[quote]

A great quote from Steve Jobs in 1995, and a nice echo of my earlier Steve Jobs remembrance post:

"Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself.

I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that 'I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I've built two other Heathkits so I could build that.'

Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way."

[end quote]

"In a hundred years, perhaps he will have been reduced to a caricature. History does that. Maybe he’ll be seen as some genius inventor who created the first computers in his garage. It won’t be an accurate image, necessarily, when seen through the mists of time. But I have a hard time thinking he won’t be remembered."

"Filmmaking is essentially the art of sustaining the suspension of disbelief: from shot to shot, scene to scene."

At the end of the day, real-world constraints of making movies > diegetic consistency.

"Ager’s thesis seem to be: Since Kubrick was a perfectionist, anything that seems like an error in Kubrick’s work must not be an error, but must instead be a deliberate choice... I’m sure there is a more official name, but let’s call this situation the genius fallacy."

Commence using the term "the genius fallacy".

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

From 2004.

Stephen Fry spends a day at 1 Infinite Loop and an hour with Steve Jobs.