tracking shot remix

A Series of Tubes: Yes it does feel like a horror movie

Found on bOING bOING, this mashup uses the idiotically famous "the internet is a series of tubes" from Ted Stevens as the basis for a trailer for a new horror movie.  A hoot!

ShopWiki paying for user generated product review videos

Check out this TechCrunch story about ShopWiki.  They will pay you $50 for a product review video (for the first 500 submitted).

Agency for Customer Made Ads

Those trend-watching folks at Springwise have a blog post about an agency for customer-made ads.  Their first campaign is for a chain of TexMex restaurants: Moe's Southwest Grill.  Winners (voted on by an online community and a panel of experts) get food from Moe's.  The grand prize winner is required to eat a Moe's burrito every week for the rest of their life :-).

Machinima User-Generated Commercials

A posting about user generated ads created with machinima (from the MIT Advertising Lab blog).

Scanner Darkly Remix winner announced

From Tommy Pallotta's blog on myspace:

RES MAGAZINE ANNOUNCES THE WINNERS OF A SCANNER DARKLY REMIX CONTEST

June 23rd, 2006 (New York, NY) RES Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the A Scanner Darkly Trailer Remix Contest. The winning trailer, Scanner Monitors Remix was created by Robert Rugan III of Birmingham, Alabama; the runner-up, Scramble Suit Remix was created by Dorian Ramirez of Austin, Texas; and the Audience Award winner, A Civil War of the Mind was created by Peter Butler, also of Austin, Texas.

RES Magazine developed this unique contest with Tommy Pallotta, the film's
producer to challenge contestants to recut, remix or remake the trailer for the upcoming Richard Linklater feature film A Scanner Darkly, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, opening July 7th, 2006. The films creative team chose one winner and one runner-up from 249 entries, meanwhile Web site visitors chose the Audience Award.

The Grand Prize winner and a guest will be flown to the U.S. Premiere of A
Scanner Darkly in Los Angeles, Thursday, June 29th, 2006 and a Microsoft Windows 64-bit powered professional video editing workstation with Adobe Production Studio Premium featuring Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop and more. Runner-up and Audience Award winners will both receive XBOX360 video game consoles, Adobe Production Studio Standard software and an autographed A Scanner Darkly movie poster.

We were inspired by the response and the number of submissions, said A Scanner Darklys producer, Tommy Pallotta. The dedication and the quality of work exceeded
our expectations in our little experiment. Hopefully this will be a catalyst in even bolder ideas of remixing movies, music and culture.

The guys and gals at RES are looking at rich media on the web in a different way than most places," said contest winner Robert Rugan III. This contest is a great example of that.

I wanted the trailer to feel like there were many layers, said Rugan. Many different trailers lurking under the surface of this one...that there is an alternate trailer if you just flipped one over.

To watch the winning trailers and all contest submissions, visit http://scanner.res.com/

Open Video Contest

Creative Commons and the Fedora Project are promoting open video with a contest.  Submit a 30 second video talking about freedom and openness and maybe win a Sony camcorder (or at least get some Fedora flip flops!).

CC Salon tomorrow night, 6pm at the Shine

Just a reminder that this month's CC Salon is tommorrow (Wednesday) night, June 14, from 6-9pm at the Shine in San Francisco.

The lineup:

• Victor Stone, ccmixter.org, fourstones.net
• Marisa Olson, International Artist and Curator at Large for Rhizome.org, http://lifeofmo.blogspot.com/
• Rick Prelinger, archive.org, preview of film, "Panorama Ephemera," "...using the Internet Archive as the primary means of distributing a (very) independent feature (under CC of course)..."

Always an enjoyable event.  Watch this short movie to get a feel for past Salons (photos from flickr.com, music from ccMixter.org, created using trackingshot.com).

Current.TV: Miami Ad School's V-CAMs

Can you call them V-CAM's (View Created Ads) if they are created by advertising students for a class project?

Nacho Libre user create comics...

Check out this story at CNet on Paramount Pictures licensing Planetwide Games' Comic Book Creator Software to let fans create theor own Nacho Libre comic books....

Cool!

Anti-mashup?

Lee Gomes at the WSJ has written this story dissing User Generated Content (UGC).  In it he likens mashups to the kind of cut/paste montages kids get as busy work in elementary school: full of fun, but signifying nothing.

I guess I'm not sure that I completely agree.  Sure there will be some fiddling around, but it seems to me that there is more than one documentary that relies on previously shot footage or photos (Ken Burns?), yet still manages to be stunningly effective.

We've seen blogging take off as a popular UGC medium.  Most of us are totally trained in writing text, drilled at it through years of school.  Even so, most blogs are pretty casual and would not be in line for a Pulitzer, and instead are meant to be read by a small, intimately known audience.

The biggest problem with UGC for multimedia (IMHO) is that most of us are not trained in the film arts.  Writing a script is a nontrivial activity.  Nor do we have the patience, money, and team to help us get lots of camera angles, etc. to make a real film.  Just putting a cheap tool that enables short film editing doesn't seem to me to be enough.  We need to understand what kinds of stories that regular people want to tell and then build focused tools (perhaps that automate parts of the process) to help them.