2008, year of video, plus my India Road Movie
Wednesday January 02nd 2008, 10:25 am
Filed under: Travel, Video
Posted by: Georgia

I’ve never been one for new year’s resolutions, but if there’s one goal I have for 2008 it’s to make peace with online video. Having spent a good part of my professional life working in television, I’ve got plenty of prejudices about quality etc. to rid myself of. In fact, I strongly believe that one of the reasons I was able to embrace audio so freely is that I’ve never worked in radio.

So brace yourself for a season of bad CFR videos as I teach myself to shoot (as opposed to telling somebody else to shoot) moving pictures, edit (as opposed to sitting with my hotshot editor brother and watching him push the buttons) and play with various methods of compression and presentation while savouring the limitations imposed on me by bandwidth and my reluctance to impose too much on the patience and goodwill of my viewers.

I recently invested in a small, cheap Aiptek GO-HD camcorder, but the video below was filmed on the Panasonic still camera I took with me to India last year. The footage sat there for a year, until, inspired by some of the things the Egypt group were doing with their little camcorders, I decided to sit down a few weeks ago and hack it into something. It’s a little over six minutes, which is a long time to be looking at footage shot from the side of an auto-rickshaw, but it’s got a nice soundtrack and a few interesting images here and there. So why not pop a Dramamine and take a look?

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10 Comments so far
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Georgia, I can’t wait to see more.

Comment by Geoffrey Philp 01.02.08 @ 10:49 am

Lucky them – I see very little traffic

Comment by Hassan Voyeau 01.02.08 @ 12:51 pm

Looks like we’ve got the same goals. I’ve finally got Final Cut Express installed. Now I just need to start reading through the 1000+ pages of manual.

Did you use iMovie or FCE for the India movie? The scenes that were slowed down really went well with the tempo of the song. And last question, how’d you get it to say “Georgia” instead of “blip.tv” in your video player?

Like Geoffrey, I can’t wait to see more.

Comment by oso 01.02.08 @ 1:05 pm

Thanks, Geoffrey and Oso. And yes, Hassan – the traffic wasn’t so much heavy as chaotic. Not so for Delhi, however.

Oso, I used iMovieHD to edit this one. I cut the next one, which I’ll upload to blip.tv as soon as my internet connection allows, using FCE.

And to answer your last question: I’m not sure how I got the video to say “Georgia” (which is my blip.tv account name) but one possible reason may be that I’m using the player “for most blogs and web sites”, not the Legacy player.

Comment by Georgia 01.02.08 @ 1:18 pm

i think the key is to remind ourselves that the web is not TV. there are so many good examples of web video that are different from what we expect to see on TV.

we’re always talking about this stuff on this group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging

it’s what we make it. I say it’s just people telling stories.

Comment by jay dedman 01.02.08 @ 3:56 pm

Thanks, Jay. And you’re absolutely right, of course.

Have joined the group.

Comment by Georgia 01.02.08 @ 4:07 pm

Love it and look forward to more!

Comment by Wendy Warnick 01.02.08 @ 10:30 pm

thanks. i really enjoyed those streets.

Comment by pepa garcía 01.02.08 @ 11:57 pm

Beautiful!
Great choice of music, and great cutting.

I’ve spent the last year sheddding my hangups about production values, too. Even though I’ve been videoblogging since 2005, and absolutely love things that people were making with the simplest tools, my film/tv preconceptions would haunt me.

So I started shooting, cutting and posting all using my N93 phone. It left very little room for worries about fancy stuff between what I was filming and me.

Here’s one I made with it which complements yours – a ride in a tuk tuk in London! – during the Navlopomo month of daily videoblogging in November:
http://twittervlog.tv/?p=218

I actually think that little still cameras are often better for shooting a lot of stuff – yours captured the colours and atmosphere of the Indian streets better than a ‘high quality’ DV or HD camera. The colours were rich, and so were the blacks. And it has a kind of warm Super 8 feel without the loss of detail. Looks fantastic.

I’ve had Kodak and Canon digital still cameras that have made *beautiful* little films, were easy and unobtrusive to use – and recorded great sound, too!

See what Jay Dedman & Ryanne Hodson do with their little camera – sometimes Jay sets his films to music, sometimes they just cut moments together with live sound. Just using simple cameras and basic editing.
The rhythm of the cuts accompanied by the changing background atmos sound is amazing. I find it totally inspirational. So personal, so immediate, so direct. No need for patronising TV presenter voiceovers to tell us what we’re looking at or why we’re looking at it.
He and Ryanne have made a bunch of films in India, Cambodia, Thailand as well as in the US. Check them out at http://momentshowing.net/ and http://ryanedit.blogspot.com/

Really looking forward to seeing more of your films, especially now that you’re in for doing it weekly :)

Comment by Rupert 01.03.08 @ 7:48 am

This is great!

Comment by Sanjiva 01.06.08 @ 10:38 am



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