Media Production

Week 10 Resources & Lecture Conclusion

May 6, 2009

As usual I didn’t quite get to finish my lecture…so here is a post that will alllow you to really engage with the material at a deeper level anyway.

I was heading toward talking about the affordances of the internet for rich time based media (like video)…and the potential this offers you as media producers to really get out there and start innovating. Below are some examples that will help frame your video project a little…..give you a sense of how it all fits together.

In the lecture I spoke about the ‘coincident affordances’ of RSS and a file based media ecology. I could now produce an audio or video series - much the same as a radio or video program- that interested people could subscribe to. With iTunes this process became very simple and easily integrated with the affordances of that player. Its worth noting that before iTunes there were a number of innovative video and audio ‘aggregators’ - most notably ‘Democracy’ which has now become ‘Miro‘. Democracy was developed and produced with the idea that those ‘co-incident affordances’ (affordances happening together in interesting ways) of RSS and File Based Media could actually ‘democratize’ the distribution of video media - Its perhaps interesting that with the take up of Itunes as a distribution tool this notion of a political opportunity seemed to dissipate….’Democracy’ became ‘Miro’ - the name change seemed to reflect a move away from the overtly political.

As I said in the lecture it was quite by accident that RSS and a File Based Media Ecology came together in such an interesting way. The notion of podcasting quickly took off among radio and music enthusiasts. Non-commercial community media had been very scarce in a broadcast ecology - it was limited to community radio which was hard to get a program on anyway. With RSS and a File Based Media Ecology- a Blog, Microphone, and freely available software- I could produce quite a professional sounding audio program that was available world-wide. I may not have had a huge audience - but I will probably have an audience bigger than that of community radio. I can also try much more radical experiments that I would never get away with on radio - long form radio-plays, soundscapes, serial music programs, or just -political or special interest programs that would never find a place in an economy of scarcity or an ecology based on an industrial/commercial ‘logic’.

It wasn’t long before we realised that what was good for audio was good for video as well. We could post a video to a blog and subscribers could get that video delivered automagically via RSS (and soon by just pressing an itunes subscribe button).

A vibrant community developed around this potential to post video in a serial form on a blog. The community congregated around a Yahoo videoblogging mailing list started by Jay Dedman which assembled to discuss videoblogging and videoblogs. One of the original members of that group was the Australian academic Adrian Miles who had in fact been playing with the idea of ‘VOGS’ for quite a while - he’d even published a vogme manifesto (with reference to Von-Trier’s Dogme manifesto).

The Videoblogging group prefered the term ‘Vlog’ - to Adrian’s VOG -there were long discussions about which was more appropriate - the group included a lot of different interests. There were (at that time) radical videographers who were adamant that blogs refuse the strictures and habits of form programmed by television and commercial media. There were videographers who saw videoblogging as the democratization of television. They, generally speaking, were looking for another place for ‘doing’ TV style content perhaps in the interests of giving voice to otherwise marginalised viewpoints - this included a ‘Citizen Journalist’ genre. There were others who saw this as a new way of distributing commercial content (or content that aspired to becoming commercial) - these people for the most part wanted to use videoblogging as a means to make a show that might even get picked up by the networks- i.e they made TV and put it on a blog and working out how to commercialize it.

In the early days there was a small community of videobloggers a lot of quite personal but quite slick and poetic, home-video’s. There was a sense that video connected people in a very ‘honest’ way and there was a lot of interaction between blogs -responses and coversations in video…this seemed like a new genre in which we, in the words of one influential member (Andreas Haugstraup), ‘didn’t subscribe to videos, we subscribed to people’. Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson were great examples of this genre and have remained very true to that vision- Ryanne’s videos will sometimes deal with important issues but always with a personal/intimate angle - it is very much a personal video diary but in some ways very different to the YouTube version -because you subscribe to people there seems to be less need to compete for attention and because I am subscribed to their stream there is a sense that I get to know these people…..perhaps that is why these are very honest and intimate videos. Michael Verdi and his young daughter Dylan were another of these early video diarists - Dylan’s blog went viral when the NY-Times headlined their story about the emerging potential of video blogs with her blog. It was clear that something was changing in the media ecology when an eight year old could get international exposure for media she’d created at home.

While all this was going Joshua Kinberg (check out this bike which prints text messages that Josh made as well - great use of media in activism…) and Dan Salber (who now works for video start-up Joost) developed and aggregator called ANT not TV which made it easy for the community to aggregate and distribute their videos (this app was sold to sonic mountain who also purchased ODEO. Note -all these people now make a living out of online video in one respect or another.

Michael Verdi and Jay Dedman wrote the books on Videoblogging - literally.

Another formative couple of members of the list were Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon. They started making Rocketboom, a snappy, very quirky daily video news/trivia/personality piece that was modeled on the basis of a ‘talking head’ news desk style of presentation. It was notable because it was relentlessly regular and reliable and had a standardized and familiar format while retaining a sense of the personal and conversational. Rocketboom also revolutionised the use of a blog form - taking a wordpress blog and styling it to look like it was designed for video -offering a variety of formats and ways of subscribing. Rocketboom was almost as easy as TV. Some argued that this was just TV distributed online.

Rocketboom very quickly amassed a large number of subscribers. They were the first videoblog to start to sell sponsored advertising spots and really commercialize their operation. There circulation increased dramatically when Steve Jobs launched video in iTunes and Rocketboom was ‘featured’ - then once again when Steve launched the video enabled ipod - and showed he had Rocketboom on his playlist.

Rocketboom has reportedly just been signed a 7 figure distribution deal with Sony. Not bad for a grassroots two person start-up made with ‘on-hand’ material. It seems necessary to note that there is a lot of acrimony surrounding Rocketboom amongst the community because Amanda Congdon- the original face of Rocketboom - was unceremoniously dumped/or split - many fell Amanda got the short end of the deal despite her part in developing the Rocketboom ‘product’.

Rocketboom’s success seemed to prove to everyone that online video had ‘come of age’……as long as it looked like TV and played like TV - and could potentially be bought for a load of money and put on the TV.

Since RB we have seen shows like the Onion News Network - really take off as well - here parody of tv finds its perfect medium

Another of the formative videobloggers was Zadi Diaz. Her videoblog was notable for its high production standards matched with a personal and poetic feel. She founded and presents the rather awesome epicfu that despite its very MTV format retains a very fresh and politically engaged and network savvy ‘renegade’ tone…Zadi was also a ‘correspondent’ for Rocket Boom in the early days - I wonder whether Zadi will be able to maintain the fierce independence that makes EpicFu somehow different to RB.

While these provide interesting and representative examples of the mainstreaming of videoblogging and what a savvy media producer can do with a video camera and the web (and the ideas!). I really want to emphasis those projects that tried to use the affordances of the new medium to their advantage - One of my personal favourites was Chasing Windmills - which really did find an interesting place for Drama and Narrative in online video. Chasing Windmills was a short form serial video. It developed a long running storyline between (initially) between to key protagonists. The drama was based around very intimate dialogue between the couple it represented- it felt personal like a videoblog, but was shot form an objective frame in black and white. It was very much like you were subscribing to the characters like you would subscribe to a blog- the dialogue was great - but sometimes quite heavy/clever - clearly this is content that wouldn’t work on TV but worked remarkably well as a videoblog….its short form, intriguing characters, and a clever balance between personal and cinematic was really interesting. Chasing Windmills felt like an opening onto personal lives in progress…really entertaining..This is also an unfinished project - despite a few examples of interesting narrative projects in YouTube (lonelygirl) this angle has been left largely unexplored/underdeveloped…..

Andreas Haugstraup was another important long term videoblogging list member. Along with Brittany Shoot he set up the Lumiere Project based on work by the Remo Collective. You can read the manifesto to find out more but Andreas makes quite radical claims about what online video should be - mostly that it shouldn’t be included any of the artifice of the cinematic medium- it should provide an opening onto the real world - this is in some ways a minor extreme rendering of Adrian Mile’s Vogme manifesto. Here he puts together an open site and calls for contributions filmed under a strict set of rules.

All of the above projects happened before and/or beyond youtube’s ridiculous rise. Its really worth thinking through what YouTube does to this burgeoning ecology of rich media online. There are many really interesting video on Youtube - but I wonder if the sites navigation have really warped the development of video-online. So much of YouTube seem like a bad episode of Funniest Home Videos and so its hard to push through that to find the really interesting uses - I would love to know how you feels about this- Have you seen Interesting uses of YouTube or is it, as Teresa Rizzo, argues in SCAN a Cinema of Attractions…..

I also mentioned a lot of music in the Lecture - this is in part because music and sound are my primary interests in media (and networks) but also because the less data intensive the medium the more agile it is in terms of development - In this sense Sound Cultures and Technologies seem to act as a Barometer for future media change - P2P first advanced in music sharing, semi-pro digital production first became available to audio peeps…etc etc. For this reason I look a lot to sites like last.fm, hypemachine, jamendo, pandora, and of cours iTunes - not as perfect models but as indicators of the affordances of digital media development and different approaches….most of what I am interested in is in that field of Discovery…..

But I’ve also found interestingly enough that I am increasingly paying musicians directly for music that I have found via sites like Cyclic Defrost - So maybe its really worth developing that content so you are ahead of the curve when/if video goes that way……Learning Music Monthly was a site that started off giving monthly LP length improvised downloads away - now they have moved to a subscription model which I will definitely pay for….

One thing is for sure - you don’t need to wait for some magic job opportunity or handshake to make innovative media - just get in and do it - feel free to ask me about setting up a podcast or vidcast with UNSWTV or on NewSouthBlogs.org - or on your own blog……There are so many exciting opportunities now…

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