Bill Cammack

Here’s ReelSolid.TV’s entry in the 2006 Halloween Videoblog Festival. Zadi & Steve of smashface.com and jetsetshow are organizing the festival, which is happening on Saturday, October 28th, from 7pm-11pm at the Yahoo Campus in Santa Monica.

Being that there isn’t anything scary in NYC, I decided to edit Galacticast’s 14-minute collaboration, node666. The original videos sent in by the collaborators can also be seen @ node666.org.

The line that always cracks me up is “… the problem is, I’m a little bit hungry and everything, and, uh… I do better with a full stomach…” :D ROFL

NODES

• Carol and Steve Show
• GALACTICAST
• Jet Set Show
• The Richard Show
• Node101
• PJK Productions
• r3wind
• Michael Verdi
• Countries Beginning with I
• Double Dork Meter
• G14 Productions
• Hockey Strike
• Interdigitate
• Noodle Scar
• Not 60 Minutes
• Pawn Takes Queen
• See a Silver Lining
• Simple Do’s and Don’ts
• The Captain Humphreys Project

Attended Jason DaSilva’s on-line talk show, “Zoom In… Producing Movies Today” on zoomin.phovi.com. His guest speaker was Karin Hayes, co-director of the film “The Kidnapping Of Ingrid Betancourt”.

Karin spoke about getting films produced, funded, publicized, and distributed. She also told us about her current film project, Pip & Zastrow: An American Friendship.

==> Watch The Video! <==
==> Read The Text Chat! <==

Join in next week via webcam or telephone conference or text chat via the flash interface.

Tonight, I went to see “New York Legends of Hip-Hop” at the Victory Theater in Times Square. Looooooong-time friends Marjory and Kim Holmes (pictured) were featured dancers, along with Rock Steady Crew and other representatives of Hip Hop culture, essentially from the beginning of it all. :D

Marj, Bill C., Kim Holmes

The show was great! :D Reminded me of ‘back in the day’, going clubbing all night, then hitting ‘Round The Clock or Midnight Express for breakfast before or while the sun was coming up. I’m sure it was even better for people that weren’t aware of or didn’t have access to the culture. Our seats were next to a tourist named Melanie. She was from Sweden or Denmark or The Netherlands, I can’t remember which. We took pictures on her camera, which wasn’t digital, so she’s planning to snail-mail me a copy whenever she develops the film!!! hahaha She enjoyed the show a lot, too.

I made sure I had my kicks, sweats & KR3TS shirt, in case I had to ‘get loose’. :D I had seen Kim recently, but hadn’t seen Marj in ages, so it was great to watch them perform and hang out with them after the show. This is the last weekend of the show, and all the remaining dates are sold out… as they should be, because “New York Legends of Hip-Hop” is well worth seeing… whether you lived through the evolution of Hip Hop in NYC in the streets and in the clubs or you didn’t, but you’re a fan of the style & energy of the culture.

I received a comment today regarding the download times of my videos along with some suggestions on how I could improve those times. I hadn’t been thinking about it in a long time, but it caused me to consider the way this site was built, and also what my procedures are in posting vlogs.

Initially, I was just building a site to hold videos as a source for my iTunes feed. I wasn’t really thinking about people watching them from the site. One of the first problems I had was that most people access my site with PCs, not macs, and a lot of them couldn’t properly view Quicktime movies. I wasn’t aware of Flash at the time… well, not as far as universal video access. I was aware of the program itself. Anyway… I made AVI files, which are completely archaic, and posted those for the windows viewers. Again, this was an afterthought, because the site was intended to be an iTunes feed, so I was neither concerned nor interested in whether ANYONE could view the videos from the site, especially PCs. By the time I started looking at the stats and saw the overwhelming percentage of PC and IE viewers over Mac and Safari users (most of which also happened to be MYSELF, since testing the links was adding to my stats :/ ), it was too late, until I decided to make my primary format Flash.

As far as the MOV or MP4 files, again, their purpose was to sit on an iPod and look pretty. :) Even though I selected ‘fast start’, and maybe even ‘compressed headers’, since the goal wasn’t streaming them over the net, I encoded them at as high a rate as I was comfortable with, which was ~ 2,048 Kbps. So.. .for someone that just plugs their iPod in and lets iTunes download videos, everything’s cool. For someone trying to watch the Quicktime file from the direct download link, my videos are going to DL slooooowly, compared to other videos of the same size (and potentially the same quality).

I really stopped thinking about it when I went to Flash, but today’s comments have prompted me to consider re-encoding the MP4s to be more internet-friendly.

Having said all that, there’s another issue. Time.

I really like the difference that H.264 makes over MP4. H.264 looks great @ 700 Kbps, even if you expand the frame size from the encoded 320×180. Unfortunately, H.264 takes FOR.EV.VER to encode. When I’m trying to post something day-of, I’m trying to get it on the site ASAP. That means I will most likely use the 2,048 Kbps MP4, which encodes MUCH faster. It also might mean I use 1-pass CBR/VBR on a flash video instead of 2-pass VBR. Flash is another issue, because now I’m aware of On2 VP6, except *that* takes even LONGER to encode than H.264! :/ So I end up using Sorenson so I can accomplish ANYTHING ELSE during my day besides encoding a video.

Clearly, since you can make the same quality H.264 video at about 1/3 the data rate of MP4, it’s going to DL faster, which is better for the viewer… but worse for the encoder! :) Perhaps the best deal is a dual-tier process where I put up the ‘fast’ version, then let the ‘better’ version render overnight. Anyway… this is what happens when you build a site from scratch, and go through several page format changes and several video format changes during the process.

Let me not even MENTION iframes! :/

Today is the day that makes or breaks my Halloween Videoblog entry for the festival next week.

The topic is “horror” or “scary”, but it could also be humorous horror or just something related to Halloween. The second question is how to depict horror in a way that actually gets across as scary to the viewer. The FIRST question is WHAT to make a video about in the first place. :D

There are different types of scary. There aren’t a lot of things in this city that are scary to me because I’ve been conditioned against it by the way they report news here. EVERY.SINGLE.DAY, if you happen by a newspaper or television news program, you get to hear about the most outlandish things that happened to people in the last 24 hours. OTOH, I was in Ohio one time, and the top two news stories were about who won the fishing contest and where he bought his bait! :D So that’s part of the problem. What might be scary to the average viewer isn’t scary to me, so my mind is going right past it and trying to think of something REALLY scary. Then again, I’m not a fan of horror films, so that narrows my scope even more, because I’m trying to make something realistically scary… not over-the-top, ridiculous-scary.

I can’t call it writer’s block, because I don’t have anything to write, yet. I can’t call it thinker’s block, because I’m thinking all the time. ‘Matter of fact, I’m devoting this entire day to figuring out what I’m going to do. The deadline is the 26th, including pre-production, production, post, encoding and delivery. It doesn’t have to be long, so I’m not concerned about the post part. I just really want to get to the point where I have a definite direction and I’m moving forward with this.

This week, Jonny’s guest speaker on Reinventing Television was Eddie Codel, producer and co-founder of Geek Entertainment TV (GETV).

==> Watch The Video! <==
==> “Read The Text Chat <==

The show uses webcams and tele-conferencing to bring people together to discuss cutting-edge issues in video blogging.

Air-time is Thursday nights @ 10pm EST. You don't need a webcam to be involved... just a broadband connection & browser to see the video and a telephone to call the toll-free conference number to listen in.

Tags: ReinventingTV, Reinventing Television, Jonny Goldstein, Phovi, Eddie Codel, Geek Entertainment TV, Bill Cammack, ReelSolid.TV

This Sunday @ 7pmEST, Jason DaSilva will be hosting “Zoom In… Producing Movies Today” on zoomin.phovi.com. His guest speaker will be Karin Hayes, co-director of the film “The Kidnapping Of Ingrid Betancourt”.

Join in via webcam or telephone conference or text chat via the flash interface.

A few days ago, I became aware of a… series of comments (because it wasn’t actually a conversation or a debate) that revolved around the reasons someone would choose or hire someone else to be a spokesperson for them. I missed that conversation, entirely, so I’ll just mention my thoughts about it here, and be done with it. Specifically, it pertained to whether a woman should be chosen for the job? and if so, should it be an attractive woman? and if so, should that be the deciding factor in hiring her? To be even more specific, they were looking to hire someone to be on-air talent… not on television, but on the internet. A host of a show. “The Face” of their broadcast.

Anyone could have been chosen to be the host of this show, yet they specifically requested an attractive female. This was called “sexism”. Definition #2 of sexism, according to m-w.com/dictionary/sexism, is “behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex”. Could choosing an attractive female to host a show foster stereotypes of a woman’s social role? Could choosing a more attractive woman who knows nothing about the topic (but is going to be fed her lines anyway, via a script) over a less attractive woman who knows a lot about the topic imply things to the viewers or people that become aware of this situation about the role of a woman in this society or what’s valued about her? I think it says more about the people looking to hire this attractive woman and their target demographic than it says about the woman herself or women in general. What could be the reason that an attractive woman was desired for the position? How about RATINGS? :D

How about if one of the reasons… if not the ONLY reason to put on the show was to get viewers? How about if they knew that they would get MORE viewers to tune in with an attractive female spokesperson than an unattractive female or a male? What’s their incentive to go with decidedly less effective ‘bait’ when they’re fishing for viewers? Where’s the ROI?

On top of all that, it’s not like they were trying to hire her for some kind of intellectual show
like “On The Record w/ Greta Van Susteren”. :D

All this new spokesperson has to do is study some simple introductory lines or read them from a teleprompter. She’s there to wave and smile and look good and ATTRACT viewers to watch the show, which benefits the guys that were looking to hire her in the first place. Mission accomplished. If you’re trying to do a show about lawyers, and you hire a woman that looks good and is NOT and never WAS a lawyer, you’re a fool. If you want someone to turn letters on a game show, there’s no need to hire a lawyer. :)

What does that say for the _content_ of a show that needs eye-candy to get viewers? hehehehe… well…… :)

However, like I said… I think it says more about the show and the show’s demographics than it says about women. If the show’s topic is appealing to men, then putting an attractive woman in the spotlight is only going to benefit you. Look at Harlequin….

They’re selling fantasies to women. Does Harlequin hire busted-looking, out-of-shape, unsuccessful-looking ‘Joe Average’s to model for the covers of their novels for women? NOPE! :D You know why? Because fewer women would BUY.THE.BOOK. They’re better off using covers that don’t imply anything about the guy’s looks at all than they are using a cover that defines the protagonist as visually unattractive.

…

That’s not to say that I don’t see the other side of the ‘argument’. Television’s filled with uncommonly attractive people, percentage-wise. Most places you go, people don’t actually look like that. :D I understand that a lot of girls and women feel pressure to attempt to make themselves look like models because they think models are the definition of good-looking, when, in fact, models are models because they fit the ONE.SIZE.OF.THE.DRESS that the designer made for the show. They hire models to fit clothes… they DON’T make the clothes to fit the models. I understand the reasons that women want to ‘fight the power’ and get more unattractive women into on-air-talent positions. However… what they’re missing is that the woman wasn’t being sought because she was a woman. They were looking for someone that would have been attractive to their target demographic… MEN. If you take away the desire to hire someone attractive, that doesn’t mean that the unattractive woman has a chance at all. She’s on the same level (if not lower) than a man now, because neither the man nor the unattractive woman is going to add to the show’s ratings. Unfortunately, even fighting the power doesn’t mean a win for the unattractive woman… it’s merely a loss for the attractive woman. And, yes… I’m aware that I’m using terms that relate to _visual_ attractiveness, because that’s the line that was drawn in this particular case.

Do I think this situation was sexist? No. It would have been sexist if what the new employee looked like wouldn’t have mattered at all to their ratings. If they were hiring a video editor, who was never going to be seen on the broadcast, choosing a more attractive and less qualified woman would have been a sexist decision, benefitting the men in the company that would rather walk in the editing suite and see an attractive woman, and hurting the bottom line, since she would be less effective at getting the job done than the less attractive woman. In the case of hiring on-air talent for a mindless hostess position, go for the gusto. Get all the ratings you can, because that’s where you’re going to get viewers, fame, advertisers, more work… whatever. If you need the new hire to actually DO SOMETHING, go with the most qualified person in the best interests of your business.

…

Like I said, I missed the boat on this conversation, but it ended with ZERO resolution, whatsoever. Each camp rallied around their respective positions, and no solutions came up that might have gotten a less attractive, yet more qualified female the job. In this case, its absolutely right what the women were saying, that her personality wasn’t being showcased and that she was chosen for her looks instead of her ideas and thoughts. “Someone” also said something that I found interesting and true. One of the arguments from the “good looks” side was that “sex sells”. Her response was that it wasn’t actually sex that was “selling”… it was how attractive the woman looked. I think she’s absolutely right. I don’t think a more sexual or sensual, yet visually unattractive woman would have stood a chance of being hired for this position, because she still wouldn’t have helped the ratings.

What never came up in the conversation is Human nature. Regardless of the technology, it’s still people on the other end of the line. Attractive people get more ‘stuff’ in this world. That’s how it is. Every time there’s a scientific study done, those are the results. All other things being equal, attractiveness wins the position. Even when things AREN’T equal, attractiveness wins the position. It’s valiant and respectable to fight the good fight, but until the society changes to the point where the viewers don’t care what the host / hostess / romance novel cover model looks like, their visual or physical attractiveness is going to be a tool to use to bait viewers into watching something they otherwise wouldn’t even consider taking a FIRST look at.

I’m going to see what I can come up with for the Halloween Videoblog Festival 2006.

Zadi & Steve of smashface.com and jetsetshow are organizing the festival, which is happening on Saturday, October 28th, from 7pm-11pm at the Yahoo Campus in Santa Monica.

A lot of other videobloggers & sponsors are involved, so it should be a pretty sweet event! :D

So now the plot thickens… :D Because there’s the The New York City Videoblogging Meetup Group that plans to meet up on the same day and time as the other meetup group.

So now, I’ve joined the Yahoo Tech Group, “VideoBlogging”. It’s an online community that includes a condensed resource of blogging and video brainstorming and Q&As.

While I was skimming the old posts, I found out that Ted Tagami posted about the NY Video 2.0 Group October Meetup that’s happening on October 26th in NYC. There are already 50 people that are planning to attend, and about 100 more undecided or that just didn’t post that they plan to be there. The group’s about video in general, not VideoBlogging in particular, but I’m sure there’s quite a bit of overlap between the two communities.

Should be interesting……..

Tonight, I headed back over to phovi.com for “Zoom In: Producing Movies Today!”, hosted by Jason DaSilva.

The show was billed as a discussion on financing, production resources and distribution, but we actually covered many different aspects of filmmaking. A new documentary filmmaker, Vexcellence had many questions, so we ended up chatting about pre-production, post, legal, lighting, crews, cameras, product placement…..

“Zoom In: Producing Movies Today!” is a LIVE video talk show on phovi.com on Sundays from 7:00-8:00pm EST. Check it out if you’re in the film industry, or just getting started. :D