Comments (7)

By Frank, 19 December 2005 4:06 pm

A few months ago I entered the StockStock film festival. It sounds a good idea – they choose a bunch of video from the Internet Archive and anyone who stumps up $20 gets a copy of their chosen material on tape. The entrant then gets a few weeks to edit it in to something interesting before posting back a completed entry.

So why am I disappointed? Because it seems that despite their novel use of archive footage they seem locked in a weird time warp when it comes to communication and sharing.

• They provide email addresses, yet have never once replied to any of my emailed questions.
• They don’t even acknowledge receipt of submissions, let alone provide feedback to entrants.
• They listed the names of the entrants whose work was selected for screening, but nothing at all about the videos.
• They have not provided any way of contacting other entrants.
• They have not even mentioned how many entrants they had.
• Worst of all, they have not provided any way for interested viewers to see or discuss the entries other than attending a one-off screening in Seattle last September.

This is crazy. I understand that my entry was probably not good enough to make the screening, but how can I get any better with neither feedback nor the ability to see the work of other entrants?

By diligent web searching, I have managed to find a very small number of other entrants who have made their entries from this year’s competition available on-line:

• “An introduction to videoblogging” by Frank Carver
• “Meuchelmörder” by Matt Longest
• “Granny Anime” by Nithin Shenoy
• “3″ by Alan McAnulty and Rik Tweed
• “Success” by Aeryk Pearson

While searching, I also found a few entries from last year, too, but still no official page, or links.

• “Aperture” by Ethan Anderson
• “n00b” by Nithin Shenoy
• “Attack of the Galact-O Cybernaut Mutants” by Alan McAnulty and Rik Tweed

A few others have mentioned their entries, but not (yet) made them available:

• Ethan Anderson
• Art Machine
• Scott Dierdorf

If any readers know of any others, please let me know and I’ll add to this list.

And to the stockstock folks, if you read this:

You have a fantastic opportunity to connect a thriving community of movie editors, please don’t waste it by being a black hole and thinking that one screening (to what, a few hundred people?) is the end of the road. Share the love.

Comments (0)

By Frank, 18 December 2005 10:24 am

I don’t tend to use the divx codec much at the moment, but it’s still interesting to note that that a new version is available. Anyone interested in playing with this generally well-regarded codec should probably get a copy.

Read more at: DivX 6.1 released… and yes it works with the new Dr. | Dr. DivX 2.0

Comments (0)

By Frank, 16 December 2005 9:05 pm

Definately worth a look; Eventdv.net has a steadily growing collection of digital video related articles. I’m still working my way through them . . .

Comments (1)

By Frank, 13 December 2005 8:07 pm

Tips on filmmaking are always welcome. If you have some time to spare, why not take a listen to this recent Cinema Minima podcast about Learning How to Make a Visually Compelling Film.

Comments (0)

By Frank, 13 December 2005 11:37 am

I love accents and regional dialects, so I was enthralled to find IDEA, the International Dialects of English Archive. There are some interesting samples available, but unfortunately they seem to have a somewhat harsh view on what you can do with them. There also seems some confusion on what rights they give out. The above “copyright” page states:

You may play an IDEA recording or text file in a lecture, class, training session, or workshop directly from the internet, or your students may do so from their own individual terminals, without obtaining special permission; but distributing copies of them either by disc or by digital file, requires special permission and the payment of an appropriate fee.

Yet the front page of the site states:

Once you have chosen a recording to download, simply click on it and save it — at no cost to you!

And when you get to a page of samples it states even more forcefully:

**IMPORTANT** In order to properly play these soundfiles, you must first save them to your hard drive! Please right-click on the desired sample and choose to save it to your computer. Our server does not support streaming audio at this time.

I leave it to you to work out what you actually may or may not do.

Via Complications ensue.

Comments (0)

By Frank, 7 December 2005 10:58 am

The always thoughtful Robert Nagle (a.k.a idiotprogrammer) has just published a detailled and useful review of Digital Video Hacks by Joshus Paul from O’Reilly.

I’ve been meaning to take a look at this book for a while – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed some of the other books in their “hacks ” series. Robert’s review not only waxes enthusiastic about this book, but includes a bunch of useful references and comparisons too.