creativity/machine

So Flickr finally ended the years of rumour-mongering and actually rolled out video. I was interested to see the way the official announcement carefully positioned the purposes of video on Flickr within the company’s (tasteful, cosmopolitan, playfully grown-up) brand identity, and its focus on self-created content:

we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share. [emphasis added, which possibly comes across as me being a bit pedantic]

They even give a carefully diverse range of quotidian examples–covering cats, places, events and people, of course.

There’s some really interesting protest going on within the sections of the Flickr community who are really invested in capital-P Photography, including this well-populated anti-video group, with some surprisingly hostile comments about the company. A lot of people seem to be worried that somehow the introduction of video will directly cause a ‘flood’ of banal, crass, and unlovely content, and will turn a photography-oriented community into ‘just another YouTube’. The controversy is tremendously interesting to me in its own right, of course–there’s technological determinism combined with symbolic boundary work and a fair amount of amnesia about Flickr’s mundane origins–at least as far as I remember there was a lot more emphasis on lifelogging using the (then) newly available camera phone than there was on digital camera arms races, fine art techniques, and so on.

So, controversy aside, how is it turning out? What do you really get when you start with a mature online social network with social and cultural norms increasingly organised around ‘quality’ content, introduce the ability to upload very short video clips (but only to Pro members), presented within the often carefully cultivated ‘photo streams’ of individual users, combined with a way of accounting for value that takes into account far more than the number of people who been tempted (or tricked) into viewing a particular piece of content?

I’m sure there will be some silliness, and unlike the Fotografrs who are protesting the move, I also really hope there will be some very cute cat videos.

But there will also be lovely slideshows designed to curate and exhibit small sets of photographic images, like this beautiful video–which is much more than a slideshow–by Timo Arnall [thanks anne, again]

And, I will bet, increasingly elegant innovations on observational and personal photography like what Photojojo is calling the ‘long portrait’:

The thing about the best portraits is how they capture the essence of a person.

Maybe the wrinkles on their hands, or the expression in their eyes, tell you about the life they’ve had.

So what if you had 30 seconds to capture that person, instead of a nanosecond shutter-click? And what if the person could talk? Whoa. Crazy, we know. We call it a long portrait.

Which sounds a lot like a micro digital story: a focus on the personal and first-person, within elegant aesthetic constraints, done with attention to detail and respect for the co-creator. Photojojo even links to the interviewing guide on the StoryCorps website to assist newbie micro-documentarists in learning the art of capturing these snapshots of individual human lives.

I really think the idea of the ‘long portrait’ is quite brilliant.

Aside from that, the collective shaping of the meanings and uses of video within Flickr’s existing community of practice is going to be extremely interesting to watch.

Wow, really nice combination of original animation with edited audio from oral history-style anecdotal interviews in this sweet short film by Julia Pott. It’s one of a few YouTube videos that won selection at the SXSW film festival.

Oh, and while I’m embedding YouTube videos, I also found The Great Trafalgar Square Freeze sort of beautiful:

Technorati Tags: youtube, animation, film, storytelling, trafalgar square, freeze

As I do when I find a series I like, over the last couple of weeks I binge-watched all 3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica. I did the same with Heroes. In both cases, eventually the tragic day arrives when I’ve caught up with the States. At best, this habit means waiting a week in between episodes, something which really doesn’t suit my lifestyle and OCD personality. At worst - well, in the States, BSG is all over until a mini-series in September, while the next season doesn’t start until 2008.

In the short time since my stockpiled episodes of Season 3 ran out, I’ve been feeling strangely sad, lost, angry and…look, let’s be honest - really quite alone.

This very well put-together ‘gag reel’ has made it all a little bit better (warning - contains spoilers!):

By the way, if anyone knows the proper details about the gag video and how it got to the interwebs, please let me know in the comments. i.e. was it on TV or a DVD extra, or was it released into the “virusphere”?

Anyway, it’s on YouTube now, and therefore=work.

Well, at least fan videos (where vernacular creativity and proprietary content get all entangled and bear fruit) are work, definitely. Like this very sweet Starbuck/Laura number for example:

Thought I’d share a couple of quite silly stop motion animations made using Boinx iStopMotion and the iSight on my MacBook Pro. I plan to do something a bit more purposeful with the software one of these days, but I was quite pleased with what I managed to achieve in an idle hour or so on a Saturday morning. And it was lots of fun!

what a cool idea:

This is a project about the 8mm film format. But 8mm is dead, you say? On the contrary! Not only is the format alive with innovation by filmmakers around the world, but hours and hours of Super 8 and regular 8mm film exist in attics and basements the world over—as home movies, educational films, works of art—that is slowly fading from the historical record.

We’re here to preserve that record before these films are lost, and to make those films available for viewing by the public and for use by artists seeking new, compelling footage. Lost in Light is a project devoted to preserving, showcasing, and celebrating films created on the small-gauge 8mm film format.

To that end, we provide free Super 8 and 8mm to video transfers to anyone who asks, in exchange for posting their video to the Lost in Light site and on the Internet Archive with their choice of Creative Commons licenses. In addition, Lost in Light includes articles and features by members of the filmmaking and film preservation communities, video tutorials for making 8mm films, as well as creative work, all with the goal of preserving and championing this important film format.

check out the project’s proposal video at Have Money Will Vlog

via copy culture

Thanks to Ben, I just found From Beirut to…those who love us. While I am trying not to drip ineffectual tears on my keyboard, I can’t recommend highly enough that you go watch it (BIG Quicktime file). Here’s the background:

This video letter was made on July 21, 2006 at the studios of Beirut DC, a film and cinema collective which runs the yearly Ayam Beirut Al Cinema’iya Film Festival. This video letter was produced in collaboration with Samidoun, a grassroots gathering of various organizations and individuals who were involved in relief and media efforts from the first day of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. It was also broadcasted at the Biennial of Arab Cinema, organized by the Arab World Institute in Paris.

Caught in my tech news net over the last week:

Via Boing Boing, another new ‘meta’ service launches into public beta:

Dabble, a site that makes it possible to search, recommend, rate, discuss and be sociable about video hosted anywhere on the the net, has come out of private beta and launched for public use. Dabbler Lisa Rein sez,

Dabble collects metadata detailing the location, authoring, licensing information, and user-generated tags associated with hundreds of thousands of short video clips. Users visiting Dabble will see a search box allowing them to do a simple keyword search for online video clips. Their results, including both amateur and professional video, will be pulled from hosting sites all over the web. Users can then begin to collect their favorite web videos, adding new videos to their collection at will as they surf other websites.
Already, hundreds of hosting sites exist where users can upload their own videos to the web and thousands of independent sites. Dabble solves the problem of navigating through all these videos, no matter where they are hosted.

By the way, VideoBomb does a similar thing - allows you to ‘republish’ online video from any source without actually copying it (i.e. remains on original server), and then users collaboratively tag and rate it (like social bookmarking services - del.icio.us, digg, reddit - for ‘ordinary’ web content). VideoBomb is a not-for-profit enterprise that also makes the Democracy Player, which is the web’s most popular RSS reader for video content (in effect, a very schmick dynamic web video player for the desktop).

The other day there were some big claims going around for Gotuit - ‘premium content’ video service - being the ‘death of TV’ (because TV is just content, right?) on that basis of offering quantitatively popular commercial content, good user interface, and SUPER fast high quality playback (which I can attest to after playing with it for 5 minutes):

Boston based Gotuit Media launched Gotuit late Sunday evening. Gotuit offers users on-demand free premium content like music videos, sports clips and short films (the stuff that gets deleted from YouTube). Find what you want, click it and watch it immediately.The site is Flash based and will have a familiar interface for YouTube users. This isn’t about long tail user generated content, though. Gotuit has struck licensing deals with labels and other content owners to show a deep library of premium content.

Full story at TechCrunch.

And (it had to happen) see this article, also from TechCrunch on PornoTube. Note the old ‘porn as technological avant-garde’ discourse.

In this videoblog remix, I think Trine begs to differ. Lovely stuff.

I’ve been thinking as well that perhaps ‘the everyday’ is the currency of videoblogging in a way that is more muted for (personal) text-based blogging. Not that everydayness is more or less present, but that it is more important in creating whatever affective power the genre has. I’m speculating very tentatively here, but maybe it has something to do with the illusion of more immediate self-mediated representation - not ‘truth’, exactly; maybe it’s about how mundane details (washing up in the background, dogs barking in the distance, whatever) creep in without being written in. It’s certainly something to do with multimodality. I wonder if Trine, or anyone else, has any thoughts on that?

I haven’t started work for the day yet, so no word count

Thank you Glen for sending me this little treasure which I found in my in-tray this morning - for that you are a prince among men.

I’ve also uploaded the first two pages of one of the many fabulous example storyboards that the book includes in glossy colour. It’s called ‘Laura’s Seventh Birthday’, and it’s all about making the cake with Mother, playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and having girlish chit-chat. In a very pretty frock.

Going beyond the frocks - Kodak teaches us that in home movies the ‘in-between’ quotidian spaces and practices of everyday life are interesting and camera-worthy. But at the same time, the aesthetics of home movies are to be distinguished from professional movie-and television production; and the home-movie maker is not to aspire to those.

There’s a lot here I can use in my ‘history’ chapter on amateur creativity, new technology and the construction/teaching of new media literacy.

Current thesis word count: 20,724

Online editing, rich ‘folksonomy’ and community-building features would seem to be essential components of whatever is going to be the ‘flickr of video’, i.e. the default destination for video ’sharing’. (That is, if there will be such a thing - remembering the very specific circumstances of flickr’s emergence, which have a lot to do with the viral marketing and ingroup psychology of the A-list techbloggers).

In addition to YouTube, which is the most well known at the moment, and jumpcut, which I blogged about the other day, a couple others have floated into my field of vision lately: Eyespot has the ‘mix and share’ ethos right up front; also, I don’t know what is currently going on at motionbox, but wanted to check it out too. Any others I should know about?