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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Indecision – an interactive hyper-videoblog story

RAAAAAAAAAA!

I finally did what I’ve been meaning to do for about 2 1/2 years. I made a hyper-videoblog post.

You can only see it on YouTube – here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtQg_LCq_T8&fmt=18

The thing that finally spurred me on was YouTube’s new Annotations feature. All this time, I’ve been waiting and hoping that they would introduce something like this.

But at the moment, they only allow you to use it on their site – no embedded players yet.

There are six different parts to it – what path you take is up to you. Click the options at the end of each clip to choose what I do.

I really was feeling indecisive about what to do with my evening – and it proved the perfect subject. I made it up as I went along, and it took 30 mins to shoot and 90 mins to get the clips onto the Mac, onto YouTube and Annotated with links.

I’ve always thought that for my hypervideo dreams to become reality, hyperlinked video would need to be a) easy to use, b) easy to create and c) within a setting that people are already comfortable with.

I’ve been working on much more complex hypervideo stories, and if this quick slapdash bit of fun seems to work, I’ll start putting some together properly. Let me know what you think.

It’s been a good week for me with my old nemesis YouTube. Tumblr saw my High Quality YouTube Embed Generator (thanks to Wreck and Salvage) and implemented it as standard on all Tumblr YouTube embedded players. So I helped make the world a prettier place.

The future is now! Even if this particular part of the future looks a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book from 1982.

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I need you

Amazing Rainbows! London Says Goodbye As We Emigrate

Click Image Above To Play
Or click here to play/download higher quality Quicktime (MP4) file

—

I hope this rainbow brightens people’s days all over the world. Please share this with any of your family or friends who’d appreciate a little magic in their day 🙂

And I’m making films for the Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Awards at the moment, so if you like this film, I’d love it if you could rate it and/or comment on the Pangea Day channel to help me out, and I’ll return the favour on your videos/blog/podcast.

Of the 200 or so films that I’ve made with my phone in the last year, I think this is the one I like the most.

We went on our favorite London walk for the last time yesterday with our friend Lucy – along the River Thames at Hammersmith.

In two and a half weeks, we’re moving to Canada.

So I started filming a plane in the clouds with my phone, thinking about making a video about us leaving, and suddenly something magical happened…

…and kept on happening! Instead of fading, they got brighter, and more intense!

In mythology, religion, art, literature, music and film, the Rainbow is a powerful symbol – a sign of hope and life and new beginnings.

I grew up in Christian boarding schools, so usually the first thing I think of when I see a rainbow is the rainbow that God sends Noah after the great flood in Genesis:

“And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.”

Yeah. It’s either that or The Wizard Of Oz.

See you on the other side 🙂

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Mrs Patel

Shot and edited on my Nokia N93 phone – excuse the lip sync – combination of the phone editor and Ovi’s flash video conversion.

“The next person to inspire me”: Mrs Patel from our local Post Office, about to be closed down by incompetence and greed in government and the privatised Post Office. After 35 years of service to our community – what does she get? An OBE? No. Termination.

This is today’s entry for the Pangea Day Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Awards.

The brief is to make 2 minute films about:

– The next thing that makes you smile.

– An act of kindness.

– The next person to inspire you.

– The best part of today.

They don’t stipulate in the rules that it has to even be shot on a phone, never mind a Nokia, but I’m doing what I always do and shooting AND editing on my N93. Hopefully that’ll give me extra brownie points with the judges! (if I get that far)

Please go here to the Pangea Day channel on Ovi and give me views and comments and favorites to help me out. You need to sign up for an Ovi account to comment, but if you have a spare two minutes, *please* do (also, you should upload your own)! It’s only the most popular films that will get a chance to go in front of the judges.

I should say that aside from the main competition at Ovi, the remarkable Mr David Howell has been appointed by Nokia to run his own Pangea Day competition at http://davidhowellstudios.com – post a link to your film in his comment section by May 2nd.

ANYWAY, enough selling

as for today’s film…

The Government are currently engaged in a disgraceful act of cultural vandalism. I believe that in 10-20 years – and beyond – they will be remembered for two things: The Iraq War, and the loss of the Post Offices.

For the sake of a mere ¬¨¬£200m per year, they are closing the last remaining centre of community in thousands of towns, villages and urban neighbourhoods. This is a brief interview with Mrs Patel, who has run our Post Office for 35 years. Two posts offices within half a mile of here are closing. Seven in our Borough. (and of course thousands throughout the country.) We have a higher density of older and disabled people in this ward than anywhere else in the borough – people who will lose vital services.

I’m glad that I’m not going to be in the country at the next election. I’d be in a real dilemma at the ballot box. I couldn’t bring myself to vote Tory, but nor could I bring myself to reward the current bastards for everything they’re doing. Every day, more reasons to emigrate.

The Post Office issue is a classic case of everything that’s wrong with a) blind Privatisation and b) our party-based representative democracy. The local MP, Andy Slaughter, who lives opposite me, was fiercely against the closure of the Post Offices. But he couldn’t express that view in Parliament, where he represents us, or he’d lose his job. He was forced to vote for something he knew to be wrong, because his weak, venal party leadership had decreed it as policy.

Anyway, you probably came here to watch me making my usual arse of myself, not listen to my political opinions, so I’ll stfu and let you meet the lovely, inspiring, discarded Mrs Patel.

Original File: MPEG4 File

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The Best Part Of Today – April 6th – Snow!

Click to Play

Amy’s first time in snow.

Formats available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4)

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Seesmic – Video Conversations

Not the most interesting post for some of you, as it’s about the features on a new video sharing site that only a limited number of people have access to. Sorry. Tomorrow might be better 🙂

I’ve been playing with Seesmic for the first time today.

(I got an invite after emailing the guy in charge a few weeks ago)

In my intro to the NaVloPoMo group about how we’d cope with trying to post video every day in November, I said that I thought any online video counted, no matter how it was recorded or published… so I’m going to follow my own advice and just publish the video conversation I’ve had on Seesmic today.

I’ve linked to the public versions of the videos, below. i.e. You can still see them, even if you don’t have a Seesmic account. But if you don’t have a Seesmic account, you just can’t get involved, reply or go anywhere else in Seesmic from these links. So you have to click on each link in turn. Which is a drag, but I guess it’ll open out before long.

The thing is, you can see how a video conversation can develop easily with this tool.

These links open in new window/tabs:

This is my original post, called “My first proper Seesmic: get mobile, Seesmic”

And below are the following short replies, all within a short time of each other, which develop into a conversation of sorts, where people are referencing each other’s replies. They’re quite quick, and you can see how this could get a) addictive and b) interesting, particularly if these people can use video to talk and show things beyond the confines of their desk.

Mike’s follow up saying that half the above video was lost

My reply to all of them

Adam’s reply

My reply to Adam and Mike

Nik’s reply

My reply to Nik

If you can’t be bothered to watch them all, my point in my video is that they’ve limited it so that you pretty much HAVE to use your webcam to record – trying to use anything else is a pain. And yet it would be SO EASY (and free) for them to change this – so that you could film outside with your regular camera and then just upload the file direct to Seesmic. At the moment, if you film something with your camera, you have to convert it to a Flash flv file before uploading, which is silly. It seems obvious to me that conversations could be more interesting if they were inspired by and conducted in more varied and interesting environments than just people’s desks/offices.

Hardly rocket science. But quite fun. And there’s a shortage of good tools to create video conversations. Damn, I hate that word. Why can’t I stop using it?

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Christmas Fair at my niece and nephew’s Waldorf school

Just a collection of moments from today.

I wish I could have shown you the Gnome House. It was one of the sweetest things I’ve ever seen. Amy was awed. But it was way too dark to film. (Even my kitchen at night is too dark to film. It’s the one thing that really bugs me about the N93. I think I’m going to have to stop using it soon, so I can have some fun with colours and night-time filming.)

Anyway, the school is pretty amazing.

Those drawings I show on the way into the main building – they’re by people in Class 9, who are (I guess) 15/16 years old.

It’s not an art school. It’s a Waldorf school – an holistic educational movement set up by Rudolph Steiner in the early 20th Century. Read more here and see the Wikipedia entry on him here. It’s pretty interesting.

Also ran into the brilliant and unhinged Jason Jarrett (ABuddhistPodcast.com and ForestRowRadio.com) whom I met for the first time two weeks ago at Phil Campbell‘s bash (see here for evidence), and only afterwards realised that we had this other connection. Only saw him briefly, but hopefully have even more excuse to hang out now.