In this industry, I'm a certified old-timer. Not in the sense of "I start my car with a crank in the radiator" but my first paying job was sweeping up the piles of confetti in a computer punch-card center after hours. The center had two 8-track tapes: Elvis' Christmas Album, and Steve Martin's "Let's Get Small". Forgetting about the long-term damage of hearing "Blue Christmas" approximately a billion times, let's just say I grew up comfortable with digital technology.
My father started programming for a living in 1959. I still remember him bringing home huge hard drives (2 feet across, held maybe 5 megs), as well as the original floppy discs—black plastic media about a foot square, and definitely "floppy".
I started doing temp design work during the "Desktop Publishing Revolution", I chiseled out a modicum of industry respect during the "Desktop Video Revolution", and I've built a respectable company during the "Internet Revolution". Accustomed as we all are with the rapidity of progress, we toss such terms about as casually as we discuss silent movies, disco, or New Coke—but entire industries have crumbled and rebuilt themselves during the last two decades, and many of us have been along for the ride.
In 1989 I worked alongside Linotype operators, amusing myself with Pagemaker even as the skilled typesetter sitting next to me experienced early-onset-obsolescence. In 1992 I produced videos in $280-per-hour editing suites—nothing that cannot now be accomplished by $15-per-hour grad students using a laptop and a copy of Premiere Pro. I produced my first training series, "Total AE", in a studio in Seattle, where I rendered titles next to a man shooting a film title scene on an Oxbury Animation Stand. And to my credit (or blame) I have helped drive the transformation, training waves of newcomers, teaching them to thrive in this brave new world.
So now, as I look around at the current state of things, I cannot help but wonder where the next revolution will occur? From where will the next wave of digital Huns ride? What current industry is poised for upheaval?
The obvious candidate, for years now, has been 3D. The industry of Pixar is certainly ripe for an upheaval: tools are typically too complicated (or expensive) for casual users, fast computers are really cheap and video cards can pretty much calculate anything in real-time now. But a key component of a revolution is customers, and 3D's market remains fairly narrow. Try as they might, companies have failed to find a way to monetize 3D content beyond games, movies, or TV.
Change may emerge the gaming world, now that casual games are all the rage, and A-list offerings like Spore and LittleBigPlanet are shipping easy-to-grasp content-creation tools. If the popularity of these titles proves to be more than a flash in the pan (and users craft content more compelling than walking genitalia) we could be on to something.
I'm also keenly interested in how the tools continue to evolve. Sketchup shows us that drawing in 3D doesn't have to be arduous (heck, I wish several Adobe apps would borrow some of Sketchup's alignment tricks). Spore and LittleBigPlanet are showing that a vast library of objects and textures can serve the needs of most users, who would rather assemble scenes from a stock of of bricks, boards, and stencils—without having to first construct the bricks and boards, or mix the paint from scratch.
Time will tell. In the meanwhile, what do you think? Are we finally on the brink of 3D revolution? Or is this just another evolutionary step in the slow plod of progress? Do you see any other areas that are ripe for upheaval or reinvention?
