AFI ScreenNation Goes Live

The American Film Institute (AFI) has just launched a beta version of a new website dedicated to teen filmmakers: ScreenNation. To quote from their About page:

AFI ScreenNation is an online video posting-and-sharing community from the AFI Screen Education Center, targeted at middle- and high-school students.

Young people aged 13-18 produce and post their own videos, made in the classroom, in clubs and after-school programs, and beyond. Links for these videos will be posted all over the web, including social network pages, blogs, websites, emails and instant messages. AFI ScreenNation users can browse and view, forward, rate and tag and post comments.

AFI ScreenNation will showcase work produced by students in classrooms utilizing the AFI Screen Education filmmaking process, proven to help kids master core curriculum subjects, excel in 21st Century skills, and learn how to learn. In addition, the site launched with videos posted by students involved with a host of featured partner programs, organizations, schools, districts and festivals—- a veritable portal for video as a tool for learning and personal expression.

The site will include tutorials and video challenges in addition to content from teenage filmmakers.

It is easy to think this is just a late attempt by an old-media stalwart to act hip, but in reality, AFI has been on the cutting edge of technology for ages. When QuickTime 1.0 came into being, Sony and Apple helped form the Advanced Technology Program at AFI Hollywood, which is where the two of us were originally introduced into this field. Their “The Cutting Edge” salons hosted by Scott Billups is where we learned techniques and formed our chops, and was the inspiration for Motion Graphics Los Angeles (MGLA). Lately, they’ve been the host of an interactive media incubator which has been very active, the Digital Content Lab. And there’s nothing like having “AFI” on your resume inside Hollywood. So if you know (or are!) a teenage aspiring filmmaker, hook them up.

Seeing RED

All of the recent posts about workflows, workarounds, and discoveries using the RED One camera brings back memories of a warning I issued when DV cameras first became popular among independent shooters and moviemakers: Be careful what you wish for; you might get more than you expected.

AFI Digital Content Lab Looking for Mentors

The American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab (AFI DCL, for short) is looking for mentors for some high-profile interactive media projects, including Grey’s Anatomy and PBS’s News Hour. Details - as well as a calendar of upcoming events around North America - are copied below from their recent press release (follow the “more” jump if you’re reading this from a main page). This is a chance to become involved with designing what some hope will be the future face of television.

Whether or not it does turn out to be the future face of television is still out for verdict: I lived through the hopeful times of CD-I and other interactive media when a lot of us thought we were going to help raise the overall level of humanity by making coffee-table books available on an expensive, not entirely easy to use medium. This episode of misspent personal enthusiasm has left me a bit more cautious, thinking the computer is for interacting and the television set is for consuming. But the number of people who vote in response to an American Idol episode (or called in to a toll number during the Shall We Boil Larry the Lobster bit on Saturday Night Live, oh so many years ago) does indicate that at least some like to interact with their mass-consumed entertainment. So here’s your chance to try to design some interactivity that works:

Dynamic Range and the RED One

Stu Maschwitz (he of The Orphanage, Magic Bullet, and The DV Rebel’s Guide fame), is one of my go-to resources when I want greater insight on digital film production workflow and its corresponding correct practices.

He recently wrote an excellent article on his ProLost blog about Digital Cinema Dynamic Range, in the context of learning how to use a RED One camera in way that would give him the same latitude of exposure control that we would expect when working with film (or other digital cameras).

Click here for the short version
Click here for the long version (and you really should read the long version – it’s very instructive)

The Public Domain, Fair Use, and Other Bedtime Stories

We’ve all been there before: We really need a particular source image to realize an idea. And we don’t have a copy of one ourselves. But look - there’s one on a web site! Or a client gives us one that they picked up “somewhere.” Or there’s a book lying around the office that we could scan. And if anyone involved feels a twinge of guilt, someone else tries to excuse it as “public domain” or “fair use.”

Favorite Technical References

The video industry has saddled us users with some truly ugly numbers to deal with (such as 720x480, 29.97, and so forth) when working with digital video. Making matters worse, these numbers are often misquoted or misunderstood.

Thankfully, there are a few web sites out there with some truly valuable, correct information on digital video standards. Here are the sites we refer to most often when we need to know the inside scoop:

The Second Revolution in Desktop Video

If you’re reading this blog hoping to learn - with post-humus apologies to Douglas Adams - The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything (view on Amazon), I’m afraid we may disappoint you from time to time: We don’t know all of the answers. But sometimes just asking questions is important, because it starts the discussions which eventually lead to the answers.

One question that’s floating around these days is “How the heck do I make money creating video content for the web, such as podcasts?” Indeed, it seems there is more money in teaching podcasting than in podcasting itself!

Motion Graphics concepts demonstrated…on a trampoline.

This isn’t new, but we just stumbled across it, and thought it would provide some comic relief going into the weekend. It’s a live, one-take, in-front-of-an-audience music video (for the song “zZz is playing: Grip”) that is also a demonstration of common motion graphics techniques and video transitions, performed by folks on a trampoline. Ya gotta watch it more than once to pick up all the details, like the musicians on the left and right (the drummer on the left is also the singer), and the person painting the progress bar in real time underneath. Hang around until the end to see that it was indeed in front of an audience.

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