Blip.tv's Jared Klett interviews filmmaker Jesse Cowell about his project "Drawn By Pain". Animation by Erica Langworthy.
Producer/Host: Jared Klett
Camera/Post: Bill Cammack
Posts Tagged “film”Blip.tv's Jared Klett interviews filmmaker Jesse Cowell about his project "Drawn By Pain". Animation by Erica Langworthy. Producer/Host: Jared Klett
Mar
20
2008
Iraqi Refugee Documentary: Five Year Anniversary of the Iraq WarPosted by Bill Cammack in VideoToday, March 20th, 2008 marks the five year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. We’ve been told what’s going on IN Iraq, but what about the people who fled to other countries for asylum and have now become refugees? What about their familes? Their careers? Christian Payne traveled to Jordan to photograph and interview Iraqi refugees. Bill Cammack edited his photos and narration into this video, “Iraqi Refugees: Life in the Shadows”.
For more information, visit Christian’s site, “OurManInside.com” via this link => [Iraqi Refugees: Life in the Shadows]. To watch the film in Windows Media or Real Media, visit The UN Refugee Agency’s ‘web videos’ page on UNHCR.org. Tags: 2003, 2008, Amman, anniversary march, Bill Cammack, Christian Payne, documentally, documentary, editor, film, five, Iraq, Iraqi, Jordan, photographer, refugee, UNHCR, united nations, Video, warChristian Payne aka “Documentally” is a photographer and blogger who was commissioned by the UNHCR to photograph the plight of Iraqi refugees in Jordan. I edited Christian’s work into a video that we’ve recently completed, and he posted this video, thanking me as well as others for what we’ve done: Seesmic Member Link | Non-member Link Initially, this post was going to be called “Thanks for the Thanks”, because I definitely appreciate Christian’s authenticity and heartfelt statements. However, that’s really a private communication between Christian and myself that happened to be expressed on a public medium (both his video and my text, above). What I think would be more useful to my 40 readers, according to Technorati (minus however-many registered search engines :p) is to talk about the process of creation, in this case, dealing with video, and the difference that it makes when you’re actually emotionally invested in what you’re doing. Also, I wanted to give Christian some more background on how we ended up working together. I’m a video blogger, which essentially means I film videos and put them on the internet. We have our own little “echo chamber” of friends and colleagues. I first became aware, sort of, of Phil Campbell on Dan McVicar’s social site “Late Nite Mash”. Bill & Dan in NYCSo anyway, I got to know Phil Campbell as a quality guy who STAYS on top of the game when it comes to social media and is simply a treasure trove of good ideas. Next in order, Andrew Lipson gave me an invite to this (at the time, invite-only) video-messaging application called Seesmic while I was an audience member of the Jeff Pulver Show. I checked it out, but it really wasn’t my type of conversation going on between the beta-testers, so I just watched Seesmic like a television show instead of participating in the watercooleresque banter. There were a couple of people there with strong personalities and methods to their madness. The most animated and volatile of them was this character named “Documentally”. So being a morning person, I tend to chat with the European folks (who are 5/6 hours ahead of us) before the Americans wake up. I’m chatting with Phil Campbell and he mentions that his friend Christian had a project he was working on. I let Phil know I was aware of Documentally and was willing to chat with him about the project. In skypeing with Christian, I got to meet the “hang out at the pub” version instead of the “Seesmic character” version. He’s a nice guy, and as he put it in the video, he’s “someone I’d like to call a friend”. I really meant to talk about the actual project, but I’ll do that some other time. This ended up being a post about connections. One of the benefits of social media is that people get to learn about each other at their own pace and according to their own level of interest. Another benefit is that we have checks and balances inside our “echo chamber”. For example, Dina Kaplan and I have 102 “Facebook Friends” in common! :O … Even if you spit that into 50 friends and 50 acquaintances, that means there are *50* people that I can contact right this second and ask them a question about Dina. I’d probably get 15 responses back, and they’d all be approximately the same, because that’s how Dina carries herself. She’s consistent. ![]() Liz Gannes, Bill Cammack & Dina Kaplan Through social media, and also by meeting in person @ Adam Quirk’s event named Vloggercue in Brooklyn, I developed an impression of Phil Campbell as a stand-up guy and a good judge of character. For Phil to bring up Christian’s project to me, I’m automatically *infinitely* more inclined to hear more about it. Yes, it helped A LOT that Christian already had a strong social media presence. Yes, it helped A LOT that the photos he shot for the project are rich and full of emotion, intimacy and meaning. However, the *main* thing is connection… passing it on. Social media offers us the opportunity to get to know each other, asynchronously… and then follow up to find out how the real person matches up to his or her online persona. Tags: acquaintances, Adam Quirk, Andrew Lipson, asynchronous, blip.tv, Brooklyn, Christian Payne, Dan McVicar, Dina Kaplan, documentally, edit, Facebook, film, friends, Jeff Pulver, judge, life, Liz Gannes, media, movie, Music, New York City, night, NYC, personality, Phil Campbell, photographer, refugee, relating, Seesmic, Social Media, tech, UNHCR, ustream, VideoClient: RIOT Productions / Powerhouse Productions ”In Step with Hinton Battle” ”The Gospel According to Patti” “Harmonizing with Patti Labelle” ”Making a Difference” Client: RIOT Productions / Powerhouse Productions ”Holiday Special with Mo’Nique” ”From Miss to Mrs.” w/ Malinda Williams Client: OurManInside.com / United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Client: blip.tv “Revision3″ ”Bre Pettis” “Paintball vs Pando” ”Break a Leg” Partial Client List I spent the day on Seesmic yesterday and had a 90-post conversation involving several of the members. I’ll say first of all that Seesmic has made TONS of improvements since Andrew Lipson gave me an invite 3 months ago. They’re always making improvements to their site, so this post may very well be outdated relatively soon. If you don’t know what Seesmic is, it’s basically like having a conversation with people on a bunch of stickies. In a way, it’s like Twitter, except it’s video and audio instead of text. You get to record a video which goes into the “public” timeline, and other people can watch it just about as soon as you post it. People who see your video can record their own video and make it a reply to your video if they so choose. They relatively recently implemented threading as a one-dimensional, reverse chronological timeline. This was way better than no threading AT ALL The reason I make a point of it being asynchronous is that it’s not a real-time conversation. It’s more like twitter or an email group than it is like Yahoo Live where several people speak to each other simultaneously, or even chat rooms, where everyone’s there at the same time and can jump in with their opinions if they feel like it. Liz Burr made some excellent points that I hadn’t paid attention to as I was absorbing so many other things during a full day’s use of the app. Someone had made the point that because you record your own video and decide when to stop it, you get to say what you want in its entirety without being interrupted. Liz mentioned that since it’s asynchronous, you can be turned OFF at ANY point, or not listened to at all, as your screen name and icon are attached to your video in the thread. This means you have more of a chance of not.being.heard.at.all. if someone decides that what you have to say isn’t worth listening to based on your behaviors and what you had to say in previous videos. I “knew” this, but I hadn’t processed it until she mentioned it to me. I was already employing that behavior, for example, after listening to a post from someone that I determined was garbage, I would skip anything with their face on it after that. At this point, I should mention how Seesmic is set up for people to become aware of people’s posts. It’s important to understand this to understand why one-dimensional threading is NOT optimal for an application like this. There’s a “public” timeline that catches everyone’s videos. This is world-wide, but you can set it to only pick up posts in your language. That’s still A LOT of people, and it’s not even open to the public yet. Your next option is a “friends” timeline. You get to choose to “follow” people, and only their videos will show up in this timeline. This is another way you can elect to bypass people whom you’ve determined have nothing valid or intelligent to say… don’t “follow” them. They’ll still show up if you’re looking at a thread that they’ve contributed videos to, but then you resort to visual parsing and skip them as usual. These abilities to select people to follow and people to “allow to speak” by clicking on their videos and watching them all the way to the end absolutely alters each person’s perception of a thread they arrive to. Seesmic member Otir read a perfect analogy of the situation, telling the story of a bunch of blind people whom were all offered different sections of an elephant to feel and then to give their opinion of what an elephant is like. Each of them had their own perception of “an elephant”, and that perception colored what they had to say about elephants. First of all, if you’re following certain people, their posts come up in your “friends” timeline. If you click on the member’s icon, you go straight to their opinion. That’s a good thing. However, you’re jumping in in the middle of the thread. You can click “conversation” and see the entire list of posts in that thread. This is where your personal bias comes into play. If you don’t have any respect for the people earlier in the timeline, you might skip their videos entirely, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If there are a whole lot of videos before the person you’re following, you might not be inclined to watch an hour’s worth of posts before you enjoy what you really came here to see… thus, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If you’ve determined that the person you’re following is more credible than others in the thread, you may be inclined to reply along the lines of that personal bias. This is where we get the blind people approaching the elephant from different sides and angles. Another “problem” with this layout is that what you’re looking at is NOT actually linear other than chronologically. The posts are laid out by the TIME that they were posted to the site, but they are not differentiated by the TANGENT of the thread that that particular post followed. This leads to a circular, “telephone game” situation, because people show up to a thread hours after it started, read something a “friend” of theirs posted, which was dealt with hours ago, and respond to that person’s post without watching all of the surrounding material. My thread was 90 posts long. Even if each person took only one minute to say what they had to say (and I’ve seen videos that were 5 minutes long, so if there’s a time limit on individual videos, it’s NOT shorter than that), that means that to absorb the entire thread, you’d have to sit there as long as a feature film. People aren’t going to wait that long to reply. As a matter of fact, people started showing up and making NEW threads asking for someone to summarize my thread because they didn’t want to go back and read it all. This is another way that posts get “lost in the sauce”. People show up and want to be involved, but don’t want to put in the work to go back and experience each post. Another reason it becomes circular is let’s say you have three tangents in a thread. As the original thread participants scramble “left and right” (since it’s all appearing as a one-dimensional timeline) to deal with tangents, 20 posts down the line, someone reads something from a tangent that was already resolved, hits “reply” and now, your 21st post is actually a response to your 5th post. :/ Then, THEIR “friends” see what THEY posted and continue the previously resolved tangent, causing the original thread participants to scramble over there and put out THAT fire… AGAIN. :/ Meanwhile, the thread splinters more and more and is misinterpreted more and more but LOOKS like a single, chronologically-ordered discussion. The snowball rolls further downhill when someone shows up to post #60, which is really only three posts removed from post #5 and doesn’t want to read the rest of the material, so they assume that all 60 posts have been along the same tangent. Like I said, this only comes into play if you’re trying to have an intelligent conversation. If you’re just socializing via video, you don’t need to worry about tangents and following thoughts and concepts. You just throw up a “me too” post and you’re good… you feel like you’re a part of the conversation, whether people are “following” you or not. Jan McLaughlin mentioned an addition that I think would work very well in these situations… the ability for the originator to moderate their thread. I suppose the ability to assign mods would be useful as well. A couple of days ago, I left a 32-post thread of mine for a few hours and when I returned, it was around 60. Thinking that there was much interesting material to sift through, I clicked on it, only to realize that two people had started online dating in my thread. :/ Instead of taking their chances in the “public” timeline, the best way to try to get each other’s attention was to click “reply” so that it would show up in their “replies” folder (an alternative timeline to “public” or “friends”. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that as they kept “reply”ing to each other, their posts were being added to my thread. It would be lovely to have a way to separate irrelevant posts from your thread. It would be lovely to be able to remove videos posted to your thread by people that just showed up to act dumb. Not *delete* them, just remove them from YOUR thread so that new people arriving after the fact wouldn’t bail on your 70-post thread because there are 30 posts worth of online dating inside it that’s completely indistinguishable from on-point conversation in a one-dimensional reverse chronological timeline. Seesmic’s making tons of improvements, so I’m sure features are coming down the line that will facilitate intelligent conversation, such as GROUPS. The ability to have a discussion only amongst the people that *you* choose would be a major development. There’s no need to block others from reading it. Just stop them from diluting the content and making the originators waste time running around putting out fires. Like I said, they’ve progressed in leaps and bounds in the three months that I’ve been on the service. Personally, I’m a fan of synchronous interaction, whether we’re talking live video or text chat. Even IRL, I enjoy holding arguments against 5 people at a time. The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you can join in on work breaks, when you get out of class, whenever it’s convenient for you, you can add something to an ongoing discussion. The downside is that depending on how much time has elapsed between the beginning of the conversation and your arrival, you might not be willing to put in the work to absorb the entirety of the conversation anyway. Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC Tags: Andrew Lipson, approach, asynchronous, context, control, dating, dog, fan, film, friends, game, garbage, irrelevant, lies, listening, looks, Lost, love, media, moderate, older, remove, removed, Seesmic, skip, Social Media, tech, threading, threads, TwitterFellaz: It’s All Over! :O The Game as we know it is about to be turned on its ear! It’s all over. Get ready for the big Going-Out-Of-Business sale. What’s on sale, you ask? YOU! You’re going out of business! Systematically, male leverage in the dating game has been eroding, or perhaps has been purposely erodED. Back in the day, it was easy to pull chicks, because they couldn’t do anything on their own. I mean, they were always intelligent enough to, they just weren’t allowed to. According to the Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S. Meanwhile, The Fellaz were living large because they were completely unrestricted in getting money, houses, land, voting, playing the field, etc. All you had to do was be better than the next man who comes a-knocking on a lady’s door as a suitor, and you were guaranteed to bag the chick. Of course, people like Fonzie had multiple chicks, either in parallel or serial, but that’s a different topic. So anyway, in the 1920s, women got the vote. No big deal. However, around the 1940s, World War II kicked off, and all The Fellaz were sent to fight (read: die). In order to maintain American industry, there was no choice except to replace the guys with the chicks that had previously been sitting around at home. *THIS* was a big deal, Guys’ leverage down the drain. Fortunately, not all chicks took advantage of this opportunity to be prosperous. There were still a bunch of lazy chicks left over that wanted to get by on their looks and become “kept women”. There was also the mainstream media who recognized the problem of women doing EXACTLY what they wanted, when they wanted, and did their damnedest to keep images of how women are ’supposed’ to act all over the newspapers, film reels and televisions. At some point in the 1960s, “Women’s Lib” popped up to combat myriad injustices towards American females. This movement has done a lot of good for women, however, some chicks got completely carried away with it! In 1968, Valerie Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto. I was lucky enough to have been handed a copy of this SCUM Manifesto by a good friend while we were in High School, and found it to be a rather interesting read. Quoting from the wikipedia entry: “Sex is not part of a relationship: on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily — far more easily than she may think — condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks out constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape.” [Side Note: Now you see how it's come to the point in 2008 when bookstore technique is a perfectly valid gameplan. Act like you've evolved as she has instead of "digging her sexually" and "constantly trying to arouse her", and you're "In like Flynn"! What this means is that the last stronghold of The Fellaz is going down the tubes, and *YOU* are about to be OUT. OF. BUSINESS! Once they figure this out, women will not need you for AN-NY*THING*! Nothing. This is partially what the movie “Fight Club” was about. Women do not need you to provide: protection = cops money = her job shelter = her house food = the grocery store sex = Häagen-Dazs The only thing she needs *YOU* for is your MIT-graduate genes, complete with orangeish-brown complexion and naturally curly hair, and if they figure out how to extract that from the bone marrow of some chick that has those same features… It’s A Wrap! Reader Derek writes: I noticed that if a pretty blonde lady says anything – anything at all – like “asdfgHJKL;”, she’s gonna get tons of replies, all in a “Wow, you are ingenious ’cause you wrote that!” Actually, it depends where you are and what you have in abundance around you. I live in New York, so we have A LOT of naturally dark-haired women and a lot that like to dye their dark hair red. Because of that, blonde is actually a commodity. Not the blonde chicks with the brunette eyebrows, hahahahaha. Not the blonde chicks with the 3″ black roots down the middle of their domes! OTOH, I have cousins that live in a different part of the USA. I went to visit them and was totally amazed with the blonde chicks they had in that area… Meanwhile, I noticed that my cousins barely looked at them AT ALL! I was like “Man… you can’t throw a ROCK in NYC without hitting several brunettes before it hits the ground!”… See, so it all depends on what you’re used to, and what you have available to you. Similarly, I grew up around chicks with BODIES. Other guys grew up liking chicks with flat asses ‘n stuff like that. So I can look at a chick and think she has the physique of a teenage boy, and the guy standing next to me is thinking “Man! Check out how nice that chick’s ass is! :O” Eventually I got used to this, and I realize that it really is “Different Strokes for Different Folks”. As far as internet culture in particular, I’d say that you’re right, that blonde chicks get more props than brunettes. There are probably a bunch of societal reasons for this including the objectification or perhaps bimbo-fication of blonde chicks ever since television and film started being shown in color instead of black and white. From Marilyn Monroe to Anna Nicole Smith, blondes have been portrayed as the “perfect” combination of sexiness and stupidity. Easy / Quick to give it up. Fun to be with. Not smart enough to make problems. Simple-minded enough to be low maintenance. Who could ask for more? Meanwhile, brunettes are often portrayed as troublemakers, thinking too much, don’t like to follow orders, not particularly sexy… This is one of the reasons why chicks dye their hair blonde, to be more attractive to guys that have gone for this “hair color indicates something” bullshit. They get tired of their blonde girlfriends getting all the raps, so they WISELY start hooking themselves up to be more attractive and get more attention. Tags: Anna Nicole Smith, attractive, beauty, blonde, chicks, dance, dating, DatingGenius, demand, fan, film, friends, fun, girlfriend, lies, looks, relating, relationships, sex, supply, USA, wii, womenAre *you* a Tech Elitist? If so, how’s that workin’ for ya? As it’s now Christmas, and we think of The Grinch sitting high on the hill, looking down on all the little people of the village with contempt… Let’s consider our own positions in our respective fields and how we’ve chosen social media sites & groups as well as whom we’ve chosen to affiliate ourselves with. ![]() There was much change during 2007. More ways to communicate. More social sites to join. More video hosts with their own little gimmicks that made them slightly different from the rest. New video editing software. New storage solutions. New live streaming options…. As new opportunities arose, there was a lot of bandwagon-jumping. Sometimes it stuck, sometimes it didn’t. When Twitter was initially unreliable, OFTEN, eventually, Jaiku came along, and there was a mass exodus. The backup plan for when Twitter would go down was for people to immediately start posting on Jaiku until the problem was resolved. Eventually, Twitter became stable, and I didn’t hear a peep about Jaiku for months until they got bought by Google. All of a sudden, here come the Jaiku friend requests. Even within Twitter, there was bandwagon-jumping. Apps were created so you didn’t have to use the twitter web page with your browser. Some people stuck with them. Some people bailed back to the web site when they realized how many twitter posts the apps weren’t picking up. Eventually, people found found satisfaction in how they received twitter posts. At some point during ‘07, Pownce became a player as well. There was much debate about which status update application was better between the three of them. I ended up sticking with Twitter, and once every so often, I copy/paste redundant posts to Pownce & Jaiku for people that primarily (if not exclusively) use those sites. I’m also biased towards Twitter because I have 341 contacts there vs. 117 on Pownce and 50 on Jaiku, many of which are redundant for the reason I stated earlier. So, for the sake of this post, I’ll say I made the ‘elitist’ decision that Twitter was better for my purposes and essentially neglect the other two services. On the social site front, I used to have a regular MySpace presence. I had somewhere around 500 “friends” that were rather randomly acquired. What I mean by that is that I had probably 100 contacts that I knew from some other site or forum or that I actually knew IRL and then another 400 or so people/companies that sent me a friends request and then essentially never talked to me “again”. Eventually, Facebook stepped its game up, and I migrated to “the better site”. Similar to my Twitter bias for status updates, my MySpace dealings dwindled to ZERO. In fact, if someone didn’t have a facebook account, I wouldn’t even bother to look them up on MySpace. The reason Facebook is better for me is that I deal with social media every day of the week. Now that I’m thinking about it, for the average joe, MySpace is more than enough, and there’s no reason for them to look for better connectivity to more REAL people. So now I have to consider whether it’s more beneficial to me to move some of my Facebook-time back to MySpace instead of concentrating solely on the site that’s clearly superior for my purposes. Next, you have video hosts. I use blip.tv because the options and functionalities serve my purposes as I maintain my own video blogs using WordPress, Show-In-A-Box and vPiP. Meanwhile, other people talk into their webcams and post videos to YouTube. I’ve posted a few videos to YouTube for test purposes, but I wasn’t impressed with the video compression quality at the time, I wasn’t impressed with the Terms of Service and I *CERTAINLY* wasn’t impressed with the dimwitted remarks people love to leave in the comments sections. For those reasons and others, I’ve left YouTube just about completely alone… However, you can’t argue with the numbers of views that people get, assuming they get “featured”. YouTube has become the go-to for people looking for any kind of video under the sun, so just by having your video there, you have more of a chance of it going viral than if you oh-so-elitely plan, film, edit, compress, upload, post, tag and advertise your own videos like I do. The question, again, is “How’s that workin’ for ya?”. Fortunately, another 2007 development is TubeMogul which enables you to upload a video once and have it distributed to multiple video sharing sites. TubeMogul also tracks statistics for you across several sites. So now, there’s less incentive to keep “all your eggs in one basket”. I’m sure we can look forward to lots more fantastic developments in 2008. Anyway… I think it’s in all of our best interests to pay attention not only to which new app or site has cool features or the elite people flocking to it, but also to whether we’re trading away communications with our core viewers, friends, contacts and followers. Just like The Grinch found out… it’s lonely at the top. Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC Tags: 2008, bandwagon, community, contacts, decision, editing, elite, elitist, Facebook, fan, film, friends, fun, game, holier than thou, host, incentive, jaiku, Joe, Jonny GoldStein, love, media, Music, myspace, numbers, Operator11, pownce, relating, relationships, snob, Social Media, status update, stuck-up, superior, tech, the social, Twitter, Viral, youtubeTitle: “The Holiday Sweater Song” The Holiday Sweater Song from justin on Vimeo. What says HOLIDAY COMFORT AND FUN more than a festive sweater, adorned with all manner of snowmen, snow women, dogs, snowflakes, and more. Let’s celebrate the beauty of holiday sweaters with some music combined with video! HUGE thanks to all the people who submitted their videos for this, couldn’t have made it without all your support. STARRING: Alan and Wife George and Nintern Erik, Jared, and Lee Giancarlo Florentini & Jon Grimm Amanda Ferri and Alex Shawn Pearlman Ramon “The Iron Dove” Steve Garfield Josh Leo Veronica Belmont Hayden Black Tim and Rachel Streeter and Amir Michelle and Felicia Andrea Feczko Dave Seger Dan Meth Marissa Nystrom Erik Beck Bill Cammack Gary the Puppet Nick and Richard Nick Douglas Blame Society Productions Erik X Raj Kyle Fasanella The Thread Heads Halcyon ART BY MUSIC BY LYRICS BY DIRECTED / WRITTEN / EDITED BY Effective immediately, Bill Cammack joins Drew Olanoff as a member of “Team SCRIGGITY“. When I first got involved in videoblogging, a little over a year ago, I used to troll blip.tv’s recent uploads to get ideas about shows that I thought were good. One of those shows was Jonny Goldstein’s “Reinventing Television” (reinventingtv.phovi.com). I got involved, immediately. => Text chat from Reinventing Television Episode 2 (October 12, 2006). ![]() Another show that I thought was cool, interesting and innovative was scriggity (scriggity.com). Eventually, I met and hung out with Drew @ several NYC events, including Videoblogger Meetups, Network2 get-togethers and PodCampNYC.
Meanwhile, I was gearing up to do my own show… I mean, I *HAVE* my own “show” already, but it’s more like a feed of stuff that I do day in and day out. It’s not a actual show, but rather an indication of what it’s like to be me on any given day. So… I was gearing up to do an actual show and started filming episodes of “The Lab”.
What I found out, and outlined in my notes about the project… was that while I enjoy MAKING shows, I don’t enjoy the rest of the process. The “paperwork”, as I call it of all the stuff that has to be done PAST production and post. Interestingly enough, Drew decided that he doesn’t want to edit. it’s ON!!! and it happens to be POPPIN’!!! – |
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