Bill Cammack

heh. Thanks for my CCIR award, Rox. :D [Chief Commenter In Residence]

It’s partially from browsing beachwalks.tv that I decided to make the switch to WordPress. There’s a lot of functionality that Blogger doesn’t have, in a tradeoff for ease of entry into blogging/vlogging.

I think beachwalks.tv’s interesting, because each episode is really the *beginning* of a conversation. I’m sure that other people have similar issues and questions, and your show gives them a starting point for introspection.

OK… so that was a hassle. :D

I just switched this site from Blogger to WordPress. Initially, I wasn’t going to make ReelSolid a web site at all. The original concept was to have it as a holder for my itunes feed. The only reason I made it a blog at all was so I could use feedburner.

I ran into an issue a while back, regarding categories. The only way to do them in Blogger is to make several blogs and link them. That’s all well and good until you have to make several changes, and then you have to go all over creation checking that you re-created everything the way you originally planned it. My boy CoolP over @ haitixchange.com had been telling me about using databases for the longest, but I didn’t have that much information at the time, so I didn’t mind changing everything every time someone suggested a new idea to me like using Flash (or at this point, Ogg Vorbis).

Finally, I decided to check out WordPress, and it’s really impressive, compared to Blogger. I went with Blogger since it’s easy to get started with, and I wasn’t concerned with any other functionality. The problem with ‘simple’ is that the more different forms of information you become involved with, the more containers you need… UNLESS you can put them all in one place and define them by manipulating their database entries. You don’t have to move the data, but you can distribute it however you want to. I can make as many categories and sub-categories as I like. I can point the car-people to the car-stuff and the bike-people to the bike-stuff.

One of the things that snagged me was that I didn’t realize WordPress was dynamically creating “pages” for archives and categories. When I switched from Blogger, I left my archive folders intact, so WP couldn’t create the new archives on the fly. I tried emptying one of the folders, and even that didn’t work until I deleted that folder, then WP did its thing. I lost a few permalinks, but I’m not concerned about that, because I didn’t have people linking to my pages anyway. They can just re-find the pages they’re interested in in their new locations. :D

Updating is MUCH faster with WP. None of that waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, WAAAAITNG!!! to see if Blogger decides to go all the way to 100 to post your entire blog, or whether you have to start all over or wait until it’s not the middle of the day :/ I haven’t gotten anywhere near plugins and backgrounds and trackbacks, blah blah blah, but there’s definitely more ‘room to breathe’ with WordPress, and my time was well spent making the changeover.

Videos and pictures from the 2006 Halloween Videoblog Festival, hosted by Zadi & Steve of smashface.com and jetsetshow on Saturday, October 28th, from 7pm-11pm at the Yahoo Campus in Santa Monica.

Make sure you check out ReelSolid.TV’s “NODE 666 Reloaded” and Galacticast’s original “NODE 666″! :D

==> Watch The Halloween Videos <==

==> Check out the Party Pix on Flickr <==

==> TV Guide’s vlogfest review! <==

I’m switching this blog from blogger to wordpress. If there’s nothing here later on tonight… that’s why! :D

Late Nite Mash is on the air! :D

www.latenitemash.com

Tonight’s guests on Jason DaSilva’s “Zoom In: Producing Movies Today!” on phovi.com were filmmaker Colleen OHalloran and investor Todd Tiberi of AwlFilms.com. They discussed the creation and funding of the film all three of them collaborated on: “To Be Continued”.

An interesting difference between doing your own videos for fun & entertainment and creating video for broadcast is that you are forced to become generic. Instead of being able to use anything you want and do anything you want with it, there are many things to be avoided in the production of a video. As a content producer, you have to think about what you might want to do with your work down the line during even the pre-production phase of creating your video.

Let’s say you do a personal interview with someone, and you like how it came out. You can do whatever you want with it, personally, but then, if you want to offer your interview to another group, they might require releases (written documents stating that the subjects in the video gave you permission to use your video of them) from everyone in the video, or they won’t accept it for their production. Even if you have releases for the subjects, you might have done it inside a restaurant, and THAT needs to be ‘cleared’.

You might use your favorite song in a video, but if you want to include that video in a broadcast, you’ll need to re-work it with music that’s cleared for use under certain circumstances (see Creative Commons), like from podsafe music network or IODA. Strangely enough, even music that comes on the radio or that someone walks by could present an issue. These things have to be considered when you’re doing a video that depends on the audio as well as the video. If someone’s saying something important while this uncleared music passes through the scene, there might be no way around it, since re-tracking the person’s dialogue means that you not only cut out the music, but all the other background sounds that make the video sound uniform.

Does this make sense? Yes. :D People work hard on their music or whatever and put their own energy and creativity into it, so they should definitely have rights to determine how their productions are used. There’s an interesting Creative Commons license that allows you to use the work as long as you attribute credit to the creator of the original work somewhere in your video, you don’t use it in a commercial work, and the work that you do that’s derived from their work is also licensed under the same CC license. It’s called CC BY-NC-SA (attribution, non-commercial, share alike). This is interesting because it creates a stream of ‘cleared’ work for people making similar videos to use.

There’s also the internet archive, where there are lots of videos and songs labeled “no rights reserved” that you can use in any way you want, and a lot of Creative Commons videos as well.

What’s “unfair” about this system (not to the creators of the work, but unfair to media creators looking for music or video to enhance their projects) is that money talks. :D If you work for a production company, or you do your own productions, you are subject to the same fees to license “real” music as the networks are. Let’s say you wanted to do a video about something and a network wanted to do the same piece. Even if your footage is better, content-wise, and your written dialogue is better, and your editing is better and your shot selection is better….. your video will have YOU playing your guitar over your drum machine, sounding like folk music from the country :/ while the network blasts “Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World” by Neil Young. Your piece IS better, but theirs SOUNDS better, so they have an emotional advantage in the effect their video has on the viewers.

Same thing if you’re a documentary maker. MTV plays music all day and all night on several channels, internationally. If you watch one of their docs, they’re FILLED… I mean *FILLED* with the latest music from the hottest artists at the time. MTV’s in the country, you hear the latest country music. They’re in the city, you hear the latest Hip-Hop. They’re in India, you hear the best mood-inducing Indian music. This is because A) MTV has the money to purchase the rights to whatever songs they want, and B) everybody wants their songs to be ON MTV so they can get publicity = more fame and sales. Nobody wants to be in YOUR PODCAST that 30 people download on a weekly basis! :D So… YOUR video or film or what-have-you is going to sound like what’s really going on… you got the music you could afford to use.

I think podsafe music network and IODA are providing a great service on both sides of this situation. They’re allowing video producers to use music with high production values, as long as the producer complies with the stipulations of the licenses. If your budget is ZERO, or even less than zero… you can still get a fantastic background track for your non-commercial work. For the musicians, they benefit because their music’s being heard by people that otherwise wouldn’t have looked them up on the internet. They’re being heard without having to be ‘hot’ enough to get into rotation on MTV. Also… you never know when a video that someone does might become REEEEEEALLY popular, and then the musicians get to ride the wave. :D

~Bill C.~

http://ReelSolid.TV

Dan McVicar, of McVlog fame (… amongst other things, hehe) presents: “The Late Nite Mash”…..

“I want to tell you about something very exciting ….on Monday October 30th
you will see the first webisode of my online series “The Late Nite Mash”.

Daniel McVicar”

____

The show starts October 30th, @ noon PST, with special guest Andy Garcia.
Be There, or… um… Be There! :D

I was checking out “Beach Walks With Rox”, and was inspired to drop some science on Passion & Investment.

I finished my video for the Halloween Videoblog Festival 2006.

Originally, I wanted to shoot something, but it’s not so easy to do a scary movie WELL in NYC in one week. Too many things count on too many things. To make up the idea, then get the actors, then shoot it, then edit it, then encode it… if anything goes wrong, you end up with nothing at all.

I decided to edit the film “NODE 666″ by Galacticast. The individual videos for the “NODE 666″ collaboration are on node666.org.

You can watch and comment on“NODE 666 Reloaded” @ ReelSolidTV Episode 27.

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 24 — One of Hollywood’s top five talent agencies has created an online unit devoted to scouting out up-and-coming creators of Internet content — particularly video — and finding work for them in Web-based advertising and entertainment, as well as in the older media.

The move by the United Talent Agency — best known as the home of comedians like Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan and television producers like Dick Wolf and David Chase — amounts to a bet, albeit a modest one, that Web video is on a growth curve similar to that of cable television a generation ago. It is also a return by Hollywood’s core talent representatives to the sort of new-media business they tested, without great success, at the peak of the dot-com boom. (Read More)

So I get on a bus, today. I normally don’t get on buses, but I decided to try one today. Not just any bus, but a bus going out of state. Not like a public bus or something. I get my ticket at the bus terminal and walk to the waiting area. I get in line behind this girl/woman/young lady, whatever your favorite term is. She’s relatively attractive. I don’t know that that has anything to do with the topic other than that’s the reason I noticed her in the first place. I don’t know that that’s not the ONLY reason I’m blogging this. :D So the bus comes, and we’re going to the same stop. It was an express bus, so I suppose EVERYONE was going to the same stop… or maybe they weren’t… maybe there were “points beyond” that that bus was going to. I call for my ride to pick me up, and she goes about her business. Meanwhile, I’m wondering to myself what the odds are that I’m going to see her on the way back “home” (at least for me).

Amongst others, I meet up with someone that took an earlier bus from NYC. I decide to leave my plans for going back home up to whenever he decides he’s leaving. That’s not exactly a fair statement. I should say that I was working with him today, so I definitely wasn’t coming back to NYC BEFORE he was… there was just nothing saying that I had to leave when he did.

Anyway… I leave it up to him, and when he’s ready to head back, I get ready to go. Our ride has to pass by Fedex, so we end up going for the 8:30pm bus instead of the 8:00pm bus. We get dropped off, and as we’re waiting for the bus, the same chick is dropped off @ the Park N Ride by her father (which I could tell because of their conversation). So now, the question has changed from “what are the odds that we will come back together on the same bus, when there’s a bus that runs every 30 minutes from the center of the universe (New York City) to some town in the sticks in Jersey” to “What’s going on here? Destiny? Fate? Meaningless Coincidence?”

It’s true that the odds were relatively good that I would come back on the same bus she did… at least, compared to other modes of transportation like New York Subways, where you can take several different lines, or you can take buses, or you can catch a cab, or you can walk. Between 10:30am and 8:30pm, there are 20 buses, but you can cut that number in less than half, considering I wouldn’t expect someone to take a bus to Jersey just for a couple of hours, then go back home. So let’s say the odds were 1 in 6.

For someone to believe that it was Destiny or perhaps Fate that caused you to run into someone twice in the same day, you’d have to believe there was a plan or someone/something pushing you in a certain direction, and also pushing the other person. Then again, you’re not supposed to be able to escape “destiny”, so what exactly WAS your destiny in that situation? Just to be there on that day, on that time? Your actions still come down to Free Will, so even when put in a situation of potential Destiny, what happens still comes down to what you choose to do, or what’s chosen for you.

Maybe it’s not a plan, but a suggestion from ‘the powers that be’. Then again… maybe it’s Meaningless Coincidence. If it’s a suggestion, and you don’t recognize or act on that suggestion, you miss out on something potentially great for you… IF the power suggesting this to you had your best interests in mind! :D Similarly, if it’s Meaningless Coincidence, and you act like it’s something special, you could overreact to ‘nothing’.

So I’m thinking about this on the subway ride home from Port Authority. What just happened? Did ANYTHING happen? DOES anything EVER happen? Is it all Meaningless Coincidence?…..

I leave the subway and walk home… just in time to meet a new chick simultaneously entering my building. :D She’s fun, friendly and attractive, and as we bid each other ‘good night’ as I leave the elevator, I’m glad that I didn’t stop to meet the first chick, because I would have missed the second one! ;)