An excerpt on user-submitted videos from the article How consumers hijacked the media model.
Viacom Inc.’s (VIA) VH-1 just launched Acceptable.tv to find talented undiscovered filmmakers and producers. On the new site, amateurs can upload their 2-minute short comedy clip and submit them for a vote. One winner will have the chance of getting his or her production aired on national television.
According to Michael Hirschhorn, executive vice president of programming at VH-1, some of the user-submitted videos are “surprisingly good.” (Go to my blog to watch my interview with Hirschhorn.) Though VH-1 has no plans to hire any of these would-be filmmakers, it might have to consider this option down the road, since talent that attracts an audience will always go where the money is.
So what appears to have changed in the economics (at least for now) is the winnowing process of finding talent. Perhaps it’s cheaper than hiring an agent? Still, there are new costs. The costs are the burden of exposing talent for free for someone else to capitalize on. Will one talented filmmaker go to Google Inc.’s (GOOG) YouTube or other sites, such as Metacafe, to get paid and be in front of a larger audience?
The economics for freelancers in media also appears to be changing. Google just introduced a “pay per action” advertising model, requiring a potential customer to do more than click on a page for the publisher of the advertisement to get paid. This pay-for-performance model is also finding its way to the content-generating process. On Metacafe, video producers only get paid after their content is viewed above a certain threshold.
What is a vlogumentary? I see it as an audiovisual (AV) documentary that uses a blog structure or (CMS) Content Management System. It has the following properties:
1. The predominating medium is video and audio in varying forms.
2. The blog is created for the duration of the documentary production and is therefore set up around a particular intent with a completion date.
3. The concept of a blog being chronological and set around the latest post is important but also the blog as an archive is crucial. This means the access to the rest of the content through (searching, categories and archives) needs to be considered.
4. The posted AV content needs to be short in duration with a degree of self-containment, along with being part of a larger whole (the blog).
5. Possibly there could be links from one post to another to direct user engagement.
6. The blog is open to two-way conversation (via comments) with the participants in the documentary and others outside of the project.
In the wildcat vlog database experiment as a starting point the aim was simply to get some video into the customised structure. I chose to use some 8mm film footage from a previous project, mainly because I always saw this footage as being an early example of a film diary. Shot over a period of 30 years by two artists Charles and Sheena Hazzard - a weblog provides an excellent structure to collate and bring together short duration clips into varying categories. The objective of these notes is to look at working towards what I call a ‘vlogumentary’.
Categories: The database structure of the weblog provides for the first time a way to separate the varying types of events that the Hazzards recorded. The user/spectator can decide whether they are interested in viewing clips associated with the ’sugar festivals’ for example. The next step would be to provide a method of viewing these collections of clips as a sequence.
Post titles: The post tilting was stripped back to simple pragmatic names. In a planned work which has a more focused theme, the post title can provide a significant insight into the clip contents before it is viewed. Also, including written body comments on a post can add significant information prior to downloading and viewing. I note on the chasing windmills vlog that they have opted for no text letting the video speak for itself as a self-contained unit alongside what is a serial ongoing narrative. pouringdown does the same.
Chronological posting: Another influencing factor is the chronological diary format of a blog. In this example the date and time of entry are not a considered part of the narrative. In a future work this feature would provide for the user, insights into how a project and narrative is structured. I note, that generally in most vlogs and even blogs for that matter the idea generally is as a user and visitor to a blog or even through RSS feeds to keep an eye out for latest posts. But, also blogs do operate as an archive that can be searched in a number of ways. The trick is to possibly work with both of these features.
Other notes: On reflection, these clips are an excellent example of covering daily events. The process of recording on 8mm film forces the shooter to edit in the camera as part of trying to capture a scene as it happens. The on/off of the edits in the camera produces a particular type of aesthetic in terms of capturing a scene quickly and as it happens. They are also good examples of working towards shorter duration scenes that fit the Internet and vlog format. A digital stills camera demands a different approach where due to size it seems to be more about keeping the camera still and looking for a continuous short duration shot.
So, what does this blog set-up provide in terms of a type of video database? Simply, it provides a latest post feature via the thumbnail clusters at the top similar to a latest post list in a conventional blog in the sidebar. A default category called ‘clips’ (usually ‘uncategorised’ on a conventional blog) where all the clips uploaded to the blog are registered. The ‘clips’ category’ page follows a similar approach used by videobloggers to direct users to the videos that have been posted on their blog. For example the 2007 video archive page on Michael Verdi’s blog, which used a yearly archiving approach. The thumbnails clusters can also be pushed out into smaller groupings as sub-categories as discussed earlier. An issue with these thumbnails is that often due to their small miniature scale they image is lost and provides little insight for the user on what the clip might be about. I note on Verdi’s blog he has been careful to choose very graphic imagery for his thumbnails. I could be argued that they force this type of approach if they are to be useful navigation indicators.
One perspective from the mediamatic website titled Select and Combine, The Rise of Database Narratives
Database narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories, Kinder explains, particular data – characters, images, sounds, events – are selected from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific tales.
This quote is amongst some writing about a recent new media documentary master class on mediamatic. I liked the idea of using a blog as a tool to engage in a two-way conversation as part of the project.
Florian Thalhofer, who is the inventor of the Korsakow system, showed his latest interactive multichannel documentary project about a social housing project in Bremen-Nord. He spent a month in Bremen to film and interview the locals and kept an online diary so that people could react to it immediately. So he used the Internet as well as live images as a basis to create an interactive film.
Creative Commons have a tool ccPublisher for tagging video and audio with a creative commons license:
“ccPublisher is a tool that does two things: it will help you tag your audio and video files with information about your license and it allows you to upload Creative Commons-licensed audio and video works to the Internet Archive for free hosting. You also have the option of publishing the licensed and tagged audio works on your own site.”
Other notes on the ccPublisher CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on CC Tools
A link to notes on self-hosting the license on you own server and more notes on embedding a license.
The BBC Innovation Labs 2007 covers amongst other things some valid questions on online documentary production. Note ‘UGC’ is an acronym for User-Generated Content.
Cross Platform Documentary: The growth of social media services had led to an explosion of new and innovative ways of realising and delivering documentary online. How can films be made, presented, shared, augmented, annotated, located, classified and discovered using these new tools? What impact does this have on the craft of documentary and what models should be explored in the future? How can we discover what constitutes documentary in the digital space? Does it have to be ’snackable’? Can it be modular and episodic? Is it possible to be an auteur and simultaneouslly incorporate UGC content?
A recent book reference from the videovortex list:
NARRATIVITY: HOW VISUAL ARTS, CINEMA AND LITERATURE ARE TELLING THE WORLD TODAY , Ed by: DIS VOIR René Audet, Claude Romano, Laurence Dreyfus, Carl Therrien, Hugues Marchal translated by Paul Buck & Catherine Petit
To tackle the question of narration in its ruptures and mutations in an age of media culture and influences of videogames – where the ludic
and interactive principle is an important element – is a way to draw up an inventory of the Nineties, a time when art starts to function like some kind of editing table on which the artists can recreate daily reality. Through that reflection on time, the question is to show how its new languages and new ways of writing are representative of the contemporary imaginary expressed in it and to reaffirm that the work of art is an “event” before being a monument or a mere testimony, an event which constitutes an experience drawing in the spectator.