360º vlog – Saturday afternoon hike with Amy

360º video – click and drag to move around.

Shot on a Ricoh Theta S in Bristol – under the flyover, in Leigh Woods, on Clifton Suspension Bridge and in Coffee #1.

#SlowVlog

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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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Capturing the castle before breakfast – Video blogging week day four

Old clips given a home for videoblogging week 2009.

Château de Quéribus (map) is one of the Cathar Castles in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in the south of France – the Pays Cathare, or “Cathar Country”. Quéribus is sometimes considered the last refuge of the Cathars – perhaps where the Cathar treasure (the Grail?) was carried to, by the four Cathars who escaped the bloody fall of Montségur.
It’s an eerie feeling to have it all to yourself before dawn.

iPhone / iPod compatible mp4 file

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All Canadian

A ‘son et lumi‚àö?£re’ for British Columbia’s 150th Birthday today.

Shot on the dock behind the local halibut burger bar.

Everything about this, and about that sentence, is Canadian.

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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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Immigrant Video Diary – Episode 1: “And you may find yourself…”

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Pangea Day – Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Awards in LA, Day One

Pangea Day, May 10 2008

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!

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