Taxonomy
I'm on steroids for the sciatica, plus a soupcon of opioids for flavor, and this morning I had an anxiety dream about work.
I was in an company making commercials under a scheme to circumvent copyright through a loophole allowing use of short enough slices of copyrighted video or film that they would not be recognized with the naked eye. We would then save enormous money in hiring actual film crews and actors to make the commercials. Our costs went into extrapolation software and a giant database of carefully tagged clips and short cheap shots of the products and some other ideas the client wanted in the ad.
Take culturally iconic or otherwise recognizable scenes or samples in subliminal hunks, and use them as seeds for the commercial we wanted to make: Tupak using Old Spice deodorant, the Beatles playing volleyball in a particular brand of shoe. The software would extrapolate from the subliminal shot the brain could see but not consciously recognize to other less-expensive shots that are not consciously related to the product, filling in the frames needed using a very fine morphing algorithm. We suggest the famous endorsement, or bring up the feeling of Original Gangsta-ness, without violating the law or having to pay the s-clip owners, or make them responsible for the connection made in the buyer's mind.
This kind of thing has been done crudely at least since Forrest Gump, but we were good at it, and what made us so good was our database taxonomy and size. We had the data structure and a bitchin' tagging system of what each s-clip might suggest to the viewer. The viewer didn't stand a chance...
The anxiety part was that I was in on a Saturday, trying to catch up when I was sick, lost my glasses, and temporarily locked myself out of the workroom. When I got back, my current boss was there (retroe-d back to a 70's dude in a mustache, turtleneck and tweed jacket somehow) and he was in a wheelchair. The tech guys had come in and randomly slammed everything into boxes so they could move more computer equipment in, and I was in a panic, trying to find my project in the slopping boxing they did. Their data structuring was crap, in a business all about proper structure and tagging!
Also, of course, a mish mash of colleagues who have retired from real job.
Now to crudely tag this entry.
I was in an company making commercials under a scheme to circumvent copyright through a loophole allowing use of short enough slices of copyrighted video or film that they would not be recognized with the naked eye. We would then save enormous money in hiring actual film crews and actors to make the commercials. Our costs went into extrapolation software and a giant database of carefully tagged clips and short cheap shots of the products and some other ideas the client wanted in the ad.
Take culturally iconic or otherwise recognizable scenes or samples in subliminal hunks, and use them as seeds for the commercial we wanted to make: Tupak using Old Spice deodorant, the Beatles playing volleyball in a particular brand of shoe. The software would extrapolate from the subliminal shot the brain could see but not consciously recognize to other less-expensive shots that are not consciously related to the product, filling in the frames needed using a very fine morphing algorithm. We suggest the famous endorsement, or bring up the feeling of Original Gangsta-ness, without violating the law or having to pay the s-clip owners, or make them responsible for the connection made in the buyer's mind.
This kind of thing has been done crudely at least since Forrest Gump, but we were good at it, and what made us so good was our database taxonomy and size. We had the data structure and a bitchin' tagging system of what each s-clip might suggest to the viewer. The viewer didn't stand a chance...
The anxiety part was that I was in on a Saturday, trying to catch up when I was sick, lost my glasses, and temporarily locked myself out of the workroom. When I got back, my current boss was there (retroe-d back to a 70's dude in a mustache, turtleneck and tweed jacket somehow) and he was in a wheelchair. The tech guys had come in and randomly slammed everything into boxes so they could move more computer equipment in, and I was in a panic, trying to find my project in the slopping boxing they did. Their data structuring was crap, in a business all about proper structure and tagging!
Also, of course, a mish mash of colleagues who have retired from real job.
Now to crudely tag this entry.