Bill Cammack

Rick writes: (in response to Pretty Girls – Too Unapproachable?)

I don’t think you see a lot of that where I live in Los Angeles. There are a lot of attractive people here… maybe that’s why. Sadly that also means a lot of superficiality. Hence, rarely a 3rd or 4th date. Looks are important, don’t get me wrong, but substance makes a relationship.

You may be right about that, Rick.

I don’t know anything about LA, but I’ve heard it’s the toughest scene in the USA! :D A female friend of mine was out there for ~ 9 months and never got a date… Well… Then again, she’s not PRIME, hahaha so I really wouldn’t have expected people to choose her over the model-type waitress/acress chicks in LA. :)

Anyway, yes… In an environment where there are a lot of attractive people, it’s a completely different dynamic. It really doesn’t matter which one you hook up with, because they’re all hot. Now… Ease on down the road to Middle America and the “hot percentage” takes an incredible dive. :O If you don’t pull one of the few attractive girls in your small town, you may as well move! :D

I also agree with the massive attractiveness being a cause of superficiality…. for the guys as well as the girls. When you know you can pick up another chick the next time you walk out in the street, there’s no need to keep one chick or date her over and over. There’s also no reason to keep going out with her if she seems like she doesn’t want to have sex with you because it’s faster to meet a different chick that actually wants to get with you than it is to change the current girl’s mind about getting with the program.

From the females’ point of view, there are so many guys throwing goods and services at them that there’s no need to settle on ONE, unless she’s sure that this is the guy she wants to spend a lot of time with. They used to have a dating show on, and I forget the name of it, something like “Single in New York”, where they followed these girls on date after date on the same day. One time, the cameras caught when one of them got out of a car, being dropped off late by one date, and when she hit the street, her other date was standing there waiting for her, hahaha. She had to hustle upstairs, change, freshen up and go out with the next guy, ASAP.

Also, people seem to go to Los Angeles to “make it big”. I’m sure it becomes in image thing as far as whom you’re dating. Guys in that situation have no choice but to hit on the hottest girls they could find in order to increase or maintain their prestige. No time for the hot girls to get lonely in THAT environment! :D

DatingGenius

Hey Derek. Thanks for the question! :D

Yes. There’s double truth in your statement. Pretty girls are perceived to be unapproachable, AND there are lots of pretty girls without men because of this issue.

See, first of all, girls are girls. :D When you live somewhere like Japan, there isn’t much difference between the girls, so they all have a chance to get guys. This leads to them being more approachable because they don’t develop a perceived superiority to the other girls.

In the USA, there’s a VAST DIFFERENCE between the looks of the girls. :D There are a few that are really attractive and a lot that are just totally busted. :D What happens here is that all the guys chase after the attractive girls and give them anything they want. This goes to the attractive girls’ heads, and they get this inflated sense of self-worth…. Until they hit 19 and their bodies stop maintaining themselves on their own. When this happens, if they don’t start working out, they get out of shape and become has-beens. :) This is when you see the zombie-like girls that you can tell used to be fine, but now they stumble around town opening their own doors and not having anyone rap to them in the streets or try to pay for them to eat or buy clothes. :D They are now experiencing what life is like for most of the population, and it’s pretty depressing for them.

Until that happens, though… They’re held up as the best of the best of American society. There’s nothing better than a fine chick, so they get everything they want and everyone listens to them and wants to be their friends. Because of this, MANY fine girls get conceited. They act bitchy towards people because they know they can get away with it. This has the effect of giving fine girls a bad name. People think they’re ALL stuck up because of the ones that can’t be gracious about their God-given good looks, which are actually the luck of the draw and have nothing to do with their own actual worth, but instead is a function of their parent’s genes.

So… Guys go out to parties and meet stuck up attractive girls and get tired of getting shot down so they stop approaching fine chicks. They start sticking to the more humble, more personally attractive and still decent-looking girls. This is why you see more girls in this range married. The guys looking to get married are tired of the incessant demands of hot chicks, so when it’s time to get married, they choose someone more ‘Down To Earth’.
Reader Derek writes:

Bill,

I hear that many a pretty girl are without men because they are perceived to be unapproachable. Any truth in that statement?

This is why a lot of pretty girls are without men, as you mentioned. Because they’ve been given a bad rap, everybody wants to hook up with them but nobody wants to keep them. Even if they have the sweetest personality, the guys that would be good for them are tired of dealing with women that attractive, so they have to go without. The only guys willing to kick it to them are players who know what they’re doing and enjoy the challenge. The problem with that is that these guys come in loaded for bear, and the hot chicks end up getting used and dumped.

So… What does this mean for attractive women? Y’all need to showcase your personalities AS.MUCH.AS.POSSIBLE! :D Let the guys know that you’re willing to hear what they have to say, and they’ll let down that shield that they built up from being rejected so many times by the upper echelon of American females. The best bet for very attractive women is to be friendly… not to EVERYBODY, but to the guys that you’d like to talk to you because they’re scared to death that you’re going to be some crabby bitch and they’re looking right past YOU at your not-as-attractive homegirl, because they figure she’ll be more friendly and likely to be good relationship material.

As for the guys… You have to realize that attractive women get a lot of stuff, but they’re also getting played left and right. Sooner or later, they get tired of that and want a “good man” to spend time with that actually likes them for who they are and not just because of their fantastic looks. Pick yourselves up after the thousandth rejection and don’t get jaded towards attractive women. Give them a chance to give YOU a chance and see where it goes from there.

Roxanne writes:

I’ve heard both. “Guys go for the pretty girls.” But I’ve also heard that guys think girls fuss way too much over their appearance. Like makeup for example. Most guys really don’t care that much about it? What’s up with this big disconnect?

Wow, Rox… That’s a REALLY good question, which unfortunately calls for a complex answer. The first question is “what is makeup doing on women’s faces in the first place?”…….

In the animal kingdom, dogs, for instance, can tell when other dogs are receptive to sex by perceived cues. It might be a smell… It might be a behavior that coincides with being in the fertile phase of the cycle… It might be how the other dog’s skin looks… I’ve heard of something called “flagging”, but I’m no dog-breeding expert.

Anyway… Humans have bypassed these natural cues by utilizing items such as CLOTHES and DEODORANT. In most cases, whatever one’s natural emissions are are completely masked now. This is why people get compliments on their cologne or whatever it is they used in their hair, because all other smells have been suppressed.

This is where makeup comes in. Makeup FAKES certain skin conditions and basically cheats the guy, biologically, into feeling more attracted to her. For instance, you’ve seen someone become embarrassed, and their face turns red (blushing). Some people have naturally rosy cheeks. Others do not. All they have to do to fake rosy cheeks is paint their cheeks red. Same deal for enhancing lips and eyes and essentially coloring shadows onto a woman’s face to make it appear that her face has curves it really doesn’t have. Same thing with plucking eyebrows. HAHAHAHA I can imagine how many guys had kids with women that they THOUGHT had slim eyebrows, and then the kid came out with some kind of bushy unibrow, hehehe :D but I digress……

Now that we know where the makeup came from, we can look at what guys consider to be “pretty girls”. Obviously, that’s subjective. Everyone has their own idea of what’s attractive and what isn’t. Even though I’ve seen makeup do ABSOLUTE WONDERS for some women….. I’m not a makeup fan. Applied stylishly, it can give a girl a HOT look, except the only time you’re going to see her like that is when she makes herself up like that. The rest of the time, she’s going to look like Plain Jane, and you’d better hope you like her that way. We’ve also seen on television when women go to sleep on their “face” and wake up looking like The Joker after he got caught out in the rain without his umbrella. :/ no good. Having said that, there are some guys that won’t be seen with a woman AT ALL unless she has makeup on and her clothes and hair are proper and she looks ‘right’.

So… Do guys go for the pretty girls? Yes. Definitely! :D However, the path to “pretty” doesn’t go through makeupville. Attractive is Attractive. She could look good in a professional suit-skirt. She could look good in sweats and sneakers after playing frisbee for three hours in Central Park. She could look good with glasses on. She could look good with contacts in. She could look good in a box. She could look good with a fox. She could look tasty like green eggs & ham! ;p~~~~~ um… what point was I making? :/

Anyway… the “too much fuss over appearance” thing is that there isn’t much difference for the guy in whether she wears the green shirt or the red shirt. Whether she wears the Manolo boots or the Payless boots. Whether she wears the skirt 3″ above her knee or 5″ above her knee… what belt she puts on… yadda yadda yadda. If the guy’s into whatever her natural beauty is, all extra preparation she’s doing is useless to him and a waste of time. That can include makeup. So, yes… Guys like pretty girls… Pretty does NOT equal Painted…. and women need to give themselves a break and take a guy’s word for it when he says “you look great… let’s go”. :)

That doesn’t mean to show up all disheveled and looking like a BUM! :/ Just figure out “when to say when”. :D

DatingGenius

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MasamiBillShow 003 – Pictures
Masami, Letitia, Masako & Bill hang out for Masami & Letitia’s last night in New York City. Masami’s on her way to Japan and Letitia’s returning to France. It’s time to take pictures! :D

Bill: hahahaha
Letitia: So funny
All: [Low Voices for the camera] HA HA HA HA HA
Masami: hahaha I ____ so bad.
Bill : hehe
Letitia: Yeah, this one… this one is good
Masami: Work it baby! Work it baby!
Bill: There you go! There you go!
Masami: Work it honey! Work it!
Masako: Oh, that’s nice.
Letitia: Yes… That’s nice.
Masako: What’s that?
Masami: It’s not the picture… talk.
Masako: Really?
Masami: Videotaping.
All except Masako: HAHAHAHAHA :D
Letitia: She looks good!
Bill: What’s that? Stage Fright, right? What’s that? Stage Fright? … “REALLY?”
Masako: What are you doing?
Bill: Nothing. Weren’t you about to sing?
[Masako fakes singing]
Masako: No… I don’t trust. :)
All except Masako: HAHAHA
Bill: … And you shouldn’t. :) hahahaha
Letitia: He was taping you
Masami: Are you taping, or the… do I have to speak low?
Bill: No… You don’t have to speak at all.
Letitia: But you can SMILE!!! :D
Masami: What did she say?
Letitia: You can smile, ohmygod!
All except Letitia: HAHAHA :D
Letitia: I can’t, hahaha
Masami: You were singing!

MasamiBillShow

So it got to the point where I knew what clips I was going to use, and I had my script for my dialogue. I had already finalized my intro, and “all” I had to to do for the credits was edit the template. Unfortunately, I messed that up because I didn’t keep track of how many “special thanks” I had. The way I did it, when I looked at the credits, they looked normal. I hadn’t recognized that a row of people I wanted to thank had fallen beneath the frame, and wasn’t showing up on the screen. The only reason I noticed this at all was because I looked at the credits after compressing and uploading the video, and I noticed that the bottoms of the letters on the lowest names on the list were slightly cut off. In my curiousity about how this could be possible, I realized that there were two more names that completely didn’t show up at all in the credits. When I increased the font for the names, the lowest ones got pushed off the bottom of the screen. Adjusting everything higher in the frame and recompressing took care of that. :) So the initial 6 or 7 people that downloaded episode 05 with Democracy Player got the version with the incorrect credits. :D

I put people in my “special thanks” section that I could remember offhand and that I could go back to my comments and see had given me constructive criticism or something that was useful to me as support in doing this 3rd (Technically episode 05) episode of “The Lab”. Based on comments that Justin Kownacki, creator of Something To Be Desired made, as well as things I’ve noticed about internet shows and understandings I’ve achieved through myriad conversations with Dre, I intend to do more with viewers and commenters than say “thanks for the info” and keep on rollin’. I agree with Justin that the future of internet shows is interactivity. I wanted to make sure I mentioned some of the key people that gave me the energy that eventually became “The Lab” Episode 05.

Unfortunately, having everything together isn’t the end… it’s the beginning. You still have to make it happen. You still have to deliver the lines you wrote with the intention with which you wrote them. Without that, all the surrounding elements are perfectly worthless. As I mentioned in Recording Episode 01 of “The Lab”, “performing” dialogue isn’t as easy as it looks, AND it’s an emotional drain… or maybe it’s not a drain… Perhaps it’s the opposite… an emotional high that you go on and then you’re released from it at the end of the process when you wrap, and that’s what feels like a drain. Either way, it’s not something you want to do when you’re not in the mood to do it. I’m very glad I’m not a peformer, because I wouldn’t be interested in doing that every day…. not even MOST days or even SEVERAL days! :D Putting in my hour in front of the camera once a week is WAY more than enough for me.

Doing my lines was easier for me this week, because I’m pretty much “over” the process. I’ve already done it enough times to know that I *CAN* do it and approximately how long it takes me to do it. I was more in a “get it over with” mode than a “get the lines perfectly the way I want them” mode. It still took me 45 minutes to do, because until you physically say the lines over and over, they’re not natural enough to “perform” them AND remember what the next set of lines is. I remember looking at one section in particular and thinking “Damn… I shouldn’t have written so much stuff!” :D It was something like three full sentences with a break point at each one of them, so as I was finished “performing” section 1, I had to start ‘loading’ section 2 so I could pass through seamlessly as if it were ‘stream of consciousness’. Like I’m writing this right now as it comes to me, but if I had to SAY all of this stuff… in a row… in one take… it would take me forever to practice it long enough to have it seem like natural conversation. I could probably repeat it verbatim very quickly, but I would sound like a robot… worse than when people read information off of teleprompters that they really have no technical knowledge about.

continued…

WOWWWWW!!!

OK… So I just spent an hour recording my lines for my first episode of “The Lab”. I’m an editor, not an actor. I had the incorrect notion that what I was about to do was more like talking than acting. It was really something I’ve never experienced before……

That was an amazing trip. I wanted to blog it now, while I’m still feeling it.

There’s a journey that you take when you try to record something quasi-theatrical. I’m even more sensitive to it since I’m an editor. I’m more aware of what I can and can’t use.

What I mean by record is when YOU’RE the on-air talent. There’s so much to think about, but then you can’t actually afford to think about it because you have to deliver the lines… that is… IF you scripted your lines ahead of time, and preferably studied them. I did neither, since I’m not an actor. I had no idea it was going to be so hard to pull at least three directions together and then do the right thing with what you receive to deliver the goods. I have no idea whether I have a show or not. If I don’t, that’s fine. I’ve slated my release of episode 1 of “The Lab” for Friday. I still have tonight and all of tomorrow to do it over if I don’t have what I need.

The first thing I noticed was that I had to stop myself from wanting to deliver the lines in a stoic fashion, just to get them out. Then, I realized things would have been way better if I had scripted the lines and practiced them instead of trying to make stuff up on the fly. I had a couple of cues that I had figured out, but the problem was that by the time I was on the spot, doing the do… I had seen the scenes so many times that I wasn’t naturally affected anymore by watching them, and there was no natural launch into what I wanted to say about the section. I had to fake the launch and then make sure I wasn’t stiff delivering the actual lines that I had just decided upon and hadn’t practiced, ever. :/

The obvious question is why not pause the process until I made something up? :D The problem with that is that I needed to shoot the whole thing in one session so there was no chance of the camera moving from where it was. I decided to run the video from the monitors live instead of greenscreening them or matting out the screens and shrinking and distorting the video. I knew I was in it for the long haul as soon as I pressed the button, so I went for it and now I have whatever I have… if anything! :D

I can’t really feel the effects from the journey at this point, but I remember hearing the click that indicated that the camera had shut off and that there wasn’t anything more I could do about getting the show on tape. I remember this feeling of… ?relief? and a return to ?reality?… I’ll definitely be doing way more pre-production for my next episode, but this time, I was so glad to get the set done that I just had to try to make it happen. Actually, when I was completely ready, I wasn’t INTERESTED in filming the show right then. That was the first battle… actually getting myself to start in the first place. It was only after I was in the process that I realized how important a script is that you’ve practiced over and over.

There’s more to being on-air-talent than meets the eye… I mean if you’re going to do a decent job at it… and I’m not saying that *I* did a decent job! :D It’s that there are things you have to remember, and while you’re remembering them, you have to forget them so you can seem authentic or natural. You have to internalize them and then live with them and “act as if”. I guess this is why some actors *coughnicholascagecough* always seem to be portraying the exact same character. Their expression is the same in different movies, so you get the same effect when you watch the actor’s performance.

Another thing that’s tough is that you’re not talking to anybody! :D I mean, you know the audience is “inside” that little lens, but there’s really nobody there, so you have to pretend you’re talking to someone. Depending on the person or people that you imagine yourself talking to, you’re going to deliver differently. You’re going to sound different. You’re going to use different words. I’m sure my performance suffered from “identity crisis”, but I’ll just fix that in the edit. :D

Just about the only thing that I learned along the way that helped me was in order to get over the fact that I was no longer highly amused by the scenes, having seen them multiple times while I was selecting them, what I DID find amusing was how ‘lost’ I was and unable to recreate my surprise and interest in the shot. Fortunately… I found that realization so funny, that I ended up laughing at how ridiculous it was and realize that that was my out. Whenever I needed a laugh, I got a laugh off of the fact that I couldn’t laugh because the scene wasn’t funny to me anymore. :D WHAT LUCK! :D

So, yes… More scripting… More practicing (more like ANY practicing, since I didn’t practice at all, having no script, just some outline notes). I didn’t want to script it, but that’s because I didn’t know there were so many other things to worry about when you’re trying to make it happen from in front of the camera instead of behind it. About 1/3 of the way through, I decided to get over the fact that I was talking to a lens. :D It wasn’t so tough after that, but that was only one of several ‘issues’ that I was having.

I decided I was going to play some music to see if I wanted to use any of it to get me in or out of the piece. Unfortunately, the way the camera was set up, I had the choices of holding the guitar at a ridiculous angle to play it or play naturally, and the guitar wasn’t in the shot at all. Since I decided on using a single shot for the whole episode, I just had to miss out on the appearance of the guitar. I’ll have to see if anything can be done with that in post.

I was very glad when I heard the click indicating it was all over. It was a weight off, for sure. I learned A LOT about the process, and I’ll be ready for it next time. I’ll also be habituated to certain elements, so those won’t be issues for me. Depending on how it works, I might have to rethink my shooting style as well, or maybe shoot it twice.. once as a practice so I can see how everything works together and then a second time as the real deal. Another issue was that I was sitting in approximately the same place the whole time, so I said approximately the same thing again, closer to the camera…. that is, from what I could remember that I said, since I had no script! :/

Anyway… anyone preparing to do this for the first time, beware! hahahaha :D This is one of those situations where you have to learn by on-the-job training, because you’re not going to feel like this in any normal situation. Even having a normal conversation and having someone tape you isn’t the same as trying to deliver lines that you HOPE are going to connect scene A to scene B, while relating to the audience in an effective and preferably consistent manner. It doesn’t prepare you for talking to a lens and convincing yourself you’re talking to a person or people. It’s not as easy as it looks! :D

Actually, I started doing better (IMO) when I stopped caring if it was good or not. :)

How you light your video is one of the most important aspects of a shoot. This is especially true if the end result is going to be a compressed and encoded video to be shown on computers or the internet or even recorded back onto tape for broadcast.

Let’s say you have someone wearing black jeans and standing in a shadowy area. There’s nothing wrong with that, and depending on how well that scene is lit, it could have a very nice, mood-creating look to it. If it’s not lit well enough, you may have a problem when you compress and encode that video. Let’s say you shot the video with frames that are 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels high. If the target size of your final video is 320w by 240h, you now have 1/4 of the pixels available to describe that frame (1/2 height times 1/2 width). This means that the program is going to have to calculate the combination of four adjacent pixels to create the single pixel that’s now representing that space. Think of it as taking that 320×240 and stretching it to cover the original 640×480 frame. Each “pixel” is now going to cover four pixels of the original. Let’s call those A, B, C and D.

AB
CD

If A and C represent the shadowy wall, and B and D represent the black jeans in the original frame, this new pixel will have to be a calculation based on all four of those. If the lighting of the scene didn’t differentiate well enough between the two, they will be seen as approximately the same color. This is a problem, because the definitions of where one object starts and another begins becomes more vague after the compression. This is one reason why people wonder why their video looks so bad once they’ve compressed it, when it looked so good on the videotape, or they could clearly see the separation between the jeans and the wall on their television screens.

You can see the effect of poor lighting if you open your color wheel settings on a graphics or video editing program. Next to the color wheel, there’s a slider that only slides from white to black. This represents “luminance” (luma) or the amount of “whiteness” of the color that you’re choosing by the wheel. Notice how you can choose purple or choose blue or choose brown… and the farther you slide the luma slider towards black, each one of those colors starts to look like the exact same color? That’s what happens to your video. That’s what the computer sees when you personally knew at the time of the shoot what colors you were looking at, but there wasn’t enough light for the computer to be able to see what you saw.

Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack