Throughout this quarter, Flip the Media will be featuring some of the best video projects from the winter Multimedia Storytelling classes.

“Cooking Up Ideas, Cooking Up Community” by Michael Bean

The subject of my video was The Food Education, Empowerment and Sustainability Team (FEEST) that meets every Wednesday afternoon at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in West Seattle to learn about food, themselves and one another – all while preparing a healthy and delicious dinner to enjoy with friends and community members.

I chose this subject for two reasons: I love to cook and always enjoy the social nature of cooking with friends or family, and FEEST is a youth-led initiative. I found it interesting and impressive that a group of young people would be taken with the idea, and I immediately knew I wanted to hang around and film them after dropping in one Wednesday to cook with them.

My goals were to highlight a cool youth-led initiative; produce a video that showed youth participating in their lives and communities in a unique way; and give a glimpse into just how amazing the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center is.
I think my video benefited from my strategy to first do some ‘deep hanging out’ – as Scott Macklin likes to say. Rather than simply showing up with cameras and expecting people to cater to the needs of my production process, I went for the first week and simply cooked and established a rapport with the group. (It helped also that I did most of their mountain of dishes).

After that, I had no issues when I came with cameras on subsequent weeks. During the cooking on the third week, I was able to get some really good footage (with the help of Scott), felt comfortable asking for quotes and generally just felt like I was welcome and trusted.

Showing up repeatedly, rather than hoping to get everything in one session, also helped when it came time to piece a story together.

I shot the video with a Panasonic GH1 Digital SLR and a Kodak Zi6 Pocket Video Camera. To capture audio, I used a Rode Mic. I must say, this might have been the most important part of the production process. I am very inexperienced with cameras and had some trouble keeping the camera steady. However, because the audio quality was generally great, it made it easier to not dwell on that less-than-stellar aspect of the video. I used Final Cut Pro 7 to edit.

Throughout this quarter, Flip the Media will be featuring some of the best video projects from the winter Multimedia Storytelling classes.

“Molly Nordstrom talks about her 2009 Climb for the Community Experience” by Madeline Moy

The subject of this video was Molly Nordstrom, the current board chair of United Way of King County who participated in our 2009 Climb for the Community. In the video, Molly shares what it was like to climb Mount Rainier and participate in this fundraiser for people in need. The goal of the video was to get prospects for the 2010 Climb interested and excited about participating.

I shot it with a Kodak Zi8 and a JVC DV-500, used a Rode shotgun microphone for sound and edited with Adobe Premiere.

On the advice of fellow MCDMer and interviewer extraordinaire Ross Reynolds, I worked really hard to take Molly back to the moment of doing the climb up Rainier. And then once I got her there, I had her do most of the talking. My follow-up questions consisted mostly of “What happened next? And then what?”

I also learned to shut up and listen when interviewing someone. Let your subject do most of the talking and wait until he or she is completely finished before you chime in.

Throughout this quarter, Flip the Media will be featuring some of the best video projects from the winter Multimedia Storytelling classes.

“Without A Clue” by John Stang and Terry Short

“Without A Clue” is a documentary about Jet City Improv’s production of “Clue” in Seattle. Footage of a live performance is complemented by interviews with the director and actors to show how the cast incorporates suggestions from the audience to spontaneously create the characters and plot for a two-act murder mystery loosely based on the classic board game “Clue.” In the film, the actors reflect on the rewards and challenges of the improvisational process.

We used three Canon Vixia HF S10 high-definition cameras and edited in Final Cut Pro. The audio for the interviews was recorded on a Sony PCM D50 digital recorder. We congratulated ourselves for taking the Sony along as a back-up because the shotgun mic that was our primary device failed after the first interview.

This was a good experience in shooting a live event in a crowded venue while having to be completely unobtrusive to the audience and actors. Since we couldn’t move around in the theater to capture the performance from various vantage points, having three cameras locked down and out of the way gave us a sufficient variety of perspectives.

Throughout this quarter, Flip the Media will be featuring some of the best video projects from the winter Multimedia Storytelling classes.

“Henry: Portrait of a serial muralist” by Ross Reynolds

The subject of the video was Ryan Henry Ward, an artist known for his murals found on automobiles, buildings, retaining walls, coffee houses and schools in Seattle. He was living in his car when he decided to make murals, first by finding blank walls and asking if he could paint something there. Today private collectors commission his work, and he can afford the rent to live in a shared house. He recently painted the wall of Value Village in North Seattle.

The goal of the video was to convey the vivid whimsy of his work while telling the story of his artistic life.

I shot the video with a Panasonic Lumix camera, recorded the audio on a Marantz digital recorder and edited it in Final Cut Express.

One thing I think I learned was what to leave out. I considered narration, music and interviews with other people, but in the end opted for the simpler elements of the murals and Ryan telling his story.

Seattle-based Pet Holdings, Inc., CEO Ben Huh (purveyor of beloved LOLcats and many other hilarious image macros) contracted with me to produce his Cheezburger Network’s 3rd Anniversary Video, an effort to celebrate the 3-year anniversary of icanhascheezburger.com and the 1 billionth collective view of the entire network’s user-generated video content.

As a new media producer and recent graduate of the UW MCDM program, I had been looking for Web video work and a means of applying the skills I had been developing as a graduate student.  About a month ago, Kathy Gill, one of the MCDM’s most popular professors (and exceptionally well established in the Seattle social media sphere, I might add) connected me with Huh via Twitter.  Huh has been in the process of hiring for various positions within his expanding Network and had been advertising such through his tweets.  However, at the time, the need for a video to celebrate Cheezburger’s birthday and billion video views had not completely arisen.  Only recently had the Cheezburger Network noted that they were approaching 1 billion video views, as the majority of their blogs’ entries have focused mainly on funny still images and memes.  Huh came up with the idea to produce the anniversary video (as well as to expand their video presence) in part based on conversations with me, and, I am certain, simply by looking at his sites’ video numbers.  As a fan of LOLcats, FAILs, and all things meme culture, I seemed like a really good fit for the project, and late one evening just before Christmas, we commenced work. Read more…

Watch the video of my entire Seattle Town Hall talk on January 13, 2010 (we’ll post the high-res version later). Here is my slide deck with notes (cross-posted from The Storyteller Uprising blog).  Special thanks to MCDM’er Jay Al-Hashal who provided the design concept for the deck and advised me on structure.  We covered everything last night — Iran, the Haiti Earthquake, Google’s stunning Chinese censorship decision, and as always, the future of journalism and the danger of echo chambers:

Animation is a very unique art form; it allows the filmmaker to control their story down to each individual frame. Each object, shadow, and line must be created and placed. The camera does not capture unintentional backgrounds, extra frames, or incidental light, there is only what the animator chooses to show.

The digital revolution in media production is dramatically changing the techniques, forms, content, and function of modern animation and is actively remixing it with other media forms so much that digitally-created animation is now nothing short of a new mode of cultural production and a totally unique form of motion-graphic storytelling of its own right.

The diversity of software tools available for creating moving images on a screen has contributed to the rise of a tremendous and diverse number of styles, techniques, and looks. The multitude of distribution channels further enforced the trend of convergence towards forms more suitable for display on multiple screen sizes and configurations.

As Manovich puts it in his review of Adobe’s AfterEffects, a popular suite for creating digital animations: “[A]s software remixes the techniques and working methods of various media they simulate, the result are new interfaces, tools and workflow with their own distinct logic. In the case of AfterEffects, the working method which it puts forward is neither animation, nor graphic design, nor cinematography, even though it draws from all these fields. It is a new way to make moving image media. Similarly, the visual language of media produced with this and similar software is also different from the languages of moving images which existed previously (Manovich, 2006).”

Read more…

IndieFlix Play It Again Podcast with Masizakhe Filmmaker Scott Macklin Hosted By Lois Fein

“We are each other’s best and most powerful resource.”