September 23, 2008
Storytelling In Online Video for Non Profits
These are notes for myself. Disregard this post. -kc.
+ Things You Already Know
People are using video to help spread their message. (you already know this.)
There are lots of genres of video.
videoblogs, docs, interviews, PSAs, infoporn, narrative, mock tv, response videos
Just because video is there doesn't mean that you have to use it. Do not start a videoblog if it doesn't make sense for your community (audience) and definitely don't do it if you don't understand the amount of work that will go into it (like lots of projects without end, fatigue will set in.)
+ Creation and Distribution
You can shoot for an Emmy just fine but just as important and more attainable is shooting for Emilia and her Friends.
Shoot within your means. Create video that gets your message across.
+ Handing out cameras vs slick vids. It's all about how much energy/money/resources you can devote to it.
There is value in cheap video. Immediate, real. Either media training through existing staff. On the Internet Production Value Is Not Necessarily a Value.
If you want to win an Emmy, fine, production is cheaper.
In-house or bloggers.
Media training for existing staff.
Get into the habit of document existing work (immediacy sometimes more important than production value then let the pros make sense of it.)
Partner with existing bloggers, forums, content creators, peer orgs.
Outsourced/Partnership
Highly produced doc is fine, just produce it so that it can be repurposed for the web.
The rise of the fakedoc has created a new creative class of media maker, professional yet cheaper than traditional production houses.
If spread is more important than control, write once, distribute everywhere.
They post it to video sharing sites, embed them within their own pages, wherever makes sense. When possible, they produce it in a way that allows it to be repurposed for multiple mediums, multiple platforms. rss, linkable, embeds. go to where they are.
Just like all new media communication, the video has to fit the audience, be it policymakers or the general public. Access is a filter.
Understand expectations differ with each platform. (YT vs Vimeo)
Web video for civilian audiences is different from web video for specialized audiences (policymakers, journalists, staffers). Web video for specialists should fit the purpose of their work (sound bytes, documentaries as top level surveys) and their use patterns. OTOH, web video for civilians needs to speak to their use patterns: at work, short filtering span (not attention) fashioned for the pipe (tend to be short form b/c of file sizes and time to engage)
Go to where they are. If you bring them back, give them action.
YouTube Nonprofits & Activism Channel
Bloggers, Forums become your advocates, your evangelists, your army.
If All You Do Is Build It They Will Ignore It.
Make it something civilians will eat up and want to share.
Make It Simple (to comprehend, to spread, to take action.)
Tailor it for the internet audience.
-Peretti rules.
Make it ACTIONABLE ("specific asks" -MHoff)
Forwardable. Shareable. Embeddable. Findable/Indexable. Actionable.
Make spread beyond the 1st degree part of your strategy.
70% of all video views came through search. Tagging, searchable pages, link economy
Metadata. Titling,
RSS feeds + distros
Civilians Will Commit Acts of Advocacy Whether You Like It Or Not. If you create & distribute video, let them use it.
Nerdfighters.
Ryanne (bloggers.)
Nathan.
Partner with these people, get into the conversation b/c, like it or not, it's going to happen without you. (Journalists vs. acts of journalism.) Connect it to groups that will eat it up (God and Politics) Make sure the video knows its' place.
Stupid is not a new concept. Trolls were always out there. They're just indexable, discoverable, explicit. Example: Pedos Online. This is a good thing.
Narcissism, Information Overload, Fear of the Unknown.
What we're doing is making the tools, the talk, the relationships more explicit. The fact that we can't make sense of this mess is a failure of our filters. But as Holly said, the web is iterative. Some of the tools are fantastic. Other tools are bunk. The ecology is changing and we're constantly building new tools to sess out new user behaviors and forms of communication and curation. Use what works for you and work with us to build better tools.
Resources
Funding Social Media Resources -- Center for Social Media at American University
Documentaries on a Mission: How Nonprofits Are Making Movies for Public Engagement
Using Grassroots Documentary Films for Political Change - MediaRights
Viral Marketing for the Real World Duncan J. Watts, Jonah Peretti
YouTube for Nonprofits Tip Sheet - Steve Grove
Producing films with nonprofit organizations
July 30, 2008
Old Threads.
A short email thread from earlier today that goes back five years:
On Jul 30, 2008, at 12:27 AM, kenyatta cheese wrote:
Hey Paul.
Likewise, I just found this email in an old folder. Please excuse the late reply.
We got pretty far with producing a bootable custom Debian disk using MPEG4IP as the streaming/encoding software. Unfortunately, it was too technical for most independent/activist/community media center staff to be able to use at the time. But also, fortunately, with the advent of broadband, 3G networks, WiFi, and everything else getting smaller/faster/better, the need for a quaint little project like ours quickly approached nil. Justin.tv allows you to do Flash streaming from the browser on your laptop. Qik.com and Flixwagon let you stream video live from a mobile phone. Who needs a DV camera and Debian anymore? Long live WiFi TV. ;-)
For the people involved, everyone on the project has moved on to other related projects, each continuing to push the tech in our own way. Drazen Pantic is creating and enabling networked art at Location1, Shawn Van Every is teaching things like interactive telephony at NYU ITP and I'm running ops for a internet video company called Rocketboom.
I hope this email finds you well.
-kc.
On Mar 26, 2008, at 11:33 AM, Paul wrote:
Hello I found this email in an old inbox. Wonder what ever happened to this project. Please advise.
Paul H.
On Feb 8, 2003, at 8:45 PM, Kenyatta Cheese wrote:
Hey ya'll.
I thought I'd share a project that might be of interest and use to some of
you.
We're currently developing a system for sending live video and audio over the public [WiFi] wireless network onto the public access cable television network with little fuss.
The primary goal is to provide a way for community producers to go live on
location without needing a production van.
The secondary goal is to lower the time/energy/technical requirements to
create a show by allowing people in your community to using their home
computer, broadband connection, and a custom boot CD (no software
installation required!).
The software that results from this project will be free (and open source
when possible) for anyone to use.
Anyone interested in providing programming/time/energy/money/guinea pig
assistance should contact me via email.
project page: http://www.mnn.org/tech/projects/laika/ (Wayback Machine link)
thx for your time.
-kc.
kenyatta cheese
manhattan neighborhood network
------------------------------
Wireless Broadcast: Public WiFi Network 2 Public Cable Network
What is the Project About?
The goal of the project is to establish procedure and criteria for
broadcasting to the cable or satellite TV network from remote locations,
using a laptop, camera and any type of available broadband Internet
connection - preferably WiFi.
The motivation for such an exercise is the attempt to break away from
classical TV production requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in
specialized infrastructure and enable immediate and on-the-fly transmission
from remote locations to the TV network, ultimately leading toward creative
production of programming from within a P2P network.
June 13, 2008
i'm going to start blogging here again.
I promise.
March 17, 2008
Tim: "I just got Rick Roll'd"
"I just got Rick Roll'd", originally uploaded by yatta.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkjv9WbrxHQ
How to Pull Off a RickRoll In Real Life.
Final Boss Form
You know that list of clever domains you're sitting on b/c you're not sure what to do with them? I started redirecting my Tumblr blog to one of mine -- finalbossform.com.
Because what's funnier than a Final Boss? Now I just need some css that better fits the name. Some darker colors and 16-bit icons should do the trick.
Now if I had only thought of a use for bluetoothbrush.org before I let that one expire.
March 14, 2008
the epic ping pong battle of ellie and irene.
the epic ping pong battle of ellie and irene. from yatta on Vimeo.
March 13, 2008
steve & steve.
steve & steve., originally uploaded by yatta.
Why doesn't anyone else find this as funny as I do?
March 8, 2008
blogging over at kenyatta.tumblr.com
Because we've been doing so much stuff for Rocketboom using the Tumblr platform, I've been posting there as of late. Come visit.
http://kenyatta.tumblr.com/
blog.rocketboom.com
March 1, 2008
BrowseTV Episode 2.4
After unearthing a bunch of BrowseTV tapes, I've started capturing them to disk, editing them down (from 30:00 to 20:00 or so) and transcoding them for the web. So much has changed with the intersection of the internet culture and video that watching this kind of stuff now seems almost trivial. But at a time when most video was still 320x240 and Real was still a dominant player, this kind of *real* tv-web interaction was kind of extraordinary. It was also a load of fun.
February 15, 2008
browsetv slate, episode 1.04
browsetv slate, episode 1.04, originally uploaded by yatta.
The opening slate for BrowseTV episode 1.04 (labeled "episode 4.0" in the screenshot, before I thought there'd be a second or third season.) BrowseTV was the live program I did on cable access from 2002-2004. I'd find interesting links on the internet, turn on a webcam, fire up an AOL chat room, and send video out of my laptop live to television. I'd spend half an hour showing the links that I found. Folks would come in the chat room and share their own. At the end of the episode, I'd make a list of all of the links from the show (along with a RealVideo stream of the show) available on the BrowseTV website. It was a grand ol' time.
Mind you, this was 2002, before videoblogging, before anyone was doing (mimicking?) my exact format on CNN or MTV or MadTV.
I just recently unearthed a bunch of old episodes of BrowseTV and expect to have them encoded and uploaded somewhere in the coming weeks.
I'm also working with the illustrious ElspethJane to bring the BrowseTV format back to the world. Expect deets soon. ;-)
February 6, 2008
24/7 a DIY Video Summit
I'll be in Los Angeles this weekend at the 24/7 DIY Video Summit. I'll be sitting in on a workshop on Open Source Tools for Online Video with Jay, Ryanne, and Tiffiniy Cheng.
Come and say hi if you're in LA.
February 4, 2008
That's Hegemony! (Super Bowl XLII Edition)
So I watched the entire game but missed almost all of the commercials as I was trying to get my Rocketboom work done during most of the breaks. The ones I did catch -- when grouped together -- painted a very particular picture.
Fucking Chinks.
Even when they aren't animated, foreigners are cartoons.
This is funny because I think she's ugly and I think that I'm not.
Good thing you're not ugly. In fact, you're beautiful. And beautiful people rule! UNDERWEAR UBER ALLES!
Speaking of ugly, go think about Adriana Lima while you're fucking your wife.
Again, I didn't watch all of the commercials during yesterday's game but the gestalt of this set left a bitter taste in my mouth.
January 20, 2008
Snow Patrol's Infinite Intro
I was searching YouTube for concert videos when I came across about two dozen clips of the band Snow Patrol taking the stage at the start of their set. Each video seemed to be from a different show. Each show starts with the same fanfare. Each fanfare leads into the same song. Put together, it looks like this:
I limited this video to the first nine clips. Check the high res file to get the full effect: Snow Patrol's Infinite Intro @ 960x540.
January 8, 2008
ridonkulous.
ridonkulous 3, originally uploaded by yatta.
Yes, I've already posted one of these but I still look at them and they still crack up.
January 3, 2008
Why The Writers Strike Needs To End: Geek Edition
An illustration of why Hollywood needs good writers:
Please don't let more movies like this get made. Ever. Please?
