Saving History: Revolution in Boston

Saving History: Revolution in Boston

Below is a preview of a documentary developed by our Lexington friend Rick Beyer.

If you look closely right after the 50 second mark you can see Marsha (blue) and Rick's daughter Bobbie (red) off to the right. Marsha and Bobbie were extras on Rick's shoot in downtown Boston in August. You may also see Marsha's back in the full program, looking at a display case.

The program is airing on the History Channel starting this Saturday September 22, 2007 at 8PM.

Hans Rosling and GapMinder.Org

Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

GapMinder.Org

From TED.Org:
Hans Rosling
Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.more ...

GapMinder.Org is a web site where Rosling makes many of the displays and tools available for viewing. It's a lot of fun to interact with the displays.

I discovered Rosling through the TED conference (see below) videos.

From the web site:
About this Talk
You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world" using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling's hands, global trends -- life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates -- become clear, intuitive and even playful.

TED: Ideas worth spreading

TED: Ideas worth spreading

My friend Joe Walters reminded me about the TED conference, and the wonderful videos of talks given at the conference that are available on the web. From the web site:

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers
and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under
a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted."

I will be posting some talks here as I watch them. They are really very impressive and worth the time spent watching them.

SNL Census: Christopher Walken

Here is a very funny video from Saturday Night Live: funny because Walken's answers to the census taker's questions are answers a little off topic...

Time Lapse Photography

YouTube - Time Lapse Video of Guy Driving Across the Country

I am about to start learning about time lapse photography. It turns out that while it used to take a lot of special purpose expensive equipment to do this, today with digital cameras and computers it is relatively easy. Now you can focus on technique rather than equipment.

In Defense of Video

Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell: Amazing Tap Dancing

I was going to title this first entry for the new year as "In Defense of TV", but I realized that it wasn't television that I wanted to praise, but rather the reproduction of real events by the use of video and sound.

Frequently people cast aspersions on the amount of TV we Americans watch -- and probably justifiably so. But this video shows that the medium is fine -- and in fact sometimes superior -- its, as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium that is the significant part.

This video clip (of the film) which was shot in one take, illustrates my point. My friend Tom Fortmann found it and let me know about it. Although possible, and perhaps that would be the artistic challenge, it would be difficult to come up with words that left me with the impression that this video engenders.

To see more Fred Astaire videos, go here for a collection of videos assembled by my friend Richard Homonoff.

More on Jumpcut

Yesterday, I wrote about Jumpcut. This morning, I tried to see how easy it is to create and publish one of these videos on my own web site. Here is the results of about 15 minutes of work in my pajamas this morning...





Of course the real time is taken in one of these apps when you go to improve it slightly: you can triple the time if you go for perfection...

Jumpcut - Make Amazing Movies Online

Jumpcut - Make Amazing Movies Online

A while back, I wrote the following message to friends: Hello Television Networks...? The gist of that article is that soon we will have the tools to pull together clips from all sorts of sources into compilations which approximate shows.

Well, it took about 1.5 months for me to come across several tools that are headed in that direction. Jumpcut is a tool that allows you to create such a compilation online out of media you have on your PC. I say "media" because you can upload video, music and still images to jumpcut.com and put the clips together with titles and transitions to produce a pretty sophisticated flash movie.

This is like having iMovie in your browser: and jumpcut does the hosting! No download of your results yet, but they have got to be thinking about how to do that. Even if they charged me a couple of bucks to download the video I created with their tools, I would gladly pay: it is certainly a lot easier than installing the tools and hosting the video myself (and I am usually against such approaches, preferring to do everything myself). Jumpcut is so easy to use, video compilations should start jumping out at us -- either from Jumpcut or any of several others in this space.

Hello, traditional TV Networks...?

From: Harry Forsdick
Date: Oct 27, 2006 3:55 AM
Subject: Hello, traditional TV Networks...?
To: Friends

I ran across something yesterday on CNet that I think is very appealing and answers the questions many people are asking about Video on the Web, such as "I don't understand the appeal of 2-3 minute snippets of video. Who is going to watch that stuff?"

Well, check out:

http://www.cnettv.com/9710-1_53-24285.html

With NBC already downsizing their news department, and CBS, and ABC not far behind, I thinking this example shows how people will want to get their multisegment TV shows in the future. Like everything else on the Internet, instead of a small number of nightly news shows, or weekly magazine shows ( e.g., 60 Minutes), this approach allows hundreds of thousands of people to participate in collecting and ordering multiple 2-3 minutes segments together into a half hour or hour show.

And furthermore, with the index on the right side of the screen, the viewer gets to decide what s/he wants to see.

This is why YouTube is worth $1.6Billion to Google. Like the Blog world, these compilations will produce a lot of junk, but there will be the standouts that get widely read because they contain superior content -- or selection of content from the millions of 2-3 minute video segments produced each day and hosted by the GTubes on the Internet. In addition there will be a lot of compilations that have appeal to smaller, focused audiences.

So, although I can imagine the major networks will start making use of this, I can also see millions of the following multisegment shows available on the Internet:

• This Week in Lexington: Highlights from various (Board of Selectmen, School Committee, Carey Lecture Series, High School Football game) town public meetings and events.
• Watch Your Baby Grow: Monthly advice for new parents including segments on the audience's actual kids as they grow up.
• (A smaller audience) Smith Family 2006 Year in Review: A month by month set of slide shows and video clips.
• ...
  

As important as the ability to string together multiple short clips (which, after all is how most news shows are structured) is the preservation of the structure of compilation, and the ability for the viewer to choose what is viewed: remember the promise of Interactive TV? Well, I think this is an example of what we were talking about.

I don't know enough about YouTube to understand whether there is already such a facility in that system. In any case, I think you will see Google starting to make use of these sorts of ideas with GTube.