I started Twittervlog 10 years ago

I started Twittervlog on March 29 2007 with this post:

The shocking innovation here was not just that I was sitting on the loo,
but that I could record a video on my phone and post it from my phone straight to Twitter.

(Instead of downloading it from phone to computer, converting it, uploading it, and copying the link into Twitter.)

And I know it’s hard to remember – but in March 2007, that was super futuristic.

Twitter was newish and had only around 100k users.
The first iPhone wasn’t released until 3 months later – June 2007; and it couldn’t record video for another 2 years until the 3Gs was released in June 2009.
YouTube didn’t connect to Twitter until March 2009.  Crazy.

This first video describes the workflow:

  1. Record a video on my phone.
  2. Email from the phone via wifi to my Blip.tv video hosting account.
  3. Twitterfeed.com picks up my Blip.tv RSS feed and posts to my Twitter account.

There were 3 great things that allowed this – all now defunct:

  • The Nokia N93, which recorded 320×240 video, had a great design with pistol grip, email and wifi.
  • Blip.tv, which hosted videos for vloggers, had a user-specific email address you could send files to and an RSS feed of your latest posts.
  • Twitterfeed.com (by Mario) which took any RSS feed and posted it to Twitter to @twittervlog

I then added in a couple of other things:

  • The built in video editor in the N93 (totally amazing back then) – I also created black & white lofi titles which I copied to the phone and added to the start and end of my videos.
  • A blog at twittervlog.blogspot.com (later rupert.how) which Blip.tv automatically posted to – Blip had so many great features, way ahead of YouTube.

I thought it’d be a brief experiment, but I got hooked on being able to post video so easily from my phone – so it took off, and replaced my old fatgirlinohio.org and workingformydad.com videoblogs.

There’s a wiggly path from this video of me sitting on the toilet describing that 3 step workflow, to the job I’ve had since 2010 as a workflow consultant for people like the BBC.

I was all about the lofi 320×240 straight-to-web 30 second video thing.  I rolled my eyes at people wasting time and bandwidth shooting HD, and predicted the death of TV.  Now I help TV people who are shooting thousands of hours of 8K (16 times as big as HD) and shoot nothing of my own.

I disrupted myself!

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THE WICKER MAN …on Hampstead Heath

A film that appears to have been made by a 15 year old boy, with his daddy’s VHS camera.

On Friday afternoon, I got a call to tell me I’d won 50 EXTRAS

to remake a movie scene
with my PHONE
on monday morning

I had 15 MINUTES to decide what movie to do and where to do it.

It’s for the NokiaMinimo.com mobile filmmaking competition which ends this week. Please click here to vote for me on their site, and watch the movies that other people have been remaking. (Voting is easy and doesn’t require registration.)

iPhone mp4 video file

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Room 773 (recut) and Nokia #MiniMO

UPDATE:
Sadly, this video was deleted for breach of copyright. Thanks so much for your votes. We were doing well…
You can see the original here.

I can’t embed this video, so here’s a link to it:

http://nokiaminimo.com/watch?movieID=3941

It’s a shorter 90 recut of Videoblogging The Conversation, for the Nokia MiniMO competition.

They want 90 second mobile videos, inspired by your favourite movie scenes. Shot on phones or point & shoot cameras. The standard of entries so far is pretty so-so – a lot of you vloggers could clean up here… The prizes include a trip to the Cannes Lions Advertising festival at the end of the month and a bunch of video kit and phones.

and I’d love your votes! 😉

I’m going to shoot another one this weekend, I think, based on the opening scene of Narc, perhaps. More to follow.

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Spies, Free Hugs and Helsinki Twestival – Day 1 Nokia N86 Tour 2009

It’s taken me a week to find the time to sort through the footage and cut it down to a watchable size – but here are 8 minutes of highlights from the 18 or so hours of non-stop filming we did on Day 1. We had some technical hitches with uploading, so I didn’t post from the road as much as I’d wanted.

@philcampbell, @vikkichowney and I were sent by Nokia & Womworld on an 18,000 mile tour of Twestivals last weekend, with instructions to document the trip on the new Nokia N86 8MP – we started in Helsinki, and then headed off in different directions – me to Bucharest, Phil to Dubai, Vikki to, um, Birmingham – where we handed our N86s over to @bvlad and @freshplastic who continued the tour – all of us reconvening in Oxford on Sunday night.

Twestivals are essentially meetups of Twitter users in scores of cities around the world, to raise money for local causes. Each city’s cause was chosen by an online vote.

Nokia sponsored our trip (as well as carbon offsetting our miles) by giving a Euro for every 5 miles we travelled. So in the end, we raised around €3600 for local causes. Plus we carried with us a free Nokia N86 for each Twestival we visited to raffle or auction.

More to come – and I’ll post some links to all the media that I and the others generated.

Formats available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4), Flash Video (.flv)

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For everybody back home – VloMo Day 5

I was putting together a big elaborate post-election video… but in the comments to the Placenta video, Frank Carver reminded me to take my own advice: the key to success in posting every day for Videoblogging Month is to avoid ambition – don’t up the ante each day. Just carry your camera with you, capture a simple moment and share it.

And I’ve been really enjoying Elsie Escobar‘s VloMo videos – she’s recording her baby girl’s first few weeks. She made me realise: I have a videoblog, we’re thousands of miles from home, and I’ve hardly posted any video or pictures of Lila for all our family and friends. She’s seven weeks old and almost 14lbs already! So to start with, here’s 90 seconds from breakfast.

I love how all these VloMo videos and comments are creating responses and conversations.

Watch videoblogging month videos at:
http://mefeedia.com/channels/vlomo08
and join the group at Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/groups/vlomo

Shot on my Nokia N93 phone.

Formats Available: iPod/iPhone compatible MPEG4 (.m4v)

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