Ken Burns let Apple use his name

Professionals smile when they hear a young film student or amateur talk importantly about using the “Ken Burns Effect” in their computer editing process. They mean the signature slow pans and zooms of still photos that documentarian Ken Burns popularized in his acclaimed Civil War and other Public Television films. Cinematographers used a rostrum camera long before computers came along.

Obviously, Burns, 55, did not invent the rostrum art form, but the still photograph occupies a special niche in creating his documentaries.

“My father was an amateur photographer,” he often tells his audiences when on a speaking tour, “and I studied still photographers, so I see the still photograph as the essential building block, the DNA of the kind of work I do.” He adds that movies, after all, “are only still photos at 24 frames per second.”

Burns credits Filmmaker Jerome Liebling for teaching him how slow pans and zooms of photos could be utilized in documentaries. Burns also cites the Canadian City of Gold documentary on the Klondike gold rush—co-directed by Colin Low and Wolf Koenig—for inspiring his own film efforts.

Speaking to the Oxonian Society of New York last year, he says the greatest compliment he ever received was from a woman who had just seen the premiere of his documentary on the Brooklyn Bridge. She came up to him afterward and asked him where he got the newsreels for the picture.

“Madame,” he replied, “the bridge was built between 1869 and 1883. There were no newsreels then.”

She was still insistent. But what about getting the stones off the barges and lifting them up to the towers?

“They were still photographs,” he told her.

“Oh, no they weren’t.”

In 1992, Burns received a phone call from Steve Jobs, head of Apple, who invited him to the company’s California headquarters. Jobs took him into a darkened room where, he says, two “geeky-looking” guys had been working for years to perfect a computer program that would permit Mac users to pan, zoom and make slow fades and dissolves between shots.

“We have been calling this program the Ken Burns Effect,” they told him, and they wanted to begin installing it in Apple software the next year.

The team members were obvious Burns’ fans.

He said their faces fell when he told them he didn’t give commercial endorsements. Burns later relented, however: If Jobs would donate some badly needed computers to his wife’s non-profit organization he would permit Apple to use his name.

That’s how the Ken Burns Effect came into effect. You’ll find it in Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto software. (PCs have their own pan-zoom software.)

Burns is a self-described “computer illiterate” who still writes his own speeches in long hand. He laughs when he tells of walking by an Apple store and someone comes dashing out to exclaim: “Guess what I was able to do with your effect?”

“I try to look inscrutable, like Yoda,” he says.