After a decadent three course meal overlooking Hollywood Boulevard at the Highlands. The LATV festival resumed their "Digital Day"of in-depth panels conducted by experts in all things new media.
Lisa Osborne, Ross Cox, Sharon Lawrence and Midori Willoughby
The seats filled quickly for the AFI (American Film Institute)'s "Digital Content Showcase" Many filmmakers and web artists who would find the Digital Content Lab branch of the institute mind-blowing, and are not even aware of it's existence. The Digital Content Lab located in Hollywood, CA has been putting together teams of working professionals from the entertainment, design and technology worlds to incubate digital prototypes over the course of the past nine years. The supervising producer of the lab, Lisa Osborne, led the panel of case studies from the lab's recent past. The first example of the lab's success was from the production company Kontentreal. The environmentally centered company wanted a way for viewers of their eco-educational TV series to be able to integrate their own ideas into the viewing experience of the entire audience. This is a tall order if you are familiar with the disparate elements of the technologies that they chose to integrate. The way that the lab is able to help these prototypes become a reality is with the help of mentors who will work on developing and executing these concepts over an 18 month period. Their impressive mentor list appears to be in the hundreds, consisting of higher ups from companies such as Comcast, Brightcove, Schematic, Sun Microsystems, Inc., and Yahoo! just to name a few. The result in the case of Kontentreal's prototype was a breath-taking design which could be accessed from broadband, a Tivo interface, a blue-ray DVD or a mobile device allowing viewers of the TV series to have a seamless interactive experience. For example: If the lab featured an episode on eco-friendly housing, a viewer could take a picture on their mobile phone after the show of an eco-friendly house in their area and email it to the Kontentreal website (which would automatically be geo-tagged on a world map accessible on all the media platforms listed above). This input would be coming from all over the world so you could find examples after the show of eco-friendly houses and resources in your area or other areas of the world. You can get a sense of the magnitude of this project and the possibilities that it has. This was one of four presentations including presentations from Cynergy Films, the Cartoon Network and Stage 9 Digital Media. Watching these presentations was a true goimpse into te future of new media technology. The AFI Digital Content Lab welcomes applications for mentors and protoypes from all over the world.
If are interested, check out the Digital Content Lab site: http://www.afi.com/education/dcl/default.aspx .
If you want to see more of what Kontentreal is all about check out their site: http://www.krfilms.com/
To see what else the LATV festival had to offer check them out at: http://www.latvfest.net/
The folks at NATPE who organized the LATV festival will be organizing their annual conference in January so keep an eye out for more info we will post as that approaches.
of his new camera stabilization device, and many interesting updates.
Here are some of David Tames' notes which he so kindly lent for Beanywood to check out.
You can check out the more detailed notes with links to all things relevant at http://kino-eye.com/2007/07/01/bmm/ While you are there spend some time exploring the vast resources that David provides for media makers.
Steve Garfield has been webcasting the meetings using Ustream.tv, but today we're using another tool, blog.tv which offers the additional capability of having participants link in their webcams and you can switch between the main stream and other streams. It has really livened up the meeing to have participants out on the net and offering their sending in their questions and comments during the meeting. An archive of the live stream is available.
On Friday, Len Edgerly (VideoPodChronicles.com) went to the Apple store at Cambridgeside Galleria at 3am to be first in line for an iPhone, at first security guards gave him a hard time for shooting video, but once the euphoria of people walking into the store took over, the security guards could not stop him from shooting a wonderful video of being first in line walking into the Apple store:
Len's first reaction to the iPhone is that it is "unbelievably cool," and he said, "I went to sleep that night holding it in my hand, Steve Jobs is right." He points out that some stuff does not work quite right yet and it's not quite perfect, for example, notes do not sync, it does not shoot video, the headphone jack does not take his Bose headphones, and it will not play Flash video embedded in web pages. But he added, "if you were crazy enough to be there [on the first day of sales], none of this detracts."
David Tames just completed a short film, The Smile Boston Project, that will premiere at the 16th Woods Hole Film Festival on August 4th. He has been organizing three panels and a seminar that will take place at the festival, visit the festival's Panels & Workshops page : http://woodsholefilmfestival.org/pages/2007EventWorkshops.php for more information.
After the "going around the table" portion of the meeting participants discussed Andrew Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur. In our discussion we raised several interesting issues in terms of the reliability of "the wisdom of the crowds," especially in terms of Wikipedia; how are we going to find "hard-hitting journalism" in the age of citizen journalism; and the validity of the professional vs. amateur duality. During the discussion, Christopher Penn suggested the book, The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto and I suggested The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. I also think Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture provides an excellent and thoughtful counter-point to Keen's argument.
It was another wonderful meeting, a delightful mix of coffee, pastries, conversation, sharing, and learning around a table.
And thanks again to David Tames for his thorough capture of information during the event! Check out his Flickr photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kino-eye/sets/72157600591613397/
You can also check out additional photos on my Flickr page http://www.flickr.com/photos/7937077@N03/sets/72157600606562105/
Andrew Keen was interviewed in today’s Metro Boston discussing who Web2.0 was ruining the Internet and culture in general. He states in his new book “The Cult of Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture”: “millions of millions of exuberant monkeys … are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity,”
Original link: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2007/200706/20070611/article_319089.htm
Keen rips apart user-generated content as a threat to existing cultural standards saying that anyone with a keyboard and a camera or a microphone can make their own news, movies or music and disseminate it on the web. The crux of his stand is that this is disintermediating Hollywood, news outlets, record labels, etc. He further states; “My fear is that if Web 2.0 continues it’s sort of idealistic rampage through mainstream media, we’re going to be left with nothing but this level playing field, and professional media is going to be undermined.” Wow!
What Keen is missing is that the cause behind the surge in user-generated media is the basic law of supply and demand. If the demand did not exist, the supply would dwindle. Why are there so few horse-drawn wagon repair shops? Because something better came along that people wanted: cars. The public constantly complains that today’s films and music, for the most part, suck. That’s not to say that there aren’t great movies and CDs being made. What is true is that many are jammed together, lowest-common-denominator targeted rehashing packaged for mass consumption. There wouldn’t be a half-dozen independent film channels if the public was happy with the available cinema. Certainly the latest Shrek or Fantastic Four has it’s audience (me for one), and a large one at that. But the public is fragmenting by choice. They are no longer willing to accept what they are force fed and are looking elsewhere for entertainment that touches them on a deeper level. I heard recently, so it may not be true, that most movies lose money. This is most likely due to the enormous operating costs of the studio, actors, special effects, directors, marketing, etc. Yet a little movie like the Blair Witch Project, made for $60,000, made over $29 million in it’s opening weekend. This was filmed with a small crew and limited cast, virtually no special effects, unless you count flashlights, and was marketed on the web by it’s writer and director. Blair Witch 2 was made for $15 million and made only $13 million it’s opening weekend. This one was made by a major production company. By the way, the original gets an 8 out of 10 stars rating while the major studio version got only 2 out of 10 stars.
There is a serious movement to abandon network news and news paper outlets in favor of consumer-generated news, blogs or the BBC. Many feel that due to their focus on the bottom line, network news agencies are focusing more on local drama or celebrity gossip than international news. As a musician, you don’t want me to get started on what record labels have been pushing. Keen says “I think record lables historically have found and polished marvelous talent.” Is he kidding?! Does he listen to the schlock on the radio? Are the Britney’s of the world really marvelous talent? Let’s not forget the Paris Hilton CD. This is typical of record company offerings. You don’t get very many White Stripes, Tools or Dave Mathews. Whether you like bands like this or not, they are quality musicians, writing quality music and releasing quality CDs. Not pre-packaged tarts with a crew of 50 year-old songwriters and mixing board gurus that represents a majority of record company releases. What he additionally fails to mention is the financial structire of record companies. Most bands don’t even make money from their CDs, the record companies keep it. Most must rely on ticket and t-shirt sales.
