Adrian Miles has made the ‘Post-industrial Video 0.5′ resource available as an insight into teaching practices occurring in the Media program at RMIT University.

An excerpt from the post-industrial education webpage:

Content still matters, but the experience of learning and being a media practitioner as a mindful, reflective, and critical maker and contributor are explicitly foregrounded. It is this experience, in what is actually a carefully crafted and managed framework (even where all appearances suggest the contrary) that is what a degree offers and needs to enable, now. I think there was a distance or difference between learning and practice, where you read, did, thought, made, but it happened in contexts distant from ‘real’ media making and ‘real’ knowledge creation. That distinction is gone for all the reasons listed, and so now this subject (and I think media degrees more generally) needs to teach (through how they are performed as much by content, well I’d probably say performance counts now for more than content) how to ‘be’ a critical media practitioner in the network.

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Spark website workshop brief.
Duration: 2 hours (2.30-4.30pm)

Making do: A workshop on making a K-film
In this workshop students will make a documentary using the computer program Korsakow. People attending the workshop will learn how to create a K-film, an interactive form of documentary that is published on the Web. Participants will record a number of informal video sketches on a variation of devices: mobile, tablet, camcorders, point-in-shoot and digital stills camera. These video sketches will be linked together into a multitude of relations in Korsakow.

What do I need to do in advance?
You will need to record 12 short-duration video clips. They can be single shots or edited sequences. The duration must not exceed 90 seconds.

What do I record?
The theme for all the k-films in the workshop is an interpretation of the ‘everyday’. Your video clips will reflect your own personal interpretation of the everyday.

In The Everyday (Johnstone 2008) which brings together writing on the this topic in contemporary art, artists look for ways to make what often goes unnoticed, visible. Artists through varying interpretations of the everyday, following different motivations, draw attention to the ‘trivial and repetitive actions compromising the common ground of daily life’⁠. (Johnstone 2008, p. 12)

Reference: Johnstone, S 2008, The everyday, Documents of contemporary art, Whitechapel; MIT Press, London Cambridge, Mass.

Tip – Do not try to plan your k-film in advance. Just record and work on making connections between your video clips later on in korsakow.

What do I record with?
Whatever device you like – mobile, tablet, camcorders, point-in-shoot and digital stills camera etc - note your endpoint is the H264 codec so try to avoid compressing up to a higher quality codec, unless you are after a certain type of effect.

What type of files do I need to have ready for the workshop?

1. All your video clips should be ready to go before you get to the workshop. This means in the first instance edited and exported at the original compression setting you recorded them at and saved to a folder (‘My Name original videos’) – bring this folder with you in case you have any issues with the next steps…

2. The Korsakow authoring and publishing tool that you will be using needs video files that are compressed with the H.264/MPEG-4 codec Export these compressed files into a separate folder – (‘My Name k-film videos’)

What frame size and data rate should I aim for?
For example, you will see in the tips and tricks compression guide they are reducing the frame size down to 720 x 405 and 512 x 288 with a limited data rate of 700 kbps. The idea generally is to reduce the file size of your video clip for FLV conversion in Korsakow and streaming.

What about compressing the audio?
Yes, aim for the ACC codec for the audio compression.

What do I bring to the workshop?
We have a mac lab with computers or you can bring your own laptop
Download Korsakow in advance and install on your own computer.
Your recording device if you can and your prepared video clips.

Resources
(download Korsakow)
the korsakow manual
Korsakow tips and tricks on preparing media assets, including compression specs…
Showcase examples of k-films

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ThinkPlus program from the de bono institute (from the website):

An innovative education project to develop a carefully planned and thoughtful metacurriculum to run alongside the national curriculum that allows the skills and abilities for learnable intelligence to be developed in young people.

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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success(form the article)

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model — long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization — Finland’s success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play.

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This is an ongoing production cookbook for working with Korsakow.

Application Context

About Korsakow from korsakow.org
(Wikipedia)- Korsakow
What has it been designed to do?
What type of application is it?
How do you work with it?

The end of the unique history – overview of Korsakow march 14, 2012

Florian Thalhofer – Korsakow Software & non-linear storytelling from Matthieu on Vimeo.

In this skype interview (full HD quality , Florian Thalhofer tells more about his programme Korsakow. Free download and tutorials are available at http://korsakow.org/.

Workflow
What type of workflow do you need to develop?
It is important to develop a systematic workflow and organise your k-fim project carefully. Workflow guide

Preparing media assets

Compression

The video files for Korsakow need to be compressed using the H.264 codec Because Korsakow compresses video file on export it is worth exploring different compression workflows. Potentially not compressing your video to much before it is put through Korsakow is worth experimenting with. In other words if the video is compressed to much then compressed again through Korsakow it may not look so good on playback.

Working with Vimeo is one option by letting Vimeo do the H.264 compression. Prepare and store video clips there beforehand. Downloads work differently on the old and new version of Vimeo. For the moment I am working with the smaller SD format rather than the larger file size HD version. The smaller file size option is provided in the download in the new Vimeo version of the website. But, it is worth exploring the full HD version and seeing which gives the best result.

Making Previews (thumbnails)

(wikipedia) thumbnails

For thumbnails in Korsakow you can have still images or use video. When you rollover a video preview it starts playing. The video could be designed differently from the clip it is previewing (i.e a short loop instead of the whole clip etc.) The frame size of these thumbnails is dependent on the interface design usually smaller than the size of the video clip it previews. Tip – Because there may be a number of previews up at one time, make sure they all small, similar file sizes for streaming nicely.

There is a few ways to do this. The idea is to navigate to a frame and capture that frame as still that can be used as a preview file that is clicked to download a video file. This happens in QuickTime. The latest version of QuickTime is version v!0.x) which comes with the Mac OS X v10.6. The jump from the previous Version 7x demonstrates some significant changes.

In QuickTime 7 which can be downloaded and added to your utilities folder is as follows:
In QT navigate the playhead to a frame.
Menu bar > edit > copy
The frame is captured to size int he clipboard.
Open Photoshop
Menu Bar > File > New > OK > Edit > Paste
Go to Image Size – change the size to a smaller image that works with your design in korsakow
(i.e 30 x 180 frame size)
Save for Web – make the file size nice and small for streaming in your k-film

QuickTime 10 process from Daniel Daly:
(This only works Lion OSX 10.73)
1. Open the video file in quicktime and move the playhead to the frame
you wish to capture.
2. Press Command(Apple) + C.
3. Open the program Preview
4. Under the File heading select New from Clipboard
5. Save the file.

Thumbnails Vimeo (Mike) – using Vimeo jpg thumbnails. (From his blog with some modifications):

1. Go to your Vimeo, hit videos, right click on a thumbnail and go to “Copy Image URL” or the equivalant on your browser.
2. Paste it into your URL box; example: https://secure-b.vimeocdn.com/ts/270/527/270527903_295.jpg
3. The end of the file name is the size, change 295 (or 100, depending where you’ve copied the URL from) to 640.
my addition – 4. right click on the image and > ‘save image as’ to desktop.

Screen Capture thumbnails: (differs for Lion)
Command(Apple) Shift 4
Captures a .png
File save as .jpg

Making Snus:

Tip- Try setting the lives to ‘unlimited’ to get the hang of your first drafts and export tests. Then change the lives as the work takes shape.

Interface design:

You can add images to the background and re-arrange the interface. This all happens inside the interface file which you double click to open.

Insert text:

This happens in the interface if you want the text to appear outside the video. You drag insert text into your interface design. NB – If you put text in the preview text window in the snu area it will appear on the thumbnails.

Troubleshooting:
(Adrian Miles has written some extensive support notes for students)
Here is a bunch of recorded tips and tricks for when things go wrong.
Things observed and learnt
Interface design notes
Notes on structure
Thinking Korsakow
Adrian’s 22 minute screencast of making a work
FAQ complied list

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