Social Media for Practitioners

Social media for Practitioners from mikejohnston

Why worry about Social media? 

Well there's value in reputation, as there has always been.  It has been suggested that we have moved to a 'reputation economy'.  Social Media offers the Practitioner the opportunity to engage in conversations with other Practitioners and also their potential cunstomers.  But there are many issues not least around attention and time.  It comes down to focus, filtering and practice.

Understanding the power of networks underlies what we are discussing here.  Here is a great video that explains and illustrates this brilliantly.  It also introduces the idea of how knowledge is organised and organisation online will pop up again when you consider hashtags.




Where peoples' interest is aroused then they will propagate what they have found, learnt or experienced.  We have seen things that have suddenly been picked up and gain massive exposure, known as 'going viral'.  This video has been viewed 21, 372, 046 times in under 2 years.

How is it useful to Practitioners?

Here is an example of a band who have clearly spent a long time creating their online presence.  It's consistent but very connected in terms of the services they have used. 

Here is a smaller scale example of a great local (Bristol) artist Nuala Honan she is on;
Tumblr
Twitter
Bandcamp
Soundcloud

But the link to a Facebook is broken.  That's a shame since it's probably her most important connection.  Facebook deserves a whole workshop just on it's own.  Here's FB's recent advert.  It still amazes me!

Twitter basics.

Not one but 2 great guides:

• LSE guide to Twitter for academics - a fantastic guide that applies to practically everyone!
• The Beginner's guide to Twitter.

I used Twitterfall in the class which allowed me to enter the hashtag #iciasat and all tweets with that tag where then displayed in real time.  Twitter requires you to understand the importance of the name you use, your 'bio', 140 characters, #hashtags and url shortening.

There are ways of curating Tweets such as Storify, Paperli and Twylar. 

There are Twitter 'clients' (applications) that allow you to tweet and manage several social media streams (accounts) such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.  I can't get on with either!

At Bath Spa University we have been using social media to cover events live.  This is a good example of the uses of SM.  The Social Media Experiment.

What to write or blog?  YouTube created a great resource called The Creator Play Book.  Below is the old version.  The newer is available here.  It gives you a good idea of the way to engage people with video but the lessons are broadly applicable.

Photography.

There is a huge value to images online.  You can't afford to ignore this.

One of the oldest established service is Flickr but sadly it's been left to rust by Yahoo who bought it a few years ago when it was the 'go to place' for photos and photography on the Net.  It's been over taken in some ways by Instagram.  Here's my Instagram displayed with Statigram some things are more popular that others.  Notice the popularity of pets, plates (ie food before and after) and sunsets!

How Journalists are using Instagram (Pinterest, Google+, Soundcloud)

Facebook bought Instagram rather spectacularly and as a result here's the 'mashup' FB meets Instagram.

There is a huge photographic community online.  Tumblr, a blogging platform works very well for photography and has a very active community too - it's very connected.  Here's My Tumblr PhotoBlog.  Here's an example of a themed 'photoblog'.  I think it's rather good. London Shop Fronts 

Blogging basics

Blogging basics from mikejohnston

I use Blogger for my own blogs and currently with the students I work with.
There are some basic rules - this covers the main points well Do you make these mistakes when you  blog?

The requirement for images and video has become easier to satisfy.  Alot can be done with a modern smart phone.  I would suggest the purchase of one would be a good way into social media both as a way of understanding it and using it.  My current preference is the iPhone 4S.

Video publishing

Video publishing from mikejohnston

As well as video there is audio too.  Although this might be less applicable in some situations.

Audio publishing 2.0 from mikejohnston

A large part of social media is in discovery and curation and you should think about fitting into this ecosystem!  Pinterest is worth exploring.

Lastly you might like to explore using Linked in.  You can find me there.  I also have an 'AboutMe' account that provides a useful place to collect all my online activities.

Lessons in 'Quick turnaround' event coverage

Last March I took part in Bath Spa University's 'Social Media Experiment' coverage of X Media Lab Conference in Bath using Social Media.  X Media Lab Bath 2012 presented a great opportunity for Bath Spa University’s staff and students. A live, high-profile digital media event right on our doorstep. Event directors, Brendan Harkin and Megan Elliot, offered us a project that would enable students to use their media creation and publishing skills. I would support the students as Producer, helping them provide a variety of video coverage of the event.  We went on to produce 3 'quick turnaround' videos.  One shot during the VIP event launch at the Roman baths (Thursday).




One at the end of the main conference day (Friday).



One at the end of the mentoring weekend (Monday)



Later over the summer we produced a final 'overview' edit using all the material.



The footage was shot on Sony Z1 DV (tape) based cameras with some further material from Canon 7D.  It was a relatively slow and traditional process of ingesting, logging and capturing and editing.  The 'quick turnaround' wasn't bad but it wasn't actually very quick.

Today the Social Media Experiment was covering the ExPlay 12 event in Bath.  This time I decided to restrict the video team to iPhone.  How did we do?  How would it compare?

The quickest turnaround is 'one step' publishing.  We shot very short 'video bites'.  Then with no editing uploaded to YouTube and then Tweeted the link.  It worked but, perhaps having become used to having the ability to edit, I felt that the bites needed 'top 'n' tailing' - trimming, to tidy them up.  The uploading and tweeting workflow wasn't smooth.  Shot in Filmic Pro - uploaded to YouTube - tweeted.  All the detail and hashtags were entered twice without a keyboard.

'Two step' publishing was easier in someways.  Shoot on phone.  Transfer via USB lead and Image Capture.  Trim in QuickTime.  Upload to YouTube.  Tweet from YouTube.  Naturally we needed a laptop.  But the whole kit we used filled one shoulder bag.  YouTube does take a while - not long but worth noting.  Sadly when you tweet from YouTube the description doesn't automatically populate the tweet.  Which would have been neat and sweet!

The iPhone worked quite well - a 4s.  Problems with focus 'bubbling' and exposure meant that we used Filmic Pro which allows the frame rate to be set along with the focus point and the exposure.  We also had a small LED light (TecPro 'Fillini') which worked really well and made a huge difference to the quality of the image.  However the video quality wasn't high - not sure why we set it so low.  The interview eyelines were difficult to bring around enough.  Shooting video runs the batteries down quickly and we had to re charge at lunch time.  It's awkward to hold, so some sort of grip would have been a good idea.  Certainly a monopod would have helped.  Even without support, the videos were shake-free as a result of the image stabilisation in the app.  I had slight concerns that Interviewees wouldn't take us seriously with the iPhone - but this wasn't an problem.  None were surprised.  We used a shotgun mic (K6+ME66) with the phone - the built in mic would rarely have worked in the noise.  I made the lead by following this tutorial.

We started at about 11am and finished about 4pm.  All 15 of the video bites were up and tweeted by a leisurely 6pm.  As well as tweeting them individually they were playlisted in YouTube as and drawn into  Storify.



Lessons learnt?  Don't leave home with a decent mic and portable light.  Downloading the clips via USB and trimming in a laptop is the most sensible route to go.  Maybe it might work better with an iPad and editing in iMovie.  Tomorrow we'll give it a go.  I have my doubts about the ergonomics of shooting with the iPad and Filmic Pro is not full screen on the iPad.  But it will be interesting to compare with today's experience.

Understanding montage and parallel action

This excellent video essay takes 'Inception' and relates it's key storytelling device, parallel editing, to cinema pioneer DW Griffith. But how do Griffith and parallel editing relate to 'montage'?




When one scene follows another again we construct a meaning from their juxtaposition. We have learnt to do this. Similarly when 2 shots are juxtaposed (placed next to each other) we look for a connection or meaning between them. It’s the association of the 2 images that creates meaning for the Viewer. (There can also be a juxtaposition within a single frame too.) We take this so for granted today that as a result it’s sometimes not easy for us to actually decide why some arrangements of images, shots and scenes work better than others. To edit we need to use these ideas since they are the basis of how to assemble a visual story. If we see the shot of a building followed by a woman at a desk we assume that she’s working in the building. This is a learned response developed over time.



The first films of the Lumiere Brothers were single reel, single shot snippets of live or staged action. These would be shown as a collection projected for an audience. George Melies effectively used what we would call ‘in camera’ editing for his theatrical magic shots that showed objects and people disappearing and reappearing. The actual film wasn’t cut and rejoined, he merely cleverly started and stopped the camera.



Until 1902, all scenes were shot in one take from beginning to end. If there was a problem with the take, then the whole thing would be re shot. The audience saw what the film maker had seen, one continuous unbroken piece of action from a single, eye level, all encompassing (wide) view. A direct copy from the theatrical experience. This meant that films were short, 2 − 3 minutes long. Few films were even broken into scenes. But Edison employee, Edwin S. Porter, a resourceful Projectionist, took what he already had - footage of fire companies in action - and combined it with footage he’d filmed, into a single event for ‘The life of an American Fireman’. The juxtaposition suggested that these events were connected and had happened at the same time. By joining separate scenes together his ‘transition’ (a dissolve) released cinema from the constraint of space and ushered in the use of editing as a way of telling the story. The edits served to make the film much more dramatic too. People would now engage more directly with film.



In his next film ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903) he cut directly from one scene to another as well as showing simultaneous action by cutting from scene to scene, now know as ‘cross cutting’. People understood that the action shown was happening at the same time. What seems odd to us now is that Porter and others failed to take this technique further and use the cut within the scene. In 1908 he directed DW Griffith in ‘Rescued from the eagle’s nest’. It was Griffith, as a Director, who would take the limelight and cinematic storytelling further that same year.

In spite of his Producers’ concern that the audience ‘wouldn’t pay for half an actor’, in the middle of the action in ‘For love of gold’, Griffith cut from a wide angle to a close up. Importantly the audience understood the cut since it was the same scene from the same camera angle. A year later in ‘After many years’ he cut to a close up of an actress then to the object of her thoughts.




Griffith carried on innovating and for ‘The lonely villa’ (1909) in an attempt to increase the dramatic effect he ‘inter cut’ between the woman and children hiding inside, the bandits outside the villa, and the husband racing home. All the action was within the same scene. Three lines of action were shown, and their screen time bore little relation to real or likely time. All his cinematic storytelling techniques paved the way for longer films - Birth of a Nation and his masterpiece ‘Intolerance’. This film was to have a huge affect on the development of ‘montage’ developed by Russian Directors, most famous of whom was Sergei Eisenstein.

‘All that is best in Soviet film has it’s origins in ‘Intolerance’ Sergei Eisenstein.

The technique of juxtaposing images has come to be known as ‘montage’, named by Eisenstein from the French meaning ‘assembly’. Montage is used to refer to the associative or intellectual juxtaposition of images. In his quest to deconstruct film-art, theorist Lev Kuleshov’s experiments explored the associative powers of juxtaposition and stressed the role of the editing in their combination.

Lev Kuleshov (http://www.thefullwiki.org/Lev_Kuleshov)

In one experiment Kuleshov used what is now know as the ‘three shot sequence’. He took a piece of film of the actor Muzhukhin with a deadpan expression. He then cut in 3 successive ‘insert’ images; a bowl of soup, a small child and an old woman in a coffin. Then it cut back to Muzhukhin for a ‘reaction’ shot. When viewers saw the cut from Muzhukhin to the insert shot it to be what he was seeing, his POV. The viewers failed to notice that the footage of Muzhukin before and after the insert shot was identical. Instead they were struck by his 'subtle but convincing portrayal' of 3 emotions - hunger for the soup, joy at the child and remorse for the old woman, in the reaction shots. Since there was no acting in the sequences Kuleshov argued that the meaning must have been created in the Viewers’ minds purely by the juxtaposition of uninflected images. By changing the experiment to include different reaction shots he found that the meaning of the sequence could be altered by the shot order. (Smiling - gun - frowning = fear, frowning - gun - smiling = bravery).

Vsevolod Pudovkin (http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ruwiki/34522)


Within Soviet Montage there were a number of schools of thought. These were particularly characterised by two ex students of Kuleshov’s; Pudovkin and Eisenstein. Podovkin went on to develop his own ‘5 editing principles’ based on montage theory and juxtaposition:

• 1. Contrast
• 2. Parallelism
• 3. Symbolism. Cutting from one shot to a completely different shot that in some way symbolises the action/character in the first
• 4. Simultaneity. This creates tension in the viewer since 2 actions on screen at the same time lead to an outcome that will connect both on screen
• 5. ‘Leit - motif’ - a reinteration of theme. The repetition of shots or a sequence to reinforce the theme

In 1925 both were charged with making a film about the Revolution. Pudovkin’s family based ‘Mother’ favoured the smooth montage and 'relational editing' of shots that maintained some continuity in time and space, following the route of Griffith.

Mother 1926




While Eisenstein’s grand symphony ‘Potemkin’ favoured more ‘dialectical’ editing, extending the juxtaposition further and abandoning any semblance continuity and providing a shock or jolt. The dialectic is argued using contrast and irony. His ‘collision’ of images used conflictional content, still/dynamic, screen direction, large/small, dark/light, real time/perceived time. He was particularly keen to exploit editing’s ability to create it’s own sense of time, or ‘film time’, drawing out and dramatising particular moments. He also popularised the use of very short shots.

Potemkin 1926



Griffiths, Pudovkin and Eisenstein were all keen on literature and looked to literature to provide them with scenarios and stories (they were particularly keen on Charles Dickens) not so Dziga Vertov. His approach to film and montage was different again…but that’s another story.

‘Temporal ellipsis’ is an editing device that might be confused with montage. In Hollywood and in scriptwriting formatting, this technique is often referred to as a ‘montage’. It is used to compress time, and is visibly seen to do so. It lies in the area between montage and continuity cutting. Filmic time is shortened or speeded up primarily to move the story forward, so unimportant items are omitted - ellipsis.

Re cycling HDV tapes - Don't

Last year we decided to switch from SD DV to HDV. (How much do I regret that decision?)

I have already blogged about the issues we had with just playing the material in QuickTime outside of Final Cut. In view of the problems we had we decided to switch back. We recycled the tapes and even took the precaution of pre striping them in SD DV. Then we sent the teams out to shoot. When they returned, we started the capture and logging. that's when the timecode issues started. OK, its one of the 3 Sony Z1's. Nope they all had the same problems. Its due to the deck we striped with being faulty. Possibly but unlikely. We guess its the original HDV timecode. Wouldn't you assume that recording over timecode would have erased the previous?

The advantages of HDV over Standard Definition 16:9 video are clearly outweighed because of the disadvantages. In fact if the time spent trying to get the stuff into the edit then out of the machines were spent on planning, shooting and editing the quality of the film would be more significantly benefited. ( Have I calmed down yet?) Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Solutions to recent transcoding problems

Transcoding is the process of changing a file from one format to another. Last week having edited as aif students needed to convert to a Wav file. Its common to have to do this converted from one to another and back again. The conversion to MP3 is also very common. These are all different CODECs.

Here is a post I wrote earlier this year about Switch - a free Mac app that makes it easy to convert from one audio format to another.

The file conversion site Zamzar is another favorite of mine. This works on all sort of file types - image, document, media.

The producers of Switch also make a free - multi platform audio editor called Wavepad Sound Editor, it looks good and will do the conversion to multiple formats too. The open source fav is Audacity - which I have found to be good. for simple stereo editing Sound Studio is neat and very mac-like. It only runs of Mac and doesn't convert to MP3 sadly, oh yes and costs $80.

You have to get used to understanding formats and develop your own toolbox and workarounds. There isn't an easy cheap one stop shop. Or maybe there is? Let me know.

31 outlines in 31 days

The aim was to write the outline for a short film each day of the month - for the whole of July. I got the idea from doing the Bath Photomarathon. A sort of writing challenge - a' writeathon'. I wanted the outlines to be for a short film of 5 - 8 minutes in duration that would be easily producible. I largely stuck to these criteria.

How did I do? Well if I'm honest, I didn't manage 31 out of 31. Life got in the way several times. The 10th to the 15th in particular - as I tried to clear the decks before my leave!) But looking at the 21 outlines I did write, I notice several things:

1. I never failed to write one when I started
2. Sometimes they came easily but mostly they didn't
3. I never spent more than 45 mins writing any of them
4. I wrote several a day at times to 'get back on track'
   
5. Some are boring, some are obvious, and some might have potential (in that proportion)
   
6. I got better at it and worked out ways of doing it more easily
   
7. The repetition and process helped. Sometimes 2 different ideas ended up in one outline
8. I enjoyed it and laughed a lot
   
9. I was pleased with some of my ideas
10. I was pleased to get to the 31st

I found a number of ways of getting going:

• save up ideas during the day (this felt like cheating)
  
• taking any idea and thinking it out. Any idea will do...and like waiting for a bus, a whole bunch tend to arrive at once
• sitting somewhere different
• listening to music
• pretending to be someone else
• start with an object, image, character, a story, a line of dialogue
• taking something that already exists and re imagineering it
• doodling
• what ifs...
• moving around
  

Was it worth doing? Yes I think it was. Leaving aside some of the ideas that are worth developing, there is definitely something to be gained from really immersing yourself in an activity. It focused my mind on lots of issues around storytelling. There are some re occurring themes - the film-making process (constructed reality if you want to be fancy), mundane things behaving oddly, and strange romances. In the future I would like to write some outlines that are more associational than linear. I think that the time constraint defines the type of film. The short film is almost a genre of its own. (One of the outlines is about this.)

Would I do it again? Yes, but not for a while. I think that I might apply the idea to photography or songwriting. I intend to develop some of the outlines too. Again I think that applying a pattern to their development might be interesting. Do 1 a week? Pick 4 for a month? I might try that next. First comes a weeks holiday.

Using Youtube or Vimeo?

YouTube is a great service and I use it alot. But there are some advantage of using another service called Vimeo. The main one is that you can upload videos and control the people who have access to it. So that rough cuts and work and progress can be shared or collaboratively worked on , privately. As far as quality goes I thinks its about even. YouTube has improved recently with the addition of HD and more importantly support for 16:9 playback. I, personally, find YouTube to stream more consistently. But then I think my home ISP (Tiscali) is to blame for this!

The basic account at Vimeo is free with limits on the number of HD files you can upload a week and the max weekly data upload. Thats 1 HD video and 500 mb respectively. Plenty for normal use. The video that you upload is converted by Vimeo and then the orginal is deleted after a week, leaving the compressed version to view and download. So its NOT a storage service for your videos!

You need to compress the video, initially. This is to maximise your data useage, mimimise the upload time and create the best looking online video. There are a number of ways of doing this. Here are the vimeo guidelines:

Codec - Choose H.264 for the video codec. Choose AAC for the audio codec.

Frame rate – 25 per sec. If there is an option that says "current" just go with that.

Keyframes - Every 25 frames. This is basically how often the compressor references your uncompressed video.

Data rate - 1800 kbits/sec for standard definition 4:3 video , 2500 kbits/sec for widescreen DV, or 5000 kbits/sec for high definition. Making these numbers higher will increase both quality and size.

Size - 720 x576 for standard definition 4:3 video, 1024 x 576 for widescreen DV, or 1280x720 for high definition. It is also best to export 1920x1080 or 1440x1080 video as 1280x720 too.

Deinterlace - Yes. If you do not deinterlace, you will often get weird-looking horizontal lines in your video.

Sound sample rate - 44.100 kHz

Audio quality - 128 kbps.

To convert SD DV use the free handbrake application. Instructions here. If you have FCP here are instructions. If you want to use Compressor (from the FCP studio bundle) instructions are here with a downloadable 'droplet' for you desktop to make it even easier.

I have also been trying QuickTime Pro and MPEG streamclip as ways of compressing the footage. I'll post about these soon.

Good luck.

Mike J

Students work for semester 2 2009

Here is a short collection of students work from 2 modules that I teach, Introduction to video (first year Broadcast Media) and Making a film (second year Creative Studies). There are more examples on the Broadcastlab's YouTube channel.

I hope that you enjoy them.

transcoding to MP3

I hate it when Apple remove a function or facility from some software. We get so used to companies adding utility. I recently wanted to create some MP3 files from .aiff files. Easy, I used to use iTunes. Possibily the only thing its useful for. Except the newest version I have doesn't seem to allow you to do this anymore. 

The solution was to use a free application called 'Switch'. This worked like a dream and with much more control and features than iTunes.  Great.

When working with FCP, its easiest to disarm iTunes. I hate the way it hijacks audio CDs and automatically opens them in iTunes. I turn this off, and re set the default application.   (Select the file in the finder, then click command (apple) + i.)

Now when I load an audio disc , I preview it in the Finder and when I open it , it opens in QuickTime. If I want to use the track in FCP then I save it to the media assets file of the project, and transcode it to 48K at the same time. No iTunes, no glitchy playback, all the assets in the right place.

The offical Apple way of bringing audio into FCP with Batch export is DAFT.

cheers, Mike J

More issues with HDV and FCP

As we move through the production workflow with the students doing 'making a film' at BSU, more problems with FCP and HDV are emerging. There is a little trick to get FCP to recognise the capture deck that's not obvious.

IF the last project created was anything other than HDV, and you open your HDV project and try to continue logging and capturing - you can't. The deck (device control) will not link to the Mac. After trying 2 leads, 2 decks and 2 machines I found that if I changed the easy set up to HDV and created a new project. Then closed it. I could then, on returning to the original HDV project, connect the deck and log and capture. What a pain!

The pictures look nice though.

Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express

Recently I have been helping students make short films.  Their first steps into filmmaking, and a steep learning curve.  We try, as much as possible, to remove some of the technical complexities.  Allowing the students to concentrate on the storytelling.  The last two weekends have seen 14 shorts in production.  They were all filmed over 2 days (a weekend). Now we're start the post production.  But first the logging and capturing.

One of the decisions we had taken fro the students was to shoot in HDV rather than our usual default, anamorphic DV.  We could see the advantage of the greater resolution - we might need to tweak some of the shots.  We'd project in 'high def' (HD) and drop the films down to standard def (SD) for the DVDs.  The data rate is, after all the same as SD, but with greater image size.  Great!  OK, we know that there's a slight lag from the time you press record to when the camera records.  But thats a small price to pay.  We thought.

If only things were as simple as they looked!  Some of the tapes we issued were pre-stripped. (We were keen to avoid timecode breaks - a perennial problem with novices).  Sadly these were stripped in SD DV.  We subsequently had worse timecode breaks than normal as the decks we were using for capture kept requesting we change format!  We worked around this problem, but there were more.

Some students, tempted by the keen pricing and educational discount, owned FCP Express and were keen to use their own machine to do their edit.  Usually we get the teams to create the master folder with a master FCP project and all the rushes.  Students can then copy this onto external drives or laptops to do their own individual edits.  It normally works fine.  On monday one keen and diligent student, having finished logging and capturing on one of the Uni's Macs, wanted help to transfer it to her own Macbook.  I was pleased to help her and we transferred the data using target disc mode.  We then opened the FCP Pro 6.0 project in FCP Express 4.0.  Problem - all the clips had audio but failed to display the video.  We investigated and discovered that there was a codec issue with FCP Express.  I suggested purchasing QuickTime Pro.  That'll sort it out.  Nope - at a cost of $30 (approx).  The next option was to delete the media and re capture from the master tapes.  That seemed a pity.  Why had this happened?

Its not clever but it would appear that FCP Express encodes HDV (Mpg 2) into Apple Intermediate codec.  FCP Pro allows you to natively edit HDV format.  To solve the problem therefore in FCP Pro we used media manager to 're-compress' the footage into the Apple format (the file size increased only slightly).  This, hopefully would work in FCP Express.  What a pain.  Next time we might set FCP Pro to capture all the films in Apple Intermediate Codec. But I suspect that there's another gotcha lurking in there somewhere!

Interesting ideas

Reading through all the post the Fd students have been doing recently. I saw particularly struck by one video on jessies blog. Stop motion animation is relatively straight forward - we did some in the induction week for fun. But they take time - and they are fairly familiar to us. Jess found one that takes the idea and technique further. Goodness know HOW long this must have taken!


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

The future shorts website and Youtube channel are great. They showed an excellent selection of short films at the Little theatre this week in Bath. One film - made in Bristol also uses stop motion. Again the idea and technique have been taken further than usual.



Lastly I have been interested in 'light writing' for a while. The technique relies on long exposures from a locked off camera with someone drawing with a bright light or touch etc. If offers an inoffensive way of adding graffiti to a building! There are plenty of great examples with this effect but this movie adds the technique of stop motion too. Stunning.



Keep blogging, Mike J

Short films

Virgin media have just run a short film competition. I really liked the winner - black hole and we've watched and discussed it in class. What about the shortlist? Since we are not doing animation I have spent more time looking at the live action shorts.

Since I am currently running a module called 'planning a film' with the aim of writing and preparing to film a short (5 - 8 minutes long). Its interesting to look at the winner - Black Hole and the runners up.

Black hole Competition winner as chosen by the judges



5 bricks high (Short listed)



Butterface (Short listed)



The calling (Short listed)



Elevator music (Short listed)



The hobbyist (winner of the the People's choice) (Short listed)



What do you think of these? Can we draw any conclusions from the short list?

Interestingly none were highly rated by the visitors to the Virgin Media website. Only Black hole was listed on the most viewed selection!

Lastly Virgin Media have now up some details about the filming and the filmmakers on the website. It make interesting reading too.

Editing masterclass

Hi Guys,

I hope that you had a great Christmas. Have you subscribed to the BBC Film Programme podcasts yet? Check out this one - an interview with Martin Scorsese's editor of choice Thelma Schoonmaker. She talks interestingly about how she and Scorsese work. She mentions plenty of classic movies. There's plenty to enjoy here. Then check out the movies! You'll be editing too next semester! Happy New Year. See you next week.

regards, Mike J