Bill Cammack

Having read the archives of HollaBackBOSTON, HollaBackNYC and HollaBackDC, that I found out about the other day and posted about… I gained more of an understanding of what their complaints are.

[Disclosure: Anyone who actually KNOWS me knows that there's nothing I like more than an attractive chick, and I'll be the FIRST one to check her out... regardless. :D]

The way I can empathize with what they’re saying is to consider bums that we have on the streets of NYC. For instance, you might have a bum standing outside of McDonalds, who has taken it upon himself to act as the doorman. As you go inside, he’ll hold the door for you and perhaps say something pleasant to you. On your way out, he’ll hold the door again, and then ask you for some change. That’s pretty annoying. First of all, it’s not like he has an actual JOB with McDonalds. Second, it’s not like you ASKED HIM to open the door for you either time. Third, you go to McDonalds all the time and open your own doors, so what in the world do you need HIM to open the doors for, and FOURTH, why would you choose to pay him for a service that you didn’t ask for. That’s a couple of levels more annoying than going to the bathroom in a restaurant or club and finding out that there’s some guy whose job it is to stand next to the sinks and hand you paper towels, and he expects you to tip him. :?

The reason I see the bum @ McDonalds as a simliar situation is that he’s attempting to interrupt whatever you were doing, saying or thinking in order to try to get some money for you, totally to HIS benefit, and none to yours. This would be similar to the guy on the street that makes some complimentary statement to a woman so maybe he can ‘get on’ in the near future. The reason it’s NOT similar is that I’m a guy. I have all these fantastic, aggressive male options available to me, such as telling the bum to shut up or mind his business, saying I don’t have any change, or letting him know I take offense to him bothering me and if he keeps it up, I’m going to do something about it.

One difference is that many women are intimidated by male harassers and aren’t willing to attempt to get them to cease and desist. This makes sense, because most men like women that are smaller than they are, so they would be physically intimidating to the women. Another difference is that women can’t act like they don’t have what the guy wants. The fact that the guy has chosen to try to get some from her indicates that he’s already decided she has what he wants. The bum doesn’t know whether I have change on me or not. If I tell him I don’t have it, and he persists, there’s going to be a problem.

This is where I empathize with the HollaBack series the most, because a lot of the women who post there aren’t willing to do anything but talk to or about their harassers. Some guy says something or touches them or does something he knows damned well he shouldn’t be doing, and their only recourse is to talk about how ugly he is or how old he is or how out of shape he is or how badly he smells or how pathetic he is or how disrespectful to women….

The pattern is clear, though. In the vast majority of the cases, by the women’s own posts, the men didn’t give a damn AT ALL what the women thought or wanted, and they still don’t. This is something they understand, but they don’t seem to benefit from this knowledge. Knowing that the guys don’t care what they think or say doesn’t cause them to revise their complaints to a more efficient format that might bring about education and perhaps some degree of change. It’s the same reason why the porno industry is big business. The women look good, do what the guys want them to do, and have ZERO opinions about ANYTHING. It stands to reason that if you take someone whose only interest in women is how good they look and “what they’re good for”, and put him on the street and he does whatever he does, it’s not an effective retort to say stuff like:

“you’re old enough to be my father”
“you don’t even know me”
“your breath stinks”
“you’re disrespectful to women”
“would you treat your mother or sister like that?” (my personal favorite :D)
“have you no home training?”
[flipping the bird or cursing him out]
[some statement to him that she wasn't "dressed sexy" at all]
“did I ask you to talk to me?”
“I didn’t give you any indication I was interested in you”
etc etc etc etc etc…….

I think HollaBack’s idea of the women taking pictures of the range of guys from pervs down to regular guys just trying to meet a woman he finds attractive is a good idea, although a dangerous one, for obvious reasons that I won’t bother to go into. Apparently they also give speeches and have other programs that they do. I think that’s great, because increasing education and awareness is key, IMO. They’re never going to outlaw guys trying to talk to girls… That’s just not going to happen. Society’s set up so that guys have to chase girls, period. That’s why guys court women and take them out to dinner and buy them drinks at the club, etc etc. It’s all an attempt to gain favor with her so he can eventually get whatever it is he wants from her… sex, a relationship, free food, a place to stay, money, whatever. Biologically, women are more of a commodity than men, simply by the incredible difference between how much sperm men have and continually create, and how few eggs women are born with and then they don’t get any more. It’s never going to be different, so the best bet is to increase awareness that women feel endangered when guys press up on them in the street.

So… With my new understanding of what the issues are for women being harassed in the street, I decided to take a walk tonight and pay attention to the interactions I had. I walked to a bar without incident. The male “doorman” checked my ID without incident. The female hostess greeted me without incident. I ordered my beer from the male bartender without incident. The few people that needed to get by where I was standing, some male and some female, excused themselves, I made way for them and they went by without extraneous comments. I left the bar without incident. I walked around the neighborhood some more, passing individuals, couples walking together and groups… no incident. I went into Barnes & Noble. I asked a woman there with a laptop if she was using a wireless connection. She wasn’t. I asked this guy behind the counter if B&N had wifi, he said yes, and got me a pamphlet on it. I thanked him and left. I ordered food from a female cashier and didn’t hear any extraneous remarks from her or from the waitress that was hanging out near the front of the place. I went to another store, then walked back home without incident.

Just about every one of those situations is mentioned in a story by some woman on those HollaBack sites, and I’m sure whatever other support groups that were created for this kind of thing. I can’t imagine how annoyed I’d be if every time I went to do something, someone tried to strike up a conversation with me or get something from me. For me, it would be like bums standing in front of every place that I want to go into and always asking me for change! :D Still, I can’t fully “get it”, because my aggressive nature makes me see situations like that as a challenge, not something intimidating. I don’t feel pressure… I just feel annoyed.

Anyway… Good luck to the HollaBack Girls. Some of the guys on those pages are legitimate creeps and need to be prosecuted. A lot of the guys are just “boys being boys”, and I can tell you, as one of the boys, a lot of them just don’t get it as far how the women feel physically intimidated by their street raps. A lot of guys aren’t going to care one way or the other, and they’re going to enjoy women as they see fit. I think that there are also a lot that would change their ways of being if they received some sort of education that what they consider flirtation and socialization is seen by many women as harassment and physical intimidation.

So we got to Uptown Lounge, and decided on Calamari as the fun-food while we “got our martini on”. We tried out the camera in low-light, but it didn’t work out at all, which was to be expected since I hadn’t read the manual. I had no idea of what I might have been able to change to produce the best setting.

Anyway… X hours later, we headed for a pizza shop, where I shot an extremely mellow (for ME) video with my new, fresh-out-of-the-box Samsung NV3. :D

When I got home, I plugged the camera in via USB and uploaded the videos really quickly. They open up in AVI format, 640×480, as advertised:

Format: XVID Decoder, 640 x 480, Millions
Audio: Microsoft ADPCM, Mono, 22.050 kHz
FPS: 30
Data Rate: 1615.81 kbits/sec

Here’s where things got tricky. :D Originally, I loaded the clips to my iMac. As soon as they uploaded, I double-clicked one of them and it appeared in Quicktime Player. I played it immediately, and it had these black clipping blotches where the camera was aimed directly at bright lights, like the menu signs in the pizza shop. I figured this had to do with the camera and that I didn’t read the manual before just pointing and shooting. So then, I went to transfer the videos to my MacBook, and they didn’t run at all. Quicktime Player would open the first frame of the cips, but it would “quit unexpectedly” when I pressed play. I tried restarting and rebooting. No difference. I looked in the manual on the disk, which is way more extensive than the hardcopy they give you, and it said to install the XviD codec.

To install the XviD codec, you have to install DivX. I installed both and rebooted. I opened the clip in Mpeg Streamclip, and the “blowout blotches” were gone, except there was a large section that glitched at the bottom of the pizza shop counter, where there were no lights at all. I figured the problem had something to do with interlacing. I could be wrong, but the programs were looking for interlaced video, and the NV3 shoots 30 frames per second. That’s different from 29.97 frames per second, and that’s certainly different from 60 interlaced fields per second like NTSC television has. I decided to render the video that had this one large glitch in it out to DV codec, using Mpeg Streamclip. I could have exported to Mpeg-4, but I wanted to see if it would look good in DV, since most of the time, I’ll want to bring the clips into FCP for editing.

I rendered to DV and resampled the 22 kHz audio to 48 kHz for the same FCP compatibility reasons. The DV file opened up in quicktime player, looked good and ran flawlessly. I imported that file into Compressor and used my iPod settings to make the m4v to send to blip and iTunes. I cropped the end of the video in Compressor.

After that test, I changed the flow. I made it so that all AVI files open in Mpeg Streamclip. I selected in and out points by pressing “I” and “O” where I wanted my in and out to be for the clip. I selected “export to mpeg-4″ with the settings of 50% quality, 1100 kbps data rate, sound AAC 44.1 kHz stereo (even though the NV3 records in 22 kHz mono) @ 96 kbps, 640×480, upper field and everything else deselected. I got the same results, except the file was named mp4 instead of m4v.

I was very happy with the results. The colors are a little oversaturated, but like I said, I never read the manual, and the video’s straight out of the box. Insert battery, insert 2gig memory card, spin the dial, point & shoot. I barely knew how to play the videos back on the camera at the time. :D

Anyway… A good time was had by all… as you can probably tell from the video! :D I’m definitely looking forward to ReelSolid.TV expanding past the borders of the U.S.A.! We’ll get to find out what’s going on in Japan from Masami, and what’s going on in France from Laetitia. Cheers to both of the ladies for helping me to NOT waste my day! :D

@ the end of tonight’s show, Jonny announced that this was the final episode of Reinventing Television. I think the format, concept and hosting of the show was great, and actually a reinvention of television.

On television, you might get to see Britney Spears on a closed-set talk show, emoting to a hand-picked interviewer with carefully-chosen questions, and after MUCH, MUCH, MUCH editing done to make her look as good as possible, physically and intellectually. You don’t realize you’re being sold something that people are hoping that you’re going to buy.

On Jonny & Peter‘s show, “REINVENTING Television”, the guests responded directly to questions from Jonny or from the audience over the text chat or the phone lines. It wasn’t so much like television as it was like bringing people together that weren’t physically in the same location into a coffee-shop or lounge environment where we could discuss common interests. Same deal for Jason DaSilva‘s show “Zoom In”, which became “Celluloid Stories”. Jonny & Jason held weekly house parties that happened to have a technical focus.

I got a lot out of the show, because I’m relatively new to videoblogging. Actually, ReinventingTV / ZoomIn was my first extensive experience with webcams. I don’t even OWN a webcam! :D I found out that I could use my DV camera that I hook up through Firewire with iChat and the application that Phovi was using for ReinventingTV, which was flash-based.

I hadn’t seen webcams as useful for anything, so I never used them. ReinventingTV was really the perfect application for them. The only difference between phovi.com‘s format and actually BEING THERE is that you couldn’t reach across the table and shake someone’s hand. :D I had felt that way before, but the final episode really showed me how ‘intimate’ the setting was that Jonny, Jason & Peter created. I had met / hung out with Rudy & Casey from Galacticast a couple of weeks ago, and they were guests on last night’s show. They were sitting on their GalactiCouch & Casey was playing her guitar, and we had verbal connection through the phone lines as well as connection via the text chat, and this was what was happening NOW… right now. Real-Time. IRL.

This wasn’t taped, so you find out that the guest on tonight’s show is actually in Puerto Rico right now. :D They were in Canada, Jonny was in D.C., I was in NYC, other people were wherever they were, but we were all together, in our little, multi-connection coffee-shop, finding out about what’s going on with Galacticast and getting answers to OUR OWN QUESTIONS instead of the questions that the corporation told the network to tell the station to tell the show to tell the EP to tell the producer to tell the interviewer to ask! :D

fantastic!

Anyway… I’ll be keeping an eye out for Jonny Goldstein‘s next project as well as Peter Raulerson (phovi.com). I think they’re both ahead of the curve right now, and when the technology catches up to what ReinventingTV/ZoomIn did with the *current* technology, there’ll be a lot of emulators of their format & style.

… often imitated, but never duplicated! :D …

Thanks for the shows, fellas!

During Thanksgiving vacation, I got to watch my cousin Morgan & the Northwest Jaguars ‘hannle they bidnezz’ against Quince Orchard, coming off with a 56-35 win!!! :D

UN-DE-FEA-TED!!!
UN-DE-FEA-TED!!!
UN-DE-FEA-TED!!!

http://one.revver.com/find/video/latenitemash#_show_video_103079

“Host Dan McVicar presents music from Late Nite Mash viewers; footage of New York City contributed by Bill C., of Reel Solid TV.”

hahahaha ok… Jonny’s going to have to change something over @ ReinventingTV.com! Last night’s show was OUTLANDISH! :D …

The first half was Steve Woolf & Zadi Diaz from Smashface.com / Jetsetshow. That would have been a funny and entertaining hour on its own…..

… but then Dan McVicar (LateNiteMash.com) jumped up in the mix, and everything went berserk! :D

Somebody says something funny, and then I’m laughing, but then I need to read the text chat then I look back up and Laurel & Hardy have bogarted Dan’s screen, so I’m laughing again and trying to type… Next thing I know, Jonny has an afro-wig, and he’s playing some instrument it looks like he created himself… Meanhile, Zadi & Steve are talking about Dan while the text chat peanut gallery’s talking about Zadi & Steve… :D

It was CRAYZEE!!! :D It was like the video-intenet-webcam-text_chat version of when they get into fights in the cartoons and all you see is a cloud of dust spinning around with fists flying in and out of the cloud. Hilarious. I’m going to have to watch the show MYSELF, just to see/hear what was happening while I was laughing or trying to get my own jokes in on the text chat or watching one brady bunch box when there was action going on in another box.

Hilarious. THAT show should definitely have been two hours instead of one, because the crowd was getting more amped the whole time! The show was just getting better and better, hahaha.

Anyway, this week’s Reinventing Television was a blast! Kudos to the hosts, guests and the “live studio audience” for keeping the party rollin’ hahaha :D

Having now placed videos on YouTube, Google Video, Revver, Brightcove, Blip, and Myspace… as well as hosting video on my own site and feeding my podcast to iTunes…..

I’ve come to the conclusion that marketing is more important than location. I purposely didn’t publicize any of the videos that I posted in order to see what would happen on each site. YouTube continues to get the most random hits, but that’s probably because they have the most viewers that are searching for random topics. MySpace had a slowly rising number of views, probably for the same reason.

A couple of the sites (I forget which, at this point) only count your video as a “view” if someone watches the whole thing. That’s pretty useless for the types of videos that I had posted, because mine have beginnings and ends. It’s clear that the video is over before it’s actually over, so there’s no real reason to go all the way to the end. That’s because I made the clips as mini-shows and not viral video. They’re supposed to take the viewer through a complete entry into and exit from the world of ReelSolid. That format’s going to be changed for my next show, which I’m working on right now.

As far as revenue-sharing, that’s all well and good IF you’re making videos that people are going to want to watch over and over, like the one where the guy gets his foot caught in the rope swing and gets bashed into the stone wall like Wile E. Coyote. :D THAT’S viral video. That’s video that someone watches 20 times, then tells 20 of their friends to watch 20 times, then watches another 20 times the next day and so on and so on. If you’re not making those kind of videos, the ROI is just about nothing. I suppose you could say that if your “I” is nothing, then you have nothing to lose by putting something on Revver or Brightcove. Some people litter those sites with tons of very short videos and get a lot of hits and make money from them… kudos! :)

Ultimately, I like serving my own videos. I haven’t been impressed with the playback from other services, but that might be because I’m on an older computer and those sites are opimized for dual-core-blah-blah-blah.

My next show is going to be a form of videoblog, so I’ll be changing the site… AGAIN, and moving videos to blip.tv. One of the reasons for this is that Revver and Brightcove are clearly viral video sites, and that’s what they specialize in. Blip’s more geared towards videoblogging, so it seems more ‘natural’ to have a presence there than the other sites. I might make viral versions of the shows, and that would be fine for me to have on these quick-hit sites, but for now, I’m going to focus on the actual content and placing it where I feel it’s part of a community instead of somewhere I tossed it to see what would happen.

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! <==

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.