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.)
I was at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho last night for Scuttle (after-work social media meetup). Tom Hall from Nokia Womworld, who sent me to Helsinki & Bucharest a couple of months ago, told me was going to turn up with some friends to make a ‘personal delivery’.
Please excuse the advertising. It’s just that I don’t get serenaded in a crowded pub very often.
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.
I’m not going to be posting everything here – just a few bits and pieces. You can follow the whole tour on Twitter here: @ruperthowe – and by following the #n86tour hashtag that the three of us are using (just put n86tour into the search box) – and most of my video will be on my Flickr stream – when my phone is actually posting things properly. Bloody technology.
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.
Nokia have flown me to LA today for the Pangea Day Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Challenge, in which I’m one of five finalists.
Update: I didn’t win, Eduardo Cachucho did, but the event was extraordinary and they laid on untold luxuries for me, Kate and Amy. We had an amazing trip.
Pangea Day was the largest film festival ever – all around the world, people gathered to watch films chosen by the Pangea Day judges. Both in officially organised events in cities on each continent, and in thousands of small community-organised clusters. The idea of Pangea Day is to bring the world together through film. It was a TED funded project granted to Jehane Noujaim, director of the documentaries Startup.com and Control Room.
The day before Pangea Day, I attended the Pangea Day Filmmakers Retreat, for which they flew dozens of emerging documentary makers to LA from around the world. It was a day of presentations from prestigious documentary makers and collaborative exercises, with group mentors. I had Matthew Modine as my mentor… So it was quite hard to resist doing my best Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Especially as the atmosphere was relatively humourless. 100 documentary makers. It was a bit like a pre-natal class. That kind of setup always presses my Naughty Boy button.
Anyway, it was a great experience. And it was all free.
Next Pangea Day – May 2010? They say they will try to do it every two years. It can only get bigger and better. Viva Pangea Day!
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.
This is one of the things I’m going to miss most about England when I go to Canada.
I shot this on Monday in Devon, on the way back from Kate’s dad’s cottage to the station in the nearest town. 20 minutes of death star taxi adrenaline. I was wondering what I should do with it until I saw Gogen’s NaVloPoMo Day 7 video of his drive back home through his town at night, set to music. Then I realised I’d secretly known all along what to do with it. NaVloPoMo is full of people responding to and being inspired by other people’s videos. Organic video conversations. I love it.
And I love how – when cutting quickly to music – you can find and take advantage of chance interactions between image and soundtrack.
It feels good to finally add the score for real, since when I’m actually driving at high speed along single lane country roads, this is *always* what I’m singing to myself in my head. And if I’m driving and there’s nobody else in the car, maybe perhaps sometimes I might even possibly have been known to sing it out loud. Maybe even quite loud. Especially the bit that kicks in after he turns off the tracking computer. It’s like being 11 again!
