WATCH THIS is a weekly column which highlights films and filmmakers from around the Web.
When I’m looking around the Web for videos to write about here, I try to cast a wide net and view all sorts of different films. I don’t really have a choice about that; the latest numbers indicate YouTube alone has 72 hours of video uploaded every minute. Yes, most of that is kittens and lip-dubs, but still, the sheer amount of video available out there makes it difficult to filter out what’s worth writing about.
I bring this up because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it is that I look for in an online film before commit to writing about it. Sam Sprynczynatyk’s short film, “Homophones,” seems a good example of the kind of film I like to see on the Web. At a mere ninety-three seconds, it is the sort of film one can watch in between bites of a sandwich, but one viewing isn’t nearly enough.
The film hinges on a very simple conceit. Every scene is a split screen, illustrating two homophones, or a pair of words that sound the same. The viewer will have to put in the teeniest bit of mental elbow-grease in order to pick up on exactly which two words Sprynczynatyk is illustrating before the film cuts to another set of words.
It’s a fun little exercise executed beautifully and minimally. What really strikes me is how this film begs to be viewed within a browser window. I’m sure the film would look just lovely on a ten foot screen, but I’m not sure that “Homophones” is as well suited to the big screen, say a festival shorts program, than it is to be viewed quickly while you’re browsing the Web or checking email. I’m as guilty as anyone of hitting play on a Web video and either giving up or switching to another tab/application while the video terminally plays down. When I started Homophones, I almost did that, but then I saw the fun in picking out the different scenes and I stopped everything else. I actually took my hand off of my mouse (a rarity) and sat back to play along.
So many of the films I see online have outsize expectations. These are films that would fit in a festival or are intended to go to theaters. But the Web, while providing access to a massive audience, should be treated as its own distribution medium. Web videos for Web video’s sake. “Homophones” is exactly that and it’s an absolutely charming little film.
Read the rest
Remix Radio on Thursday, May. 31st
99% Invisible is, as producer Roman Mars tells it, a “tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world”. Don’t let the “tiny” fool you: there’s nothing small about the ideas Mars explores.
Episode 55: The Best Beer in the World
If you’re a beer nerd, or have a friend who’s a beer nerd, you’ve heard of Belgian beers. Belgians take beer very seriously. Amongst the 200 Belgian breweries, there’s a very specific sub-type: Trappist beers.
According to our reporter Cyrus Farivar (also from Episode #36 “Super Bonn Bon”), there are two things you need to know about Trappist beers. First, they’re amazing. Second, they’re made by Trappist monks. These monks trace their roots to a monastery in 17th century France, and have since spread out to all over the world.
The main concept behind the Trappist lifestyle is that the abbey should be economically self-sufficient. In other words, the monks should make something and sell it to the public as a way to fund the operations of the abbey itself. Some make cheese. Some make spirits. There’s even one in Germany that makes lentil soup. But none of the Trappist products are as famous as the beer.
Read the rest of the article, including bonus video, at 99% Invisible
New episodes of 99% Invisible, air weekly on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am, and Tuesdays at 10:55pm. Also, 24/7 on Public Radio Remix.
Produced by Roman Mars, with support from LUNAR. It’s a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco and the Center for Architecture and Design.
Twitter: @romanmars
Read the rest
DJ Mike Biggz on Thursday, May. 31st
The name Azealia Banks (not to be confused with the Aussie rapper signed to T.I.’s Grand Hustle) has been buzzing around like a swarm of bees, after the success of her viral hit “212” and new deal with Universal Music. The term “viral star” may translate to “unwarranted hype” to some hip hop fans. Does her anticipated EP 1991 live up to the hype?
As she says in the title track “1-9-9-1/My time has come”. 1991 is the year Azealia Banks was born and this release comes just days before her 21st birthday. The music of this EP is also fitting to the title, since it reminds me of early 90s New York house music. Some hardcore hip-hop fans who don’t like dance music might be turned off since there are no “rap” beats. It’s all house and electro, but as I said earlier, the musical concept of this EP really is more an homage to NYC’s house music roots. If this came out in 1991, it would be up there with the ranks of hip-house greats like Techotronic, but way, WAY more lyrically advanced.
Anyone who ever questioned Banks’ lyrical ability, should give this EP a good listen. In fact, you’ll be forced to listen to this EP a lot, just to catch what she’s really saying. Like Nicki Minaj, Azealia Banks has a flawless rapid fire delivery, minus Nicki’s strange tourettes-esque voices. From the title track to the EP closer “Licorice”, her rhythm over these four, 4 to the floor records, are just ridiculous. On “Van Vogue”, her flow effortlessly switches up with the music’s cord progressions without skipping a beat.
Bottom line, the girl can rap! Banks is that very rare breed of female rapper. YouTube vids aside, she has emcee skills for days, and has managed to get on without a male counterpart’s co-sign. What does that mean? Well, many of your favorite female rappers got on because they had an established male rapper ushering them in. Kim had B.I.G., Nicki has Wayne and Drake, Foxy had Jay-Z and Iggy Azealia–who Banks has expressed her disapproval of– has T.I..
Tip recently fired off at Banks with some amazingly sexist remarks and I’m still not sure how they slipped past the ears of the radical feminists in hip-hop. Aside from her non music hype, the good and bad, her music really speaks for itself and we’ll all be waiting to hear more from Ms. Banks as her mixtape “Fantastic” and debut LP “Broke With Expensive Taste” are set to drop before 2012 comes to an end.
Read the rest
Robyn Gee on Thursday, May. 31st
Attention starving musicians: a new way to perform and collect quick paychecks is available online.
Stageit is an online concert venue for musicians. Artists offer webcam performances to their fans that usually last 20 – 30 minutes and cost around $5 per ticket. The performance is not archived, so if you miss out, it’s your loss. While there’s no audio coming from the fan side, fans are able to chat questions and make requests via chat.
Evan Lowenstein, founder and CEO of Stageit.com, said it’s kind of like a hang-sesh with your favorite artist. “We’re a compliment to live touring….These are little bits, like a day in the artist’s life to share with their fans. From a fan’s perspective, we allow you to see three concerts in a night in an hour and a half…. To not have to deal with parking, dinner, or a babysitter – it’s a different experience,” he said in an interview with TurnstyleNews.
Stageit is not to be confused with a Ustream look-alike. Ustream is a free live video streaming site that uses an ad-based model, so the viewer is not paying the broadcaster for any content. Instead, Stageit tries to foster the relationship between the artist and the fan. “Their interest is to get as many eyeballs as possible. As an artist you might say, that’s a really good thing, but they’re getting money from Chevy. They’re not getting funding from the fans,” said Lowenstein. On Stageit, fans directly support and pay the artists they watch.
Stageit launched in March of 2011, and business is growing rapidly. In February of this year, they had 4,000 artists offering concerts, and now they have around 10,000. Artists include Jason Mraz, Jimmy Buffet, and Trey Songz, as well as several lesser-known and independent artists. And anyone can sign up. But if you’re one of the top-selling artists, or you’re already a big-name musician, you’ll appear on the Main Stage or the home page.
Jack Conte is a musician with the group Pomplamoose, an “Indie Rock Pop” duo that is known for their re-harmonizations of pop songs, and their video songs on YouTube — some of which have over 9 million views. Pamplamoose played their first concert on the Stageit Main Stage last week.
“[Stageit] comes very naturally to us, it feels like an extension of what we do, except live,” said Conte. “We asked during the stream for everybody to type in where they’re watching from. It was unreal. We had every continent represented and a lot of countries I didn’t know existed,” he laughed.
The first time an artist plays a concert on Stageit, according to Lowenstein, is priceless. “Every artist that does it kind of makes the same joke, ‘Hey, I’m not wearing any pants!’ It’s a different vibe for the artist, it’s a hybrid between sitting still in a recording studio in front of a microphone and performing live where people are actually watching you,” he said.
Conte said Pomplamoose had tried to stream concerts using other platforms. ”There are a lot of websites and start-ups that are devoted to helping musicians mobilize their fan base, but few of them offer legitimate revenue streams,” said Conte. “[With Stageit] you take musicians and have them do what they do best, and out the other end of the machine comes money. That’s such a wonderful idea for a website. It helps artists make a living,” he added.
Conte said that Pomplamoose hopes to offer a monthly concert on Stageit, since their first one went so well. In the future, Stageit will include a “Side Stage” feature with more options for connecting fans to each other and to the performing artist.
Read the rest
When Shannon Mills left her job as the director of a nonprofit in Berkeley, California about five months ago, she didn’t know what her next job would be. After freelancing for awhile, she decided to hunt for something more permanent.
“I started putting in applications and you know how the job market is …it was just crickets on the other end. People weren’t even telling me thank you for applying,” she said. That routine can become demoralizing. Mills switched up her strategy, migrating her search for work to TaskRabbit.com.
TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque conceived of this online marketplace in 2008 after the stock market had crashed, and the wave of layoffs was creeping. “It’s really about empowering people in a service networking marketplace to connect and help each other out,” she said.
Many of the site’s early “Rabbits” were unemployed people looking to tide themselves over until they found a stable job in their field. More recently, the ranks have been plumped up by a lot of full-time moms, who take on Tasks like a grocery run at Costco.
“They’re out running their own errands anyway,” explained Busque. “It may be more difficult for young professionals that live in the city with no car. Our most popular tasks are in the category of house chores, grocery deliveries, food deliveries. One thing that did really surprise me is Ikea furniture assembly…there’s people out there that are experts at doing this.”
Using TaskRabbit, you can outsource everything from fixing a doorjam to penning a love letter.The person doing the hiring posts a task with a suggested fee, and then qualified TaskRabbits can counter bid. Busque says if a TaskRabbit has diverse skills, they could end up getting two to three Tasks, and up to eight hours of work, a day.
According to Gallup, the U.S. under-employment rate is hovering at 19 percent. New apps and services that help people supplement their incomes are taking off in cities around the country. Until TaskRabbit, Craigslist was the go-to free online destination to find casual work. But TaskRabbit’s strapping infrastructure of profiles, bidding, and reviews makes Craigslist’s “Gig” category look a bit quaint. And crucially, TaskRabbit has one-upped Craigslist on the trust factor.
“There’s a video interview,” said Busque, “a series of background checks including a Social Security trace…from there, just like at the DMV, all of our TaskRabbits have to read a manual, take a quiz to get their license.”
WALKING THE GIG TALK
“Trust and reputation are critical,” said Ariel Seidman, founder of a similar service, Gigwalk. “We’re helping facilitate a transaction between two different people. To me that’s the big learning across all these different systems.”
While TaskRabbit connects individual users with each other, Gigwalk matches people looking for extra cash with businesses that are looking to outsource localized tasks they don’t want to hire a staff for. Many of these business clients are using Gigwalk as a de facto workforce platform.
Twenty-three year old Maia Bittner tried Gigwalk soon after she graduated from college. Bittner was freelancing in software engineering, a member of “the cafe class” that parks themselves at coffee shop tables in San Francisco’s Mission District, fueled by espresso and free wireless. Gigwalk’s simple tasks, like taking panoramic pictures of the inside of her makeshift office, let her make a little extra cash while she was doing other work.
“They were going to post this onto Bing maps,” said Bittner, “so if people were looking up different restaurants to go to, they would be able to see what the atmosphere was like. I figured the seven dollars would buy my coffee for the day.”
Now that she’s got a full time job, Bittner accepts gigs infrequently. Scanning the app one afternoon, Bittner likes one of the gigs listed, which involves driving a client to the airport and being paid 40 dollars for it. But Bittner says it’s not uncommon to see gigs that seem tedious, like another one she spots in the queue.
“It says find and photograph UPC codes,” she said as she scanned the gig. “They pay eight dollars, which sounds like a lot of money for just taking a picture of a UPC code in a store. But I think it involves me looking through the store shelves, and trying to match up a UPC code with an item on a shelf.”
For Shannon Mills, TaskRabbit has let her re-invent her work life and enlarge her network. She finds freedom in it. She’s cobbled together enough work that it basically amounts to a full time job. She makes, on average, a thousand dollars a month. ”It’s enough to sustain me,” said Mills. “I think that this is an experiment for me, and I’d like to keep trying it for little awhile, and see what works and maybe what doesn’t work.”
One thing that might not work, over the long term, is the lack of stability. That’s the catch about services like TaskRabbit, and Gigwalk. They’re thriving in part because of a shrinking traditional marketplace, and they don’t offer benefits, insurance, or a guarantee that the work will be there the next day.
TaskRabbit is growing fast. After getting its first round of venture funding last year, Task Rabbit has 4000 active Rabbits getting work from the site, and a thousand more on the waiting list. Using Gigwalk, 130,000 people have completed gigs across 50 the states.
This story also aired on NPR’s Morning Edition. It was produced by Youth Radio’s New Options Desk.
Read the rest
Really really stupid.
TechDirt reports that a firm working on behalf of 20th Century Fox issued a link takedown notice (yes, this is something they can do) to Google that asked for a link to an SFGate article be removed. The reason? It was infringing on Fox’s film Chronicle’s copyright.
SF Gate is, for those who don’t know, the website of the newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle. One of the oldest papers on the west coast.
This is not only silly, but dangerous.
Opinions expressed in Game of Buzz are the sole responsibility of the author.
Read the rest
Image: Three of the film’s co-writers: Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Dave Segal, and Adam Conover. Source: ECP website.
The comedy troupe Olde English loves a good challenge. So when founding member Ben Popik threw down the gauntlet and asked his friends to write a movie together, using a method devised by the Surrealists, the group took on the task. Right before they all went their seperate ways. The result– The Exquisite Corpse Project– will have its world premiere this weekend at the Dances With Films Festival in Hollywood.
The rules for the project were simple: each writer would come up with 15 pages of a script. The next writer would have only the last five pages of the script along with a list of character names and locations to work with. Popik would be responsible for directing the result.
What Olde English has delivered, however, isn’t an off-the-rails series of sketches (although there is a little of that) but a hybrid of narrative and documentary that provides a bittersweet look at a creative marriage that had nearly run its course. A touch of Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, but with more laughs and no psychoanalyst to help the “band” process things.
Earlier this week I met up with Raphael Bob-Waksberg and David Segal in Los Angeles. They are both writers and subjects of the film, having been with Olde English from the start. Bob-Waksberg revealed that the troupe didn’t set out to make a documentary.
“I think that’s something that we really found in the editing of the movie,” said Bob-Waksberg. “None of us really knew what this documentary stuff was going to be when we started. None of us knew what this thing was going to be when we started.”
All that Segal and Bob-Waksberg, along with Olde English compatriot Adam Conover and collaborators Chioke Nassor and Joel Clarke, had were the rules and the troupe’s penchant for approaching comedy with an eye towards structure.
“We were always a group that was interested in form first,” said Bob-Waksberg.
Case in point: the 2006 “Rules Show” that Olde English mounted after four years of writing and performing together.
“We gave each other rules based on each other’s weaknesses,” said Bob-Waksberg. “Dave, for example, was famous in the group for not being able to remember any lines. So I gave him a challenge: you have to write a monologue and perform it, and you have to get it line for line perfect. You can’t improv.”
“If you mess up you have to start over,” Segal added.
“Someone in the audience is going to be on book,” continued Bob-Waksberg, “and he did it.”
“I started over a lot,” Segal admitted.
The film cuts back and forth between the story of a couple whose relationship takes a series of improbable twists and turns and the documentary footage of the writers who are flying blind. Everything is structured so that the writers are, more or less, discovering the story at the same time that the audience is. In less confident hands this could have lead to a meta-textual disaster, but the storytelling chops of Popik and his collaborators are strong. Producing over one hundred and fifty short videos, as Olde English has, will do that for you. The documentary portion of the film plays it straight, even as the film within the film veers into self aware territory, a kind of neurotic by-product of the exquisite corpse process.
Yet the film within the film that we get is more fractured, perhaps, than the one that the writers actually produced.
“It was amazing how much of it connected. How many plot things ran throughout the whole movie,” said Segal of the script, the first read-through of which is documented in the film. “There were a bunch of weird coincidences with themes. There was at one point a theme of statues.”
Not all of those coincidences made it into The Exquisite Corpse Project’s final cut.
“In Joel’s section one of the scenes that we ended up cutting,” said Bob-Waksberg, “He’s like joking around and saying ‘I’m Anthony and you’re Cleopatra, watch out for snakes lady.’ And then totally coincidentally this whole snake thing comes up later [in the script].”
Nevertheless the film focuses on the fissures in the creative process. Offering up an examination of all that can go wrong when you are working closely with your best friends. There are clear moments of tension in the film that reveal the kind of productive creative-disfunction familiar to anyone who works on collaborative projects.
“I’ve gotten angrier with you,” said Bob-Waksberg to Segal during our interview “and Ben and Adam and {lead actor] Caleb [Bark] than I have with anybody else in my life. I include my parents in that. You’ve seen me at my angriest and ugliest. I think I’ve seen the same of you.”
“I threw a chair,” Segal confirms.
Yet both writers, who only recently saw the finished product for the first time themselves, said that they’ve taken away an upbeat lesson from the final film. Segal confided that he was concerned initially that the movie would show Olde English at their rawest and most fractured. Instead he sees the film as a testament to the strength of the troupe’s bond.
“It could have gone really negative afterwards,” said Segal. “The potential is there to have hurt feelings. At the end of the day we’ll argue and do all this and then the next question is: ‘Hey do you want to go to Joshua Tree?’ We’re just really good friends.”
The film breaks out of its shackles as an examination of a single project and stands on its own as a meditation on the uncomfortable truths, and unexpected joys, of creative collaboration.
The Exquisite Corpse Project premieres at 2:45pm this Saturday, June 2nd as part of the Dances With Film Festival, held at the Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood.
Read the rest
The Hollywood Fringe Festival, the annual un-curated theater, cabaret and film festival that takes place all around Hollywood is just two weeks away. As part of the final run-up the Festival is drumming up support for their Kickstarter for the year, looking to grab a wide base and complete a fundraising goal $20,000 in those two weeks.
The centerpiece of the campaign is the $5 Fringe button, which grants a discount on tickets and drink. Use it five times and it pays for itself. The festival, however, has a full stack of rewards which include having cocktails named after patrons.
Kickstarter is an interesting play for an organization like the Fringe. The crowdfunding site has taken on the airs of a pay-for-play environment, yet this kind of fundraising is more along the liens of traditional festival fundraising. Only they are cutting out the middleman of a large development team and relying on Kickstarter as their infrastructure. It’s a strategy that paid off last year, but was a down to the wire affair–if memory serves– to reach $10K.
As always, it’s an all-or-nothing affair. Which might just be part of the appeal– every Kickstarter is a little drama of its own.
Read the rest
NPR on Tuesday, May. 29th
One of the day’s most-discussed stories has to be The New York Times‘ report headlined “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves A Test Of Obama’s Principles And Will.”
It’s a long, detailed look at how the president has “placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.”
Obama himself, the Times‘ Joe Becker and Scott Shane report, approves “every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’ poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war.” Those who end up on the list become targets of potential drone strikes.
This afternoon, All Things Considered host Melissa Block asked Shane what surprised him most among the things he and Becker discovered.
For Shane, it was the Defense Department’s “rather open process by which they nominate” suspects to that kill list. As he and Becker wrote:
“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.”
It is “this strange, secret trial in a way,” Shane told Melissa.
The nominees get sent to the White House, where the president and his top advisers hold “Terror Tuesday” meetings to go over the list and related topics. If, when it comes time to fire a missile at one of the suspects and it appears there might be family members or other civilians nearby, Obama “has reserved to himself the final moral calculation,” the Times reports.
More from Melissa’s conversation with Shane is due on All Things Considered later today. Click here to find an NPR station that broadcasts or streams the show. Later, we’ll add the as-broadcast version of the interview to the top of this post.
Read the rest
Turnstyle on Tuesday, May. 29th
The Force is strong with Alain Bloch, founder of the Golden Gate Knights. Bloch, a life-long devotee of the Star Wars franchise, teaches a class that allows his padawan leaners (that’s “students” for you non Force Sensitives out there) to unleash their inner Jedi through fight choreography.
In the Sith-free shadow of the series reaching a milestone 35th anniversary last Friday, we offer up this look at Master Bloch’s own San Francisco Jedi Academy.
Read the rest
9(MDA3MTM5NTU4MDEyOTk3MjkxOTMwNTY3ZA001))
