Name: How the "Ken Burns Effect" Came to Be
Uploaded: 2025-10-18T14:45:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How the "Ken Burns Effect" Came to Be' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How the "Ken Burns Effect" Came to Be' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-18. Transcript available.

Ken Burns, thank you so much for hanging out, man.
My pleasure, my pleasure. Good to be with you.
And thank you for all your examination of humanity, I guess, through
documentaries.
I was like, I know about you as most people did, you know,
kind of when you burst onto the scene with the Ken Burns effect.
I think that's when it kind of hit a lot of my culture, you know.
You're like, instead of hiring actors and everything, we're just going to
slightly.
Want to hear the story of how that happened?
Yeah, I would love to.
Pretty cool.
So, you know, I've been trying to make films about American history since, like,
the mid-70s.
And I'd had some success, a couple Academy Award nominations,
but I'd hit the jackpot when this big series in 1990 came out on the Civil War
series.
Yeah.
Which, you know, used the photographs and stuff like that.
And our idea was to energetically explore the landscape of a painting
and treat an old photograph like it was a feature filmmaker's master shot,
having a wide, a medium, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, an insert of detail.
So we were just sort of very energetically exploring the landscape of each
image.
And so I got a call in 2002, November, and it said it was Steve Jobs.
I went, really?
And he goes, yeah.
He said, will you come out and visit me?
And I said, yeah, that's me knocking at the door.
So a few weeks later, in December of 2002, I'm in a room with him.
We're talking.
And he brings in a couple of pretty nervous engineers.
Yeah.
And they're, and I'm a Luddite.
And particularly-
You're a Luddite?
Yeah.
Meaning I'm not a big computer person.
It represents a group in England in the 19th century who were opposed to
technological changes.
And so-
Okay.
So Mennonite, Luddite, Amish, similar.
Well, not quite.
It wasn't religious as much as a kind of a social, anyway.
Okay.
So Amish without the dairy kind of thing.
That's right.
Exactly.
So it's, it's basically folks who are opposed to it.
I'm not.
I'm just inept.
So my children and my grandchildren helped me with all of that.
Anyway, Steve is saying, look, we've been working on this thing.
And every Mac computer that comes out next month, January of 2003, is going to
have this feature on it.
And he's showing me, and it's sort of like you can upload your photographs and
pan and zoom on them.
Very, very simply, a kind of crude, superficial version of what we do or try to
do with our stuff, to wake up the image, to wake the dead, you know.
So I'm looking at it, and I'm kind of going, cool, because I don't really know
what's going on.
And he says, so we'd like to keep the working title.
And I said, what's that?
And he said, the Ken Burns effect, I said, you know, I don't do commercial
endorsements.
He goes, what?
And the engineers kind of blanch.
And I'd known a little bit that he had a temper.
He never showed it to me.
But we went back to his office, and after an hour, I worked out an agreement
that he could use it, but I'd.
Yeah, I already had a temper.
His iPhone always had a cracked screen.
Maybe.
But I know some folks who got yelled at.
He never, he said, what?
So at the end, I walked out, and he basically agreed to give us what turned out
to be over a million dollars of hardware and software that we gave away to
nonprofits, except for one or two computers that stayed in the office, because
we didn't have a good Mac computer in the office.
And then we became friends for the rest of his life.
And so whenever I visited Silicon Valley, I'd stay with him, you know, his kids,
his daughter became an intern for us for a couple of semesters.
So it was a really good relationship, but it is really funny.
It's the technological tail that wags the dog of what I'm trying to do, which
is take these old things where you don't have newsreels or you don't have
living witnesses,
and try to wake up moments in the past and make them as dramatically compelling
as you would if you could talk to some veteran, say, of the Iraq war who's
still alive.
Well, you certainly mastered it, man, you know?
I mean, and the Ken Burns effect, it's like, that was at the time where
everybody was trying to be, could suddenly, everybody could suddenly be a
filmmaker, right?
That's right.
Well, this is what Steve did.
I mean, by inventing this, he made us all filmmakers.
He made us, it democratized it all, and what you needed were the tools to be
able to polish it.
I mean, my kids now and my grandkids can do stuff with this that I wouldn't
have any idea how to do it.
And one of the cruder tools is the Ken Burns effect, which has saved lots of
vacations, lots of birthdays, lots of memorial services, lots of bar mitzvahs,
you know?
That's a great point.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And people say, oh, like, man, you didn't ask him for a cut?
And I said, no, I don't do commercial endorsements.
But if I'd said, like, I want one one-hundredth of a penny every time it's used,
he'd go, okay, we'll call it the pan and zoom effect.
You know what I mean?
It was like, the great thing was to just sort of split the difference in the
middle and not be so obstinate that I couldn't yield.
I don't do commercial endorsements, so it was sort of awkward.
But at the same time, I wasn't endorsing a thing.
I was endorsing an idea of how you use and manipulate images, which is what I
do for an image, for a living.
Right.