Life @ Light Speed

I have been conscious of a love of light for a good portion of my life. As a director, DP and storyteller, I feel fortunate to practice a commercial art form that lets me explore that as an important pillar.

To most of us, light has a few basic properties. One is the physical delight of what we see; rainbows, brightness, shadows, diffraction and the sort of stuff that dazzles our eyes. Second is heat, think sun that warms our globe and keeps us alive. But third is the science, the heady Einstein relativity and the movement of electrons… the out-of-grasp nerdy that in simple name could be called the speed of light.

Not many of us pay attention to this third, but all the communication, information, media, delight and, yes, noise that flies around us every moment is founded on the microchip and the basic concept of digital electrons moving at or near the speed of light. It struck me that right here and now, Life @ Light Speed is The Metaphor for much of our digital world.

In a moment of wonder as one trying to keep up and contribute, I realized with a little amused delight that I have been playing with and manipulating the speed of light for some time now. Wow. OK, not quite as physicist or a super hero, but subtly in my work as a media storyteller.

We achieve now with the help of the digital design but draw from deep roots in the analog of the human. Moving media storytellers harness the Light as a representation the Life, and can make it more recognizable, emotional, mysterious or known…

For me this inspired a revisit and a fast montage re-edit from a project that occurred right near the turn of the millennium at a threshold of this digital era. We took a moment to cut together a short visual ode from some of the gems and pieces as a brief reflection of metaphor: Life @ Light Speed. It seems as relevant today as it did eleven years ago.

I look forward to conversing soon.

-Jay Alan