3 June 2008
Producers Institute Day Three
Posted by andybeach under: Cool Things; events .
Monday at BAVC was great - we had three very interesting presentations (though I had to skip the last one due to a meeting offsite) followed by an afternoon of discussing ideas with the teams.
The first presentation was by Joe Fox who has created a piece of software called Memory Miner. Memory Miner is billed as a digital story telling tool (a pretty important thing for a room full of documentary filmmakers). Though its primarily geared towards personal storytelling (like your family history), its very easy to see how a producer could use this as a data collection tool during the research and production part of their project.
But its not just a collection tool, memory miner allows you to push the content you collect in a variety of ways, including, short flash videos for putting on the web, flickr for photos, and even map coordinates in google maps. Its a fairly interesting tool, and at $45, pretty cheap. Oh, and double bonus points for having both Windows & Mac versions.
Next up was Bernhard Drax. Bernhard is a composer in real life, but has become a journalist in Second Life and showed both examples of his coverage “in world” and talked about the phenomenon of machinima. Machinima is…. Drax’s Second Life reports can be found here.
And finally Tony Walsh (who was also a mentor last year at the Institute) held a round table on Game Development and Marketing. I really wish I had gotten a chance to see this, but am hoping I can pick Tony’s brain later about all of this. Tony has started a new company called Phantom Compass since last year focused on consulting with companies looking to design, develop, produce games & game content.
What else did we do all day? Well after I got back from my meeting, The teams were busily working in their various labs and I wandered around help various teams, including the “No Dumb Questions” guys and the “What We Got” team. Then Joe Rubin (iWitness team) and I sat down for about an hour to go over ways to capture web chat videos (through iChat & Skype) so Frontline can record interviews over the Internet, then package into pieces destined both for broadcast & the web. How were we doing it? My suggestion was using iShowU to record a specific part of your screen that had the vide window open. It let’s you record video as well as 2 tracks of audio (your microphone and the audio coming off your computer) so Joe will have both his interview questions and the interviewee as separate tracks. Because there are presets for DV-NTSC (how they are editing in FCP already) its very easy o drop these interviews into their existing timelines and cut them down.
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