Interviewer- It is definitely a magnitude lower resolution than print. Although, I imagine that for certain kinds of text on the web, we will develop appliances to conveniently print the material that is principally textual. Otherwise, new media is a quick hitting environment.

Harry Marks: As an example, I got onto some strange site the other night, and I can't remember the name of it, but featured this incredibly angry guy. I mean, incredibly angry. But he had the mechanical ability and sensibility to transmit his anger and fear or whatever through this document on the web. Because he used sound. He used disturbing images. And it ran fast. And I think that this was something that you could almost not turn away from until it started to bog down in the mechanics of bandwidth. Bandwidth is a problem. We are standing on the edge of this incredible precipice. I guess it's a convergence of forces. As a result of some deal between Microsoft, AT&T, Sony for a new delivery platform, bandwidth may not be an issue at all. I don't know what the future is. But we are obviously moving toward the internet becoming a more transparent medium. And it has to be very transparent. You can't keep getting error messages, and stalls, and waits. It's got to be a transparent process. Otherwise, the rhythm and the story is lost. That's why I've been looking at about five or six different presentation applications. And I'm trying to figure out ways for people to do what Susie Clark was doing in a very, very push button kind of way. You know what PhotoDeluxe is? [Adobe’s home consumer photo manipulation tool]

Interviewer: Yeah.

Harry Marks: What we need is PhotoDeluxe for movies. My original interest was to create templates so that people could pour documents in and they would come out as a finished piece. I don't know that that product will ever see the light of day because what has to happen underneath is so dicey. It's so complicated. It's like Premiere[Adobe's professional standard video editing tool] on steroids with what we'd be asking it to do. I think it's just fraught with dangerous frustration for the user, and if the users get frustrated, they'll run away.

But I think there are products to look at out there. There are ways to enable people to tell very compelling stories that really would lead them along, draw them out, suggest things to them that would get them out of a brain dry moment. And I just think it has to be easier than applications like Premiere.

Interviewer: I agree. We have found a way to teach with more sophisticated tools like Photoshop and Premiere, but we are always considering having an approach to a workshop that is not so demanding on the introductory students. I am considering mastering PowerPoint. Because PowerPoint '98 may be all I need. And it's kind of out there and ubiquitous anyway because it ships with Office '98.

Harry Marks: We're talking the same language. That's exactly what I'm talking about. That the PowerPoint model is really perfect. I had a good experience with making an effective presentation with a similar product called Persuasion when we first started the Advanced Technology program at AFI. It’s all you need, a product with good templates that can play all of the various templates. Interviewer: Anything that allows you to know what the principles of assembly are in a relatively short period of time. In the sense that the way we do with writing. We kind of know where to put nouns and verbs and subjects.