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One Millionth Tower – review

documentary, Reviews, web Comments Off

Dec 312012

According to Angela Watercutter on Wired, One Millionth Tower by Katerina Cizek, Mike Robbins + friends:

…was carefully crafted to be watched on the internet. It uses interactive tools to illustrate the Toronto residents’ ideas about how to improve the decaying high-rise in which they live. Powered entirely by HTML5, WebGL, and other open source JavaScript libraries, One Millionth Tower is loaded with photos and information from all over the web, and exists in an online environment that is about as close to three-dimensional as something on a flat screen can get.

“We’ve added an entire new layer to the web and One Millionth Tower is one of the first examples of that,” said Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, the force behind the Popcorn.js toolkit that powers the film. “In the same way we all got really excited when you could highlight a word on a page and create a hyperlink … that’s happening now with film. I think of this as the first real web-made documentary.”

The resulting film is unlike any before it. It can be watched without much interaction, but it’s much more fun to play with it (see “How to Watch This Movie” at right). Some aspects change even without viewer input: For instance, the time of day and weather in the film change based on actual conditions in Toronto….

The interactive movie is chock-full of photos from Flickr, street-views from Google Maps and changing environments fueled by real-time weather data from Yahoo. Everything is triggered by Popcorn.js, which acts like a conductor signaling which instruments play at what times.

This documentary can never be the same on two viewings, no matter how carefully you try to retrace your steps, because the data it pulls in is always evolving. It doesn’t make great use of UGC, but it could, the principle is there. The data being pulled in is quite well integrated too.

So well done them, this may indeed represent a future direction for participatory documentary.

Curation is the zeitgeist of our times

social media, This working life, web Comments Off

Dec 302012

Producer Steve Rosenbaum‘s antidote to digital overload:

To separate signal from noise, there’s an emerging class of information superheroes called Content Curators. They’ve got ties to a number of legacy job descriptions, but they’re in some ways extraordinarily new. Think of them like Journalists who’ve climbed into a time machine and been transported to the future, where there are more sources, and more tools, and stunning and sometimes reckless speed.

Curators are both collectors and creators. Capturing the zeitgeist of the web, and knitting together images, text, links, and video along with their own original content to create a focused, contextually relevant editorial for an overloaded world. For a journalist the decision is simple. Embrace your new role as a curator and be part of solving digital overload, or continue to create stand-alone acts of original journalism and have your voice increasingly drowned out by the rising tide of unfiltered information.

But can’t people curate their own stuff? No.

People will pay for clarity, authority, context, and speed. So, how does the changing nature of the web change the need for curation?. It turns out – it speeds it up. We’re now moving to a place where a large amount of the information being created and consumed is images. Cisco, the web technology and networking giant, predicts that 62% of web traffic will be video by the year 2015.

Which makes video a big prize for curators, and a big pain point in the world of digital overload

So, a new job description is born:

…what the web needs most are focused, topic oriented editorial specialists. Individuals who can gather information, provide context, separate information and ideas from data and noise. A new brand of journalist that can bring a distinct editorial voice to a curated content environment.

For some journalists, the idea of being both a finder/filter of content and a creator may seem like they’re giving up the part of the job that they most love. But rising tide of Digital Overload has created an over abundance of unfiltered content, and a growing need for curators to turn a noisy web into a infinite number of trusted verticals.

[image: a Wordle of a paper I'm writing, in which I argue that UGC curation is the future for documentary]

an activist UGC doco

documentary, social media, web Comments Off

Dec 202012

Rise Like Lions: OWS and the Seeds of Revolution (2011) by Scott Noble is a tribute to good editing, as Noble manages to bring together UGC from various sources, captured various ways, and makes it work together.

The approach gives the work a very different, participatory mood. It’s more like a tribute to a movement / community. There is no voiceover, but textual interstices act as segues and extra information, which somehow seem less intrusive. The camerawork was, in the main, filmed ‘on the run’ and illustrates that wobblycam lack of tripod look, however it seems appropriate to the theme. Although presumably all shot on domestic equipment, it doesn’t seem problematic for small screen viewing, and since it appears to be aimed at an internet based audience, its lodef quality doesn’t intrude. Stills have also been effectively incorporated. Truly some genius editing here, pulling it all together.

Some people don’t like the image quality, but for me using UGC and found footage gives this doco an authority it wouldn’t otherwise have.

This is one of the films listed in Films for Action, a great resource for activist documentaries.

[Still from Rise Like Lions by Scott Noble]

5 rules for being a media professional

Contemporary Media Work Practices, Networked Media, This working life Comments Off

Oct 082012

In the era of user-generated content, what does it mean to be professional? There is so much fantastic UGC, it shouldn’t be about whether you get paid or not. And you can’t rely on the quality of your gear to answer the question, either, as Phil Rhodes argues:

Few people will shoot their childrens’ birthday party with an F65, and it’s unlikely that the next superhero blockbuster will be shot on a Canon 5D. But there’s now a huge middle ground, bigger than ever before, in which it’s not inconceivable that cameras like the C300 might end up on anything from low-budget shorts to much wealthier TV shows, documentaries, corporates, features, wedding videos, or almost any genre you could name.(RedShark)

Here are some first ideas on redefining professionalism:

Professionals complete what they have committed to.
Professionals maintain a consistent style and quality.
Professionals take ownership of their work.
Professionals understand the importance of drafting and editing.
Professionals are always expanding their horizons.

Portrait by Andy Newman explores what ‘professional’ means in the context of contemporary photography. It’s a beautifully shot traditional little vid doco, but the editing is a little jarring.

Some reflections from Andria Lindquist:

I think one of the things with being creative is just the willingness to try things out, and see what it looks like afterwards….also, go with your gut and be confident about it.

The things that I am most proud of are my drive and my consistency.

Whether you’re doing it with your phone or your doing it with a 3000-dollar camera, it [needs to] change the way you look at things….being a professional photographer happens when its in every aspect of your life. It is the means for your living, not just in a monetary sense, its carried through in every day, and everywhere you go, you’re a photographer and that’s who you are.

Saying what you want is not something that people do, and I fail at it all the time but I try to do it.

You have to protect yourself from being spread too thin because then you don’t have the same drive and passion to go with your full heart on something.

Some reflections from Cory Staudacher:

Anything that I want to put out, I’ve thought about it, I’ve refined it. Like, this is quality enough for me personally that I’m going to share it. People love consistency …