October 2006 Archives

Many people will confess their love of DVD comentaries, in fact it's really common amongst film students now that a large part of their knowledge, prior to coming to film school, is obtained from DVD Director's commentaries.   I've never really gotten into them that much, it's a rare occcasion that I'd even remember they are there, and less often that I'd find an interesting one. 

One I can recommend though is the Robert Zemekis film 'Contact', it's brilliant!   You can listen to eith Zemekis, Jodie FOster or the special effects team, all three are engrossing.

Now there is a new website called Sharecrow, where you can record your own DVD comentaries.    Obviously there are boundless opportunites for accademics and lecturers with this, but it's probably also a film geeks dream. 

Possibly the biggest news on the net today is that Brightcove has been launched.    This is a new video sharing site, definately out to challenge the reign of Google Video and their new acquisition You Tube.   Brightcove is a little different, it attached advertisements to videos but then shares the revenue of that advertising income with the content creators.

Brightcove also works by having channels, and commerical networks can pay to have their won channel created, for example if you go on the Intervission Records Channel their is a behind the scenes video with Pharrell Williams and Gwen Stephani as they record her new track 'Wind it Up'.    By the way - this is a great promotional video because, I've heard the track and it is so awful, but it comes across quite well in the video.

The two big questions of You Tube have been whether they can find a business model that works? and Would people watch if there was advertising present?   Brightcove may be about to provide those answers.   

It's also interesting from an advertising point of view, a 2 miute behind the scenes clip of Pharrel and Gwen is probably 10 times more engaging than a 30 second add spot.

Swarm of Angels is a new project that plans to make the first feature film through a participatory media process. While Hollywood scripts often have a host of scriptwriters to get them to the finish line, what is a script written by hundreds or even thousands of people through a wiki going to come out like? Will the wisdom of the crowd shine through? While many people are begining to consider user generated content in television and radio, if we really want to project into the future what is particpatory group media going to be? On side thought... in 50 years time will 'America's Funniest Home Videos' be recognised as the leader in user generated content and be required viewing in tertiary media programs?

Six months ago many industry insiders were astounded at the speed that television networks were moving to make episodes of popular shows downloadable on the internet.    It's a rapidly changing world, a number of new shows, such as the Aaron Sorkin penned 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip' have been shown on the internet before their television launches in efforts to build up loyal audiences.   Now another watershed mark, in the US Fox will offer new episodes of 'The O.C.' online, one week prior to their television release.

One of the biggest news stories in the world this week was the crash of a small plane into a New York appartment building.    Fox News's  Scott Wilder reported the story live using his Treo mobile telephone.     While Viewer submitted images have become acceptable and  fairly common place over the last 18 months this is another major change in the way the news is reported as it was a reporter using the hand-held technology, as opposed to a member of the public.

As mobile video technology continues to improve and participatory media and 'behind the curtain' experiences increase, could it be possible that some of the future factual, documentary and even drama productions will be filmed by the general public on their mobile telephones?

It's interesting that games can draw from such a wide range of texts, if we were to write a list of 50 books for filmmakers would we be able to include titles like 'Understanding Comics' by Scott McCloud alongside the standard fare such as Robert McKee's 'Story'. It's great too see McLuhan's 'Understanding Media' and Johnsons' Everything Bad is Good For You' included, these are like bibles to me.

There is a little piece here in the LA Times, (you need to scroll down a bit to read it) that suggests that with newer models of cars having integration with IPOD's this may have a big effect for radio, which counts people in their cars as one of the biggest market segements. Even if your not in radio or music , you should pay attention to this area, the digitisation of music and audio content is leaps and bounds ahead of visual mediums, it's almost like a crystal ball in to the visual media's future. At first I thought, what difference is going to make, at the moment I can leave the radio and switch to CD, I still come back to the radio. The big difference of course is at the moment, I have maybe 6-10 CD's in my car, at the moment it's Massive Attack, Felix the Housecat, Natalie Merchant and Sarah McLaughlin - sometimes I'm not in the mood for any of them - radio will win out. But..... if I had an IPOD in my car the radio would have to wait until I wasn't in the mood for 1000's of song choices. Radio has changed before, television forced it out of the centre of the living room, to the periphery of our lives. Where will it go when digital music hits our cars? The key though is keeping people's attention, radio can offer live events, people in the studio, competitions, up-to-date jokes, political commentry. Maybe radio's audience is going to be listening to podcasts of yesterdays show on their IPOD's in the car.