I can’t offer much commentary yet, but I thought this was an interesting story of old technology meets new.  After the death of his grandparents, filmmaker Morgan Dews found audiotapes and dictaphone recordings they made chronicling their unusual lives and marriage. He made a 75-minute documentary and is distributing the film theatrically in New York and Los Angeles, and over the internet as well, beginning at 9 a.m. Friday morning.

The article contains some great commentary by the director on filmmaking in the digital age, including his belief that an online releasing strategy is the only one left to truly independent filmmakers in the 21st century. I think there’s a great deal of truth there, but I think it is also only a matter of time before we see all films released theatrically and online simultaneously.

Has anybody ever seen the television show Three Sheets on the MOJO HD channel? It’s an informational show about drinking customs all over the world, with host comedian Zane Lamprey, and his trusted sidekick, Pleepleus (a stuffed monkey.) If you haven’t seen it, you have about two weeks to catch it before it goes off the air. Many of the shows fans are upset and have started using social networking sites in an attempt to save the show. They’ve started a Facebook group called “Save Three Sheets” and a google search of the same term turns up blogs encouraging fans to write to the network.

I’ve seen many a “save our show” campaign before, but the interesting thing here is that it’s not the show that has been cancelled. It’s the network. Read more…

I’ve had another chance to watch Advertising the American Dream, the featurette on the Mad Men DVD. I think it’s interesting the way advertising has evolved and continues to evolve, with the new technology. So I’ve included here a partial and unofficial transcript from the featurette, which starts off talking about advertising in the past and the American dream, then moves on to talk about the ways in which advertising is different today than it was in the days of Mad Men.
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The Advertising Age article that was required reading for this week’s COM 529 class talked about the Cinematch application in Netflix. Netflix tracks your rental history and allows you to rate movies, then Cinematch analyzes your data and the data of others similar to you to make recommendations of “movies you’ll love.” The Advertising Age article cites the Cinematch application as drawing millions of users to Netflix. I doubt this very much. I think Netflix was the right idea at the right time, and that alone garnered it millions of users. I personally think Cinematch is terrible at predicting movies I’ll love, and I prefer to base my picks on either Rotten Tomatoes or my favorite critic, Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune.

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I wanted to address Adrianna’s comment from the COM 592 Wednesday night class that advertising is a necessary cost of business that must be included in any budget.

The absolute best show on television right now is Mad Men, and it just happens to be about advertising, advertising in the early 1960s when it was experiencing a renaissance. On the DVD extras of season one, there is a great vignette about advertising, in which someone notes that the greatest feat of the advertising industry is convincing people they need advertising. If toilet paper weren’t advertised, would you stop buying it?

The segment on advertising is really fascinating and I’m unable to do it justice in a blog post. Regrettably, I could not find it on-line, but this Making of Mad Men vignette has some insight into advertising as well. If you haven’t seen the show, you are missing a truly remarkable and unique piece of storytelling.

I love the comic strip Zits, which is really in tune with the parent-teenager relationship. I don’t have a teenager but I was one, and I often see echoes of myself and my parents within the strip. Recently though, the strip has been focused on the ways in which teenagers communicate with each other and the ways in which this is challenging for their parents. I don’t see a whole lot of myself in this. I’m no longer a teenager and I don’t have any digital natives of my own. I just have to assume that, as always, Zits is doing an excellent job of portraying this world. It certainly seems accurate.

Read more Zits here.