I love the tiny window this gives you. It’s still not quite the video equivalent of Twitter, but it could get there once people find a way to @ one another and follow the conversations. Not that I think that’s a priority. Right now it’s just fun to see what can be achieved in such a confined space. Christian as always is way out ahead:
When I logged on for the first time it was a little like a video conversation yearbook. All the familiar faces where there already. I noticed that while most people were faltering with the built in limitations of the platform Christian was already on his 8th page of videos! I mentioned this to Jess and her reply was:
He’s like Monkey: irrepressible!
It’s not a bad comparison. He’s a little wayward at times, but makes for an excellent ambassador. If I was starting any video related platform I’d ensure he had an invite from day one. He brings an audience and certainly puts a new place through its paces.
This website follows Bryony as she attempts to make the world’s first UGC zombie movie.
What’s a UGC movie?
UGC stands for User Generated Content. That means it’s a film that’s made entirely by contributions from the online community…
So what’s the BBC’s involvement?
The Zombie movie is entirely up to Bryony – we’re just following her as she makes it…
The Beeb are actually doing a bit more than that. By choosing to follow the project and committing to having a documentary by the end of it the BBC are in many ways legitimatising what Paperlillies is up to. At least in the eyes of BBC viewers who think YouTube is nothing but a place to watch old episodes of Doctor Who or ‘that video with the monkey’ (take your pick).
It’s an interesting step for a channel like BBC 3 and I think the correct one. Just recently I watched Adam Buxton’s MeeBOX and while I’ve always enjoyed his work and he’s obviously very in tune with the Internet this came across as a tad dated and way too obvious. Disturbingly he also suddenly looks a lot like Documentally.
The other show that promised to play in the world I live and work in was Delta Forever:
This was a pilot for a proposed show about an online community whose lives revolve around a very Harry Potterish series of novels. Some things the pilot got absolutely right (the Scottish character defending the original title of the first novel over the bastardised American version rang some serious bells for this Dark Materials fanboy), but the most obvious failure was the idea that these kids needed a visual cue to help them stand out as Internet nerds. The cast had to suffer a tedious amount of OTT makeup. Horrible to watch, which was a shame for the few good performances that got buried. But there was something there that to me at least warranted further viewing and I’d be interested to watch the concept develop if it gets picked up for a series.
That may of course have more to do with the pilot revolving around an advance geek screening of a film that the fans will either love or loathe. Something I have a certain familiarity with…
The zombie project though is an entirely fresher idea. First and foremost this is a project developed by an already popular online community member and something that was set in motion before the Beeb swung a beam on it. I think an organisation as big and respected as the BBC getting involved at this stage of an online madcap idea is very important and the payoff for everyone involved is accumulative.
There is of course the danger that if handled improperly the YouTubers will come off as a little irregular, but to survive on YouTube you need to be pretty thick-skinned so I’m not too worried with that angle. It should be win-win for the Beeb as this kind of thing makes them look web savvy at a time when they need a leg-up in that area. The worry is that they’ll cut corners on this in the way they have with the iPlayer (great concept, horrible realisation – note the two show links above now have nowhere to go which will now instead send you straight for a torrent).
What they could have on their hands is something as vital as say the upcoming We Are Wizards or at the very least an interesting companion piece to it. It also comes at a time when Joss Whedon is putting a fork in this space too.
Oddly enough this seems to be the summer for home-made zombie projects. I’ve been made aware of a small pile of them currently in production with budgets ranging from the very modest to the very respectable. This however is by far the most interesting. The plot for once is the least of my concerns as I’m far more interested in how a community comes together to pull this kind of project off.
It’s the kind of thing that was talked about a lot in the early days of Seesmic but it came to nothing. While some of my more succesful recent projects have been built in a similar way by finding the right people with the right skills in my own social media backyard (which handily stretches across the globe), but nothing quite on this scale.
Getting the right people together to land an interview with Stephen Spielberg is one thing. Beating him at his own game is quite another…
Toby Moore‘s Cool Curve presentation is now online:
This is the presentation he gave both at the Tuttle and Reboot from an original concept worked out with David Terrar and David Tebbutt. The video is a cleaned-up version of this talk, but now filmed (properly) by Laura Kidd, further tweaked and distributed just about everywhere by Phil Cambell.
The content of the presentation has been refined through lots of feedback, but this is the first chance to put it in front of as wide an audience as possible.
I’ve been hanging out with the Cool Curve for a couple of months now, testing it on people, catching reactions to it and generally building up a picture of what it covers and where it still needs a little TLC. I’m very interested to track the feedback on this so if you can free up 20 minutes and a coffee please give it a whirl and let me know what you think.
At 19+ minutes it obviously needs editing down and I also think there’s a couple of natural pauses in the flow that will allow us to split the presentation up. The latter part regarding Chris Brogan‘s “conversations are rivers” and how that should be developed feels like it’s going to grow into something that works as a stand alone piece. I’d love to see The Cool Curve refined a little more and given to the guys at Common Craft to play with.
That said, I’m a big fan of Toby’s drawing over powerpoint style and this makes a great jumping off point for conversation.
When I first started talking to DT and Sleepydog about the Cool Curve I was immediately struck by how my own creative (and not so creative) endeavours fitted within the structure. That’s something I want to discuss further as I’m not usually comfortable being pigeon-holed between two axis, but this is such a resilient little idea that it’s hard to dismiss, even for a contrary SOB like myself.
More to come once the video has been digested a little further… (it’s also up on Google Video and Vimeo)
A couple of weeks after mentioning The Flip I finally got my grubby little hands on one. I went to the European launch this evening and came out with one for free (and a lot of beer mats). Nice little event. No hard sell, great venue (The Soho Hotel) and free food and drink. I would have been impressed if they hadn’t thrown free cameras at everyone…
I did a short(ish) unboxing video:
And had a conversation about the thing on Seesmic and Twitter. I also threw some FLIP video up on YouTube. You can see it here, but the built in software (and by built in I actually mean built into the device which is handy) seems to have over compressed the video. The sound especially is weird. I just reviewed the raw file in fullscreen and its actually very impressive considering the price of the camera.
I’ll take it along to tomorrow’s Tuttle if anyone wants to have a play with it.
I’ll be writing more about it and have some very particular ideas in mind in how to use it, but for now I need a coffee and am weirded out by using a white Macbook (mine is in for repair at the Apple store).
Once I get all my kit back I’ll really put the thing through its paces, but for now I’m quietly impressed.
It’s nice to see a company that simply gets the kind of products that we not only need, but want to use. Archos could learn a few things from these guys.
When I was at the Googleplex a few months back I heard that the project to drop a translation service into Google Talk was coming along really well. The idea is that you’ll be able to chat someone on the other side of the world (or even in the same building as you I guess) without the language barrier. So I’d type in English and they’d receive the DM in their own language. Their replies would then also appear to me instantly translated. Not quite there yet, but very fucking cool.
A year or so ago I did a fun interview with Chinese director Zhang Yuan. His replies were often lengthy and yet what the translator passed back to me was often very short. It was kind of frustrating. Now if we’d been able to push the translator aside and stick in a couple of GoogleSpin ear pieces instead… then my English would be transcribed via Spinvox into text then pushed through a Google translate-bot before being sent on to his earpiece as spoken Chinese.
I smirked when I saw how they slept at the Googleplex:
No smirking now that it’s 3am and I’m wide awake. I could do with one of the sleep machines from Judge Dredd that gave you a full night’s sleep in just ten minutes.
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