the org's advantage with this kind of thinking.
  - guappa 1y ago
    Painters in the renaissance were making their own paint most of the time. They were not just buying whatever was available and hoping for the best.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      They tended to use a lot of things like lead. While I could probably duplicate their methods, it would (like it did to them) poison me. However duplicating the paint won't make me an artist. Practice painting would make me an artist and buying paint would allow more time to practice. Practice would also let me learn how modern safe paints work and so I could make something that looks like what they could do with modern paints, or I could create something they could not for lack of ability to get that color/shine/whatever (I'm not a painter and don't know the terms they would use).
  - tetha 1y ago
    > Scaling this up further... I want senior management that is in tune with the unique advantages of different parts of the org, and who then use that knowledge to make better decisions about direction. We can go in direction A, B, or C... that group over there is great at A, so let's pick that and give it to that group. Some see Conway's Law as a sort of "doom", but I've seen it used to the org's advantage with this kind of thinking. This is something I'm pushing towards in our overall platform - I'm kind of trying to identify both related things, as well as things of similar necessary velocity or lack of velocity and try to put these into a team or into teams close together. If a team has a large mismatch of velocity between their topics, it tends to be straining, tbh. For example, frontend teams or teams largely fronting AI features with little persistence to manage want to and need to be fast. These guys want to be able to throw stuff at a wall and see what it sticks, or they want to react to shifting trends very quickly. All good and well. It's valid practice in the right situation. On the other hand, we're a team handling databases, long term archiving, hardware acquisition and management. Handling these correctly is a direct plug keeping customers lawyers down. Yet,sometimes lead time of hardware purchases, racking, configuration, qualification and full utilization can be a quarter of a year. Note that this doesn't apply to standard requests like restores, database provisioning and such. We can stand up necessary standard persistences for new applications within hours if necessary, or a day or two usually. In the past, we had these different velocities mixed up in teams and it was a mess and frustration for everyone. We were in the middle of larger storage migrations that require some care, and suddenly there's a sales-project crashing in with an ASAP tag preempting everything else. Or a frontend dev suddenly had to do capacity planning for a CI cluster. Overall silly. Now the projects requiring planning, capacity estimations, budgets and honestly, old-school project planning are in our court and the dev-teams can rely on that and run free and wild however they want. It's much more effective for both sides.
- protocolture 1y ago
  >The idea that a film artist doesn’t need to know how a camera works is laughable. And not just the camera, but different film stock, processing methods, lenses, lighting, and the interaction of all those as well as the subject being shot. The level of attention to detail in great films is wild. The Aliens documentary is really good for this. So much of the special effects on the film are in camera tricks. Cameron is a really interesting person to study because he absolutely mastered every part of film making before deciding to go all in on Avatar and ubiquitous 3d effects.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Yes but at some point you can stop understanding how it works. Maybe it wasn't the best example but I think picking it apart misses the larger point.
  - whatnow37373 1y ago
    Yeah but any abstraction can be made to work if it remains sufficiently abstract. All of life is “energy conversion”. All of programming is “translation”. All programming is “solving problems”. Etc. Not all abstractions generalize (in an useful way).
xlii 1y ago
Since you mentioned violin I’ll share my recent discovery. Pianos (like grand ones, but also recent electronic ones with sophisticated key action mechanisms) are built to provide two-way feedback. There’s feedback on key press. There’s bass rumble you can feel as your feet touches the pedal. This combined with string action can help with building „relation” with the instrument and take from it. But I still couldn’t build one..
friendzis 1y ago
Your comment falls into the engineering superiority trap. Yes, one needs to understand how camera (or many other instruments) works, but only because different tweakable parameters are not completely orthogonal. > The camera is the artistic instrument of cinema and using it well requires understanding how to leverage lens selection, aperture, shutter speed, exposure, focal plane, lighting, framing, etc to achieve the desired artistic outcome. This is the key sentence. If you had a digital camera that perfectly mimicked output of film camera, you could take a "filmmaker" from 70s, give them the digital camera and they will successfully create a film of equal quality. Yes, one needs to understand that e.g. focal length changes depth of focus, but it's all about controlling the output. One does not really need to understand the inner workings of a system, all they need to understand is which parameters affect output in what way. >> there is probably not much of a predictable relationship between knowledge of how the camera works and quality of the resulting film. Yes, usually some technical understanding is required to understand the relationships and use them well. However, even perfect understanding of inner workings of a tool does not translate to being a good craftsman. There is some overlap, but that's it. One still needs to understand the filmmaking part well to make a good film. Hence, the observation that technical knowledge does not translate to film quality - it's a required, but not sufficient criterion.
- guappa 1y ago
  > If you had a digital camera that perfectly mimicked output of film camera You must first prove it's at all possible. And they could of course not do any of the special effects obtained by compositing images on the same film. And they would have no idea how to do that with a computer. It's not the same at all.
- mrandish 1y ago
  > all they need to understand is which parameters affect output in what way. Yes. That was the point I was trying to make and after reading the responses, I see I didn't make it as clearly as I could have. I think the confusion is in the multiple ways to interpret this phrase in the original article, "knowledge of how the camera works." I thought the examples I cited (lighting, lens, aperture, etc) would make clear how I took that phrase but they didn't do so sufficiently. I'll give an example. In the example I'll substitute violin for camera again because I think it helps to remove some of the technical nuance specific to cameras. I took "knowledge of how the violin works" to include "knowledge of how to..." apply finger pressure on the strings, rock the strings to create vibrato, use bow strikes, apply rosin - all to achieve. I did not take "knowledge of how the violin works" to mean things like: the effect of internal geometry on acoustic resonance. To me, those are "knowledge of how to build the violin" which I already said wasn't necessary to be great violinist (although the example of 'geometry -> acoustic resonance' is more 'designing a violin', I group design as part of 'building'. I know see several people took the phrase differently when that interpretation wasn't the point I was trying to make. As a filmmaker, "knowledge of how the camera works" means knowing how to apply lighting, lens, aperture, shutter speed, etc to achieve the desired artistic result. I didn't mean "knowledge of how the camera works" in the sense of "the impact of pre-charge voltages on charge coupled devices", which to me is akin to "the effect of internal geometry on acoustic resonance" in a violin. As I said that's designing a camera/violin, which is part of "knowing how to build it" not "knowing how it works". "How it works" is simply too open to interpretation.

abtinf 1y ago

For anyone confused by this point perhaps watch some of the “why [movie] still looks like a billion bucks” videos on YouTube by Wolfcrow. The idea that a film artist doesn’t need to know how a camera works is laughable. And not just the camera, but different film stock, processing methods, lenses, lighting, and the interaction of all those as well as the subject being shot. The level of attention to detail in great films is wild.

rented_mule 1y ago
I once heard a great question to illustrate this... When you are inspired by a painting, is this your first thought: "I need to figure out what brand of paints and brushes this painter used so I can paint like this." Of course not! It's the painter that determines the quality of the painting and not the maker of the tools. A great painter (or filmmaker or cook or software engineer or ...) will understand the unique attributes of the tools available and leverage those to do great work, whether that's in oil or water, black & white or color, Python or Rust. A difference between experts and non-experts is that experts will find opportunity in the constraints of the tools they have available, and not only frustration. I believe this extends to engineering managers. I want managers who are good at spotting the unique advantages of each person on the team and are good at structuring the roadmap and individual projects to let the team get the most out of those advantages. And I want them to spot where advantages and disadvantages can be paired to enable learning. All this helps teams see how valuable their teammates can be and how much they can learn from each other. I've seen it result in teams achieving remarkable outcomes while having a ton of fun doing it. Scaling this up further... I want senior management that is in tune with the unique advantages of different parts of the org, and who then use that knowledge to make better decisions about direction. We can go in direction A, B, or C... that group over there is great at A, so let's pick that and give it to that group. Some see Conway's Law as a sort of "doom", but I've seen it used to the org's advantage with this kind of thinking.
- guappa 1y ago
  Painters in the renaissance were making their own paint most of the time. They were not just buying whatever was available and hoping for the best.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    They tended to use a lot of things like lead. While I could probably duplicate their methods, it would (like it did to them) poison me. However duplicating the paint won't make me an artist. Practice painting would make me an artist and buying paint would allow more time to practice. Practice would also let me learn how modern safe paints work and so I could make something that looks like what they could do with modern paints, or I could create something they could not for lack of ability to get that color/shine/whatever (I'm not a painter and don't know the terms they would use).
- tetha 1y ago
  > Scaling this up further... I want senior management that is in tune with the unique advantages of different parts of the org, and who then use that knowledge to make better decisions about direction. We can go in direction A, B, or C... that group over there is great at A, so let's pick that and give it to that group. Some see Conway's Law as a sort of "doom", but I've seen it used to the org's advantage with this kind of thinking. This is something I'm pushing towards in our overall platform - I'm kind of trying to identify both related things, as well as things of similar necessary velocity or lack of velocity and try to put these into a team or into teams close together. If a team has a large mismatch of velocity between their topics, it tends to be straining, tbh. For example, frontend teams or teams largely fronting AI features with little persistence to manage want to and need to be fast. These guys want to be able to throw stuff at a wall and see what it sticks, or they want to react to shifting trends very quickly. All good and well. It's valid practice in the right situation. On the other hand, we're a team handling databases, long term archiving, hardware acquisition and management. Handling these correctly is a direct plug keeping customers lawyers down. Yet,sometimes lead time of hardware purchases, racking, configuration, qualification and full utilization can be a quarter of a year. Note that this doesn't apply to standard requests like restores, database provisioning and such. We can stand up necessary standard persistences for new applications within hours if necessary, or a day or two usually. In the past, we had these different velocities mixed up in teams and it was a mess and frustration for everyone. We were in the middle of larger storage migrations that require some care, and suddenly there's a sales-project crashing in with an ASAP tag preempting everything else. Or a frontend dev suddenly had to do capacity planning for a CI cluster. Overall silly. Now the projects requiring planning, capacity estimations, budgets and honestly, old-school project planning are in our court and the dev-teams can rely on that and run free and wild however they want. It's much more effective for both sides.
protocolture 1y ago
>The idea that a film artist doesn’t need to know how a camera works is laughable. And not just the camera, but different film stock, processing methods, lenses, lighting, and the interaction of all those as well as the subject being shot. The level of attention to detail in great films is wild. The Aliens documentary is really good for this. So much of the special effects on the film are in camera tricks. Cameron is a really interesting person to study because he absolutely mastered every part of film making before deciding to go all in on Avatar and ubiquitous 3d effects.
SoftTalker 1y ago
Yes but at some point you can stop understanding how it works. Maybe it wasn't the best example but I think picking it apart misses the larger point.
- whatnow37373 1y ago
  Yeah but any abstraction can be made to work if it remains sufficiently abstract. All of life is “energy conversion”. All of programming is “translation”. All programming is “solving problems”. Etc. Not all abstractions generalize (in an useful way).

xlii 1y ago

Since you mentioned violin I’ll share my recent discovery. Pianos (like grand ones, but also recent electronic ones with sophisticated key action mechanisms) are built to provide two-way feedback. There’s feedback on key press. There’s bass rumble you can feel as your feet touches the pedal. This combined with string action can help with building „relation” with the instrument and take from it. But I still couldn’t build one..

friendzis 1y ago

Your comment falls into the engineering superiority trap. Yes, one needs to understand how camera (or many other instruments) works, but only because different tweakable parameters are not completely orthogonal. > The camera is the artistic instrument of cinema and using it well requires understanding how to leverage lens selection, aperture, shutter speed, exposure, focal plane, lighting, framing, etc to achieve the desired artistic outcome. This is the key sentence. If you had a digital camera that perfectly mimicked output of film camera, you could take a "filmmaker" from 70s, give them the digital camera and they will successfully create a film of equal quality. Yes, one needs to understand that e.g. focal length changes depth of focus, but it's all about controlling the output. One does not really need to understand the inner workings of a system, all they need to understand is which parameters affect output in what way. >> there is probably not much of a predictable relationship between knowledge of how the camera works and quality of the resulting film. Yes, usually some technical understanding is required to understand the relationships and use them well. However, even perfect understanding of inner workings of a tool does not translate to being a good craftsman. There is some overlap, but that's it. One still needs to understand the filmmaking part well to make a good film. Hence, the observation that technical knowledge does not translate to film quality - it's a required, but not sufficient criterion.

guappa 1y ago
> If you had a digital camera that perfectly mimicked output of film camera You must first prove it's at all possible. And they could of course not do any of the special effects obtained by compositing images on the same film. And they would have no idea how to do that with a computer. It's not the same at all.
mrandish 1y ago
> all they need to understand is which parameters affect output in what way. Yes. That was the point I was trying to make and after reading the responses, I see I didn't make it as clearly as I could have. I think the confusion is in the multiple ways to interpret this phrase in the original article, "knowledge of how the camera works." I thought the examples I cited (lighting, lens, aperture, etc) would make clear how I took that phrase but they didn't do so sufficiently. I'll give an example. In the example I'll substitute violin for camera again because I think it helps to remove some of the technical nuance specific to cameras. I took "knowledge of how the violin works" to include "knowledge of how to..." apply finger pressure on the strings, rock the strings to create vibrato, use bow strikes, apply rosin - all to achieve. I did not take "knowledge of how the violin works" to mean things like: the effect of internal geometry on acoustic resonance. To me, those are "knowledge of how to build the violin" which I already said wasn't necessary to be great violinist (although the example of 'geometry -> acoustic resonance' is more 'designing a violin', I group design as part of 'building'. I know see several people took the phrase differently when that interpretation wasn't the point I was trying to make. As a filmmaker, "knowledge of how the camera works" means knowing how to apply lighting, lens, aperture, shutter speed, etc to achieve the desired artistic result. I didn't mean "knowledge of how the camera works" in the sense of "the impact of pre-charge voltages on charge coupled devices", which to me is akin to "the effect of internal geometry on acoustic resonance" in a violin. As I said that's designing a camera/violin, which is part of "knowing how to build it" not "knowing how it works". "How it works" is simply too open to interpretation.