Throughout this quarter, Flip the Media will be featuring some of the best video projects from the winter Multimedia Storytelling classes.

“Honor & Tradition” by Stephen Brashear and Xurxo Martinez

Our client was Academia della Spada, an academy that teaches 16th Century sword fighting techniques and frames them as part of Western Martial Arts. Every other year, the academy organizes a symposium on Western Martial Arts called 4W. The goal of our video, which focused on 4W, was to explore and explain Western Martial Arts through the words of instructors and participants.

We shot the video with a Canon 5D Mark II and recorded the audio with a lavaliere micro and a Rode shotgun. We edited the video in Final Cut Pro.

We learned that it’s difficult to put together interviews that were recorded in different settings with very different background noise. Additionally, we learned the importance of planning the video before you start shooting.

The news regarding the MCDM is indeed spreading. I met with a group of filmmakers from Qatar yesterday as they identify and visit various “hot-spots” for digital story telling and documentary.

These visitors are in the United States under the auspices of the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program. Their program is arranged by World Learning Visitor Exchange Program and the World Affairs Council.  They outlined their objectives to me as follows:

• To gain an overview of documentary filmmaking and the independent filmmaking community in the US;
• To explore institutions that provide training, professional development, and support to filmmakers;
• To examine documentary film as a form of free speech and as a voice in public discourse on social, political, and cultural issues; and
• To observe how film festivals bring the filmmaking community together and support the development and distribution of independent films.

It is gratifying to know that the message about our good work is making its way around the globe as we prepare our curriculum and position our activities to better serve a “glocal” (global/local) constituency.Qatar

http://www.vimeo.com/11769258

Tracy and her husband Patrick are the publishers of the West Seattle Blog, one of the hyperlocal weblogs that have proved it is possible to make a living from community journalism in a neighborhood or small town. She has been identified as one of the communicators who is finding ways of making sense of news as a business by people like the Poynter Institute — she is part of their Sense-Making Project — and the News Innovation program at CUNY. Read more…

Throughout this quarter, Flip the Media will be featuring some of the best video projects from the winter Multimedia Storytelling classes.

“I am a Flip Camera” by Anna Pan & Antika Emyaem

Our video is a promotional video for the UW Pocket Media Festival 2010.

The goal of the video was to convey that everyone can use a pocket camera and be a video producer, in addition to encouraging people to participate in the 2010 festival.

We shot the video with a Canon HV30 and edited with Final Cut Pro.

A recent Japanese TV drama features the Twitter phenomenon in Japan. Written by a famous screenwriter and starring popular Japanese actors, this show is about a group of youngsters who met each other through Twitter and grew their friendships and relationships in real life. This TV show shows that Twitter has gone mainstream in Japan, and makes me feel curious about how Twitter got its popularity there.

The total number of Japanese Twitter users is impressive: it passed 5 million in February and is expected to reach 10 million by the end of this year. (source) In contrast, most international social networking sites have had difficulties attracting users in Japan. For example, Linkedin and Facebook have less than 1 million users in Japan. (source) The number of registered members of the local social networking site, Mixi, is 10 times greater than Facebook. Twitter is the first foreign brand to break through and obtain success in Japan.

Launched in 2008 in Japan, Twitter didn’t establish a local office; instead, it partnered with a Japanese internet service company, Digital Garage. Using Twitter is very similar to sending text messages. Since the Japanese are heavy users of text messaging, they were able to easily adopt the Twitter service. In addition, Japanese people very often use mobile phones for web services, and Twitter Japan provided official mobile access. Furthermore, while the Japanese market was full of social networking services, there were no services in existence that were similar to Twitter.

Twitter has been implemented differently in Japan than in the U.S. Some applications and functions are only available in Japan, like video sharing and ads on each page. Twitter Japan also built a business model in January, earlier than Twitter in the U.S. Users are charged to access certain types of content, images and videos from businesses, and then Twitter shares the revenue with those companies. This model is different from the “promoted tweets” model in the U.S, Twitter’s version of keyword ads.

It is always interesting to see how culture affects technology adoption. An article from Techcrunch shows the reasons why the business model of Twitter Japan might work. Twitter obviously understands the importance of localization and how to win local customers’ hearts. Every other international web service could learn something from Twitter’s actions.

Recently, a new start-up called Richi Tip Box has grabbed people’s attention in Taiwan. The goal of this service is to encourage blogging by ensuring that bloggers receive financial support. Currently, a popular source of income for bloggers  is advertising. However, Richi Tip Box has a different approach: bloggers can use the Richi platform to propose topics they would like to write about and seek micro-funding before publication. Interested prospective readers can then donate money to support the proposed blog post. When bloggers have enough funds, they start working on the projects and publish them by the promised date.

The concept of micro-donations is not new; they have been used as a fundraising tool by charitable organizations. The Richi Tip Box founder decided to apply this funding model to supporting bloggers because he thinks readers should be able to enjoy the content without being distracted by ads. In addition, he felt that bloggers whose articles are in demand by readers should have a chance to earn some income. The spread of the Facebook “like” button may mean that people have become more comfortable with giving compliments online. Richi Tip Box provides something similar to this “like” application: an icon for bloggers placed on the sidebar. If readers click the Richi Tip Box icon, they do not only “like” the article, but also donate money. Before Facebook, this function may not have been well-received.

When thefunds have accumulated to a specific amount, bloggers can withdraw them from their Richi accounts via Paypal. One of the key features of Richi is that it manages the complex cash flow on behalf of the bloggers. The company knows that in order to persuade people to buy digital content, it is necessary to reduce the complexity of the transaction. Readers can simply add money via credit card or Paypal, just like purchasing Skype credits. Bloggers can concentrate on blogging and do not need to worry about dealing with money.

The Richi Tip Box model is different because it makes readers pay before the work of the blogger is done. From my perspective, this model will work best for those bloggers who already have a group of followers. Those who are just getting started will need to utilize the power of social networks to grow their readership. The Richi idea is inspiring — people can pay for their beloved bloggers, knowing that the content will be of good quality. I believe this service is based on the right motivation and concept, and I’m curious to watch  it develop.

Last month, Wolfire Games, an independent game developer and distributor, unleashed a pay-what-you-want campaign for a bundle of indie games that seemed to take a play from the famous Radiohead pay-what-you-want experiment. The Humble Indie Bundle, as it was called, was offered from May 4 through May 11, and generated over $1.2 million in revenue for the game developers who participated, as well as two charities.

The bundle initially consisted of five indie games: World of Goo (2D Boy), Aquaria (Bit Blot), Gish (Edmund McMillen), Lugaru (Wolfire Games), and Penumbra: Overture (Frictional Games ). Later, Amanita Design kicked in a sixth game, Samorost 2. All the  games run on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms.

People could literally pay anything they wanted for the Humble Indie Bundle, starting at $.01. The largest single donation rang in at $3,333.33. I personally paid $10.01. You could choose to allot part or all of the price to the two charities, Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). While you could have bought the games or donated to the charities separately, the combination of the two made the bundle appealing. You can’t deny the power of one -stop shopping.

John Graham, Chief Operating Officer of Wolfire Games, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the Humble Indie Bundle campaign in a post-promotion debriefing.

How did the idea for the pay-what-you-want Humble Indie Bundle come about?
Ever since the success of 2DBoy’s pay-what-you-want experiment and our Organic Indie Preorder Pack [a game bundle of Wolfire’s Overgrowth and the Unknown Worlds’ Natural Selection 2], we had this feeling that independent developers could really do a lot to promote themselves.
How did you decide what games to put in the bundle?

Our main requirement for this bundle was that we needed awesome indie games available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.  We didn’t have a fancy rubric, and weren’t maximizing any kind of bundle hotness equation, but I think it’s fair to say that we ended up with a group of games that are all different but very awesome.
Have you ever tried anything like this before? Did you learn anything from the Radiohead pay-what-you-want experiment?

Well, our theory was that a pay-what-you-want bundle would maximize participation and also allow people to feel like they were getting their money’s worth, and I think this proved true.  With pirated copies already easily available for all the games, we figured our biggest risk was not piracy but rather that we would spend a lot of time on this promotion, and then no one would hear about it. Read more…

I quickly learned the expression “loaded for bear” as I struggled to master what it would take to become a backpack journalist several years ago.  It’s a wonderful way to say “be ready for anything” — and when you’re out there in the field by yourself armed with a camera, you had better locked and loaded for the shot of a lifetime.  The conundrum?  You have to pack enough to prepare for all eventualities, while at the same time you need to be compact and mobile.

Now, As I prepare for an intense five-day shoot in Detroit, I have to think hard about the ratio of gear:production values.  For sure, YouTube and Flip cameras have sensitized us to shaky video and hollow audio.  But at the same time, as everyone piles into the visual storytelling game, maybe better production quality will help my content stand out.  It’s a lesson I learned after the MCDM hosted TEDx Seattle.  We originally intended to stream the event live through a consumer-grade camera.  Ultimately, we decided to spend some money and go with a high-end setup that would emphasize the “professionalism” that our degree represents, through broadcast quality video and audio.  It was a sound decision: we found out later that we had higher than average viewership for this kind of event, and people remained on our streaming site longer.  Other than the exceptional content, I believe superb audio-visual standards of our live stream compelled our viewers to stick around.

I’ve been noticing this “bifurcation” for a while.  On one hand, we do want more “authentic” multimedia content, and it’s great to have all of these amateur sources.  On the other, we’ve bought into high-definition TV and 3D Hollywood blockbusters in a big way.  Indeed, The Economist magazine remarked upon this peculiar phenomenon last year: Read more…