Driving in Chennai is extremely easy and extremely hard at the same time.
The driving test is bizarre. The theoretical part is filled in online by the driving school tutor coaching you and you are not required to have any theoretical knowledge. The practical exam consists of driving in a circle using the first and second gear for ca. two minutes, stopping, driving back for ca. ten meters, stopping.
After that, the road is yours.
And it works. If you've never driven in Chennai before, here's the thing: you just do whatever everyone else is doing and you'll be fine.
Mostly.
You drive in a river of constant traffic with other cars, autos and bikers directly in front, behind, and at your sides. You need to drive at a consistent pace, without braking suddenly, without taking unexpected turns.
The single lane you are driving on has three lanes. You might not see them, but others do. Drive left, you will be constantly blocked by people stopping randomly on the road, slowing down to take turns, being stopped by the police. Drive right, you will be constantly blocked by people stopping to wait for a chance to take a right turn. Take the middle way. It doesn't look like there is a middle way, but it is always there.
Bikers and, especially, scooter drivers, are carrying all sorts of stuff including windows, tables, ladders and, occasionally, queen sized mattresses. If you didn't expect loading capacity of a scooter to exceed that of a car, you need to get used to it.
Calling someone a pube, while not considered high class, is acceptable on the road. Flipping a bird is absolutely not.
When driving, barely driving, or simply stuck in traffic, you can't but notice posters and ads. Political, commercial, and some simply announcing family events and functions---marriages, deaths, anniversaries.
A thing happened here. Over the last year or two these signs have been replaced almost entirely by AI-generated printouts. Movie posters, fully AI-generated. Ads. Even political campaign posters. These used to be hand-painted. And some were truly terrible. Face proportions all wrong. And they would always show the party leaders like movie heroes.
Things have changed. Political ads are now cheaper to create. They also all look the same. With the newly elected actor Vijay as the chief minister of the state the movie posters and political campaign posters have become kind-of mixed-up as well. I have already seen several where Vijay is giving a hearty kiss to some local party representative. The representations are probably not hundred percent consensual. But they are everywhere.
Back in the 2000s the indologist Bernard Bate has narrated the story of a storefront sign painter. Due to the transition of store signs to digitally printed ones the painter has lost most of his customer base and ended up unemployed. Eventually committed suicide.
It makes you wonder, with the movie posters. There are entire departments with people specializing in these; even in small details of these, in film poster psychology and typography. There's going to be another avalanche of highly qualified specialists either unemployed or facing pressure to change their niche. It makes you wonder where they end up.
On a more positive note, I've been looking into colorists of some of my favourite movies, and it's been a bizzarre experience. Bizzarre, because with film editors, the editing process takes time, often a lot of time, but colour grading can be faster once you get really proficient at it. So some of these people are everywhere.
Yvan Lucas, the color timer of The City of the Lost Children and Delicatessen, was later dragged into Hollywood. Transitioned from film grading to digital post-production and is listed as the head colorist of Long Ago in Hollywood, Irishman, Barbie, even some of the Hunger Games movies. It's really peculiar---editors tend to specialize in a particular niche, just like directors or cinemats, but now I'm here, wondering how I can possibly reconcile Barbie with The City of the Lost Children.
And that's not the only one. Some of the really popular colorists are seemingly everywhere. Michael Hatzer, colorist of the first Hunger Games movie, graded also things like Ready Player One, No Country for Old Men, The Revenant, and the One Piece Netflix series season 1. Steven Scott, who's graded The Children of Men, is also the colorist of the Fifty Shades of Grey and one of the Avengers movies. The list goes on.
But it's hectic; with professional grading pretty much every minute counts and there's no space for an error. This might be one reason why oldimers---color timers, like Yvan Lucas, who have actually worked with exposing film to differently coloured lights to achieve a particular effect---remain so relevant.
But, Shopify App Store time! I keep working on my scraper which gets some relevant stats for the 20,000 applications I am tracking, and I love it. At the moment the series of pages listing research data I use is officially too cluttered for anyone not unhinged to use efficiently, but I can't stop myself from executing new ideas pretty much the moment I get them. The amount of data I store makes this a highly impractical exercise were I to ever open the data for public use---the size of the tables and the relations between them make the app pretty slow---but I love everything about it.
My latest additions---a separate page for promotional video research from the published apps, and a separate page tracking reviewer activity---presenting data about the actual stores which have left reviews on the App Store.
Findings? As of now it's very early stage, so very few. But it seems that on average, one reviewer store would leave two app reviews, the mean really skewed by few significant outliers. In general, it's really a wild west, reviews are few and very few apps seem to have proper, functioning pipelines for getting new reviews. Only a few merchants leave more than one stray review for an app, which is more than disappointing.
Unsurprisingly, review apps do an excellent job at getting new reviews, with Judge.me being particularly good---with close to 40k reviews, as opposed to 13k by the next most popular app. Loox, the biggest competitor to Judge.me, tags behind with 8k reviews.
Videos? I was surprised that Judge.me, a company actually hiring promotional video producers (looking at you, Cameron!), does not have a video on the app store, that's really bizzarre.
For other apps? 6k out of total 20 have videos.
Overall quality? Not great, with few exceptions, based on the few I've seen.
Lightward as a company is unbeatable when it comes to promo video quality, because of a few reasons, not least because the founder team (or, possibly, everyone on their team) is very passionate about their products.
Major companies, Meta and TikTok, have decent but generic motion graphics. Videos with motion graphics and stock footage in general summarize possibly 90% of the few videos I've seen.
There's a few exceptions. Awin, an extremely poorly reviewed affiliate platform, has a perfectly acceptable promotional video with good use of colour. Printify stands out with an amusing promotional video. It might be surprising that 'promotional video with more than one actor and green screen and no stock video footage' is exceptional, especially given that some of the apps have spent heavy funding on software development. But it's also interesting. Again, Shopify App Store is still the Wild West of sorts. It's expanding rapidly, but it's still populated by eccentrics and individuals crushing it as opposed to behemoth companies. It's where the beauty lies.
That's scratching the surface.
So long, I'm off to stalk more colorists.