here's a piece I wrote for a street press
mag recently, trying to encourage some more cross-over and/or dialogue
between the quite vibrant VJ & videoblogging scenes... am sending
to both the eyecandy & videoblogging lists too, as well as posting
at a few forum sites, and up@
www.skynoise.net
so we'll see if it generates some more cross-fertilising?
jp
Open Call to Video Bloggers & VJs :
Get Jiggy
Despite all the creative aspirations and
technical skills they share, there's surprisingly little overlap
between the huge populations of VJs & video bloggers.
Nurturing mutual status as pixel underdogs,
both VJs & video bloggers are adept at dealing with low or
non-existent budgets, and both champion storytelling and/or aesthetics
and visual ideas over production values. That's not to say production
values are ignored - in fact, production values probably tie up more
than their fair share of discussion time in either community, but a key
defining aspect of being a VJ or videoblogger is the joy of just of
being able to get those pixels out there.
While all this pre-supposes you have
compelling video / stories / pixels to begin with, at least the current
state of video play helps level the media playing field to some degree.
And the current expansion of mobile video ( phones, PSP, video iPods
& many other handhelds ), continues this window of opportunity for
bedroom pixelists. And to think of a hybrid army of these pixelists,
loaded up with the combined skillsets of the VJ & VideoBlogging
massive, is to imagine a continually more diverse and decentralised
media. So let's bring it on.
What can Video Bloggers learn from VJs?
VJs know how to move pixels in real-time.
Whether responding to music, or creating live audiovisual pieces, VJs
are at home using real-time editing tools, allowing easy compositing,
layering, sequencing and effects on the fly. Aside from live
performance though, the 'instrumentness' of these real-time tools means
they are also very effective and flexible video production tools.
Creativity can be given a new leash when freed from the constraints of
the rendering timeline, and levels of complexity can be explored
spontaneously that would take a long time to build up to with
traditional video editing software. And VJ software is especially
suited to online video publishers, because both VJs & VideoBloggers
tend to use 320 x 240 sized clips ( the bloggers because it's a default
multimedia size compromise for bandwidth concerns, the VJs because it's
a compromise between resolution and allowing the speediest real-time
triggering and manipulation).
VJs also have extensive knowledge about how
to get projections happening, whether on a screen in a club, theatre,
projecting from a rooftop, mobile van, shopping trolley, or even the
side of a train. This is a very useful amount of technical knowledge to
tap into, but should also encourage online publishers to think more
about where their work can be shown offline - where can video be seen?
Be shown? Where can stories be told? Where can your colours be
projected?
VJs also know a lot about codecs, and the
ways video is compressed to create the best combination of image
quality and speed of playback and 'scrubbing' ( moving a file backwards
and forwards on a timeline smoothly ). And a thing or two about
transitions, visual storytelling, the power of the image, the use by
date of the image, effects ( and their ever shrinking use by dates),
automated processes ( such as visual manipulation by audio analysis ),
video signal routing, capturing, sampling and much much more.
Key VJ community resources & forums :
What can VJs learn from Video Bloggers?
Videobloggers ( also known as vloggers)
know the online networks inside out, and know the values and pleasures
of automated publishing - getting your work out there in appropriate
formats, having it automatically archived and linked to from a main
page, having it easily cross referenced or quoted and having interested
audiences automatically notified when it is published. All of which
help make any particularly worthy video rise on it's merits rather than
marketing budget ( netheads love
calling this a 'meritocracy' ).
VideoBloggers also know a lot about compression codecs ( though more
focussed on image quality and shrinking file size than clip triggering
speed), about getting work out to as many different platforms as
possible, about storytelling, about audiences, about online promotion,
about embedding hyperlinks and much much more.
Of course, many VJs are already posting
videos online, but few are harnessing the benefits and play available
with networked publishing. VJ Falk ( Berlin ) (
www.prototypen.com/blog/falk
) continues to clock sporadic VJ created pieces, vjtorrents.com
provides 'BitTorrent and RSS feeds to showcase high quality videos of
live video mixing from around the world' and VJ Bertranol ( France )
http://mjukma.free.fr posts
occasional live mixes and has also created (free) software allowing
easy publishing of video within a blog / web-publishing system.
Hollywood is catching on though - Clerks Director Kevin Smith has a
videoblog (
www.clerks2.com) and
Peter Jackson provides a King Kong video diary (
www.kongisking.net/kong2005/proddiary
) - but there is still time to define your niche. Time to carve out a
global audience auto-downloading your every (bedroom produced ) episode
to their computers, handhelds or mobile phones.
Key VideoBlogger community resources &
forums :
jean poole
