The Art of Telling Stories: Aurora Gordon

The Art of Telling Stories is a series of posts designed to take a deeper look at what it means to tell a story. Writers tell stories constantly, but many other people in many other vocations tell their stories as well, but in other, often more subtle, ways.

Today's guest is Aurora Gordon, a dailies colorist for television, a video producer, and a brilliant artist. You can check out her newest trailer about the Daily Ocean as well as several of her other projects on her website or on Vimeo. In addition, the image to the right is one in a series of nine that will be available to benefit the Red Cross of Oklahoma with the recent tornado damage.

Aurora, tell us a little bit about yourself.

I'm a dailies colorist for television - and that means I'm the one applying a look to the footage
immediately after it was shot (so I work the graveyard shift, yikes!). We do this so that the footage will look as close to the final intention as possible for the rough cuts before the footage goes to a final color session for polishing, and eventually broadcasting on TV. In ideal situations I talk to the DP beforehand, and we discuss what sort of look he's going for.  Then it's up to me to come up with the right "cocktail" of dial pushes to recreate that everyday.  I go through all the footage and make sure if more than one camera is used that both cameras have the same color balance.  So, if B Camera looks too blue compared to A Camera, I'll either add yellow to B Camera, or add blue to A Camera.

What that means in reality: I stare at monitors overnight and turn knobs and roll track balls!

In my daytime I'm a video producer and lately I've been working on a documentary about a woman who goes to clean up the beach 20 minutes at a time.  I work mostly on personal documentary style projects but I've been known to take a commission or two. Especially if it means working with an awesome small business.

How would you define storytelling?

Wow, storytelling defined!  I'd say good storytelling is forgetting about your ego and relaying events in a generous, affordable, relatable way. Being a liaison to the world - even if it's a small story.


Would you consider yourself a storyteller? Why?

Definitely.  I used to get asked a lot, are you ever going to specialize and focus on just videos, or just color? And I think it's a lot of the same skill set.  To me it's almost the same job.  As a storyteller you have to get this idea in your head out to an audience - and as a colorist I have to get the idea in the DP's head out to the audience. But, there's still a lot of room for my interpretation.  For example if someone says to me "Make this scene warm!" my first image is a slightly yellowed cozy kitchen, probably with something being baked for hungry guests in the oven.  So I'll then grade the scene with my interpretation of warm - gold familiarity.  But another colorist might grade it like a warm body on a beach - almost red. I live in a land of subtlety and perhaps it's hard for a lot of people to understand nonverbal storytelling as the same as Storytelling with a capital S - but that's what I like to think I do best: subtly transfer feelings.


How do you decide what images tell the story and what ones don't?

When I'm cutting a documentary project, I'm just ruthless. I ask myself: what's the most important image here, and what am I really trying to say?  Does this other image inform and support that? No?  On the cutting room floor it goes then. Another good question to ask is: Would an alien get this image?  Hopefully it's powerful enough some creature from Mars would even understand.


What impact does colour have on the story being told?

Ah - this is a good question. Like I said before, it's a nonverbal art form. I think really great color can take a cold, steely scene from a movie like Skyfall, and make a lonely spy trapped in solitary confinement relatable to everybody's life. What's actually on screen might be a creepy dude with a bad attitude and a bionic jaw, but everybody has a time in their life that was blue and steely and lonely. Sometimes it's easier to say with a look than words.


Do you think you could tell a story with just colour? How?

I think there are color arcs like there are story arcs. I don't know if I could just pop colors on screen and say something a viewer could understand though. I do think oftentimes the color really confirms what you're seeing.  For example, oftentimes movies will end warmer than they started.  If it's a happy ending, it probably looks a little rosy too.  A filmmaker can dial in a look that says, "You might not feel this way, but here's how I want you to feel."  I think a stylized look can be a really honest tip of the hat to the fact the story is of course coming from a biased and subjective point of view.  For example, Wes Anderson always uses his yellowed, aged, signature look and I think that's a nice way to subtly say to the audience, "This is my fading memory and it may or may not be what's really occurring in the world."

But I also think there can be stories told with color in homes.  I'm fascinated with the way people choose to decorate and paint walls. I think there's a reason some people have dark walls and some people have light walls.

What is your favourite part of the work you do and why?

My favorite part is probably the moment before I dial it in.  (Do people know what that means?  We say a scene is "dialed in" when we've got the knobs literally dialed in to the right position. It's another way to say "nailed it.")

When I'm working on a challenging scene I might go back and forth with 10 different versions that are all minor, minor changes, but from version 1 all the way to version 10 is cumulatively a big change.  I like the challenging scenes because oftentimes the moment before it's dialed in is the moment I try something new and discover a new way to combine shadow, midtone, and highlight color values.


What is your favourite colour?

Green!  Our eyes are most sensitive to around 550 nm, which is about green. So I like green because it illuminates most things for humans.

Also, when my husband James first met me he insisted I have green eyes, even though my driver's license and everybody else in my life says I have blue eyes.  He sees me green instead and it makes me laugh.


Is there anything else you would like me to share?

Eat your vegetables! Play with animals! Don't buy things that sell you another version of yourself!


Don't forget to visit Rory's website to learn more about what she does and what she can do for you!

31 Days of Planets: Mars

Day 8: Mars, the Red Planet

Mars is an intriguing planet to us here on Earth. When Giovanni Shiaparelli was first trying to make a map of Mars in the late 1800s, he saw through his telescope lines on surface of the planet which he called canali. He thought they were ditches dug for water. This caused people to believe that there were aliens on Mars. This, however, has not yet proven to be true, but culture still clings to the hope that life may exist outside of our solar system - or quite frankly inside it, but not in a necessarily recognizable form.

Mars is an intriguing planet, as I said, largely because we've got robots up there! The most recent rover, the Curiosity, is the size of an SUV, and the pictures she is sending back are incredible. A robot laboratory on wheels, Curiosity landed in August 2012, and is working to discover if life ever existed on Mars.

Mars is one of the most studied planets with several rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity roving about its surface. Hundreds of pictures have been beamed back - everything to the falling of a rover through the air, close-ups of the planet from space, and images of the mountains and desert from the ground. Mars has piqued the interest of humans for centuries.

In addition, there is recent talk of inhabiting Mars. From Elon Musk's statement to colonize it, to the Mars-One program which intends to make a TV show out of it, colonizing Mars seems to be the next giant idea. We just have to get the general population on board - and then just do it.

In conclusion, Mars is intriguing - let's get up there. It's only a 9 month trip! Our ancestors did way more than that when they colonized the US. I think it would be an amazing adventure.

Pictures from NASA.

What They Really Found On Mars

NASA's new social media effort, mainly the "7 Minutes of Terror," seemed to work miracles for the general public's interest in space. Based on my own Facebook wall (and my cat's Facebook wall), many, many people who aren't interested in anything that happens outside of about 10ft over their heads, began posting links to information about Mars, links to videos and information, and statuses about how cool space is and Mars is and etc, etc.

I was not surprised, however, (although a bit disappointed) when the excitement died down within 48 hours after the landing. The posts petered out. The likes and comments ceased. A week later, the news posts are even mostly gone (except for the thing with Obama).

I'm a little sad. I had hoped that combining the Curiosity's epic landing with the upcoming election would make space travel and discovery a major topic for the Presidential candidates.

It didn't.

So we're back to the same old grind, with a few new people who are excited about space, and a large number of people ready to jump on the bandwagon if anything interesting happens.

Something interesting did happen, though. Something that no one is talking about. Do you want to know what they don't tell you? Do you want to know what they really found on Mars (besides dirt)? I'll give you a hint. It was the same thing they found on the moon.

Yep. Daleks. We're all going to die. End of the world. Christmas, 2012.

Let's hope the Doctor is ready and waiting.

Pictures of Earth, Pictures of Mars

This is a stock photo. It is Earth in a drop of liquid.

If you zoomed in, and then zoomed in some more, and then kept zooming and zooming and zooming and zooming and zooming... you might see something like this:

or this: 

or this:

or this.

This is Mars. It's a photo from NASA.

If you zoomed in, and then zoomed in some more, and kept zooming and zooming and zooming and zooming and zooming... you might see this (which would make any geologist very excited):

or this:

or this:

or this.

Just think: in the next 50 years, we'll be there. Some how, some way, we'll be there. 

The future isn't that far off.

Why We Should Go to Space, Part 1

I am writing a paper about why I believe we should go to space, fund the space program, build up our private space industry, and put the best minds we have to work solving problems of physics, of faster than light travel, and of energy conservation. I will be sharing a compilation of my research as well as bits and pieces of the paper itself as it is written. You are all invited to participate: please comment, email me, Facebook me, share with me your thoughts; all perspectives are welcome.

Here is a gem I found on Yahoo Answers. All errors are depicted as presented on the site. I read this with a mixture of interest, disbelief, awe, and embarrassment for my fellow humans. Enjoy.

The question is as follows:

Is space travel waste time and money?

The best answer:

yes, why look for life out in space when we have people starving to death here on earth!

Other answers:

#1. mineing companys would get fat

#2. Applied research is easy to justify financially, because you have a goal going in that a venture capitalist sees as profitable. A lot of pure research (research done because scientists are curious) doesn't generate profits until centuries later. If not for Ben Franklin's kite experiment, mankind wouldn't have taken the first steps toward understanding electricity (controlled lightning).

#3. i wouldn't say so...that is an experience that few have the chance or the money to experience...i say if you have the time and money...go for it because i think that you would be one of the very few that would be able to say...'hey, i have been out in space...how cool is that?'

#4. No way! It is critical and wonderful. If we stop spending all our money or war and maybe on looking after our planet and space travel...then we might save ourselves from our own destruction.

#5. redirected those dollars could mean our survival.

#6. No. The faster we unravel the wonders of outer space the faster we can Trek it!

#7. no, more money should be spent on it than spending money on junk

#8. No, why?

#9. It's not a waste of time. We find out about other things living out there in the world.

#10. You are on a computer. Thank the space program for many improvements in the things we have in life.

#11. the least thing would be go to space and watch our earth from inside the ship. But its about experience. it can't be measured. The great thing is its available to common man. Raher the question should be do i want this experince and if yes can i afford it. its not about 'HOW MUCH".. this is what i feel...u might feel different..

#12. I don't think so. Humans are curious, its no wonder we are so interested in discovering what is out there! Look at what we have here, imagine what else is out there. No harm in at least trying.

#13. imagine mars if full of oil!!!!

screw you iraq U.S.A U.SA!!! :-P

#14. Some space exploration is good for the sake of knowledge, but most of the manned plans have no use whatsoever, unless you consider tremendous waste of resources a use. Explore using robotics.

#15. yes, because it's so expensive. you could have give your money to the poor and those people who needed it most. You could have devoted your time by making good deeds. traveling in space can olny satisfy your imagination but if you help other people, it would give you joy within.

#16. Wasting time and money is impossible. 

Is someone moves away from Earth, the time that the person flew from would go faster until he or she could not tell the time.

About the money, they won't be lose as their still in the bank or in your houses.

#17. No. The technology we have gotten as a result of space exploration has more than paid for itself. 

As just one example: The Microwave Oven alone (a NASA invention) has saved this country more in electricity than we have ever spent on space travel.

Now let's talk electronics, food storage, solar cells, and metal alloys...

Source(s))

"It's raining soup; grab yourself a bucket" (D. D. Harriman)

http://academicvc.com/about-stephen-fleming/other/go-get-an-asteroid/

#18. Hell no. Expand or die.

How Much is the Universe Worth?

Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently asked this question in a speech: how much would you pay for the universe? He was referring to the recent funding cut that NASA took. He states that if one penny of each tax dollar went to fund NASA, we would surpass our wildest space dreams in a matter of a few decades.

One day, this concept is going to be one of those things that we talk about nostalgically, that people use as writing prompts for historical fiction novels. Right now, we think like this:

Can you imagine living in a country where women don't have the right to vote?

Can you imagine living in a country run by slavery?

Can you imagine living in a country where drinking alcohol was banned?

Can you imagine living in a country with vast tracts of unexplored land?

Can you imagine life without cars, or televisions, or phones, or heaven forbid--electricity?

And 67 seven years from now...

...Can you imagine living in country that wouldn't fund space travel?

And I will be 89 years old, cranky and obnoxious, living in a nursing home that orbits the moon, being interviewed on HoloSkypeOrbital by a 3D replica of my great-nephew who wants to do project on the history of space flight.

"My mother remembers them walking on the moon!" I would screech. "My mother watched the Challenger explode on a black and white TV! They didn't have space travel for real until I was about 52, even though NASA started hiring astronauts when I was only 23! Do I remember life without space travel? Of course I remember! My brain's sharp as a tack--do you even know what a tack is?"

"Let me tell you this, boy," I would interrupt as he sputtered to ask another impertinent question. "There's nothing more torturous than having the technology to do something but having those putrid politicians REFUSE to help do it! We were in an economic recession, them trying to tell women what not to have babies, worldwide religious clashes, the planet dying from carbon fuel poison, just out of a war on terrorists (terrorists are bloody hard to find, remember that, boy) and then politicians took money away from space travel! Can you believe it? Space travel! The only hope the people of the world had--just cut its knees right out from under it."

"What about the Dragon's fire? What about the descent of the Phoenix?" my great-nephew Gary will ask. "Do you remember those?"

"Naming all them spacecraft after mythical beasts won't give them no magical powers," I'll croak. "And of course I remember those! But you know what? Accidents happen. When they were inventing regular flights, with airplanes, you know what? People died. Amelia Earhart? Know who that is?" I'll shake my head. "Schools don't teach anything these days. She disappeared. Forever. Never seen again. More people died in car crashes back then than anything else. And murders! All over the place. But you know what? They still flew planes. They still drove cars. They still had babies. What's a couple of suborbital explosions? Sad, maybe. But they aren't the question."

"What is the question?" 

"The question is this: who are we and who do we want to be? Are we a nation of cowards and small-minded simpletons? Or are we a nation of intelligent visionaries with a backbone of steel and a work ethic of gold? Because that's what it took, Gary. It took intelligence, steel, and gold. Do you believe that?"

"Of course! We have space ships for people and space ships for mining and space ships for protection and space ships for research and we're mining asteroids in the asteroid belt and have a station set up on Mars!" He gets excited and begins to bounce up and down--because that's what kids do when they get excited.

I tap the top of the holo-monitor, the same spot where webcams used to be on a 2D monitor (now the hologram itself is the camera), and exclaim, "Now you tell me something, boy! Can you imagine living in a world trapped on the surface of the planet? In a country with a government who wouldn't fund space travel? Tell me--can you imagine a world without space?"

My Favourite UFOlogist--Guest Blog by Peter Sieling

Thanksgiving gatherings in our family included my Methodist preacher father, uncle John, a devout Mormon, and uncle Bill, a UFOlogist. We cousins ate at the kid’s table, out of sight of the adults. Fifty years later we still remember when Janie shot a pea straight up and it stuck to the ceiling (and for all we know it’s up there still…).

            You would think the adult conversation must have been fascinating at the adult table but I doubt it. Adults know how to avoid really fun topics at family parties. After dinner, Uncle John always stretched out on the floor and fell asleep. Uncle Bill wandered over to the piano and played pop tunes from the 1940’s. I don’t remember what my dad did—probably teased my cousins.

            Uncle Bill was a famous UFOlogist. As an optical physicist, he was especially interested in analyzing UFO photos. He interviewed George Adamski, the man who flew in an alien ship back in the fifties or early sixties, and other UFO celebrities. Bill translated the book Angels in Starships.

            As a teenager, I attended one of Uncle Bill’s slide presentations in Dresden, NY. It lasted nearly three hours—slide after slide of UFOs and alien beings from his collection. Most were obvious fakes, but some were genuine, according to Uncle Bill.

            Bill occasionally brought UFO books to family gatherings. One that I remember had big beautiful glossy photos of flying disks. The author claimed to have met many times with the aliens. They told him that most humans were not highly evolved enough to talk to them (they used direct mind-to-mind communication). The author must have been more evolved, as they met with him and taught him many truths, Bill said.

            “What truths?” I asked Uncle Bill.

            Bill hesitated before answering. It seemed as if the teachings were a secondary issue to him. The big thing was that extraterrestrials were visiting earth and communicating with humans. I felt, on the other hand, that if extraterrestrials were teaching humans, they must have something worth hearing, useful things like power supplies used in their ships, weird metal alloys, and interesting additions or corrections to our theories of time, space, and relativity. “Why, they told him that mankind has the power to, um, control their own destinies, and that we must learn to live in peace and cooperation with all the rest of the world…”

            I was disappointed with his answer. Space aliens would not teach humans the philosophy of secular humanism. We already have that. I expected something so foreign and bizarre, that I wouldn’t believe it. Humans can’t come up with anything truly new. We create myths from composites of that which we’ve already seen. The ancient gods were larger than life (and wickeder) men and women. Dragons are big lizards with bat wings. Science fiction writers assemble their sentient aliens from ants, spiders, herbivores, or bees. I wanted something stranger than giant egg-laying machines and slimy moon creatures.

            I visited my Uncle Bill and Aunt Rhoda a couple years before they died. Bill and I sat at the piano and he showed me the four diminished chords. He had taught himself to play the piano and had a name for each chord. There was a flying saucer ornament hanging from his Christmas tree. Now that I was an adult, I couldn’t ask about flying saucers.

            Uncle Bob says before Bill died, he decided UFOs were all a hoax. I think it’s all a hoax too, except that one of my cousins saw one landed in a field with two extraterrestrials walking around outside it, in metallic colored suits, like My Favorite Martian wore. She still says she saw them to this day, forty years later. I believe my cousin. So I live in paradoxes. I file UFOs in the same box as wild cougars with orange tracking collars, cloning wooly mammoths, cold fusion, global warming, and 100 mpg carburetors—interesting things to believe in, hope for, or fear, but not things to alter the routine of daily life.

            Until, late one night, driving down the dark rain soaked highway, suddenly the car engine dies and there’s a bluish light hovering above the road, blinding me…

After Curiosity Killed the Cat, She Got a Masters in Astrophysics

Yesterday I was at work. I was lying on the ramp on stage right, waiting for the bloody-long counting house scene to finish, and staring up through the grid at the ceiling--arched-brick vaulted ceilings are very cool. A bit of light bled from stage, but otherwise the only colours immediately visible to my eyes were various shades of black. I started imagining that I was not looking up, but instead looking down.

I kept looking down--down 25 feet with nothing to stop me from falling into the arched-brick trench, except for one lonely pipe sticking out from the grid. It was awesome. I love space--and not just outer space, but all kinds of space (another reason why the ocean is so magnificent).

This should help you understand why I am jealous of the Mars Rover. Curiosity not only gets to soar into the atmosphere and look down on Earth from way up in the sky, but she has blasted completely through the atmosphere into the great vacuum of space surrounding our little tiny planet, and has managed to already (in less than a month!) travel more than 31 million miles towards Mars. That said, she still has over 300 million miles left to traverse. To top it off, she gets to land on a completely different planet and explore miles and miles of countryside more or less untouched by humans.

While I may be a little jealous, I am also extremely excited. Curiosity has a lot of technologically advanced equipment on board. This is what she has planned for us here on Earth:

• Information about rocks (you probably guessed that one)
• What is all this methane from? A theory about whether life does or doesn't exist on Mars. (Finally! Evidence one way or the other!)
• Pictures. IN COLOUR. Let me repeat that. COLOUR PICTURES. Panoramic ones, too! Not just pictures of the rocks, but of the landscape and terrain, and already they are planning to stitch them together. Somebody buy me a poster!
• COLOUR VIDEO. Did you catch that one? COLOUR VIDEO. We get to WATCH the scenery of MARS, as well as the descent from outer space to the surface. Also, let me add this: it's HIGH DEF. I hope it comes out in theatres.
• Best yet, it's going to EMAIL IT TO US FROM MARS. Okay, email might not be quite what is happening, but you get the drift. It's going to send it to us. We don't have to wait. Well, I might have to wait. But the scientists don't. And the sooner the scientists get it, the sooner they share!

Curiosity has three cameras, four spectrometers (which measure light), two radiation detectors, an environmental sensor, and an atmospheric sensor. The size of a small SUV, she has 6 wheel drive, can turn 360 degrees in place, and has the ability to climb steep hills. Basically, she's the coolest robot we've ever made.

Currently, the rover is on a steady, unhindered track towards Mars, and is already working to monitor the effects of radiation while protected by the spaceship, with the hope that this will help us understand how this sort of trip might affect a human.

One day I hope to travel to Mars, although I doubt the chances of that are particularly high. For now, I'll just stare up into the deep dark heights of the theatre, and imagine I'm looking down from a spaceship at the dark arched-brick vaulted side of Mars.