Thing 13: Video
This is a cross-post between WordPress and Medium.
I’m making crawlingly slow progress through 23 Things as I have a) been a bit blindsided by the US election results as well as b) trying to make sure I make the most of this course as an opportunity to properly reflect on the topics raised here. It’s also been a great chance to do a bit of curation/updating of my assorted platforms as I go through each topic, adding to the length of time between posts. A recent email announcing an extension for the submission completion date till January 10th 2017 was welcomed though :)
My interest was piqued when I spotted that the content for Thing 13 referred to a video service that I’d not heard of — MediaHopper. On closer inspection, it turned out to be the University of Edinburgh’s own video-hosting platform. We have something similar at City, and having ‘your own YouTube’ can certainly be rather handy when you want staff and students to have the benefits of a video-hosting platform without being advertised at or open to all. But not being a member of Edinburgh staff with access to MediaHopper, I’m using this post for a little reflection on YouTube instead.
Trying to watch video online before the prevalence of YouTube was rarely easy, even when it was available. Launched in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006, YouTube has come to define online video more than any other service. I’ve had an account since 2007, so am a reasonably early adopter of this particular technology.
I’ve been working with video for much longer than that. I produced a 60m documentary in 1995, shot and edited on S-VHS, and even made shorts on Super-8 before that (yet to be digitised). I’ve been working with digital video for a little over a decade, following purchase of my first Mac and roughly parallel with YouTube’s journey. In this post then, I take that approximate decade of online video and use it to showcase ten highlights from my film work during that decade.
1. Journeys by #SouthernFail (2016)
This was made as an attempt to vent my frustrations with the ongoing challenges of a difficult daily commute as well as give a voice to ‘the suffering Southern Rail passenger’ in the ongoing saga of trying to get the train into and out of London. It was entirely shot and edited on a smartphone (iPhone 6s), which made for an interesting experiment in working within limitations. It has also received quite a bit of media attention, resulting in being the self-produced video with the most views on my YouTube channel (almost 2,800 at time of writing).
2. New learning spaces at City (2015)
This short was an early piece produced at work and largely done in collaboration with a brilliant colleague called Steve (plus a cast of many others). It was designed as a means of showcasing a range of then-newly launched flexible learning spaces to academics that might be teaching in them as well as the wider university community, including lecture theatres with sofa seating and computer labs with pop-up PCs. The film was put out on the university’s YouTube channel and has been seen widely within the UK HE sector as well as attracting international interest in City’s learning spaces.
3. The Flipped Classroom (2014)
‘The Flipped Classroom’ was produced as part of a job application a few years ago, intended to explain the concept of the flipped classroom to an academic audience. I used very simple tools for this one, preparing most of it with animations in PowerPoint and recorded using Camtasia screen capture software. I often make use of icons from The Noun Project in my design work — this was an early use of them in film.
4. I link, therefore I am (2012)
Between 2011 and 2013, I took a Masters degree in Digital Media. One of the module tutors set an unassessed short essay to give students some writing practice and I produced this ‘video essay’ in response. It was also put together as a submission for ‘The Past Re-Imagined As The Future’, a competition that invited new film remixes that combined material from The Prelinger Archive and soundtracks from Free Music Archive content. I didn’t win anything, but I think my submission was appreciated by the judges and it was certainly a fun one to make.
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5. The Japan Movement series (2010–2012)
‘The Japan Movement’ is a series of four experimental short films using footage shot on a 2010 visit to Japan and largely all soundtracked with Creative Commons-licenced music. The films all revolve around the theme of movement. ‘Makes The World Go Round’ was mostly shot in my former local sushi joint, by placing a camera on the conveyor belt. I make a cameo in it, drinking some green tea at the counter. ‘In Motion’ attempts to convey the business of Shinjuku station, which serves around 3.5 million people every day. ‘J-Journeys’ was primarily a bus ramble through suburban Yokohama with a bus seat acting as a ‘tripod’ fused with a train journey out West. ‘The Crossing’ is a very slowed down traverse across the famous Shibuya Crossing, with a century-old poem over the top.
6. Winter In America
My tribute to the then-recently departed Gil Scott-Heron. With music from an audience recording of a gig posted online and cutting room floor footage given away by the BBC for their ‘Digital Revolution’ documentary (plus a few more scraps from the Internet Archive). As mentioned above about ‘Journeys by #SouthernFail’, I do enjoy seeing what can be done within certain limitations — in this case, it was to produce the whole film in black and white.
7. Station to Ocean (2011)
‘One Day On Earth’ was ‘the first film made in every country of the world on the same day’, using footage shot on October 10th, 2010 (10/10/10). I took a walk from Brighton station to the Pier with a video camera, sped up the footage to fit into a time limit and submitted it as my contribution. Can’t remember whether my contribution ended up in the final result of not, but I produced ‘Station to Ocean’ from the footage.
8. Change (2008)
After the shocks of the Bush-era, I got caught up in the global ‘rise of Obama’ moment. Via my electronic music alter-ego, Control K, I produced the track ‘Change’ about the 2008 US election. I felt it needed a video too, so put this simple one together with monochrome graphics and fairly static images. What a different time that seems from 2016 election.
9. Endgame (2007)
Whilst living in Tokyo, I fronted a band called Shelf Life. We put one CD out, with ‘Endgame’ being the final track on the album. This was the pop video we made to accompany the song, which borrowed heavily from ‘Hey Jude’. It was produced by a renowned Japanese pop video director, who happened to be a local in the bar where this was shot. This was a good lesson in the reality of film making, which turns out to be a lot less glamour and a lot more waiting around, doing endless takes than the finished result appears to suggest. Great fun to make though.
10. The Listening Project (2007)
This is the trailer for a Bush-era documentary called ‘The Listening Project’, where a film crew visited 12 different countries to try and find out ‘what the world really thought about America’. I wasn’t part of the crew but I co-ordinated the Japanese leg of their tour and sourced interviewees for them, including the journalist and the two rappers shown in this trailer. No doubt global opinion of America is likely to take another different turn in the pending Trump era.
I have a Vimeo account too, and used this post as an opportunity to add a couple of the films from above to that. Must admit that I far prefer the Vimeo interface. However, if you do anything with online video, you kind of have to have a YouTube presence. I keep YouTube for everything and Vimeo to have a more selective ‘artsy’ channel.
