Jeff S

forsaken butter

Perfect weather week is ending. Here comes the cold. Here comes new stuff with the cold though!!!

I got some hot new/pink wheels courtesy of Dave. My green wheels were on the verge of causing an accident, so I have been ridin' dirty on a bike for the majority of the summer. Bikes are wonderful, but the logistics of locking up a bike in NYC can sometimes be time-prohibitive. Thus, scooter.

Dave and I are working hard on an untitled project, something along the lines of "Action All-Stars." It could be our most thoroughly thought out and theoretical project yet, but palatably so. People of all ages will be able to enjoy, that sort of thing.
It must be difficult to appreciate how much thought goes into most of our video work (even with something seemingly simple like Whale Balls). It is surprisingly hard to not make something terrible. New and great ideas are hard to come by, and even harder to organize and present. For this reason, and because Dave works a lot, most of our videos come out looking really dirtstyle, though unapologetically so (embrace your medium!).
This project, on the other hand, will have a much tighter aesthetic. When treated properly, found footage can hit just as hard as shooting a frame of film. It's gonna blow all yer "I so could have done that" comments AWAY!

The other week I attended a roundtable at Wired magazine's NextFest, a technology trade show that happens now and then. This particular event concerned the emergence of usable web video technologies (i.e. Youtube, Google Video, etc.) and how this affects traditional TV businesses (i.e. NBC, ABC, ETC).
It was moderated by Wired's editor, Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) and was populated by plenty of "The Man": NBC's CEO, CBS Digital's CEO, MTV's CEO and Discovery Channel. Google Video was there too.
The conversation was predictably awkward, with Anderson asking semi-hard questions, and the networks providing demi-responsive answers. Talk veered quickly towards the lack of great business and advertising models ($$$). The monetization of "premium content" (Survivor) on places like YouTube was talked up, as was protecting copyrights of rights-holders. The popularity of user-generated content and the hypocritical attitude concerning illegally uploaded content (Family Guy clips) was largely overlooked.
I think that the media industry is going to find itself in a sink-or-swim situation very soon. Despite CBS/NBC/etc.'s emphasis on the high production costs of quality programming, I would bet my new shoes that quality programming will continue to survive regardless. Quality programmers, on the other hand...

An interesting aside: when Chris Anderson was probing the participants to see how they might envision the monetization of online content, or whether monetiziation is even possible, Larry Kramer (prez of CBS digital) said "I'm surprised—you should be the guy who says technology will solve everything."
This is an unexpectedly rich jab at technology-folk, actually giving Wired and their crew a bit more credibility in suggesting that Anderson supports a more critical look at technology, contrasting Wired's usual techno-hype-scheme.
By using the word "critical," I am not referring to the Luddite-style "lamer Kramer" method of technological criticism.
related: a meta Pitchfork article (responding to a Chuck Klosterman article on video game criticism) about the lack of competent technology critics

I also got to see Park(ing) come here recently! Park(ing) is a performance/installation done by the ReBar group in San Francisco, and Transportation Alternatives from NYC brought it here. This mini park was installed in a parallel parking spot for the day, with the meter fed the whole time. Well done TransAlt and Rebar!