One of my friend introduced me a short film – SIGNS, which was really the best short film I’ve ever seen in Youtube. It is a simple short film about communication. I think this film sets up a great example for the multimedia story telling class. Here is the link to the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy0HNWto0UY&eurl=http://home.xiaonei.com/Home.do  Hope you guys will enjoy it.

Journalism faces an unprecedented existentialist crisis, due to the economy, new digital platforms, and dwindling advertising revenues.  In collaboration with the Online News Association and the UW Journalism program, we hosted this forward-looking forum on potential future models of news.

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Today we talk about foley. Your film creation cannot live on music alone, unless you are making a silent movie, or you make sure you record every footstep sound carefully, you will need some sounds effects to enhance the action on the screen.  Most professional editing suites come packaged with all sorts bits and bites that you can use. If you do not have those, there is hope on the internet for non-commercial use: basically for free for students and filmmakers for online distribution and film festivals, with possibility of licensing for commercial when (more realistically, if) needed.

The resource I want to share with you today is The Freesound Project. Freesound makes available an ever-growing database of sound effect licensed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. This means you can use and abuse the samples for non-commercial purposes including remixing, file sharing and webcasting.

You may search the site using freeform text, tags, descriptions, usernames, or geotags.  There is also a “sounds-like” type of browsing available on the site. An account is required, but sign-up is free.

This was going to be the exception to creative commons music and a post about licensing from small recording houses. But in the past two days while talking to musician and studio manager Robby Baier at SoulTube, Robby just went ahead and posted a Non-Commercial, Attribution, Limited Use notice to the site. I verified this with the studio, and indeed, licenses to students are free (yay)-festival licenses included. When the money comes (keep believing), they would want to talk to you some more about commercial distribution and offer to even help you pick the right song for a scene. Either way, always give credit where its due.

SoulTube is home to a small, but a unqiue and beautifully-produced collection of artists. They have licensed music to commercials, TV, and films before so they are not new to the game. Check out their site, go to the “Songs For Film” section and choose the advanced search feature. You can explore from their list of artists, pick a mood, or search for specific words in the lyrics database (kudos!).

If this does not sound too good already, most of the tracks are also available in instrumental versions and you can hear the music and download it from the site directly.  Again, the only drawback is that it is a small collection, but the experience of dealing with people passionate about their music is vastly superior to any of the stock music houses or large labels.

You have labored over your film concept (the one you just came up with an hour before you had to pitch it), you have poured every emotion in your soul into the storyboards (mostly fear), and now you scurry about in the last two weeks of Winter quarter, squeezing whatever creative juices (and hard-earned cash) left in you to put out a story you can call your own into this cyberworld.

Visually, things seem to be falling into place (historically known as the crapper), and now it is time to find that perfect minor chord to send your audience weeping after they view your piece.

The musicscapes are vast and this post (in three parts) will only attempt to provide some guidance for those creating audio-visual projects to navigating the creative commons music territories (or swamps).

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The economy keeps getting worse, and we communicators keep wringing our hands about the state of media — especially with the potential demise of the Seattle Post Intelligencer.  We’re even hosting our own event, “Journalism on the Brink: Can Digital Save It” this coming Wednesday (RSVP info below).

But as I stated in my Techflash.com profile last week, I believe that at the height of chaos, when everyone else is running away, there is immense opportunity for anyone who keeps their eyes on the prize.

Here at the Master of Communication in Digital Media, we have really focused on new communication models, and social media platforms as part of this opportunity.  Read more…

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.

Though we exist in a time of great media upheaval, where the Internet has made available so much story for so little effort, millions are still drawn to long-form traditional narratives. We still go to the cinema, the bookstore, the concert, the play, the big game, the event. Though so much power can be packed into a media snack – a tweet, a blog post, a text message, a sentence, a word, or even an acronym (LMAO anyone?) – we still sit down for super-sized media meals. Something must be inspiring us to pull up that chair and sup from the old media table. Inspiration seems to be the answer. What is the importance of inspiration to storytelling? In our digital world – full of bombardment from massive narrative abstraction and fragmentation, where so much story content is being communicated in so many bits and bytes and packets like bullets from a fiber-optic Gatling gun – we still find time to stick the old media morphine drip in. This happens when we do something so archaic as watch an hour-long drama on network television, spend nine innings at the baseball stadium, or, gasp, read an entire Harry Potter book cover-to-cover. Read more…