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bees

WonderCon 2012: My Weekend Highlights

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Doug Luberts

A few years ago I reluctantly ventured to WonderCon at the Moscone Center, at urging of some friends who assured me that it was what all the cool nerds would be doing that weekend. I say reluctantly because, even though I had been self-identifying as a geek for years, there was something about the whole con scene, particularly the nerds getting dressed up in costumes, that I just didn’t grok…No doubt a view prejudiced by the rather stilted view of fandom presented in the documentary ‘Trekkies‘.

Well, I went, had a great time, saw some panels, and especially came to appreciate the passion, and commitment to their craft, that was evident among the cosplayers. Every year since I have been back, taking as many cosplay photos as possible, and putting them on my Flickr page, to celebrate all the hard work that these folks do just to have fun!

My favorite cosplay group from WonderCon, featuring the beautiful, but slightly injured, Kit Quinn.

When it was announced that WonderCon was going to be in Anaheim this year, I wasn’t sure I was going to make the trip, but WonderCon is just too much fun to miss…Not to mention that these conventions are one of the few times a year when a lot of folks in the web content community get together ‘IRL’, as the saying goes. Also there was going to be a very special panel with my friends from ‘The Guild‘, launching their new Geek & Sundry channel, and there was no way I was not going to be there for that.

I got down to Anaheim late Thursday night, checked into the hotel, and got my mobile editing rig set up…I was thinking about doing some ‘Skippy’ videos, and other coverage, and wanted to upload as many photos from Friday as I could after shooting.

The Mobile Shooting Lab in my hotel room.

Friday was all about shooting cosplayers…Usually things get really crazy on Saturday, but there was a wide selection of Superheros, Zombies, Sith, and Jedi to choose from.

Friends from "The Guild of Extras" (l. to r.) Kevin Rusley, Jes Reaves, Christopher Setts, and Kenny Mittleider, aka 'GeekyFanboy', host of the 'Knights of the Guild' Podcast.

I also shot a video interview with the Rebel Alliance, a Star Wars ‘Good Guy’ cosplay group, and another with Kenny ‘GeekyFanBoy’ Mittleider, from the ‘Knights of The Guild‘ podcast, who was also cosplaying as Frodo Baggins…Those will be up on the Geektastic Nebula YouTube channel next week.

Friday night was a quick dinner of taquitos (which you really can’t find to easilly in the Bay Area for some reason), and then back to the hotel for ingest and color correction of photos and video…By about 2am I uploaded the first set of about 150 photos to flickr, to give the fans who couldn’t make it to the con something to look at.

Saturday was going to be a big day…In addition to the Geek & Sundry panel, I’d been emailing with Greg Benson (@mediocrefilms on Twitter) about plans to help him shoot some nerd/hottie-on-the-street interviews with his character, Yeshmin Blechin. This was going to be a lot of fun, and I was really looking forward to it.

I’ve known Greg, and his wife, Guild/Geek & Sundry Producer, Kim Evey, for a number of years, but never met Greg, IRL, until about a month ago…He’s a really nice guy, and we had a great time going to a local content producer’s event when I was in Los Angeles…We both share a kind of singularly-demented sense of humor, so I was very excited about working with him on one of his crazy-ass Yeshmin videos involving, well, uh…Yeah, ex-actly.

As his character, Yeshmin Blechin, Greg Benson always brings out the best side of his guests. (Photo: MediocreFilms.com)

I spent the morning dealing with the 45-minute Starbucks line, fighting off cheerleaders, volleyball players, and soccer moms, for my morning fix of a 5-shot, iced, venti, skinny mocha (a basic eye-opener)…and oh, the cheerleader thing…

There was a cheerleader convention, and some sort of volleyball event, going on at the Anaheim Convention Center. It kind of had me thinking about how many nerds were re-living high school traumas at the hands of cheerleaders and athletes (But not me, of course…No major damage there. Much.) At points the cosplayers and the cheerleaders were taking turns getting photos of each other, and it appeared that some really strange crossover meme potential was gathering in the air.

And speaking of strange crossovers…

Offered without comment or explanation, I give you 'Batgirl'.

After a few hours of shooting more photos, this happened…A spontaneous worshiping of a Knight who says “Ni”, by a bunch of sword-and-sandals wearing cosplayers. It pretty much stopped traffic in the convention center hallway…The cheerleaders seemed particularly perplexed, but I think that’s just their baseline anyway…

"For those who understand no explanation is needed, ...For those who don't none will do". - Jerry Lewis

Next up it was time for the Geek & Sundry panel…Well, more like it was time to go to the DC Comics panel and make sure you had a good seat for the Geek & Sundry panel, which was immediately thereafter…Members of “The Guild of Extras“, an elite commando unit and group of friends, formed by a cadre of Extras from “The Guild“, activated “Zaboo’s Seat Savers” network, and commandeered the best seating real estate in the hall. Well done, Guildies!

A few members of the "Guild of Extras" getting ready for the Geek & Sundry panel on Saturday. (l. to r.) Dallas Bloom, Jennifer Chauvin, Anthony Thompson, and Jen Ramirez.

The Geek & Sundry launch panel took off with Kim Evey introducing the panelists, including Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, Mike Richardson from Dark Horse Comics, Veronica Belmont, and Tom Merritt (I’m not making introductions because, with the exception of Mike from Dark Horse, if you don’t know who any of these folks are, you probably wouldn’t be reading my blog in the first place. :) )

Kim Evey, Geek and Sundry Producing Partner, doing a super job moderating the panel on Saturday.

There is this naturally great chemistry between Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton...The fun they were having was really coming through, and that brought an amazing vibe to the panel.

Felicia introduced a trailer highlighting all of the new shows for the Geek & Sundry YouTube channel…It looks like a lot of fun stuff, including a vlog from Felicia called, ‘The Flog‘ (which was the original name for, what is now, feliciaday.com, bitd), an animated series from Dark Horse  Comics, called ‘Dark Horse Presents‘, and a re-imagined web tv version of Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt‘s ‘Sword and Laser‘ podcast that I’m quite excited about.

‘Sword and Laser’ is being produced up here in the Bay Area, and anything that brings more web tv production up here is something to stand up and yell about (which I’m not doing, because it’s undignified…But I’m ‘woo-hoo’-ing internally in a major way.)

Wil Wheaton is doing a celebrity board game show called ‘Tabletop’, and there is also a kids’ show from nerd singing-duo, Paul and Storm, called ‘Learning Town‘ that I can’t wait to hear more about (love those guys!)

One of my personal highlights of the weekend was finally meeting the very cool, and hysterically funny, Veronica Belmont, on Saturday...Not to mention finding out that she's a NY Tri-State-Area homegirl. Veronica will be co-hosting the new video version of "Sword and Laser" along with Tom Merritt on Geek & Sundry.

Geek & Sundry has a full line-up of shows, and there are trailers and full information on all of them at the Geek & Sundry site…The programming kickoff is set for April 2, 2012, but you should go on over to the G&S YouTube channel and subscribe now, so you don’t miss out on any of the new programming.

Mike Richardson, Producer of the animated series, "Dark Horse Presents", discusses his show at the Geek & Sundry lineup.

After the panel, it was time to go shoot some Yeshmin with Greg Benson.

It was a little touch-and-go on Saturday morning, as Greg messed up his ankle a while back and was scheduled to have surgery on it this week (today, in fact. Get well soon, Greg!), the cold, rainy, weather was aggravating the injury, so we weren’t sure it was going to happen, but it did, and the results are hilarious.

Greg is an extremely talented, and knowledgeable, filmmaker…Shooting with him was not only fun, but an amazing learning experience. He can slip in and out of character instantaneously, doing some pretty outrageous, not to mention quick, improv with his ‘victims’, while maintaining complete situational awareness, being on the lookout for interview opportunities, and making the folks he interviews feel completely comfortable and at ease (despite Yeshmin’s propensity for being, well…provocative?) Anyway, it takes a lot of talent, and experience, to pull that off and make it look easy.

The the Japanese Lolita style of cosplay is getting very big over here...This lady provides a striking example of the style.

Also, the shooting style is very run n’ gun, using just a simple HD camcorder and hand-held audio recorder. It really made me re-think the need to carry around as much equipment as I usually do (although I come armed for video and still photography.) Great stuff.

There are four videos that came out of it on the MediocreFilms and MediocreFilms2 YouTube channels, plus a vlog that Greg shot during that day in which I make a short cameo, in a highly sleep-deprived state. :)

Saturday night was about a magnificent dinner with friends at Morton’s Steakhouse…We all tend to work unreasonably crazy hours, and not get out a lot. This was a chance to kick back with a lively bunch of people in a forum that doesn’t require Skype, or a Google+ hangout, and have a good time…The food at Morton’s is spectacular, and the company was amazing. A night of great food and lively conversation with a bunch of smart, funny, and articulate people. It just doesn’t get better than that.

I opted to head out of town on Sunday morning, knowing that if I returned to the con for the third day, I would have probably spent all my reserve cash on priceless objets d’arte…Like this vintage ‘Watto’ character from Episode I, who seemed to be using Jedi mind tricks all weekend to get me to take him home …

"What do you think, you're some kind of Jedi or something?"

It was a great WonderCon, and I’ve still got lots of video and photos to share. Been traveling a lot lately, and will be staying at home, shooting and working on a lot of video projects for the next few months, before VidCon and San Diego ComicCon…Both of which I’m really looking forward to.

"I've got a bad feeling about this...I think those WERE the droids I was looking for!"

Buffy-creator

An Open Letter of Thanks and Appreciation to Joss Whedon, on the 15th Anniversary of ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Doug Luberts

Note: A number of recent events have caused me to pause and consider the remarkable impact the Whedon Clan has had on my life…Almost all of it without their knowledge, of course, but today’s tweet from writer Jane Espenson reminding everyone that today is the 15th Anniversary of the premiere of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, really got me thinking…And Taryn O’Neill’s open letter to Joss seemed like such a good idea that I thought I’d do what any good writer would do…Steal the idea and make it my own (kidding) (not really.)

Dear Joss:

You don’t know me…Well, that is, we’ve never properly met, although we’ve been in close proximity enough times that you’d probably recognize me in sort of a “He looks strangely familiar, but don’t think I’ve got a restraining order out against him, yet”, kind of way.

We’ve been together at a comic book store signing in Santa Monica in 2004, the 2009 Streamy Awards, when I was sitting right behind you and NPH, as part of ‘The Guild’ crew that was nominated along with your ‘Dr. Horrible’ folks…

Joss and Me at the 2009 Streamy Awards (l. to .r) Some dude who looks like Walter Cronkite, Jeff Lewis, Me, Vince Caso's Gorgeous Date, Becca O'Callahan's forehead, Joss Whedon, Vince Caso, half of Sean Becker, and Maurissa Tancharoen-Whedon. (Photo by Mary Higgins)

Most recently, I was in the audience at (redacted) when you came to talk to the (redacted) for (redacted), and screened a bunch of (also redacted.) We even walked past each other on the (Redacted, again…Sorry, NDAs, but you know what I’m talking about…)

I’ve never really talked to you on any of those occasions, because, aside from being intensely shy around folks I don’t know, when you meet a celebrity, unless you have some common ground to keep the conversation going, it always turns in to a series of “What’s your favorite color”-type questions, and you and I really don’t have all that much in question, except, well…A mutual love of Shakespeare, television, musicals, film, comic books, and…Oh, shit…I really blew it, didn’t I?

Damn.

The funny thing is that you are probably one of the two people who are my biggest influences, and have had the most profound impact on my life and professional career over the last fifteen years…and that other great influence is someone I would have never met, worked with, or became friends with, if it wasn’t for you and your work.

Sounds pretty strange, right? How could some dude, whom I’ve followed from a far for years, skulked around on a few occasions, but never actually met, have that much impact on someone’s life in a totally healthy and non-sociopathic, well mostly, way, not requiring therapeutic intervention and a lot of psychotropic medication?

Well, back in the mid ’90s I was very gainfully employed in information systems consulting, owned my own company, and was making a ton of money twiddling bits for Fortune 100 corporations…and was completely miserable about it. The business, not the money.

Money isn’t bad … I kind of like it, in fact. Channeling Xander (which I frequently do, and nobody in the office gets, which makes me look oddly out-of-place a lot), I’m gonna’ go out on a limb here and say money is good. But it wasn’t enough.

My original entertainment career had taken a side track after film/theater school and early work in television production, and a side trip to New York morphed into something completely out-of-control. The career I had left behind was always, and I mean always, in the back of my mind. (Well, what I really wanted to do was direct. I’m sure you’ve never heard that before. Much.)

Then, on the heels of some great TV Fantasy and SciFi programming that was really spreading like wildfire in the mid-’90s, like ‘Babylon 5′, came ‘Buffy’…And a whole new way of looking at long-form television.

You broke every convention around, bent genres, wrote brilliant, snarky, dialog, and had chicks kissing on screen (I really liked that part…a lot.) This was not your Father’s Television series (although your dad and granddad wrote for some of my all-time favorite shows as well), and taken along with the work that folks like Aaron Sorkin and Kevin Williamson were doing at the time, I really wanted to work on this kind of television.

Then there were all the chats on The Bronze, and The Bronze Beta, and seeing folks like Mere Smith break through the fourth wall and get a shot writing for you just sent me over the top…

By the time Firefly premiered, I had gone back to school, learned to combine my bit-twiddling abilities with editing and VFX software, and had sold off my life in New Jersey, to move back to California, and start building a tv/film career from the bottom of the ladder.

Fast forward a few years later, I got into the Motion Picture Editors Guild, worked on a bunch of features doing editorial, VFX, and Pipeline Technology work, and landed a job at Industrial Light and Magic, fulfilling a dream that I’d had since 1977, when I first saw ‘Star Wars’…

Life was good, but working on Blockbuster VFX movies was still not fulfilling all of my creative needs. I was looking to do more, looking to create, and looking for a medium where I could have greater, and more direct impact in whatever role I played…And then you, Jed, and Maurissa, wrote ‘Dr. Horrible’, a show which lead me to one of the most life-changing events of my career…Working as the VFX guy on Season 2 of ‘The Guild‘.

It was Dr. Horrible that lead me to Felicia Day’s IMDb profile, and a reference to a little show I’d never heard of called ‘The Guild.’ By the time I’d surfed to YouTube and heard the words, “oh yeah, there’s a Gnome Warlock in my living room sleeping on my couch”, I knew I had found something amazing, and was hooked.

A few months later, after Felicia posted a tweet about looking for crew to help on Season 2 of the show, I sent out an email that said, basically, “Hey…I think what you’re doing is really cool. Can I help?”

She said yes, and that lead to the closing sequence of Season 2, Episode 12, a Streamy Award Nomination for Best VFX in a Web Series, membership in the International Academy of Web Television, and involvement in a community of creative individuals who have become my friends, mentors, and greatest source of inspiration…Not the least of whom is Felicia, herself, who has been huge source of moral support and encouragement for my own efforts in content creation.

Right now I’ve also been (redacted) with (redacted) on a new (redacted) for (redacted) (redacted…Sorry, FrieNDA this time…I’m under so many different types of non-disclosures I’m not even sure if I can talk to myself most of the time. Which is just as well, because there are always arguments.)

So yeah, we’ve never chatted, but your work has directly impacted my life in some truly profound ways…Oh, and bee-tee-dubs, aside from all of that, I just love what you do. ‘Buffy’, ‘Angel’, ‘Firefly’, ‘Serenity’, ‘Dollhouse’…Forget about professional impact, just the amount entertainment, and sheer joy, that you’ve brought into this life over the years is enough to be thankful for.

So, yeah, Joss…Thanks. Thanks for ‘Buffy’, thanks for all the inspiration that’s guided my life to new ground, and all of the personal and professional relationships that have grown out of that inspiration. It’s all appreciated far more than even these words can convey.

So, if I say ‘Hi’ to you the next time you’re at (redacted), don’t worry…It’s not a mugging, or a hallway pitch (which isn’t much different from a mugging, I would imagine), and I promise I won’t ask you what your favorite color is (blue? Damn…)

80smovies

My 80′s Movies ‘Must See’ List

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Doug Luberts

So last week I had a whirlwind vacation (?) in Los Angeles wherein I saw a lot of old friends, took a few meetings (I mean, come on, it is Los Angeles, after all), did some sightseeing and photography, and a bit of partying. All-in-all, a really great trip, and I can’t wait to head back down south again…Next trip is for Wondercon, the week after next, which should be about a zillion shades of awesome.

One of the events I attended while down there was an ’80s Movie Marathon Weekend, at my friend Kenny‘s house…Well, I actually went for the Saturday night portion, as I couldn’t be there for the whole thing.

Kenny’s movie marathons are legend…wait-for-it…dary. One of the best parts of going, as Kenny points out in his blog post about the weekend, is that we’ve been friends for years, initially through our involvement with ‘The Guild’, but never actually met IRL, as the saying goes, until this weekend. The Guildie involvement doesn’t just end with Kenny, as pretty much everyone there has been an extra on the show, or worked in the cast or crew. It was a great opportunity to meet other folks who are diehard Guild fans…Yeah, I worked on the show a number of years ago, but started out as, and continue to be, a fan, and friend, of the show. So it was fun to hang out with a bunch of folks who all share the same special geek affinity.

There was a whole line-up of great films for the marathon…I was crushed that I had to miss ‘The Princess Bride‘, due to an afternoon committment, as that is by far my favorite film from that period.

Although the event got me thinking about some of my other favorite films of the period, and that usually means compiling a list.

To share.

With you.

My readers.

Both of you.

So here are a few, but by no means all, of my favorite movies from the ’80s, that weren’t on Kenny’s playlist …

1. ‘Local Hero’ (1983)

‘Local Hero‘ was a bit of a sleeper when it premiered in 1983. I was still in San Diego at that time, just finishing up at San Diego State, and working in local theater as a lighting and sound guy. The film played at a local art house in Ocean Beach, for what seemed like forever, and I kept hearing wonderful things about it, and decided to check it out.

It’s an oddball comedy that is both a romcom and a fish-out-of-water story, about a oil company guy (Peter Reigert from ‘National Lampoon’s Animal House‘) who is sent out by his boss, played by Burt Lancaster in a standout role, to buy up a little town on the coast of Scotland to build an oil refinery. It’s a tale of twists and turns that winds up with Reigert’s character, Mac, falling in love with the sleepy little town, and its collection of brilliantly quirky, but charming, people.

Great movie, but one of the things I love about it the most is the score by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame.

Mark is a genius…His music beautiful and lyrical, and, in fact, it is this music that links him together with my other favorite film of the period, ‘The Princess Bride’, for which he also composed the score (but not the title theme, ‘Storybook Love’, which was actually written by a fellow named Willie DeVille, but that is another story entirely.)

There is a fairly recent, digital, version of the soundtrack for ‘Local Hero’, as well as many recordings of the signature song, the ‘Wild Theme’, or the up tempo version of the ‘Wild Theme’, called ‘Going Home’ (The theme of the Local Hero), which Knopfler used to end all of his gigs with Dire Straits, and still plays as an encore in his solo gigs today.

I love ‘Going Home’ … I’ve got no less than ten different recordings of it, in different orchestrations, live and in the studio, and I never get tired of listening to it, especially when I’m on a road trip in the car.  If you like ‘Local Hero’, and ‘The Princess Bride’, get a copy of Mark Knopfler’s album ‘Screenplaying‘…It’s great mood music, and has all of the hits from both movies.

‘Local Hero’ … Great film. Highly recommended.

2. ‘Dream a Little Dream’ (1989)

I’m a romcom guy, and not ashamed to admit it. I love a good romantic comedy, hope to edit (and create) many more of them. While I do toil in the fields of big-studio tentpole VFX films, I’d rather watch a small indie romcom any day of the week.

‘Dream A Little Dream’ is another quirky-as-all-getout film starring the ’80s dynamic duo of the the ’2 Corey’s', Corey Haim and Corey Feldman (yeah, I know … but still it works in this iteration, all odds be damned), along with an entirely enchanting Meredith Salenger.

It’s a tale of body-switches, dreamscapes, and romance, all backed up by one of the greatest pop tunes ever…’Dream a little dream with me’, which is another song that has been an all-time favorite of mine, ever since I first heard Mama Cass Elliot singing it in the late ’60s (Cass had this wonderful legato and could effortly bend notes notes to her will, especially in this song…)

To me, it’s often the the music that makes the movies memorable, especially a romantic comedy where the music can heighten the emotions of the story into something sublime, and that’s the case with ‘Dream a Little Dream’, which gets to some very, and delightfully, metaphysical places during the telling.

Get a hookah and a bottle of wine, and watch this one on a Friday night with someone you love (or would like to…)

3. Airplane (1980)

Do you remember back when comedies where balls-out funny, and so politically incorrect that they’d never see the (green) light of day in the 21st Century? Yeah, so do I.

Airplane probably influenced me more, in terms of my own brand of comedy, than any other film except for Mel Brooks’ ‘Blazing Saddles‘ (another film that would never get greenlit today) or ‘The Producers‘ (the original 1968 version, not the musical…The musical version on Broadway rocked, but the movie musical was like a rock…off a diving board…into the deep end of a pool. Mel should have directed it himself.)

There is every kind of the wrong kind of joke in this movie…From blow-up autopilot doll fellatio jokes, to dying kid-on-a-gurney and drug humor (‘Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue’), it is a non-stop laugh riot. Hell, they’ve even got ‘America’s Mom’, Harriet Nelson, doing ghetto humor.

Oh, and Leslie (“Don’t call me Shirley”) Nielsen … Pure win.

The movie is just so wrong that it’s totally right …

4. ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ (1982)

If you’re talking about comedies that define the ’80s, ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High‘ has got to be one of the first films that gets name-checked.

The Cameron Crowe/Amy Heckerling pairing not only defined the suburban teenage experience of life in the ’80s San Fernando Valley, but it also launched the careers of a number of fine actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Sean Penn, not to mention featuring a brilliant performance by the late Ray Walston, as grump history teacher, Mr. Hand.

One of the marks of a true classic is film is how many quotes from the film make it into the vernacular…’Fast Times’ is a movie that still gets quoted often (okay, maybe mostly by me, but that counts … )

5. ‘Heathers’ (1988)

Forget ‘Mean Girls’…Meet some really mean girls…and guys. ‘Heathers‘ is one of those black-as-night comedies that I just love so much.

Winona Ryder gets caught up with (psychotic) bad boy Christian Slater, and visits vengeance on a bunch of high-school bullies, drama queens, and lunk-heads. They even blow up the high school years before ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘ (but there wasn’t any giant snake Mayor-meat involved.)

It’s quite the fun flick.

6. ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ (1986)

Got to finish this list with a musical … I love a good musical, and ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ is, IMO, one of the best movie adaptations of a stage musical ever made.

Directedy by Frank Oz (the voice of Yoda and Miss Piggy) this is the odd story of Seymour Krelborn and his ‘Mean Green Mutha’ from Outerspace’ house plant, Audrey II (voiced to hilarity by Levi Stubbs, the great baritone singer from the Motown group, The Four Topps.)

This is a classic musical in its own right…And has songs you will find yourself singing right out of the theater (‘Suddenly Seymour’ is one of my favorites for the shower), but the film is full of great performances from huge talents like Rick Moranis as Seymour, Ellen Greene as Audrey, and a brilliantly sadistic Steve Martin as the mad dentist, Orin Scrivello (D.D.S.) The cast also includes such greats as John Candy, James Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Bill Murray, just to name a few.

The thing that makes this movie stand out as a movie musical, is that there is no pretense to realism…Oz created a very stylized world from the get go, and carried the surrealistic, sci-fi comic book, look throughout every area of the production…It’s bloody brilliant.

One side note, the play, and the movie, all derive from a 1960 Roger Corman film of the same name, which features a young Jack Nicholson…It’s a horrible film, but so horrible that it’s worth watching.

Okay…So there’s a few of my favorites. Got some of your own? Please leave a comment!

oscars

The 2012 Oscars: A brief rant.

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Doug Luberts

Roger Ebert’s preliminary write-up on the 2012 Academy Awards began with, “It was like an episode from ‘The Twighlight Zone’“, which I wholeheartedly agree with…His rationale for that statement, I can’t agree with, but the overall conclusion was on-target.

It was a strange, strange year for Oscar.

I really have to wonder what was going through the minds of the Academy voters that gave the Best Picture Oscar to ‘The Artist’, an airy souffle of a film at best, or saw Martin Scorsese’s directorial efforts on ‘Hugo’ as anything less than a masterwork. Or if these self-same Academy voters realize the opportunity to place the history of film squarely in the common experience of generations of children that was lost when elevating the French pastry that is ‘The Artist’ over the cinematic masterpiece, and treasure, that is Scorsese’s ‘Hugo.’

It’s not that ‘The Artist’ is a bad movie…It’s a very good movie, for one that is a loose remake of an established classic (‘Singin’ in the Rain’), one that I enjoyed quite a bit. It’s just that ‘Hugo’ is a far superior movie in just about every way imaginable.

I really hope that, in the final analysis, this wasn’t some kind of referendum vote on films made in Hollywood versus those shot abroad, but there’s got to be some reason that the Academy passed ‘Hugo’ over for a film whose main selling point is that it is a very ‘happy’ film, and that’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense to me … No, not that it makes sense, but that it would make sense to a bunch of big-media, old Hollywood Industry professionals that don’t have a clue as to how to save jobs in a town that is now being overrun by a new generation of filmmakers who are making content almost exclusively for the web.

‘Hugo’ is a cinematic masterpiece of Cecil B. DeMille-like epic proportions. In my opinion, there is no praise high enough to describe how much I love this film, or the advances that Scorsese has made in visual storytelling with ‘Hugo’.  And I don’t think there are a lot of folks arguing that point.

Had the Academy given the Director, and the film, its rightfully-deserved top honors, the film would have been re-released, it would have garnered the kind of box office that it did not see in its initial run, because there was not a lot of marketing push behind the original release, and an entire generation of parents and children would have gotten a second chance to experience this film in all of its 3D-stereo glory, the way it MUST be scene to fully experience the genius of this film.

Further, it would have established ‘Hugo’ as a classic that would be locked into the hearts and minds of future generations, as their parents passed down the experience, generation after generation. That’s a loss, and it’s a shame.

Part of the opportunity lost was to educate generations of kids on the history of cinema, in a way that seems almost incidental to the story, but would have the result of having every kid who falls in love with this movie, understand the, largely true, story of French filmmaking pioneer George Melies. It’s a lost opportunity that every AMPAS member who voted for ‘The Artist’ should be kicking themselves about for decades to come. Think about it.

Then there was the almost total lack of recognition for Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”, which, to me, was only second to ‘Hugo’ in this year’s field of films, and an entirely enchanting work that represents Allen’s best effort in decades.

Oh, and let’s not forget Alexander Payne’s ‘Thanks for coming’ award for ‘The Descendants’. Thanks AMPAS. For what, I’m not sure …

Ebert wrote another piece on the night, which basically painted the Academy’s screw-ups as a Republican Party-like attempt to find a candidate that has the broadest appeal to the base … In other worlds panders to the lowest common denominator of audience members. Thanks, Roger, but you’re not making me feel much better with that thesis, either.

This is what bothers me … The Academy, AMPAS, is us. Well, not me, yet, but the filmmaking community at large. It’s made up of working professionals drawn from its ranks. If Roger Ebert’s thesis is correct, haven’t we forgotten what the Academy Awards are all about? That is, celebrating the best in filmmaking achievement, and elevating the very best of those efforts, showcasing them to the public as the very best of what the filmmaking community has to offer?

AMPAS has lost its way, and is now trying to second-guess the public, and figure out how to reward what its members think the public likes. The system is broken, and the results, this year, were a disaster.

 

 

 

St. Patrick's Church, San Francisco, 2012. Nikon D7000.

Nikon D7000: Closer Look, and a Peek at the D800

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Doug Luberts

Time’s flown pretty fast since last March, when I wrote this post about first impressions of my new Nikon D7000. Seems like I really owe my readers an update on the camera, and my experiences with it since then.

I love the D7000. It creates amazing images, and finally gives me the level of camera that I need to create images that are as compelling, and reach the same kind of quality, that could be achieved with Nikon film bodies during the analog shooting days.

Not going to get into a big tech analysis on the camera features…Think I covered that in the previous post, linked above, and there’s also a lot of online coverage and fact sheets available.

The D7000 is a strong shooter, build-to-last, and with a control set that will be comfortable to all Nikon shooters as soon as they pick the camera up.

For stills, in conjunction with Adobe Lightroom, it’s a superstar.

 

St. Patrick's Church, San Francisco, 2012. Nikon D7000. Processed in Adobe Lightroom.

 

For Digital Cinema applications, the D7000 is a major leap forward for Nikon. The D90 was flawed, to the point of almost being useless for video, by a slow sensor and resulting digital artifacts.

Nikon still has a way to go, and I think they actually got there with the newly-announced D800, which is a superb cinema camera with updated features and ergonomics not found in the D7000.

I’m including the Nikon “Joy Ride” video, shot with the D800, to give you an idea of what this new camera is capable of, and you can keep up to date on the D800, and all other Nikon news at NikonRumors.com, which is my go-to news source for all things Nikon.

While I’m still shooting all of my web video with the D7000, and the video is gorgeous, the biggest issues with the camera revolve around the need to set exposure outside of live view mode, and then go back into live view to capture your video…It’s a pain in the butt. Nothing more than an annoyance that doesn’t affect the quality of the work, but the shooting experience suffers for it.

Changes made to camera settings while in live view aren’t reflected in exposure, and live view does not give you exposure information in the LCD.

Also, Nikon just doesn’t seem to care enough about the workflow…Where Canon offers plugins for FCP, and other software, to make the ingest experience seamless, Nikon is an all manual process involving copying files and transcoding, and possibly having issues with Gamma viewing problems in FCP that are just more work than they are worth…I’m going to be buying a Canon, likely a D60, this year for shooting video, as Nikon just doesn’t seem to want to get the workflow right for HDSLR shooters.

The lack of a headphone jack on the camera was a huge mistake…One that I resolved by using a Juiced Link DSLR Pre-amp Adapter for $144, which you should just figure in as part of the cost of the camera if you’re going to be shooting video…It’s worth it, and an absolute necessity if you are doing single-system sound.

The audio quality out of the D7000 is not bad, and good enough for single-subject interviews, but you’ll likely want to go dual system for anything more elaborate than an interview setup. In that case the Zoom H4n is still the best, and most versatile option for web shooters.

This Juiced Link DSLR mic pre-amp includes the headphone jack that Nikon left off the camera, and is a must for video shooters.

 

Another great thing about the D7000 is that it works with all of the Nikon AF-S/AF-D line of lenses, which you can pick up on eBay for a song. The older lenses are a bit slower focusing than their newer counterparts, and don’t have the VR (vibration-reduction) features, but they do have an aperture ring, great glass, and create awesome images. One big advantage that you don’t find with the red-ring lenses so highly coveted by Canon shooters.

On the whole, the D7000 is an amazing camera, and the best ‘pro-sumer’ (emphasis on the pro) camera Nikon makes before you get into the D800 realm … Something I hope to do within the next year. :)

 

Ciji and Adrian, February 2012. Nikon D300. The older D300 produces great results, but its auto-focus system and sensor are no match for the D7000.

timthumb

Twitter 2012: Finding Your Voice in Changing Conversation

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Doug Luberts

Note: This entry kind of grew to gargantuan size, as there is just so much to talk about when it comes to Twitter as a social networking tool. It is mostly intended for folks who are new to social networking, and Twitter, or who have had a tough time finding their voice, and building a presence, although there might be something there for old Twitterists as well.

Oh, teh twitterz…My old friend. I start this entry with ‘The Twitter Song’ by ihatemornings (Ben Walker), as a reminder of where we’ve come from, and where we’ve gone … And a lot of the stuff that Ben polks fun at in his music video is still completely on-point.

Twitter can be fun, entertaining, perplexing, infuriating, and all of that at the same time…It’s pretty much replaced most commercial news outlets as my primary source of news and information, as well as a tool for marketing my personal brand, my web portal and video productions, and, most importantly, a way of staying connected to all of the friends and colleagues that I’ve made in the web space.

Twitter’s tag line has always been ‘join the conversation’, but that conversation is changing…Twitter has grown up over the past few years, and the way folks are using Twitter are changing as a result of the product maturity, and experience that has come out of the communal experience of the last few years.

Joining the conversation, and getting your voice heard can be a challenge, and building a professional presence can be daunting for a lot of folks, unless you’ve got someone who’s figured all of this crap out giving you some pointers…Which is what I’m going to do.

I’ve been helping some friends lately with advice on how to use social media to help get their documentary funded. A ‘social media plan’ if you will…and my friend tells me he’s gotten some benefit from the ideas I was throwing out, so I figured I’d share…

Now, I don’t sell myself as one of those ‘Social Media Strategists’ that seem to turn up daily on my Twitter followers tab, promising to help get me thousands of followers and make lots of money using Twitter…I never follow these folks, and they usually go away real fast. Not to say that there aren’t real social media gurus out there, but the real experts tend to be folks who are working in full-service media and public relations capacities who have developed their expertise, and are using it, in the context of the broader services they provide their clients.

I’m just interested in sharing what I’ve learned, and am learning, because it’s still an evolving process, with friends, and all you folks, for free…Because I don’t think using social media approaches anything near the complexity of quantum mechanics, or anything you can’t learn yourself without having to hire someone who is going to charge you good coin for what basically amounts to common-sense ideas.

Also, the folks who have been my mentors, and who I’ve learned all the basics from, offered their basic game books for free…So look at it as giving back.

First a few things for new Tweeters:

Get an Account

First step, and the easiest…Get yourself a twitter account.

Two suggestions:

Use your full name for your name, and whatever you feel comfortable with as your handled (I used @dougluberts, but some folks like something more creative, and/or brand-oriented for their handle. Keep the handled short, because it will be helpful when folks tweet at you and re-tweet you if your handled doesn’t take up too many of the 140 characters available for a tweet.

Use a headshot for your Avatar, unless you are setting up an account for a web site or brand that uses a logo for its primary identity…Let people see a photo of you, and they will be more likely to become comfortable with you, and want to follow your feed.

Tweet Something

Well, you’re hooked up. Say something.

It’s your brand, what do you want to Tweet about? One thing that you will hear me say, again, and again, is that this is a conversation…Tweet things that you will will draw other folks into the conversation.

A lot of n00bs will make the mistake of tweeting their mundane actions:

Wrong: Just had some spinocolli for dinner.

Better: Tweet a fantastic photo of an amazing dinner you prepared that will make your followers’ mouths water.

Homework: Learn about #hastags, and how to use them.

Getting into the conversation: Following and Followers

Find some folks to follow, with whom you share a common interest, or affinity. Twitter will help you get going with a new account.

First piece of advice: Don’t worry about who is following you. Figure out what your interests, passions, and/or personal brand is, and follow people who have the same, or related interests with you.

Next, follow the conversations that these folks are having, and throw tweets at them when you have something to say…Remember, this is a conversation.

Engage with people with whom you share interests. Ask direct questions…The worst thing you can do at first is throw open-ended tweets out and expect folks who aren’t following you to respond. Ask  someone something specific, comment on a tweet from a celebrity, or subject matter guru, with a joke…Or share some information with them that would be of interest from THEIR perspective.

One thing you can do is quote other folks tweets with your own comments in front of them. That creates a new tweet in your stream, that all of your followers will see, and the other person will see in their @connect tab. This is often a great conversation starter.

You will find that even some very big celebs, with huge followings, will sometimes respond to you…Not all, especially the ones who have assistants tweeting for them (which I think is kind of bogus, and most of the celebs and weblebs (social media celebrities) who I know personally, only tweet for themselves…)

Don’t be discouraged if your first tweet or two doesn’t get you into a conversation…Keep at it.

Again, who you follow is more important than who is following you, so don’t get caught up in a numbers game. It can take a long time to build up a following unless you’ve got a built-in brand factor, like a Lady Gaga or Aston Kutcher…You won’t go from zero to a bazillion-gagillion followers in a day.

Don’t get bummed if folks you would like to have as followers (and those are usually the folks with the big social media profiles, so everyone wants to be followed by them) don’t follow you back, even if they have a good tweeting relationship with you…It’s the communication that’s important, and while some celebs will follow everyone who follows them, many folks (including myself) try to keep their following count low, so  they can keep the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio low on their personal stream.

I’m following about 700 folks, which is too many, and it gets really tough to focus, and pick up on key messages, if you’re following too many people.

Also, some folks also use things like Tweetdeck, and Twitterific, so that they can set up filters and groups…You may be getting a lot more air time than you think (but don’t count on it.)

Again, focus on who you are following, and the content that you create…Add value to the information stream and the followers will come in time.

It is good to know your followers, at least in general terms (It gets hard to keep up with after a while), especially if they turn out to have information streams that are similar to yours, and you want to follow them. One good tool to use for checking out who is following/not following you, who un-follows you, and such, is who.unfollowed.me.

Who.unfollowed.me is actually a complete set of tools for tracking your followers. There is a free, or ‘lite’ version, which I use currently, that gives you a lot of functionality to see who your followers are, and when they leave you.

 

By using who.unfollowed.me, and checking it periodically, you can see if you’re tweets are attracting, or chasing off, the kind of followers that you consider are key to your personal brand…Or if you’ve just got a lot of churn going on in your followers because of bots…A problem Twitter has yet to effectively deal with.

Again, don’t get too hung up on who un-follows you at a micro level…Some folks might just want to connect with you in other ways, like Facebook or Google+, or sometimes you might just not meet their information processing bandwidth requirements (too many tweets, not enough tweets.) Look for trends of who is following and un-following you, and don’t get hung up on individuals.

For judging the overall effectiveness of your social media efforts across platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.), there is Klout.com (although I find their math, and overall logic to be somewhat vague), and peerindex.com, two analytics sites that are very useful, and will be the topic of future write-ups.

RTs and Getting Your Stuff Out There

A few years ago, this was pretty simple…You tweet about your stuff, I retweet you, and you reciprocate. Got a hot project? Just tweet a celeb, and ask for a re-tweet. No problem, right?

Well, that was then, and now is different. Things have gotten a lot more complicated than BITD (and by that I mean 2008. :) )

A lot of folks will not tweet or re-tweet anything other than things that either:

1) Are part of their product line or brand

2) They have a vested interest in

3) Are videos, products, or stories from trusted friends and partners

4) They get paid to do product placement in their tweets

or

5) They just don’t give a crap about anything but self-promotion and are just shouting their own virtues, non-stop, at the top of their lungs, into cyberspace

Twitter has grown up, as I mentioned before…Companies, big and small, have Twitter policies. Many companies will look at tweets by employees about company business as if the employee is acting as a press resource…You tweet about the guy who TP’d the corporate bathroom, and you’re making an unauthorized press release about company business. That can be embarrassing to the company, and might just get you fired.

Some companies, even some small production companies doing web content, have policies in place about not tweeting about other company’s videos or products unless it is part of their overall strategic marketing plan…You’ve got a buddy working for WeeWeeSmall Productions, who you think should be re-tweeting your latest vid, and get irked when he doesn’t? Well, he might not be able to do that and keep his employers happy.

It’s become increasingly difficult to cut through all of the noise of Twitter, and other social media platforms, and get a brand presence established (which is one of the reasons I’m trying to give content creators an edge, with respect to geek-affinity content, by offering content aggregation on GeektasticNebula.com in an effort to create a unified brand from many smaller ones.) That can be a factor for some folks who feel that using their social media presence to promote other brands and products is at cross-purposes with their own goals…So they don’t. It’s tough, but this is business, and although I don’t necessarily agree with that type of approach, everyone approaches their social media strategy, and rules for engagement, in their own, or their company’s, way.

Then there’s the problem of, “Hey, if I tweet for you, then I’ve gotta’ tweet for this other guy, and his two friends, and …”, and the next thing you know, you’re in the middle of all kinds of interpersonal dynamics issues over person X feeling disrespected because you didn’t retweet their stuff, but did for person Y.

It can be a friggin’ mess…

And that only escalates with the profile of the person being asked to do the tweeting…I’ve got a few friends that are pretty big players in the space, and they are constantly being bombarded with requests to tweet stuff for them…At some point they’ve just got to say no, both to keep peace, and because it gets to be too much of a time suck, and, face it, we’ve all got our own work to do…

One friend told me, a few years ago, that they were asked to get some big Hollywood producer they knew to tweet about something or other, and the response was, “Uh, no…I can’t do that.”

Because that would be one way of losing that producer’s ear, as bandwidth, and face-time, are valuable commodities for busy people.

I no sooner heard that story than someone approached me with a “You know…if you could get so-and-so to tweet about my stuff, I could really do something great…”. Yeah, you and everybody else. :)

I don’t, as a rule, ask folks to tweet, or re-tweet for me…If they want to it’s appreciated, but you’ve got to respect people’s time, and keep expectations real. If someone likes your stuff enough, and isn’t otherwise constrained by any of the other factors, you’ll get your message out.  I have great Twitter conversations with folks, all the time, who don’t re-tweet my stuff…And it’s all good, because we’re interacting, and that’s what is important.

Again, the message here is that Tweeting and Re-Tweeting can be a lot more complicated, for the reasons I’ve mentioned, than seems obvious. Don’t get frustrated by failure to get RT’d…Just keep doing your thing.

Non-RT Responses from High-Profile Tweeters

There are also a lot of instances where the absolute last thing you want is for someone with a few million followers to RT your post…Especially if you’re a blogger with a site on a non-industrial-strength host, and you’re tweeting a blog link  (Doug raises hand and points at himself.)

I use a pretty good hosting company, that offers unlimited bandwidth for a reasonable rate…One that is sustainable for the level of interest this blog receives, but is also affordable for someone who doesn’t derive the kind of ad revenue necessary (yet, but hopeful…) to sustain the cost of a dedicated server. I can take a good burst of hits in the thousands…But that’s about it.

In short, while I can take a pretty good amount of traffic in every-day use, one re-tweet from a celebrity like Stephen Fry, with his 3.8 million followers, and my host’s non-dedicated server would die a quick and painful death from the resulting traffic. Taking down all the sites on the server I’m sharing the space with, and having some poor guy in a basement somewhere going nuts trying to get everything back online.

The usual result is that the hosting company kicks you off of their service, because their ‘unlimited bandwidth’ deal isn’t really a free lunch, and you wind up scrambling for a new web host while loosing traffic, which is a huge PITA.

I’ve seen this a lot, and have one friend who I refer to, kiddingly, as Kali 2.0, as she has been known to lay waste to entire web sites with a mere touch of the re-tweet button (Yes, I’m talking about Felicia Day…How long into the post did you think it was going to be before her name came up? Seriously. :p )

Kidding aside, celebrities like Stephen Fry and Felicia Day have learned, the hard way, that a well-intentioned RT can cause unbridled havoc. Which is why you might see other things, like having your tweet favorited, or post bookmarked, or a comment liked on Facebook, a video favorited on YouTube, etc … Which will be a great show of support, show you that your efforts are being recognized, and drive traffic your way without making any data centers, or IT-tech people’s heads, explode.

It’s a good thing, and should be appreciated when it happens…

Paid Product Tweeters/Promoters

Case, #4 is the one that I, and many folks that I know, don’t really like…The paid product placement tweeter.

As discussed in this Huffington Post article, there are folks out there who make money by freelancing their Twitter feeds. Some of these are big players, like Kim Kardashian or Snoop Dogg, and some are folks who are much lower on the radar, but still have significant ability to influence a brand based on their authority with, and demographic make-up of, their followers.

An advertiser pays them, and they will start tweeting about the product/brand in question as if they were just really into whatever the product is, and you would think, based on whatever drives you to follow that Tweeter, that they are giving you info based on their own preferences…Using their social capital with you to get you to buy into what they are being paid to tweet about.

I think it kinda’ sucks. No, actually, it outright sucks…It’s a breach of trust, when you think about it.

There is nothing wrong with paid product placement…As a model it’s been around a long time, and as a financing model for web video it has proven effective (I’m thinking specifically of shows like Ileana Douglas’ ‘Easy to Assemble‘ which is set in an Ikea store, and sponsored by Ikea), and there is nothing wrong with it … As long as it’s out in the open, and you’re aware of it. Same with branded Twitter identities, such as production companies and shows, that Tweet their sponsors products…Nothing wrong with it at all.

What I’m talking about is the Tweeters/Bloggers who surreptitiously slip product placement into their twitter stream when I’m following them because I trust their taste in <FILL IN THE BLANK>. They are misusing their position as a thought leader, and, to me, this is wholesale BS.

It’s also a part of why YouTube has a paid product placement policy in place for shows that are monetizing content through AdSense.

Twitter really should have a policy about this, but I don’t see it as being enforceable…Especially for a company that still hasn’t figured out how to deal with the porn-and-spam-bot problem that is a huge, rampant, pain in the butt.

Often, it’s hard to tell when someone is doing it, unless they are just an obvious Twitter sell-sword, in which case you might recognize products that are off-brand suddenly popping up in their stream on a regular basis…Often times folks will be a lot more subtle.

The Pure, and Shameless, Self-Promoter

Finally, there are some folks out their who are just shouting their own message into cyberspace, and don’t give a crap…I don’t know why you’d want to follow someone like that, unless they are just that damn compelling that being a voyeur into their lives is appealing, but these types can benefit your own social media activities, in some cases, as I’ll explain in the next section.

“Well, that was kind of depressing as hell, Doug, what do I do to get my stuff recognized?”

Easy…Add value.

Don’t count on anyone else to promote your video, product, book, neat idea, whatever…Build your own social media profile by being part of the conversation, and adding value to it.

Maybe folks won’t tweet, or re-tweet about your message, but they almost always are willing to tweet, re-tweet, or join in a conversation about their own.

Be a fan…Be a supporter.

Find stuff that falls into your passion, or affinity, zone that others are doing, and support them. Build relationships, and join in conversations.

Write blog articles that review other web shows, or events, or products. Tweet about that, and that the creators of those other events and/or products will drive traffic to your site, because it is great for their marketing plan. That’s how you will develop a voice…as well as brand authority, which is important.

In doing so, you may not be getting direct support for your brand, but by developing your profile through tweets, retweets, and conversations about things related to your own brand, you will build a following, and that will enable to you get your message out there, on your own, without having to rely on the value of someone else’s social media identity to do it.

It works…in time. But there’s another part of this as well…

Don’t rely on Twitter as your only social media platform

Twitter has become a less-than-ideal communications medium for trying to get your message out there, for a number of reasons.

There is only so much you can communicate in 140 characters and, as I mentioned before, the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is pretty high, and not likely to get any lower. I’ve had recent conversations with friends who regularly follow me, that had no idea that I was producing a new show…Wow! Discouraging. Clearly an indication that noise is a factor.

Also consider that there are now ‘promoted tweets’ (and tweeters), and that Twitter is really just starting to get going with its own monetization strategy which will likely drive up the noise level for those who don’t have advertising dollars to spend.

No, you need to go to other places.

Facebook is important. Google+ is important, and becoming more important…Especially with the synergies between Google+, YouTube, and AdSense, Google is looking to maximize both the user experience, and their return on investment.

If you’re not spending a significant amount of time leveraging these other platforms, as well as Tumblr, Flickr, and LinkedIn, you are missing opportunities.

Yes, it’s a lot of work, and Google+ is not nearly as easy to integrate with the other platforms … and I don’t think Google thinks its in their best interest to be. They want to provide as much of a one-stop shopping experience as possible, and maximize revenues.

I’ll talk more about these other platforms, as well as analytics and social media profile tools, in a future entry.

Would love comments, and questions, and any feedback on if you folks feel that blog entries like this are helpful …

Remember, it’s a conversation, so speak up!

 

skippy

Welcome to Skippy’s Basement, our new show!

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Doug Luberts

Skippy is an ardent fanboy, comic book scholar, and contemporary sage.

He lives in the basement of his parents home in Brooklyn, New York.

He is 43 years old.

Skippy, along with his co-host, and best friend, Ralphie ‘The Wrench’ Robaccio, will be hosting a show live, on tape, from his basement, bringing Geektastic Nebula Viewers all the latest from the world of Fandom and Entertainment.

‘Skippy’s Basement’ will start airing later this month, on the Geektastic Nebula YouTube Channel.

Kiala drew this logo for the Book Club...Sorry, too WWF, not enough Labia Majora (photo by Kiala Kazebee)

Felicia’s Vaginal Fantasy Bookclub: A Google+ Video Hangout

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Doug Luberts

Update: Since I first wrote this, there has been an another edition of the Vaginal Fantasy book club for February 2012, and the ladies have agreed that the book club hangout will happen on the last Monday of every month.

You can view the February Hangout here…Wherein they discuss “Silent in the Grave” by Deanna Raybourn (Well, I think they did…In between all the drinking, and talk of which hunky celebrities and fantasy characters they’d most like to have their way with… )

You read the title right…and no, I haven’t sold out and gone into the smut-peddling business (yet), nor have I turned to writing a sordid exposé about Felicia Day to earn coin.

No, my friends, this is a bit of a review of Felicia’s latest new media experiment, and, once again, she’s on to something great here …

The concept: use the fairly-new technology of Google+ video hangouts as a forum to assemble a group of notable women writers and new-media personalities for a monthly book club discussing ‘Vaginal Fantasy’ genre lit…For those not familiar, I think this also falls under the heading of ‘Bodice Ripper’ romance novels, the kind of stuff involving cover photos of shirtless, long haired, overly-adrenal males having their way with stacked beauties (I may have passed one in a book store, or grocery checkout, once.)

Multi-cam format allows a switch-feed to the main screen, while viewers get thumbnails of all participants below.

Felicia’s been a devourer of the genre as far back as I can remember, once tweeting about going on a ‘Highland Hunk’ buying spree (Bodice rippers involving dudes with six packs in kilts [usually 'worn true', I'd imagine, although trying hard not to...]) at the 3rd Street Promenade after quaffing an adult beverage with dinner (Felicia doesn’t drink much, and I’m told by sources, who shall go nameless, except his initials are ‘Sandeep Parikh‘, hilarity often ensues on such occasions…Sandeep is what you call an ‘enabler’.)

So the book club is another project where the subject matter is an affinity for Felicia, who mentioned, a couple of weeks back, that she decided to do the book club last-minute, as a fun project with some friends.

Well, this ‘fun project’ is not only that, but it’s an exciting format, with a lot of potential for growth, and an excellent use of an enabling technology, the G+ video hangout. The hangouts put the kind of live, multi-camera, switch feed capabilities into the hands of content creators that big-media broadcasters have had for years, and that new media creators, like Leo Laporte, have spent small fortunes to implement on their own.

Yeah, there have been options for this from U-stream, and Blip-TV, for a while, but this seems easier, and with the overall integration between Google+ and YouTube, this is going to be a killer app … But before I geek out too much on the convergence-media aspects of the tech, let’s talk about the show, because that is why we watch.

Joining Felicia are Veronica Belmont, from Tekzilla and TWiT TV, and the Sword and Laser podcast, Bonnie Burton, Sr. Editor for StarWars.com (and a colleague of mine in a galaxy far, far away), and Kiala Kazeebee, blogger, writer for The Nerdist and Nerdpuddle, and prolific Twitterer about pie and alcohol (usually both, and at the same time.)

It’s these ladies that make the show something other than a garden-variety video podcast, and turn it into a truly compelling, and fun to watch show, in that their personalities are diverse, complementary, and taken together have an amazing interactive chemistry.

'VaginalFantasy' was a trending topic, World-wide, on Twitter during the premiere broadcast. (photo by Kiala Kazebee)

Slight disclaimer…I’ve known this crew for years, except for Veronica, whom I’ve not met, and not a small part of the reason I tuned in was to see my friends doing their thing, as well as see what Bonnie and Kiala would bring in a video format, as they’ve both been known primarilly as writers to date (although Bonnie has a collection of old ‘Ask Bonnie‘ videos from her days at the now defunct webwaste.com, that are pretty damn funny, and worth the watch.)

Everyone brings something slighting different to the round-table…Felicia and Veronica are pretty much known quantities in terms of their presentation style, but having the freedom to cut loose, and the license for off-color humor offered by the subject matter (I mean…When your show name starts with ‘Vaginal Fantasy’ what ISN’T on the table?), both present new sides of themselves.

Kiala is a natural as far as the broadcasting side of things goes…She was coordinating all of the questions and monitoring comments from G+ and Twitter, while keeping the momentum going with the conversation and color commentary … She’s a lot like a Robin Quivers-type (Robin Quimvers?) to Felicia’s host role (No, I’m not going to compare Felicia Day to Howard Stern, first off she’s nothing like Stern, and secondly, she’d likely kick my butt… ;) )

Bonnie brings a really great oddball dynamic to the group…She’s kind of like that crazy Aunt many of us have … You know, the one that’s a lot younger than your Mom, so she’s one of us, but is kind of whacky, yet world-wise, and is usually the family member that gets a little drunk (okay, a lot drunk) at family gatherings and tells the inappropriate jokes that make Mom turn photographically-unreproducible colors, while laying the rest of the crowd out laughing.

Plus, she was badly lit, un-prepared because she hadn’t read the book, and started going off-topic and doing bits with a taxidermied chipmunk (Bonnie is big into Anthropomorphic Taxidermy, IRL…) that was totally off the hook.

It was frikkin’ brilliant, and I hope they will add Bonnie’s being somewhat out-of-step as a running gag with the show, which would just add more comedy value.

Now, as I guy, you’d probably expect me to write something like, “Yeah, I watched it to see my friends, and to see how they used the new tech, but although the ‘Vaginal Fantasy Hangout’ is sure to be a hit with, and a great show for, women,  it’s not something that a guy would watch.”

Yeah, I could write that, but it would pretty much be a load…

Hey! Dudes! I’m talking you with the Penises…This is a show with a bunch of hot chicks talking dirty about smutty topics…You are going to LOVE this show. Tell the wife you’re watching it to get in touch with women’s sensibilities, so you can understand her better, and watch for the quim jokes.

In the words of Alexander Lavelle “Xander” Harris, “Yes, men like sports. Men watch the action movie. They eat of the beef and enjoy to look at the bosoms”…Men will also like watching women talking funny about sexy books. Dudes will love this show.

Kiala drew this logo for the Book Club...Sorry, too WWF, not enough Labia Majora (photo by Kiala Kazebee)

It IS also a great show for women…There is something outstanding about the idea of a book-club show that focuses on a feminine-interest genre that is the opposite of high-brow, offers lots of opportunities for jokes and diversions, and has a wonderfully compelling cast of smart ladies who are both knowledgeable and passionate about the subject matter.

The common thread that seems to run through whatever Felicia Day does, and I’ve often heard her say this in interviews, is to follow your passions…Once again, she’s done that with the book club, and that has lead her to something awesome and will, I believe, be another out-of-the-park hit with the fans.

As of yesterday, scheduling for The Vaginal Fantasy Book Club (and they’ve got their own tumblr blog set up already, and I’m almost mortified, yet intrigued, about what the visual design may look like if Kiala has anything to say about it based on her logo sketch …) was still a bit up-in-the-air, so follow Felicia, Veronica, Bonnie, and Kiala, on Twitter, to keep up with the latest.

Felicia will also be launching her new YouTube Premium Channel, Geek & Sundry, in March, so check them out on the Web and YouTube and expect more great content from the creator of ‘The Guild.’

FCPUG San Francisco 2012

11th Annual FCPUG San Francisco Supermeet – Highlights

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Doug Luberts

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you could tell by all the non-stop spamming last Friday, that I was at the annual conclave of editors and content creators known as the FCPUG Supermeet, at the Mission Bay Conference Center.

The day-long event began with a series of workshops offered by different vendors, followed by a vendor showcase before the main event: A 3+ hour-long stage event featuring content creators and vendors highlighting innovation, creativity, and the latest developments in content creation technology.

Here’s a sampling of some of the highlights of the day’s events …

The calm before the swarm ... Awaiting the arrival of the FCPUG crowd.

Fotoshop by Adobé

Commercial director Jesse Rosten‘s hilarious parody of beauty product informercials, Fotoshop by Adobé,  has been making the rounds since it went viral a few weeks ago.

Jesse was on hand to screen the video, and talk about the genesis of the project.

Canon USA

Canon USA was doing ‘Future of EOS Cinematography’ workshops during the morning, focusing mainly on the new C300 Cine Camera … The pitch is that while the 5D has gained a lot of interest/acceptance from filmmakers and videographers, it was primarily designed for AP/Reuters-type news photogs, and the video function was an afterthought (nice afterthinking!) The C300 is designed from the ground-up for filmmaking.

The camera offers impressive ergos, and a lot of features packaged into the base product (control surfaces, LCD display, motorized handle, etc.) which comes in at a suggested retail of $13K.

It’s available with either an EF or PL mount, enabling use of either standard 35mm lenses, or the really high-end Canon glass, and Canon is coming out with a set of new EF Cine Prime Lenses ranging from 24-85mm (priced at $6800/ea.) and Cine Zooms, offering more precise focus calibration and controls for the professional DP.

The camera records mpeg-2 @50Mbps to an MXF file format, with Canon Log as an option. The claimed dynamic range shooting C-Log is 12  stops!

It’s also close to drag-and-drop for editing, via FCP 7s log and transfer feature. (Mileage for Avid editors may vary … :) )

It shoots a wide variety of frame rates/sizes, and offers variable shutter angles.

Canon provided lots of hands-on time with the new C300 Cine Camera

The C300 uses a 3480 by 2160 CMOS sensor (8.3m pixel) that shoots at 4:4:4 and downsamples to a 4:2:2, 1920×1080 image… The big difference in approach with this camera is that there is no de-Bayering going on. The sensor gives a high-speed readout that virtually eliminates most of the artifacts typical of CMOS-based cameras.

Oh, and did I mention that it uses widely-available, low-cost, Compact Flash media?

For the stage show, Alex Buono, the Director of Photography for ‘Saturday Night Live”s Film Unit gave a chat about working with various cameras, with an emphasis on the Canon HDSLRs and the new C300. Alex, is no stranger to the FCPUG Supermeets, and is always a great presenter, showed some shorts and other material from SNL shot with the new Cine Camera…It looked amazing.

This camera is a RED-killer, at least for broadcast work where quick turnaround is needed, and will give the Arri Alexa a run for its money. The Sony F65? Maybe not so much, but the C300 is going to be the first choice of a lot of shooters.

Alex Buono, Director of Photography for 'Saturday Night Live''s Film Unit

Jimmy Fallon’s crew will be shooting with the C300 for remote shoots, while they are on location in Indy this week for the Superbowl. That material will air W-F.

Also, Canon mentioned that the new Canon 1DX SLR will have recording in AVC-Intra as an option, and will clock in at about $6K list.

Light Iron

Light Iron is a company specializing in on-set data acquisition and digital imaging technology…They’ve taken on-set Data I/O and Management to the next level.

CEO Michael Cioni gave a presentation on ‘The Future of D-Cinema Workflows’ which was informed, if not brilliant,  and he made what I thought was one of the most profound statements I’ve heard about production in a long time: “Workflows are not commanded, they reveal themselves to you…” (If this guy isn’t crushed by forces loyal to the Status Quo in the Industry, he could be a game-changer.)

Light Iron has developed an entire platform for on-set acquisition, starting from a central workstation/data repository, called the Outpost Mobile System, along with a set of enabling hardware and software technologies, including an iPad-based tool that enables anyone on-set with a need to see what is being shot in real time.

They’ve also developed some pretty smart data transport hardware, including a “firewire”-type drive array that is built into a box built to take abuse, with a D-SCSI-based interface for speed, and built in power supply (if you can find an OSHA-type power cable, you never need to hunt for power transformers with these drives.)

These guys are schooling everyone on how to do data acquisition, and do it right!

Scribbeo from Digital Film Tree

Ramy Katrib from Digital Film Tree presented their new ‘Scribbeo’ iPad app, a collaborative filmmaking app that allows mark-up and annotation of movie files using a distrubuted server.

Digital Film Tree made a big name for themselves when they helped Walter Murch transition over to Final Cut Pro for ‘Cold Mountain’, and are a leading provider of turn-key post solutions for cutting rooms.

Ramy Katrib from Digital Film Tree Demos their new Scribbeo App for collaborative filmmaking.

Scribbeo is a new iPad app that enables users to share movie files distributed by a (FREE) server. The app lets users collaborate, mark-up and annotate movie files, and share the results…The app is brand new and will be in the in the App store any day now…I think the target price is something like $2.99.

It might just be worth a look. :)

Adobe CS and Premiere

Adobe hosted a DSLR Editing Workshop with Adobe Sr. Content and Community Lead, Kevin Monahan,  during the morning sessions … Primarily focusing on feature sets, with an eye towards tempting current Final Cut 7 Editors towards adding CS5.5, and Premiere, into their work flow.

Adobe Premiere Pro Product Manager Al Mooney was also on hand for the sessions, and wasn’t shy about answering questions about current issues with Premiere, and what they are working with their developers to add, or improve, in future releases.

This is a very refreshing change from dealing with the tight-lipped security at Apple, where editors never knew what to expect in terms of performance enhancements, or future feature sets…Adobe’s transparency is going to be a major asset in winning content creators over to their products.

Adobe continues to make big inroads into the professional market for Premiere, especially in the Broadcast field. They’re upping their game with the tool, and announced a lot of new features that will be available in CS6, which will be formally announced at NAB in April.

Adobe Product Manager, Al Mooney

The big news for this event came in the form of a preview of Adobe Prelude, a log-and-transfer, pre-screen and tag, tool for ingesting footage. This has been something missing from the CS5 Suite, and reminds me a lot of Autodesk Backdraft, but with a much more intuitive user interface than the editing tools in the Smoke family.

Sneak Peak at the Adobe Prelude CS6 User Interface

Phillip Hodgetts, and the New Now

I never know just quite how to classify Phillip Hodgetts, or maybe that he is just so versatile that his involvement in content creation and post production just defies categorization…He writes, he develops software, he is a post production guru, author, and podcaster.

Phillip was on hand to discuss topics from his latest book, ‘The New Now: How to grow your production, or post production, business in a changed, and changing World.’ (available from Amazon), a book with a title so complete, and all-encompassing, that it eliminates the need for further elaboration.

Hodgetts related his business experiences in his native Australia, with a set of strategies design to help one stay competitive, including giving yourself an unfair advantage, and making sure that you own part of whatever product you are creating … He’s a guy with a lot of battle-tested knowledge, and his book should be a compelling read.

Dropping the F-Bomb

Show Producers Daniel Bérubé and Michael Horton, who run the event in conjunction with Claudia Crask and SFCutters, stepped up during the show to “Drop the F-Bomb”, a reference to a graphic on this year’s audience badge with a bomb going off behind the ‘F’ in ‘FCPUG’.

After many years, and no doubt much consideration, Mike and Dan announced that the organization was changing its name, and rebranding itself as the ‘Creative Pro User Group’ or ‘CPUG’, to better reflect the times, and focus of the group.

Michael Horton and Dan Bérubé announce the name change to 'CPUG', the 'Creative Pro User Group'

I had lunch with Mike Horton earlier in the afternoon, and, while not discussing the re-branding as such, we spent quite a bit of time discussing the changing nature of the content creation space, along with a shift in interests away from product-specific focus, to one that was product agnostic, and directed towards all content creators, and not just editors.

This is a change that a lot of us in the FCPUG community (I started attending LAFCPUG meetings when I was living in Los Angeles back in 2002), have been suggesting for years, and I believe it will open up this loosely-knit network of content creation affinity groups to a larger prospective audience.

The World-Famous Raffle

Guys, unless you’ve been to one of these things, there’s just no way of explaining it…Mike Horton’s personal comedy-stylings for running a raffle are worth the price of admission by itself.

The next big event for the CPUG Network, will be the Las Vegas Supermeet at NAB in April.

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Geektastic Nebula

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Doug Luberts

Coming to a YouTube player near you, Geektastic Nebula. A new web portal for all things geek and nerd culture-related.

2012 is set to be a breakout year in web video, with content distributors set to ante-up unprecedented amounts in content development and acquisition deals.

Major players from YouTube to Netflix are vying for position in a race to get the best original content they can for their viewers. At the grass-roots level, YouTube partners are enjoying greater revenue, benefits, and more special development and funding deals than ever seen before.

The bottom line is simple: There has never been a greater demand, or better opportunities, for web video creators seeking online distribution and revenue for their work.

That’s great for larger players, with established audiences and YouTube partnerships, but what about for smaller players with quality shows, who are trying to elbow their way into the spotlight where their programming can be seen?

Well, for content creators who are developing programming aimed at the ‘Geek Affinity’ market, Geektastic Nebula will be one option.

Geektastic Nebula is a new YouTube and Web Portal that is launching in 2012, and will offer original content and programming targeted at the Geek Affinity Market…Everything from Comics to Science Fiction, and Conventions to Cosplay; It will all be there in a one-stop portal, dedicated to bringing out the Geek in each of us.

Why the Geek Affinity market? Well, first and foremost, because I am, and always have been, a geek…Way back to before being a geek was cool.  If we are talking about geek affinity, well that’s been my personal brand way back to grade school, and it’s a passion as well as a way of life.

Second, I’m far from being alone…The Geek Affinity market is one of the largest out there. We geeks tend to be smart, well-educated, have money, and spend a lot of time on the Internet. Who could think of a better target audience, with demographics almost equally divided between male and female, from 13 to the grave?

Then there is the overwhelming amount of diversity within the Geek Affinity market in terms of brand extension…If I can use marketing-speak, it’s a vertical market with the biggest horizontal base imaginable. The possibilities for subject matter and programming are almost limitless.

Geektastic Nebula will offer a YouTube channel for video content, as well as a traditional web portal for print media. We intend to create real, interactive, transmedia experiences that will push the limits of both our creativity and available technology, and offer subject matter from news to scripted narratives.

Our initial focus will be on Web Video, and providing a full slate of programmed content that will serve as the base of both our identity and revenue.

Programming will come from two sources:

I. Original Web Television Content Produced by and for Geektastic Nebula

Geektasktic Nebula will produce original series, in conjunction with our production company, TurboMandala Entertainment.

Our initial offerings will include:

‘Rockets and Robots’ – A Science Fiction/Nostalgia show focusing on the best of Science Fiction from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s

‘Watch With Me’ -      An interactive show covering the best in Web Television, from the Geek Perspective

We are also working on an auto-racing reality show that has a heavily geek-centric theme, as well as a few other hosted, and narrative series.

II. Geektastic Nebula Will Aggregate/Syndicate Original Programming from other Creators

 

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where we get back to the matter of smaller creators getting their programming to an audience, and building a monetization stream:

We will build it for them, and with them.

Geektastic Nebula will partner with other content creators to aggregate and syndicate their content on a percent-of-revenue basis. In other words, if you are a content creator, you let us stream your content on one of our branded-channels, and Geektastic Nebula will pay you a percentage of the monetization from ad revenues.

Not only will we pay you a percentage of the revenue, we will pay you THE LION’S SHARE of that revenue…Of course we will take a percentage for marketing, administration, and technical support, but that’s part of what will make this work.

By running your programming under the Geektastic Nebula banner, you will have the benefit of being part of a consistent, unified, brand with solid marketing and a clear identity.

Instead of being a ‘one-man-brand’, running all of your own social media marketing, and advertising, campaigns, you will have the benefit of Geektastic Nebula’s marketing.

Sure, you can still do your own, and add your voice to the mix, in fact that will be part of the overall promotion of the show, but by uniting with the Geektastic Nebula brand, you can take a lot of that weight, and time, off of your shoulders and focus on doing what you do best…Creating content.

Also, while you will be sharing your revenue with Geektastic Nebula, you can count on that revenue being higher.

More exposure, and brand recognition, will result in more views. With more views comes higher revenue and the bonus of YouTube partnership revenue levels. All achievable in a fraction of the time that it would take for you to establish brand recognition for your programming by going it alone.

Best of all, at the end of the day, you will still own all of your Intellectual Property rights to the shows you create.

That’s right, you are the creator, and the sole owner of all of your videos, and Geektastic Nebula will never want it any other way…While you will be asked to sign an agreement to run your content exclusively on our channels for a specified period of time, all of your rights remain your own. At the end of that time, if you want to run on your own channel, or syndicate to other carriers, it’s all good!

So that’s the plan, and we’re all very excited about the year to come, and all of the prospects for Geektastic Nebula, and for the folks with whom we partner.

There is much more information to share that is outside of the scope of this blog post. If you would like more information about Geektastic Nebula, and/or content opportunities with the network, or would like to read a copy of our whitepaper, please complete the contact form on this site, and someone will promptly get in touch with you.

As always, your comments are welcome! Thanks for reading this. We think it’s going to be a Geektastic year for web content creators!

CliffsNotes Juliet

CliffsNotes – A unique interactive experience.

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Doug Luberts

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows
Doth, with their death, bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

-Shakespeare, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Prologue

I love Shakespeare. I’ve loved Shakespeare ever since that time in the 10th Grade when Mr. Mauri Pelkonenen, of the Bay Ridge Pelkonenens, explained to our Shakespeare-as-literature class that when Iago says to Brabantio:

“I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter
and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.”

What the conniving little SOB was telling Brabantio was that his fomerly pure-as-the-driven-snow daughter was getting shagged rotten by a black dude!

Holy crap! (Hey, I said I was in the 10th grade…Throw me a friggin’ bone here, people.)

That would have been scandalous enough for white, working-class, Bay Ridge Brooklyn in 1974, but in the 1600′s England? Shakespeare was like the Jaqueline Susann of his day!

Now, later on, I kind of got a perception of the Bard as being more like the Neil Simon or Norman Lear of Elizabethan England…He was about packing butts in the seats, and putting on a helluva’ show. This wasn’t high-brow stuff, this was just good, down-to-earth storytelling, and it was right there for anybody who could get far enough through the language to understand it.

Sadly, few did … William Shakespeare, or Christopher Marlowe, or whoever he really was, remains an enigma to to most.

In high school, few of my peers embraced Willie-the-Shakes with the same enthusiasm that I did…Most got by in the class by reading the old standard Cliff Notes. They weren’t proud of it, but, you know, you do what you have to do…Although I always thought those folks who went the Cliff Notes route really kind of deprived themselves of the full flavor of the Shakespearean experience.

Well, Cliff Notes has sort of reinvented themselves in a new form for a new generation of scholars having a tough time with the material…CliffsNotes Movies.

If the viewer clicks on a character in the movie, biographical information on the character appears in the lower screen, providing a deeper-dive context.

CliffsNotes Movies are offered through the Cambio platform, and uses technology from Clikthrough to create an interactive user experience where the view can click on the movie screen to bring up more in-depth information on story themes, characters, locations, or take a quiz on what they’ve learned.

As interactive story-telling goes, it’s pretty neat stuff, all very well packaged into an excellent web site design.

The real question is, in terms of Shakespeare, does it really give you the full flavor of the Bard’s work? In a word, no.

The animated films are really well done…They are light, funny, and written with a sense of style and with that young readers will be drawn in by.  Cliff himself, a sort of kid-lit superhero, is engaging and walks you through the play from start to end. The reader will learn the story, and the characters, but much of the richness and depth of understanding of Shakespeare’s skill and wit can only come from doing the real homework and reading the original material…Just like old-school Cliff Notes, these movies are one-step removed from the actual experience. There are no short cuts to Shakespeare.

But the real story here isn’t about the Shakespearean experience…It’s about this marvelous approach to storytelling, and the potential of this technology to reach audiences in a new and entertaining way, where at least a portion of the content is user-driven, and on demand. Possible applications range from classroom curriculum to marketing and sales training, with suggestions that even greater interactivity could be built into these types of applications as the technology matures.

 

 

iawtvorg

Why I Do What I Do … No, this isn’t about Existentialism.

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Doug Luberts

This past Friday, Dec. 30th, I received an email from the IAWTV (International Academy of Web Television), the Academy was asking members to do a 30-second promo spot for the 2012 (Inaugural) IAWTV Awards. The awards are going to be held at CES, in Vegas, on January 12th, and the videos will be promoted by one of the Award’s sponsors, DBG, a content production and distribution company.

The idea is to tell the story of “Why I do what I do” with regard to Web Television.

It was a welcome opportunity, as the IAWTV, which has been around for a few years, but really just starting down the path of accomplishing its mission of promotion, education, and advocacy of the Web Television Industry, is an organization whose purpose, along with its leadership, I believe in, and am only too happy to help.

I had just finished shooting a commercial parody in house, and hadn’t struck the set yet … Rare is the day you have a hot set in your living room, and a hot project falls out of the sky to give you something unexpected to do with it!

I decided to talk about why I got into web video, with ‘The Guild’, initially, and now on my own, and use the idea of the small web video producer shooting solo at home as a metaphor for what is great about the potential of this medium, where anyone with a camera, and a vision, can become a content creator…Okay, it’s a little more complex than that if you want to shoot something more than ‘cat on a treadmill’ videos, but that’s where it starts.

The shoot took about an hour, and I spent the better part of today doing Post on it. I’m wildly happy with the results.

Alright, so it does look like I’ve got a yellow-giant sun burning a hole in the top of my noggin, but I lit the set for a character with hair, not my native chrome-dome. :) Other than that I’m still a happy camper.

Hope you guys enjoy.

Meanwhile, if you get a chance to watch the IAWTV Awards on January 12th, 9pm Easter/6pm Pacific, on the IAWTV YouTube channel, you’ll get a chance to see what the best of Web Television has to offer. If you’re not familiar with some of the high-end work that is going on these days, I promise you it will be an eye-opener.

guildxmas

Holiday Videos: Six Degrees of ‘The Guild’

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Doug Luberts

Some pretty amazing, and talented, folks have worked on Felicia Day‘s hit web series, ‘The Guild‘, over the years. Most of whom have gone on to create a significant body of work outside of the show.

Here’s a collection of holiday videos created by, and featuring, current and former cast and crew of ‘The Guild’, with a brief introduction to each video by myself.

Also, Felicia just released a Guild, ‘Zaboo’ one-shot comic, co-written with Sandeep Parikh, it’s available on Amazon, and at better comic book shops everywhere.

Season 5 of ‘The Guild’ is also now available on iTunes.

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Teh Twitterz Conversation the Interwebz was invented for …

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Doug Luberts

So, this conversation happened this afternoon on Twitter between ICM Web Super-Agent, and Deadliest Man Alive, George Ruiz, Queen of All Internet Geekdom, Felicia Day, and Nerdist Bloginatrix, Kiala Kazebee (who is definitively a top geek girl, even though someone forgot to put her on the list.)

I record it here for posterity, because, shit, somebody had to …

These people are why I <3 the Internet Age! It’s a great World we live in. :)

Curated YouTube Playlists: A great idea that needs a little work

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Doug Luberts

I was out to dinner with my of my web video production friends, last week, and after the usual important discussions about vital topics of the day, such as Dr. Who, Star Wars, and the irony of Kim Jong Il’s death being announced by CNN while we were in the middle of eating Korean Barbecue (dying is easy, finding good Korean Barbecue in Oakland is … Also pretty easy), we started talking YouTube and content creation, and the topic of curated YouTube playlists came up.

You create a curated playlist by building a playlist of videos, and then adding your own video introductions. It allows you to become the host of a show on any area of topicality on YouTube, and feature other folks’ work in your show without directly, or inappropriately, making using of their Intellectual Property.

Sounds good? But wait, there’s more!

From a monetization standpoint, it’s a win-win-win situation … If your videos are enabled for monetization, via Google AdSense or a YouTube Partnership, you make money. If the content you are featuring is monetized the creators of those videos make money and, if everything is monetized, then YouTube’s algorithm has incentive for promoting your playlist videos because YouTube/Google makes money. Like I said…Win-win-win.

But there’s a but … (isn’t there always?)

Playlists are still a bit funkified, and need some work from the YouTube engineering folks, especially with regard to how their embedding API works with 3rd-Party applications like Twitter and Facebook, as well as, to a lesser extent, getting the kinks worked out of how playlists function on the YouTube site.

As an example, I created a playlist called ‘The Six Degrees of ‘The Guild’ Holiday Videos“, it’s a list of videos created by folks who have been part of the cast and crew of Felicia Day’s hit web series, ‘The Guild‘. The topic itself could easily be another blog post, but sufficed to say that there’s an incredible amount of talented folks who have worked on the show over the years, and they’ve created a body of work outside of ‘The Guild‘ that’s nothing short of amazing…I just cherry-picked six of the best of them, including a Christmas video from ‘The Guild’, and added my ‘Hooray for Santa Claus‘ music video. To that I added seven brief introduction videos for the curation aspect.

If the user starts the playlist from the YouTube Playlist Window, or clicks on the list from a YouTube channel’s playlist views window,  the user experience is great, and each video in the list auto-plays in succession in on YouTube Video Pages. Occasionally a ‘plugin missing’ error might occur in the browser (I’ve seen this in Google Chrome) that requires the user to refresh the page, but it’s generally smooth sailing, with the playlist working as-advertised.

The problems with the YouTube API start happening when you try to link your videos in external sites (noticeably, I have not seen this to be a problem in Google+ for some reason. ;) )

On Twitter or Facebook, linking the list from with a ‘play all’ link will run the first video, switch to the second, but not autoplay it. This is a problem for most content creators, as it’s those secondary apps that we’re going to rely on go get traffic to our videos. YouTube has got to work on this…and I have no doubts they will, as this is their bread-and-butter, and they are encouraging use of these playlists in their YouTube Content Creator Playbook as a way to promote and share content. I just mention it as, right now, it’s a gotcha’ that content creators need to be aware of.

For right now, the best way to link your playlist content is just to provide a link to the playlist window, and the user can hit ‘play all from there.

Also, YouTube needs to provide some housekeeping options on their new Channel Pages for videos that are part of curated playlists…There needs to be a way of not having  them all on your channel’s ‘videos’ page, as they can confuse users who click on them randomly when they are not auto-running from a playlist. Which brings me to another point.

While the playlist functionality is great, when everything is auto-running correctly, video publishers need to make sure to add annotation links in all the intros in their curated playlists that point to the next video in the link with the playall tags embedded in them…For the first video in the list, this will ensure that the a viewer coming into the video randomly will be able to get into the autoplay list mode, and for the other videos, it will guarantee that the viewer has an option to ‘kick start’ the rest of the videos in the list if the playlist becomes disable or they don’t auto-jump to the next video in the sequence.

If that sounds a bit kludgy, it’s because it is…This is a relatively new form of viewing experience for YouTube viewers and creators. One that has a lot of potential but, just like folks who drove early cars, like the Model A, you have to be willing to get under the hood to make this work for now. Hopefully this will not be the case for very long…Google’s got some of the best engineers in the business, and if anyone can make this happen, they can!

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