VAPERS

DS107 CARNAGE from Jim Groom on Vimeo.

A trailer for a film not yet made….

Take the jump for an overview of the process, thoughts on why iMovie 8 sucked, and a bit about Mario Bava.

I actually got th idea to edit a foreign language trailer after watching how much fun Shannotate had with her Downfall remix. I was having a bit of trouble finding the perfect trailer and started to think about the psychedellic, tripped out trailer for Mario Bava’s 1971 mother-of-all-Slasher films Carnage (a.k.a Bay of Blood a.k.a Twitch of the Death Nerve). It is a favorite film of mine, just as Mario Bava is a favorite director of mine, this blog owes its name to him. If you watch the original Carnage trailer you’ll realize there isn’t really that much to change, the horror scenes are posterized, and the actor titles are stark, while the film’s title—which is repeated over and over again—is tripped out and consuming. Watching it again it dawned on me that I could make some very subtle edits to this trailer to keep the psychokiller/slasher theme going for the ds107 philistines. I really like how subtle the changes are, and how they bring the players of ds107 to the fore once again. It isn’t perfect, but I am pretty happy with it.

Now, here comes my rant on how much iMovie 8 sucks. What I did was rather straight forward in terms of video editing. I added “DS107″ in front of the Carnage titles and changed the original actors names to represent a sampling of the ds107 separatists. Should be a dead simple project even in a rudimentary tool like iMovie 8, right? Wrong, cause iMovie 8 sucks, and when they went from iMovie 6 to iMovie 8  they basically gutted this software, some of which they brought back in iMovie 9 and 11. So, what am I bitching about? Well, the following:

• iMovie 8 does not allow me to use more sophistcated titles with effects. In fact, iMovie 8 got rid of almost all the effects–slow motion, black and white, etc.
• It also removed the ability to pull the audio track out of the video and edit accordingly.

Those are just two of the issues that I faced when worked on my simple project that made this software a pain in the ass. And what’s more I never got iMovie 9 or 11 on my computer because they are not free upgrades, you have to buy iLife which also sucks. OK, so there that is, for a longer list of why iMovie 8 was so abysmal search the internet it is well documented, I just happened to have to work through it tonight.

So, with no real freedom to choose title effects I couldn’t reproduce Bava’s brilliant title effects. I had to stick with centered, lower third, align left and align right…a paltry selection. What’s more, I had to cut out pieces of the video with names of the original actors and replace them with still images that fit the space I had cut out with the new titles. But it turns out I couldn’t do this cleanly because when I cut the clip the audio was also gone because you can’t extract the audio from the video in iMovie 8. LAME!!! Adding insult to injury, it took me a good half an hour to figure out that in order to copy a bit of a still and create a sequence that is 0:xx.x seconds long I have to right click the original sequence and click “Add still frame to project” which I then had to change the time by going to Edit—>Change Duration. That was annoying, why can’t I just make certain clips longer? So, I had to add the titles with basic tools, and re-synch the entire music score for the trailer after all my edits were done. What a sucky workflow! No question that the logic behind iMovie 8 was to get more people to buy Final Cut Express. A program I really do want to start playing with for more complex projects after seeing what Michael Branson Smith has done with that stuff, but not for basic editing that is a result of Apple’s denigration of a program that in many ways got me into video editing back in 2004. It was once pretty good.

Anyway, that is my process and it was unnecessarily time consuming because I have iMovie 8. I was gonna wait to use iMovie 11 at work some time this weekend or Monday, but I know that would be a nightmare of piling up work. Plus, I have an idea for another video project which will require Final Cut Pro Express, so time to get a bit more serious despite Apple sucking.

There is some serious madness happening in ds106′s Summer of O’Blivion, and Michael Branson Smith’s video editing has been amazing as the above Forbidden Planet remix video bears witness to. Just in time for the video section of this course, and if you haven’t seen The Excorcist remix, you really shouldn’t miss it—despite how hard it is to watch.

Tonight the face-to-face ds106 class, as well as anyone on ds106radio, had the pleasure of hearing Tom Woodward take us on a tour of some fascinating videos that really set the stage for what’s emergent right now in this most popular of media, but also asking us to stretch our understanding of what video is, and what it can be in our present moment. He broke the videos into a series of differnet sections (you can see the entire playlist here) from “What is video?” to the art of “Dead Simple” video to remix to takes, etc. I love his approach of lining up a series of compelling videos and framing each of them for discussion. And what’s more, there was both discussion in class and on the back channel, and all this over Skype being broadcast out to the radio. Blows my mind.

I can’t thank Tom enough for agreeing to join, and apologize publicly for giving him no setup up time before the class—I failed him in that regard, but it was a major success nonetheless. And here ‘s the audio, which would be best accompanied by the list of video resources which we discuss that he provided here: http://bionicteaching.com/umw_video.html

Tom Woodward in ds106 talking video 3/29/11

There were so many compelling video from the list I recommend them all, but here were my top five in no particular order:

“50 People, 1 Question”: It’s amazing to watch people open up through storytelling!

Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

Tarp Surfing: Simple and very rad.

tarp surfing from justin Bundschuh on Vimeo.

Sour: Why haven;t I seen this before? So creative, and all with simple web cams. Amazing!

SOUR / ????? (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.

Down on Me (with me and 50 cent): Why is 50 Cent in this kid’s room?

Speed painting Kurt Cobain: There is something crazy happening here in terms of iconic representation and process

And that gives you a small but telling taste of how awesome it was. Thanks Tom!

I started a page on the ds106 wiki that takes you throw the possibilities for getting the Video Essay done. It takes you through ripping DVDs (for Mac and PC), some quick trimming and compression tools, and how to do a voice over narration in iMovie and Movie Maker.

Would love if anyone who has something to clean up or add would do as much. You have to login to edit to prevent crazy spam, just use your ds106 username and password if you have one, if you don’t you can easily get one here. If the logging in and editing is a drag, just let me know anything you want to share in the comments.

erchache2000 shared the link to the above video of Isaac Asimov talking with Bill Moyers in “The World of Ideas” back in 1988. His fascinating discussion of the idea of computer mediated instruction being anything but dehumanizing. I love Asimov’s idea that rather reproducing a model of privilege that had been available only to the few, i.e. 1-on-1 instruction, is now available to the many: the one-to-one amngst the many. He gets beautifully at how the internet allows for a radically different paradigm for thinking about education, while at the same time touches on the thrust behind unschooling when talking about not only allowing, but encouraging, kids to follow their own interests. What’s more, Asimov seems so cool in this video, I love his final comment “why not?…why not?” Spoken like a true believer, I love that about this video, it’s speculative, visionary, and in many ways idealistic—what we don’t seem to realize is we have that platform, and it’s time for us to use it with some of that vision.

It’s been a long while since I played with WordPress plugins on the bava. But tonight I was thinking that if CogDog is right, and just about everything we share through various networks can be thought of as blogging, than one of my most productive forms of saving (and inadvertently sharing) I really don’t have a way of sharing with those who might be interested. What I am talking about is my YouTube favorites. I have favorited close to 1000 videos on YouTube since 2006. many of which have suffered the fate of fascist copyright takedown, but there are still more than 689 out there in the open. And what gets me is I have no real way to simply share them. I could hook them up to my twitter, but that seems obnoxious.

I could also blog them—which I wouldn’t mind as much actually—and I even found how get an RSS feed for YouTube favorites here (in example below jimgroom is my username on YouTube):

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/jimgroom/favorites?orderby=updated

But when I tried to pull this in via FeedWordPress it includes the title of the video, a permalink that points back to the video on YouTube, and the description in the post body, but no video—which defeats the purpose in my mind. So I went searching for WordPress plugins, and the best i came up with is TubePress. It was just updated in the last two days, and it works well for me on WP 3.0. (It also integrates with Vimeo.) It has options galore in terms of videos you can pull in from YouTube, and while I was just interested in my favorites, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So, to test it out, I put a TubePress widget in the bava sidebar to feature the latest videos I’ve favorited on YouTube. You can see that to the right. You can also embed them within a post or page with a shortcode:

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It’s nice and all, but the free version (a.k.a. as “non-premium”) has some real limitations—namely you have to pay for access to additional video galleries, more options, etc. As of now, you can only utilize one of the many options available, which makes it far more limited that it initially appears.Is the premium plugin the way of the future for extensive WordPress plugins? I hope not, cause it sucks.Additionally, the shortcode/widget logic around which this plugin is designed doesn’t provide a feed for my YouTube favorites.

Anyway, returning to my feed issue for YouTube favorites,  I have to assume no one really comes to my blog anymore to actually read it, if they read it at all it’s via RSS. So, how to share this stuff in a useful way? I’m not sure, I can definitely pull it into the feed with FeedWordpress, but the lack of an embedded video insults my sense of aesthetics and web decency, so anyway—I see TubePress as an interesting, if temporary, solution to a larger problem of effectively aggregating the work I do in several places around the web. I’m not too diffuse though when I think about it, my blog is foundational, twitter is highly annoying but next (but ever since Twitter Tools started to suck with OAuth I dropped that plugin), then YouTube, Flickr, and finally delicious. I am pretty much a five social network guy, though I admittedly duck in and out of Facebook every so often–and surprisingly more this year than ever.

Not sure how I want to archive and aggregate all this stuff, but I know I do. And keep in mind I am talking about aggregating not archiving. I like Tom’s aggregation site a lot, and I may experiment more with that—but I wanna see if I can find some way to actually frame what’s what more. I don’t know how exactly, I need to think through this more. I think it might be coming up with the right theme to place on top of feedWordPress, and somehow pulling that into bavatuesdays as it is now. It is kinda the method D’Arcy has taken that I like so much—he archives all his own stuff on his web host. And he even excludes certain posts from his feed—his asides. I wonder if excluding some of these and including others would be as easy as a tag on any of these social networks, but all the while pulling them all into my database for archiving. What ever happend to ArchivePress? It’s not exactly what I’m talking about it, but it is in the vicinity. Anyway, it would be fun to figure some of this out, and then approach ds106 this next semester as a kind of aggregating/archiving project for their semester’s work. I did some of this already, but it might be nice to have a clearer sense of what might be useful myself before I try and demonstrate it.

Sometime this month the 176 videos I have uploaded to my YouTube channel have been collectively viewed more than 1 million times—well, 1,041,448 to be exact. It’s pretty crazy to think videos I have uploaded have been watched that many times, particularly because most of my videos are either joke videos, family videos, video game snippets, or clips from films that I have blogged about over the last five years (that’s right, bavatuesdays turns five years old in less than a month).

And the community on YouTube is vigorous to say the least, I get anywhere from 10-15 comments a day on my videos, and friend and subscriber emails regularly. But I never feed the comment community there because it has always for me been a staging area for the blog where I can really contextualize what I put up there. Which is kind of ironic given how much I use YouTube myself for research, nostalgia, blogging, and general entertainment. I have a weird relationship with YouTube, but of all the Web 2.0 tools I find I use Wikipedia and YouTube far more than any others—save maybe Google search.

What’s interesting is that the most traffic on my YouTube channel has been garnered by two videos. The screencast/demo of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Atari 2600 game I did a few years back which has 126,000 views.

The other one is the “Patriotic Popeye” cartoon I posted as a joke for the 4th of July three years ago which has a 134,000 views.

So these two rather unremarkable videos are responsible for more than a third of all my views on YouTube over the last three years. But where it gets interesting is that the other 600,000 or 700,000 are spread out around various clips of films I’ve uploaded. The views on these clips make up the bulk of my channel’s traffic, which is very encouraging to me. My personal videos and joke videos get a very small amount of traffic, but the movie clips are gold. And one of the things I pride myself on is that I have always tried to upload decent quality clips from good films that at the time I uploaded them did not already exist on YouTube. I felt like I was helping build out the unbelievable open and public archive that was and is YouTube. A public square for good film clips which provides an indispensable service to contemporary culture that you really can’t find anywhere else. Possibly the second best thing—and a very, very distant second—is the Internet Archive. I wanted to help build the archive that is YouTube, and over the last three years I have. Here are some of the movie clips I have uploaded along with their views to give you a sense of how these rather marginal films have a regular and consistent audience of fans on the internet:

The beginning of RIchard Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) —the first film clip I ever uploaded to YouTube (26,379 views).

The trailer for The Miracle Mile (1988) –not the best quality but I actually found the video on MySpace and downloaded and ported it to YouTube a few years ago (51,196 views)

THe Repo Code scene from Alex Cox’s masterpiece Repo Man (1984) with 59,450 views.

The openings of two of my favorite films by John Carpenter, the 1976 classic Assault on Precinct 13 (26,242 views) as well as Jamie Lee Curtis narration at the beginning of his 1981 apocalyptic visionEscape from New York (57,422),

And then there is the internet scene from David Croneberg’s Scanners (14,969).
.

And even Mario Bava’s The Whip and The Bodywith 41,950 views—a little bondage always helps those stats!

And then I can’t forget the Italian TV vignettes with the great Totò I published. Like Totò Cassiere with a healthy 49,830 views.

So while most of my 176 videos have less than 100 views, the clips I have been sharing out for films and video games have resonated rather widely. As for the final class of videos, well there are maybe 20-30,000 views on all my video art stuff. The only one of these videos with more than 1000 hits is The EdTech Survivalist with 1780 whopping views (I love this video):

After than it gets fewer and fewer. But somehow, some way, what has become a part of my process of posting to my blog–namely uploaded and sharing video I created or wanted to critique—has hopefully fed the same joy I feel every time I search YouTube for a movie clip and hit the jackpot. It is a very good feeling, and I want to share in some of the work.

I’ve been knee-deep in film commentaries, homemade Halloween movies, and mashups for the last three weeks in ds106, and it has been awesome. I’m on the verge of finally finishing my mashup, but in the meantime, here is a short video made by Wesley Frank,  Kyle Nero and K “Money” Hernandez titled “Kyle Nero’s Halloween.” This totally appeals to my kitsch/b-movie sensibility, and the fact the Chucky from Child’s Play figures so prominently into this short film makes all the more alluring. I particularly enjoyed Kyle’s deadpan acting s well as Aubrey Elliot. What’s more, Wesley’s writing and direction were a lot of fun, and his establishing a sense of shot order is pretty impressive. Enjoy more ds106 internaut greatness.

Note: I’m cross-posting this here as well as on the ds106 course blog for two reasons. 1) It pulls widely from Andy Rush’s unbelievable Digital Video resource blog/site, and I figured this would be a great thing to highlight for anyone working with video in or out of the classroom. In particular check out the “Fast, Cheap, and Under Control” –it’s like Xmas for teaching video. 2) I had problems with the video portion of ds106 last semester, and was hoping for some feedback. This is the first of a three (actually four assignment) video run. I’ll be blogging all of them, and feedback is welcome.

For this assignment I am going to ask each of you to select several scenes from your favorite films (or one of your favorites), and edit them together and comment on some of the filmic elements of the scenes? Why do you like these scenes? What strikes you about them? What makes them good cinema? Is there a subtext at work in this film? In short, I want you to comment on the scenes as a narrator explaining to your audience explaining what you find important about the scene, and why.

If you want more specific example of what I m talking about, here is a commentary of the 1978 zombie films Dawn of the Dead I did a couple of years ago.

I’ll also be working on a new version for the The Shining over the next few days as well.

And now, how do you do this? Take the jump for some recommendations.

First and foremost, remember to consult the unbelievably useful resource for all things video provided us by the great Andy Rush: http://video.umwblogs.org

Getting the digital video
Now, chances are you’ll probably be able to find a good number of the scenes you need one video sharing sites like YouTube, etc. This would probably be the easiest solution, and the following tools should be a great help in downloading them:
Fastest YouTube Downloader (PC/Mac) - Seriously, it’s fast!
Video Download Helper – Download YouTube videos in the browser
1-click YouTube Video Downloader

Alternatively, Andy Rush also blogged about using VLC to record segmets of a DVD straight to your hard drive on a Mac or PC. This could be an easy and useful alternative for those of you who still own DVDs, like me

If YouTube is not your answer, you can also rip scenes right from a DVD:
DVD Fab (PC) -
MacTheRipper (Mac) -
Mac DVDRipper Pro ($10)

And finally, if you already have your film in some digital video format on your computer (mp4, avi, divx, etc.), then jump to the next part.

Getting the specific clips you need
Onc you have gotten digital video of the film you will be commenting on, you will need to get the specific clips you want to talk about. This is where I would recommend a tool like MPEG Streamclip (PC/Mac), though there are others. Important: When using a Mac and working with video editing/conversion tools like MPEG Streamclip (or even Quicktime, Evom (Mac), and Handbrake (PC/Mac)) I highly recommend that you make sure to install Perian, which is a free utility that adds a series of codecs recognition tools across various video compression tools on your computer.

What MPEG Streamclip will allow you to do is select and trim exactly the clips you want to discuss from the longer scenes. Doing this in MPEG Streamclip will save you time and energy before importing it into a video editor like Moviemaker or iMovie, both of which bloat video unnecessarily and take a lot more time. Not that you may have to cut a longer scene up into various clips, that you will then edit together in your final version. Also, when converting the clips, make sure they are the same aspect ratio, and that you are saving them in the proper codec for your video editing software.

Editing your video, and adding the audio
Most of you will have on of two basic video editing tools: Moviemaker and iMovie. I will expect you have some basic competence in either of these. If not, there is this thing called Google…. What you will need to do here is import your clips, organize them accordingly to the logic of your commentary, and then record your commentary on top of the clips (which can be done in either of these applications).

Also, if you don;t have either of these tools and are lookingfor an online editor, check out Jaycut, it is free but there are alos some real limitations. Also, Videospin might be a good alternatives for you PC users.

Upload it to you Video Hosting Service of choice
Finally, upload your finished video to you video service of choice. Here are some recommendations if you don’t have one already:
* YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/
* Blip.tv – http://blip.tv/
* Vimeo (HD) – http://www.vimeo.com/

This assignment is due by this Thursday, October 28th.

My digital storytelling class is about to embark on the wonderful world of video story telling, and I found a beautiful example from my favorite new HBO series, Eastbound & Down. I don’t know why I like this show so much, but the character matchup of Kenny Powers and Stevie Janowski just crack me up to no end. Anyway, I wonder if I can work in an assignment to try and make the cheeziest video possible, using this as the model.