Surely no one sane thought this was a good idea. Go on - try clicking it for the full sized disaster, then hit the back button.

As Photoshop Disaster say, "Red Bull in Hungary makes you wish you had never seen this image. Scrubbing your eyeballs doesn't work, I tried."

for the hell of it...

Some things are made just for the hell of it. So, for the hell of it, I thought I'd share.



The derelict radio station. from Druskq on Vimeo.

If you're interested in 3d creation and motion detection software have a look at the user comments below the vimeo page, and Druskq's comments in response. Interesting stuff.

Textual events

And now for some BOOKS (remember them?). THREE of them.

One. Or, rather, one hundred and one: "101 Screenwriting Tips". I met Alexis Nikki through an on-line writer's group. We were the only two scriptwriters, and quickly realised that feedback from prose writers was actually not that helpful. They got hung up on commenting on irrelevant things (objecting to the use of the present tense, the lack of description, the apparent lack of internal life of the characters, the lack of their thoughts, the lack of shading on how to deliver dialogue) or suggested adding things like camera movements, character's thoughts or various other no-nos. Nor did they help with aspects that really needed their input. So the two of us ended up playing script ping-pong.

Meeting up on London's South Bank would have been great, but she'd brought along some third person, so we couldn't get down to as much of the shop talk, writer's discussion and gossip that we wanted to. And then we lost touch when the writer's group folded. As you do.

Now she's surfaced again (to my attention, I'm sure she was around all along) with a new book, 1o1 Screenwriting Tips and screenwriting and film review blog The Third Draft. She describes her approach thusaway:

"The merit of my book comes from the very fact that I'm a relative beginner in the business. I'm the rookie whose struggles are still fresh in her mind and whose enthusiasm remains undimmed. These pages don't contain a complete philosophy or method, but practical tips that you can consume. If you're a beginner, this book provides encouragement, motivation, and a wealth of information. If you're more advanced, you'll discover some new angles amongst the usual advice."

Which is refreshingly honest or a great spin, depending on your level of cynicism. It looks interesting and I'm sure I'll return to it to do more of a review. The timing seemed apt - just as I was going to do a screenwriting workshop for my local IOV meeting. So I bought it forthwith. (Well, clicked a button, forgot about it, then it arrived weeks too late to be useful. Thanks Amazon.)

Two. Me mum! My copy of Alison Wilson Smith's book Nature's Playthings arrived today and it's fantastic - the company have done a really good job with it! I was 'proud son' material anyway - but here's yet more reason to be so. It's a hard book to define adequately. On the one hand a manual for the games children can play with things they find in nature. It's also a memory of three or four generations of bringing up or being around children. On another level it's an oblique commentary on the 'thing'-obsessed, sedentary, overly-protected, TV and computer-focussed childhoods we provide our children. I'm not sure the cover conveys all that, but the inside certainly does.

I have to declare an interest (apart from the obvious filial one), there's some lovely pictures of my son Tom, and I took a few of the photos in the book, including this portrait of her on her boat on the Cam. Given that I only had a point and shoot camera, I'm quite surprised at how well they have printed. Meanwhile Tom (at four years old) is completely unfazed at his 'Nanny-on-the-boat' writing a book - after all she writes him lovely letters so why not a book? And it's not as if it's the first book his picture has been in - he also appears in Colin Barratt's Digital Video for Beginners with his other nan.

Three. My dad! (Yes, this is getting silly.) James Bruges first brought out The Little Earth Book so the obvious sequel The Big Earth Book is a sumptuous coffee-table update and revision of the little one. A former architect, he's been a green activist for a while now, and both books are highly recommended for direct, positive, big-picture solutions to our current ecological crises. And more power to his elbow: let's hope they make a difference.

So, as former writer's group colleague, son and son all I can say is, "BUY! BUY! BUY!"

Web video

It's not really there yet, is it. I'm currently testing the various services to see if I can get something half decent through one of the 'sharing video' services...

And so to this one. Frankly, I'm appalled. How can the blue (of the Mec petals at the beginning) change colour? It's a different blue! How can that be an encoding issue? And that's before we get onto the rest of the quality issues. Well, see for yourself:


... and this is following best advice. I encoded to a high bitrate MPEG2, square pixels, Main Concept codec care of Adobe Media Encoder - which looks stunning played directly. Then I uploaded to Google and let them do their worse. Hence the above.

I'll do the video-geek thing of putting up a few more tests, to see what you think. Next is Google via MP4, and I'll try latest advice for encoding for YouTube and I also try, yet again, to see if I can get Vimeo to work (reaches for the rolleyes smiley... )

This is so far away from being an acceptable consumer experience though....

Cab Calloway re-mixed by Remyyy

I stumbled upon this by accident (via the dad of the band of another track this user re-used... I think). Anyway - a re-mix of an old Cab Calloway number (with a link to the original) that is just somewhat surreal - particularly when it's a near-close lip synch. Just thought I'd share!

Just make sure you hang around until the main vocal comes in, it's worth it...



You don't know me from Remyyy on Vimeo.

How sweet is that?!

If you ignored the 'it's just a message and will only irritate' message and actually listened to the 'utter' at the top of the page (and sorry to waste your time with an answer phone greetings message, but I did warn you). But if you have, you'll hear how professional it is.

I like it. Even more, I like the fact that it's an introductory present from a couple of voice over artists. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, that it's the nicest business-related present I've yet had. As they said

Emma’s done a custom phone greeting for you. We’ve attached it as an mp3; hope you can find a use for it. It’s a small bribe to make you feel warm and gooey towards us! (Maybe you never use voiceovers – it’s ok, use the greeting anyway.)

How sweet is that? See Emma Thurston's website and Colin Day's website.

At the same time David Petherick introduced me to utterz.com, hence the new widget on the page. Hence the test. Hence the irritating bit of audio you listened to (don't deny it). Hence this explanation.

Utterz seems like an interesting combination of radio, conversation and messaging. You can post a message, pic or video from your mobile phone to use it on their site, or to post out to your own site. It might be something we use with our media simulation work, when we have to feed back from a muddy field in the middle of Wiltshire.... but that's another story.

In the meantime, I need to work out the video equivalent of Emma and Colin's present. Is there one? Answers on a postcard. Or via an utter. Or maybe even a video postcard. Now there's a thought...

[Stop press: utterz doesn't seem to be working so i've removed it for the minute until I work out what's wrong.]

Videographer

"Videographer" - wots one of them then?

I've always had problems with this term. Firstly that it's just plain ugly ugly ugly. It doesn't smell, but it sounds bad. To make it work you have to change the 'o' from 'owe' to, er, however you phonetically spell the short /o/ and then put the stress there, just to emphasise the difficulty. Another is status. It's not 'director', 'producer' or even 'editor' or 'script-writer'.

Next it's confusing. The Wikipedia entry was written by someone who confuses 'Videographer' with 'Cinematographer' or with 'DoP/DP', ie. the one who actually touches the camera and only touches the camera. Wrong.

It points to the key aspect of videography - it's misunderstood because people don't know where to place it. It's not part of the film industry (whether Hollywood, left-field, low-budget or whatever) and it's not part of the broadcast industry. And, typically, your videographer is not even part of a team.

In terms of sector - the videographer creates and delivers video product direct to the client. That could be community, event, wedding, corporate, in-house, or whatever.

In terms of mode of operation, typically the videographer works alone or in a small group, perhaps of cascading freelancers who have a similar 'videography' background. The key difference here is that the videographer deals with the whole process themselves. They are not a small cog in a big system (like with the film world or broadcast) typically they work on the whole process from getting the client in the first place, working out the brief, writing the script (if there is one), organising pre-production, filming (rarely as part of a 'film crew'), editing, working on drafts with clients, then purposing in whatever way is required.

When you are dealing with 'the big boys' (yes, usually men) they tend to denigrate this sector - with their 'you don't wanna do it like that' attitudes and more expensive toys. What they miss is the strength and interest of the videography sector. This is not a set of people who are specialist in one tiny aspect of production. This lot do the whole process, and often to a economical budget.

There's got to be some status or class in that. Surely. Which would you prefer - control of the whole process, or to be one small part in a juggernaut? I know what I've chosen. I'm even coming to terms with the term... until someone comes along with something better, that is.

For more of us, see the IOV - there's even a 'find a videographer' function.