A photographic imagination

I wanted to update you on your interest in participating in the video project

As you may already know, I have created some short videos using the photographs in my stream and text and audio/sound derived from both original and other sources. Those films can be found here:

www.youtube.com/user/avproducer

My goal for this project is to push the boundaries of what I can do with multimedia tools, explore collaboration and the weaving of narratives and different voices. I am hoping to go beyond the slideshow so there is room to experiment.

The project's working title is "A grammar of motives". The title comes from a book by Kenneth Burke that I started to read back in 1979 and have never finished although I own two copies and frequently flip through them.

I am currently planning 5 sections to mirror Burke's dramatic pentad:
+ act
+ scene
+ agent
+ agency
+ purpose

More on Kenneth Burke here
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Burke

With that brief introduction to the project, this is how you can contribute.

Record an audio/video diary entry/entries about the intersections of your life (real or imagined) and the work in my photostream. The entry can be in the form of poem/letter/lullaby/rant.

Record a voice mail message to me about something that has just happened. You can report. I am open to other possibilities - pass the phone around a dinner party, dial in from a church service, a bathroom stall or call from the beach - the settings are endless.

An informal, intimate and authentic voice is all you need to bring!

You can contribute as much as you'd like and it would be helpful to me for you to identify your self at the beginning or the end of your call/recording.

To record you can call a voice mail box

646-495-9204 x 52402

or

Upload a file as MP3/WAV/MP4
URL: drop.io/rdiorio
dropio1

Click (add) File

You can email me via flickr mail with questions.

I appreciate your help and look forward to seeing what we get. I also anticipate the need to have some specific passages of text recorded and I may additionally each out to you for that.

I am hoping to complete the collection of material by mid April.

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From WSJ.com

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs's recent open letter urging that digital music be distributed free of copyright protections was aimed at the recording industry. But it made waves in another key constituency Mr. Jobs does business with: movie makers.

Executives at Hollywood studios believe it is only a matter of time before the debate over removing copyright protections spreads to movies from music. Until now, the studios have steadfastly asserted that copy protections -- known as digital rights management -- are essential to preventing piracy of films.

The studios are increasingly engaged in internal debate over the right course ..

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From Robin Good

"To me the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, some... just people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them, and - you know - suddenly, one day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart - you know - and? make a beautiful film with her little father's camera...corder - and for once the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed. Forever. And it will really become an art form.
That's my opinion."

Francis Ford Coppola

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In Quantity has a quality all of its ownv Davin McHenry writes:

I joined a Yahoo email group recently the focuses on newspaper video. The group seems to be mostly photography staffers hashing out how to add video to their websites. What struck me was how most folks seemed to be centered on buying high-end video equipment and expensive and complicated editing packages. The goal seems to bring documentary-quality video to newspapers, mostly in the hands of photographers-turned-videographers.

And I just don’t see how that’s going to work.

A bit of disclosure here. At Bakersfield.com we’ve taken a decidedly low-fi approach to video. Ninety percent of our video is shot by reporters and 99 percent is shot with point and shoot , consumer-grade cameras. With our staff (~24 reporters) and our equipment (2-3 cameras) we’ve been able to shoot and edit 600+ videos this past year. We’re averaging about 700-800 views per day in recent months.

If we had taken the opposite approach and focused entirely on our photo staff I think the flow would have been significantly lower. I imagine we would have had, at best, 2-3 videos per week, rather than per day.

I don’t see how you build a daily audience with that kind of content flow. Especially given the nature of online video.

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From Teaching online jounralism

Between You and Me.
A film by Patry Krebisz

A friend recently bought the Canon EOS 20D. I tried its burst mode and was in seventh heaven. In this mode we could record at five frames per second (as opposed to film’s 24). We could shoot for about 12 seconds before the camera’s memory buffer would fill up, so our takes had to be really exact -- no long, hypnotic shots. I did a series of tests beforehand to find the best setup ...

I have been working on some still image based products for the last few months. I have a created a few prototypes and a couple of small films of my own photographic works.

This flip book style is an interesting approach that I hope to incorporate in the next interations.

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From Thomas Hawk

Why after a year and a half can't Yahoo! get it together and get Flickr's interesting photos integrated better into Yahoo! Image Search? It's amazing that Yahoo! has a legitimate trump card where they could dramatically show their superiority to Google and it largely gets ignored.

I know I sound like a broken record but why doesn't Flickr just throw the video upload switch and let this very dedicated community develop into the leading shared orginal content video service.

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I am so often convinced the blogs, vlogs, pods are linked to the very modern tradition of photography.

Does this statement ring true?

Blogging is a modern invention—one that, from its inception, inspired a host of conflicts and anxieties. Indeed, when we talk about blogs we are talking about modernity; the doubts that blogs inspires are the doubts that modernity inspires. Blogging is a proxy for modern life and its discontents.

What are some of these troubles? From the first, the essential nature of blogging was puzzling. It tended to blur categories—which can be both exciting and unsettling. Was blogging a kind of art? of commerce? of journalism? of science? of surveillance? Was it a form of creativity, a way of bringing newness into the world, or was its relation to reality essentially mimetic or, even, that of a parasite?

The original:
The Treacherous Medium

Photography is a modern invention—one that, from its inception, inspired a host of conflicts and anxieties. Indeed, when we talk about photography we are talking about modernity; the doubts that photography inspires are the doubts that modernity inspires. Photography is a proxy for modern life and its discontents.

What are some of these troubles? From the first, the essential nature of photography was puzzling. It tended to blur categories—which can be both exciting and unsettling. Was photography a kind of art? of commerce? of journalism? of science? of surveillance? Was it a form of creativity, a way of bringing newness into the world, or was its relation to reality essentially mimetic or, even, that of a parasite?

Thanks to GalleryHopper for the pointer

What do you think?

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A short film.
Words by John Dos Passos

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When worlds collide

From Publishing 2.0

The widely-used and much reviled term “user-generated content” implies that somebody is making something. But the dirty little secret of “user-generated” sites like YouTube and MySpace is that much of the content is not made by the users themselves — it’s appropriated from someone else.

At the end of the day, whenever anybody uploads or posts something to the web, it’s just a form of publishing. What’s radical about the new digital reality is that I can publish anything that I made — and I can publish anything that anybody else made.

Basic common sense tells you that if I were to take all of the content from another blog, publish it here, and then run ads against it, that would be wrong. Much of the tangled web we now face results from the euphemistic obfuscation of terms like “user-generated content.” If we call it what it is — for example, people streaming music from their MySpace pages while MySpace runs ads on those pages — then we can have a clear debate about the right and wrong of it.

In a great tradiion, MySpace and You Tube is the home of appropriation art. In that sense we have contemporary and modern traditions that as Wiikipedia says of Duchamp: "Duchamp's "creativity" as an artist lies in the gesture of selecting the urinal as an art piece and displaying it in an artistic context." So MySpace and You Tube "artists", if they can prove the transformative nature the "long tail" on the appropriated work on their page they can sit at ease. .

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