Tag Archives: Occam’s razor

THE FUTURISTIC FILM INDUSTRY

The future is coming fast—especially in the film industry.  Some of it’s already here. Augmented and virtual reality. CGIs. Digital recreation. Algorithmic editing. Edge computing. 5G/6G networks. Cloned voices. Scanned actors. Non-real celebrities. Drones. Artificially intelligent screenwriting. Remote filmmaking. 3D printed sets. 3D previsualization. Real-time rendering. Sound and light tech breakthroughs. DJI Ronin 4D 6K condensed cinematic lenses. Micro cameras. Avatars & holograms. Blockchain, crypto & NFTs. The Internet of Things (IoT). And, of course, the Metaverse.

The global film industry is huge. It’s astoundingly enormous, and it’s growing massively. According to a study by Globe Newswire, the worldwide film industry grew from $271.83 billion (US) in March 2021 to $325.06 billion in March 2022. That’s a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.4% indicating in another four years, 2026, the film-making world will generate 479.63 billion dollars. By the end of this decade, it could be worth a trillion.

If you’re a regular DyingWords follower, you might’ve noticed I haven’t published a book in nearly two years. That’s because I’m immersed in the film industry—studying screenwriting, producing film content under my new company Twenty-Second Century Entertainment (22 ENT), and generally learning what this business is about. I’ve also done on-camera work as a crime and forensic resource in non-scripted documentaries that flowed from blog posts I’ve created. Plus, I’ve made some great filmmaking friends who are teaching this old dog new tricks.

Before I expand on future film technology, I’ll give you a snapshot of what I’ve got on the go. My eight-part Based-On-True-Crime book series is contractually optioned by a producer who has it before a major film company. If this gets “Green Lit”, we have a total of thirty episodes loglined under the working title Occam’s Razor. My hardboiled, private detective storytelling concept called City Of Danger is a twenty-four-part series with a right-of-first-refusal agreement through a leading netstreamer. (See my webpage for City Of Danger—scheduled for 2024). The Fatal Shot is a film production “treatment” I wrote which is being “shopped around”, and I’m collaborating with a long-time colleague on a very interesting screen project titled Lightning Man that I believe has excellent film potential.

Enough of my BS. Let’s look at the futuristic film industry.

Everyone’s talking about the metaverse. Especially Mark Zuckerberg who rebranded Facebook into Meta. He’s betting big that this is Internet 3.0 and, from what I know, I’m sure he’s right even though he can’t get Apple to form a joint venture.

The term metaverse isn’t new. It’s been around three decades and was once known as cyberspace. Although the metaverse is already here and in its infancy or at an inflection point, it’s a hard concept to wrap your head around. Maybe it’s best to let Mr. Zuckerberg explain:

“The “metaverse” is a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you. You’ll be able to hang out with friends, work, play, learn, shop, create and more. It’s not necessarily about spending more time online — it’s about making the time you do spend online more meaningful. The metaverse isn’t a single product one company can build alone. Just like the internet, the metaverse exists whether Facebook is there or not. And it won’t be built overnight. Many of these products will only be fully realized in the next 10-15 years. While that’s frustrating for those of us eager to dive right in, it gives us time to ask the difficult questions about how they should be built.”

Zuckerberg says the metaverse is the mobile web’s successor. First there was Internet 1.0 which was static. You could surf the pages and send emails on a desktop. Internet 2.0—where we’re at now—is mobile. It’s smartphone streaming and TikToking. If you want to call the metaverse Internet 3.0, then you need to use compatible words like immersive, interoperable, and integrated. It’s a world of shared virtual experience that can happen at home, on the go, and wherever you are with a connected device.

What the metaverse holds for the film industry is not so much technical advances in production. It’s deliverability and viewer experience. The metaverse won’t be the place you’ll be watching a movie. It’s where you’ll be fully interacting with your five senses—sight, sound, small, taste, and feel. It’ll be like you’re right there in the middle of the set.

If you’re interested in learning more about the metaverse, here are three resources I recommend:

The Metaverse: And How it Wil Revolutionize Everything —Book by Matthew Ball

Value Creation in the Metaverse — 76-page pdf by McKinsey & Company

What is the Metaverse? — Article at Government Technology

There are two evolving technologies that’ll give you that immersed feeling. One is augmented reality (AR). The other is virtual reality (VR). There’s a big difference between the two immersive platforms.

Augmented reality is enhancing, or augmenting, real events with computerization. AR morphs the mundane, physical world into a colorful, visual place by projecting visual images and characters into an existing framework. It adds to the user’s real-life experience.

Virtual reality creates a world that doesn’t exist and makes it seem very, very real. Think the movie Avatar. VR also incorporates sensory-improving devices like goggles, helmets, headsets, and suits.

You could say computer-generated imagery, or CGIs, is old technology and not something futuristic. You’d be wrong. Advancements in CGI development are nothing short of breathtaking. The CGIs five years from now will make today’s stuff look like a preschooler’s drawing.

Technology’s ability to recreate faces, bodies, and even dialogue is dramatically improving. It’s progressing to the point where it’ll be possible to make an exact replica of just about anyone. Would you like to meet a completely believable Elvis Presley? How about Marilyn Monroe?

Speaking of Elvis and Marilyn, cloned voices are becoming the thing. Computerized synthetization takes old audio of past people and recreates their voices into a life-like state. This process will use artificial intelligence (AI) to build a smoky Marilyn or a crooning Elvis and respond to printed dialogue. It like the current AI text-to-speech but on steroids.

We can’t talk about futuristic filmmaking without bringing up artificial intelligence. AI is moving ahead at lightning speed and it’s bringing the film industry with it. I’m fascinated with AI developments. But I’m also a bit fearful. Here’s a DyingWords post I wrote a while back titled Helpful or Homicidal — How Dangerous is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

One thing about AI I’m really looking forward to in the film industry is this: Artificially Intelligent Screenwriting. If you’ve ever written, or have tried to write, a screenplay, then you appreciate how much work and effort goes into it, never mind the brain drain of creating unique content.

Recently, researchers at New York University built an artificial intelligence screenwriting program. They called it Benjamin who, among other things, wrote an original soundtrack for its movie after being programmed with 30,000 songs in its data input drive. Can you imagine the 2025 Academy Awards, “And the Oscars for best screenplay and soundtrack goes to… Benjamin the Bot.”

AI isn’t just real in script and score writing. Virtual actors and non-real celebrities are on the way in. It’ll soon be possible to select the movie cast and digitally scan them, then recreate their entire actions throughout the film without them being physically present. It’s well within the realm of possibility to have a virtual Ryan Reynolds or Anne Hathaway act their parts while the flesh and blood realities sit at home. After being paid a substantial sum for licensing their images, of course.

Turning real people into realistic avatars or digital images of themselves is a current technology. Take a look at the leading lady on my City Of Danger promo poster. That’s a real person (a stunningly attractive and stylish, high-status lady, by the way) who was scanned and run through a NextGen Pixlr filter. The plan for City Of Danger is to digitize the cast and set them loose in virtual reality following the human-written episodic scripts translated by AI. Fun stuff!

Drones are fun stuff, too. What used to be aerial filmed with helicopters and airplanes is now drone territory. Drones are far cheaper and much safer. With highly sophisticated controls and cameras, filming by drones will mostly replace piloted vehicles. Take a look at this drone footage of the new Vancouver Island Film Studios, twenty minutes north of my place: https://youtu.be/aTsyRrROx34

Remote filmmaking will put a big dent into on-site producing. With huge advances in film technology, internet sharing, and cost-cutting, more and more productions will happen on sound stages like the six built at Vancouver Island Film Studios. It’s realistic that a director—yes, a real person—will do their work remotely. Instead of fighting traffic and flight delays, a filmmaker will be able to do their job sitting on a yacht in the Maldives and direct their work in the metaverse.

3D printed sets are soon to be here, if not right now. It’s going to be far more efficient to create film set artifacts rather than source them. Those 3D objects can also be scanned and set into virtual reality situations.

3D filming has come a long way since the days audiences sat watching The Power Of Love back in 1922 and wearing those goofy glasses. Now, we have up-close 3D on the laptops and soon to be glasses-free for the big screen. But the big wait for is 4D filming, and it’s a promise to come through VR in the metaverse. Instead of only seeing height, width, and length, you’ll experience depth. You’ll be inside the picture—on the inside looking out at the 3D world.

There are massive changes coming in cameras, sound recording, and lighting effects. Have you seen Top Gun Maverick? That is amazing work, and that’s just the next step in futuristic filmmaking. And you know what? Very little was done through CGIs. It’s just super sophisticated camera, sound, and lighting effects. Here’s how they did it: https://www.indiewire.com/2022/06/top-gun-maverick-making-of-cockpit-1234729694/

Top Gun Maverick used a Sony Rialto Camera Extension System. Yes, it’s expensive but so were renting the jets at over $11,000 per flying hour. More reasonable in my upcoming league is the no-longer-futuristic DJI Ronin 4D $-Axis 6K Cinematic Camera that recently came online at $9,000.00, and that’s just for the lens. Think about it—a 4D, 6,000-pixel digital camera. There isn’t a 6K monitor yet made, but I bet it’s on its way.

Micro cameras have amazing potential. The future is wide open in melding nanotechnology with filmmaking. I can’t imagine what’s happening at the molecular level.

I can imagine, however, what’s happening in the post-production level. It’s not just screenwriting, casting, set building, and cinematography that takes time and money. Editing is a huge time suck in the filmmaking process. What’s just arriving is algorithmic film editing. This is AI software that thinks through the film data and makes automatic jump cuts at precisely the right moment.

Have you heard of edge computing? I hadn’t until I began investigating the futuristic film industry. Edge computing is capturing data at its source and not having to upload it to a server for processing. That eliminates having to use an expensive and laggy “middle-man” like a cloud or a mechanical server. Using edge computing to harness and develop digital data speeds up processing time and reduces costs.

Hologram displays are in their crude evolutionary form today. That’s going to change soon, and holograms are part of the new, end-product “dimensional delivery”. By dimensional delivery, I mean the 4D technology where you’ll be able to watch a digitized hologram of your show. It will be like watching a completely realistic stage play, and you’ll have the option of joining in.

“Joining in” is a fascinating film delivery concept. In the future, algorithms will track your viewing habits/choices and will give you the option of personalizing your selection. You can make yourself into an avatar and can substitute your avatar for a cast member. On the international stage, you can change your race, gender, and language.

All this talk of high-density technology needs delivery infrastructure makeover. Internet providers today don’t have the speed or capacity to process and send out 5K resolution and totally digitized, virtual reality entertainment. But that’s changing, too, with 5G.

5G is the 5th generation wireless mobile network. It’s already happening and 6G is planned. To serve the metaverse, massively higher, multi-Gbps and ultra-low latency is crucial. The 5 and 6G networks will deliver the films of the future that today’s 4G system can’t.

One more film-world reality is money. Movies cost a lot of money to make. I’m told a show like Occam’s Razor typically budgets at around $50,000 per edited minute of film. Doing the math, a 60-minute episode would cost $3 million, give or take a fudge factor. So, a 10-episode season would cost the film’s financier around $30 million. To me, that’s a lot of coin—a lot of coin that can be saved through emerging technology.

Future technology will significantly reduce time and expenses in film making. Payment methods are changing, too. Blockchain will keep a digital trail and funds will commonly exchange in crypto currency. Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) will probably be part of the package, though they’re going through a reevaluation at the moment.

I’m a newbie to the film industry, but everyone working in the business is a newbie to what’s coming at us from the future. My niche is making content—inventing and telling stories through characters, plots, and dialogues. But to make decent (meaning saleable) content, I must be aware of how the overall film production and delivery systems work. That’s what the past two years have been about.

City Of Danger seems to be saleable content. At least one film producer at a name-brand netstreamer thinks so. Realistically, the show is a few years away—2024 at the earliest—because the technology for what we want to portray isn’t perfected yet. Our plan is to screenwrite the 24 episodes (underway) and have it ready to be digitally produced in virtual reality by scanning the actors, turning them into avatars, and showing them as you see Susan Silverii who graces the promo poster. This should cut production costs to maybe half of today’s typical rates of filming a live actor and on-location series like Occam’s Razor.

Wish us luck. Or, as they say in theatrics, “Break a leg”.

USING OCCAM’S RAZOR WITHOUT CUTTING YOUR OWN THROAT

Occam’s razor is the law of parsimony. It’s a mental model of reasoning. At its core, Occam’s—also spelled Ockham’s or Ocham’s—states, “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” Simpler yet, when solving a problem, the simplest solution is usually the right solution… but not too simple lest you cut your own throat.

A razor is a philosophical principle, or heuristic (shortcut) rule of thumb, that allows you to cut to the chase of the matter and shave off, or eliminate, unlikely explanations for a phenomenon and/or avoid unnecessary actions. Razors include three reasoning forms: deductive, inductive, and abductive. We’ll get to those in a bit, but cutting to the chase of this piece, the simplest example of Occam’s razor is the duck test.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, has feathers, and quacks, then it’s probably a duck. There’s also the zebra test commonly used in medical fields to avoid unnecessarily complicated diagnosis—when hearing hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

That’s all fine and dandy when examining webbed birds and hooved mammals. How about using Occam’s razor in everyday situations like homicide investigations?

I was taught back in Murder School 101 to always use Occam’s razor for solving crimes. My mentor was an old sergeant named Fred Mahle. Wonderful guy, rest his soul. BTW, Fred was the RCMP detective who got child serial killer Clifford Olson to confess and turn over ten bodies for a fee of a hundred grand. Best business deal ever. Ten families got closure. Olson got life and painfully died in jail from pancreatic cancer.

Fred was right when he said, “Looking at murder cases, the simplest answer is usually the right answer, but be careful with that logic. It could backfire, and you could cut your own throat.” Fred also taught me that the more bizarre a situation, the closer the answer was to home. Additionally, Fred said, “You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar” and, “You slide further on bullshit than you do on gravel”.

Anyway, back to Occam’s razor and how this logic works.

William of Occam was a fourteenth-century Franciscan friar who had trouble with conventional Christian doctrine like miracles. As a scholastic philosopher and theologian, William took a heuristic (mental shortcut) approach to explain the unexplainable. History credits William of Occam with wise quips like, “It is vain to do more with what can be done with fewer”, “A plurality is not to be posited without necessity”, “Circumstances being equal, that is better and more valuable which requires fewer”, and “Entities are not to be unnecessarily multiplied”.

Greats like Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, and Sagan all bought into the law of parsimony—parsimony being defined as, “Quality of being careful with money or resources: Thrift. State of being stingy, economy in the use of a means to an end. Economy of explanation in conformity with Occam’s razor”. These thinkers knew the simplest explanation to a problem was preferable to one that’s more complex. (Usually).

Minds like these deferred to core mental models which are the way we see the world and interpret reality. Mental models include concepts like core competence, first principles thinking, thought experiment, second-order thinking, probabilistic thinking, inversion, and Occam’s razor. Great minds also employed the three forms of reasoning.

Deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning support any analytical application of Occam’s razor. Rather than paraphrase what deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning mean, I’ll simply copy and paste this piece from Merriam-Webster:

Deductive Reasoning

Deduction is generally defined as “the deriving of a conclusion by reasoning.” Its specific meaning in logic is “inference in which the conclusion about particulars follows necessarily from general or universal premises.” Simply put, deduction—or the process of deducing—is the formation of a conclusion based on generally accepted statements or facts. It occurs when you are planning out trips, for instance. Say you have a 10 o’clock appointment with the dentist and you know that it takes 30 minutes to drive from your house to the dentist’s. From those two facts, you deduce that you will have to leave your house at 9:30, at the latest, to be at the dentist’s on time.

Deductive reasoning always follows necessarily from general or universal premises. If a sandwich is defined as “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between,” and a hot dog is defined as “a frankfurter; especially a frankfurter heated and served in a long split roll” then one must deduce that any hot dog served in a split roll is a sandwich.

Inductive Reasoning

Whereas in deduction the truth of the conclusion is guaranteed by the truth of the statements or facts considered (the hot dog is served in a split roll and a split roll with a filling in the middle is a sandwich), induction is a method of reasoning involving an element of probability. In logic, induction refers specifically to “inference of a generalized conclusion from particular instances.” In other words, it means forming a generalization based on what is known or observed.

For example, at lunch you observe 4 of your 6 coworkers ordering the same sandwich. From your observation, you then induce that the sandwich is probably good—and you decide to try it yourself. Induction is at play here since your reasoning is based on an observation of a small group, as opposed to universal premises.

Abductive Reasoning

The third method of reasoning, abduction, is defined as “a syllogism in which the major premise is evident but the minor premise and therefore the conclusion only probable.” Basically, it involves forming a conclusion from the information that is known. A familiar example of abduction is a detective’s identification of a criminal by piecing together evidence at a crime scene. In an everyday scenario, you may be puzzled by a half-eaten sandwich on the kitchen counter. Abduction will lead you to the best explanation. Your reasoning might be that your teenage son made the sandwich and then saw that he was late for work. In a rush, he put the sandwich on the counter and left.

If you have trouble differentiating deduction, induction, and abduction, thinking about their roots might help. All three words are based on Latin ducere, meaning “to lead.” The prefix de- means “from,” and deduction derives from generally accepted statements or facts. The prefix in- means “to” or “toward,” and induction leads you to a generalization. The prefix ab- means “away,” and you take away the best explanation in abduction.

Whether you reason by deduction, induction, or abduction, you can always learn from what the greats had to say about using Occam’s razor. Here are three reasonable quotes worth noting:

Albert Einstein referred to Occam’s razor when developing his theory of special relativity. He formulated his own version: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. Or, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Physicist Stephen Hawking advocated for Occam’s razor in his book, A Brief History of Time: “We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us mortals. It seems better to employ the principle known as Occam’s razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed.”

Isaac Newton used Occam’s razor, too, when developing his theories. Newton stated: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” Newton sought to make his theories, including the three laws of motion, as simple as possible, with only the necessary minimum of underlying assumptions.

Furthermore, simple is as simple does. A conclusion can’t rely just on its simplicity. It must be backed by empirical evidence. And when using Occam’s razor to make deductions, we must avoid falling prey to confirmation bias. In the case of the NASA moon landing conspiracy theory, for example, some people consider it simpler for the moon landing to have been faked, others for it to have been real.

Lisa Randall best expressed the issues with the narrow application of Occam’s razor in her book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe: “Another concern about Occam’s Razor is just a matter of fact. The world is more complicated than any of us would have been likely to conceive. Some particles and properties don’t seem necessary to any physical processes that matter—at least according to what we’ve deduced so far. Yet they exist. Sometimes the simplest model just isn’t the correct one. This is why it’s important to remember that opting for simpler explanations still requires work. They may be easier to falsify, but still require effort. And that the simpler explanation, although having a higher chance of being correct, is not always true.”

Occam’s razor is not intended to be a substitute for critical thinking. It is merely a tool to help make that thinking more efficient.

Harlan Coben has disputed many criticisms of Occam’s razor by stating that people fail to understand its exact purpose: “Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess.”

Occam didn’t have the only razor in the think-tank shop. Other greats contributed to the critical thinking crowd. Here are some examples:

Hanlon’s razor — Never attribute to malice which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hitchen’s razor — What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Hume’s razor — What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is.

Alder’s razor — If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it’s not worthy of debate.

Sagan’s razor — Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Okay. This is all philosophical and eggheady. What about some real-life examples of critical thinking used to disprove flawed logic using Occam’s razor? To combat the Walmart of Weird Beliefs and the Grab Bag of Fake News? I’m not going to try and explain bizarre behavior like QAnon, Proud Boys, or crazy conspiracy theorists who wear tinfoil hats. As my wise, redneck brother-in-law Darryl says, “Ya can’t fix stupid.”

But I will touch on two high-profile puzzles that can be solved through the application of the law of parsimony—Occam’s razor. One is the JFK assassination. I’m a life-long student of that event and, at one time, I wasted hours debating the case on an internet board. Like Darryl says, “Ya can’t fix stupid”, so I gave up.

The Kennedy assassination brings out craziness in people. Conspiracy Theorists (CTs) will have you believe in a massive cover-up by the Illuminati, a hit by the Mafia, a plot by the military-industrial alliance, LBJ did it, and on and on and on and on…

Using Occam’s razor applied to the case facts, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. A deranged man brought his cheap rifle to work and shot the President of the United States—arguably the most powerful and important person in the world—from a tall building. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? After 57 years there hasn’t been one single irrefutable piece of evidence that anyone other than Oswald was involved. Nothing. The simplest answer here is the correct answer.

Another Occam’s application is explaining the enigma of Donald Trump. Trump supporters will have you believe the man is an impeccably-crafted genius with sight farther than the furthest horizon. Others, using Occam’s razor, simply say the man is a natural-born grifter and a common asshole. I know which explanation I’ll accept.

Remember, Occam’s razor is complemented by other mental models, including fundamental error distribution, especially Hanlon’s razor, confirmation bias, availability heuristic thinking, and hindsight bias. The nature of mental models is that they tend to all interlock in a lattice and work best in conjunction.

It is important to note, like any mental model, Occam’s razor is not foolproof. Like Fred said, use it with care, lest you cut your own throat. This is especially crucial when it comes to important or risky decisions. There are exceptions to any rule, and we should never blindly follow the results of applying a mental model which logic, experience, or empirical evidence contradict.

Using Occam’s razor, though, you’ll generally call out quackery with the duck test, and when you hear hoofbeats behind you, in most cases you should think horses, not zebras—unless you’re on the African savannah.