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Wednesday 16 December 2009
Monday 7 December 2009
IPhone Orchestra
Stanford iPhone Orchestra Is Redefining Music's Limits [VIDEOS] - http://mashable.com/2009/12/06/stanford-mobile-phone-orchestra/
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Sent from my iPhone
Saturday 5 December 2009
Are downloads really killing the music industry? Or is it something else?
Check out this bookmark from MyDelicious: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/jun/09/games-dvd-music-downloads-piracy
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Sent from my iPhone
Thursday 26 November 2009
Wednesday 18 November 2009
Thanks for all the filming work that has been going on over the last week or so. Next deadline is for a rough draft to show for the week beginning the 30th. I know this might be a stretch for some of you - if you are in this position it is important you talk to myself and Miss Street this week and early next to work out the way forward. This week we are focusing on a review of your Pre production work.
A reminder of the Assessment criteria for that aspect
To obtain Level 4 you need to show an excellent level of -
research into similar products and potential target audience
we spent quite a lot of time discussing what this would look like
organisation of actors, locations, costumes, and props
work on shotlists, layouts , drafts, scripting and storyboarding
care in the presentation of research and planning
Use the link to the exemplar blog to improve and to Mike Fews' blog to explore these Assessment criteria.
A reminder of the Assessment criteria for that aspect
To obtain Level 4 you need to show an excellent level of -
research into similar products and potential target audience
we spent quite a lot of time discussing what this would look like
organisation of actors, locations, costumes, and props
work on shotlists, layouts , drafts, scripting and storyboarding
care in the presentation of research and planning
Use the link to the exemplar blog to improve and to Mike Fews' blog to explore these Assessment criteria.
Sunday 8 November 2009
You don’t need to sell a million to make a mint - Times Online
On October 14, the Danish singer-songwriter Tina Dico celebrated her 32nd birthday by announcing her latest project on Pledge Music. For €10 (£9), pledgers got a download of The Road to Gavle (inspired by her soundtrack to Oldboys, a Danish independent film) ahead of time, as well as exclusive video blogs, unreleased songs and live recordings. But there was more on offer. The €300 premium package gave pledgers her seven albums and a Christmas card (all signed), along with a personalised video message and song. Other variations offered signed albums and cards, handwritten lyric sheets or tickets to private gigs. Within 24 hours, she had pledges of €35,000 from only 600 fans. All the premium packages were gone.
That evening, Dico, who has been living in London for the past eight years, sold out the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. At least half of the audience had flown over from Denmark to help her celebrate. An established star in her home country, with a growing following abroad, Dico sells on average 80,000 albums. Apart from a brief, unhappy sojourn with Sony, she has always been independent. Her intimate songs are enhanced, not harmed, by relatively low recording budgets, she tours with only two musicians and she has embraced the opportunities technology has given to keep close to her fans on her website (tinadico.com). She controls her own destiny and she makes a good living.
“If an artist has 5,000 fans willing to spend £40 on them every year, they can have a long career,” says Dico’s manager, Jonathan Morley. “They may not be living in a mansion, but they will be stable financially.”
The hard part is getting 5,000 fans to buy the album and T-shirt, go to a couple of gigs and still crave more. Best suited are solo artists in a well-defined niche, with a post-credit-crunch financial consciousness and a determination to put in the work, to interact and communicate with their fans. In the Facebook world, staying in touch is not difficult, although websites need to be regularly updated and to reek of reality, not hype.
The key is financial independence. Selling 100,000 albums on a major label, even on its top-whack 20% royalty, won’t put much of a dent in the £500,000 it has spent to get that many sales. If it’s your own label, you can be in profit selling a tenth of that number.
Stephen Dale Petit, a California-born guitarist and blues evangelist, financed his first album, Guitarama, by busking on the Tube. Now Petit (guitararama.co.uk) can sell out the 100 Club, in London, regularly, while his summer tour featured the former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor.
Merchandising is a crucial part of his profit margin. “You can make a good-quality T-shirt for less than £2,” says Mike Andrews, of Enable Music, who advises independent artists. “Selling it for £10 can be seen as a bargain.” Providing quality connects with fans and does not have to be prohibitively expensive. It costs about 80p to produce a CD in an attractive fold-out sleeve rather than a tatty jewel case. Selling that at a gig for £10 nets a £9 profit. If the act were signed to a major, they would have to pay dealer price for their own album, netting about £2.50 a sale.
That is why Kate Walsh can afford to support Paolo Nutini on his European tour. If she can sell 25-50 copies a night of her three albums and her EPs, that will make enough to pay her expenses. While she’s not a huge shifter of T-shirts, the EP on which she covers three of her favourite 1980s songs is particularly popular at gigs. Two years ago, the singer-songwriter (katewalsh.co.uk) recorded an album in her producer’s bedroom for £500. Tim’s House became an iTunes sensation, outselling Take That. With a minimal marketing and PR spend, the album sold close to 10,000 copies and was picked up by Universal, which promptly spent a lot of money failing to turn Walsh into the next Norah Jones. After she recorded the excellent Light & Dark, the label, preferring to put its marketing efforts into Pixie Lott, dropped her.
“The advantage of signing a big deal is that it puts wedge in the bank and keeps the manager solvent,” smiles Morley, who met Walsh at a Tina Dico gig. “Universal needed to sell at least 100,000 albums, but those are traditional big-record-company expectations, and it quickly became obvious that Kate didn’t fit. So we went back to doing it ourselves. At the moment, Kate is not going to sell a million albums, but there are plenty more people who could love what she does. It costs her £10,000 to make an album, and in four years’ time she will have four albums out and she’ll be playing 50 to 100 shows a year to 500 people a time, selling close to 100 CDs a night. Creatively, this is a better plan.”
Publishing royalties — whether from advances, album sales or radio plays — are an essential part of Walsh’s income. She has also attracted enough attention to get a “sync”, or backing track, on the hit American television series Grey’s Anatomy, which likes to showcase unknown artists. “The slam-dunk income stream for independent artists is the sync,” says Mike Andrews. “Of course everybody wants to be in Grand Theft Auto, the Cadbury’s Flake ad or a blockbuster movie, which can all be worth £500,000, but there is money to be made on websites, from radio and TV ads and in television programmes.”
The right sync can kick-start a career. The American singer Ingrid Michaelson’s breakthrough hit, The Way I Am, first attracted attention on Grey’s Anatomy. A song played in the background will earn about $15,000 for the owner of the recording copyright and $15,000 for the writer. (However brilliantly your gothic swamp-rock numbers go down in a Brighton pub, you are unlikely to get a sync on True Blood without either a publisher or a specialist sync agent, both of whom will take at least 20% for their services.)
How do you pay for recording, marketing and touring costs without a record company? Pledge Music is one of several business models that helps artists to raise capital from their fans. Benji Rogers, an independent musician, set up Pledge (pledgemusic.com) last year because he was “tired of playing great shows, selling a good number of CDs, and still having no money”.
“I saw incredible talent that would sign to a label only to get dropped, and people selling out shows, yet still broke,” Rogers says.
“I noticed sales for larger acts dropping off sharply, fans losing interest and everybody blaming everybody else for why the music business was doing so badly. There had to be another way. Fans don’t want round plastic discs, they want personal contact. Pledge doesn’t sell CDs and DVDs. We offer fans the chance to go on a journey with the artist, in return for which they are rewarded with exclusive material. Originally, I estimated that the average pledger would spend $50. Our experience is that it is almost double that.”
Colin Smith (colinsmithmusic.com), of the New York-based Irish rockers Mr North, needed funds to master, publicise and tour his solo album, The Wilderness. Looking at his fan database, Rogers reckoned he would be lucky to raise $900. By offering everything from private gigs and answerphone messages to guitar lessons — “The three things I said I would never do” — he raised more than $23,000. Right now, Smith is out on the road, and doubtless relieved that none of his fans offered good money to go shark-diving with him.
DVDs’ days are numbered as viewers run for the stream - Times Online
Electronics manufacturers and retailers have begun to prepare for the death of the DVD as sales of the physical format continue to plunge.
This week Best Buy, one of the world’s biggest retailers of consumer electronics, announced plans to push consumers away from its stores’ DVD aisles by making it easier for them to rent and buy movies and TV shows over high-speed internet connections.
Ways to download or stream movies are proliferating via gaming consoles and set-top boxes and TV manufacturers are also introducing ways for consumers to get streaming content on to their bigger screens in the corner of the living room.
Even manufacturers backing the Blu-ray format for high-definition movies are hedging their bets by introducing Blu-ray players that can also show internet video.
Best Buy, which will open stores in Britain next year, said it was setting up its digital delivery service in partnership with CinemaNow, which has deals with the main movie studios.
The software making it possible to shop CinemaNow’s video library will be included on all the web-connected devices sold in Best Buy’s 1,000-plus US stores. That means consumers who buy flat-panel TVs, Blu-ray players, personal computers and mobile phones from Best Buy would be able to get downloads of videos the same day they are released on DVD.
The alliance marks the latest step away from the DVD format. Consumers are getting more ways of finding home entertainment with just a few clicks instead of travelling to a video rental store or waiting for a disc to be delivered through the post.
Apple’s iTunes online movies, Amazon and DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix have all been winning fans with digital delivery systems, while Blockbuster has a deal with CinemaNow that lets people rent movies over the internet.
Last month Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, predicted that his company would deliver more movies by streaming, rather than physical format, within two years.
In the US, total disc sales, including DVDs and Blu-ray, fell 13.9 per cent in the three months to September.
Netflix said 42 per cent of subscribers streamed at least 15 minutes of video through its internet-viewing service during the last quarter, up from 22 per cent at the same time last year.
Beautiful day for YouTube as 10 million tune in to U2 gig - Times Online
For U2 it was just another outlet for video footage but it may well prove to be the moment when the internet showed that it could generate audiences to rival broadcast television.
On ten million occasions viewers clicked on to YouTube to watch U2 perform live at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena, Calfornia at the end of last month, a record for simultaneous viewing on the video website.
Malcom Gerrie, the chief executive of WhizzKid Entertainment, the company that filmed the event, said that both the band and YouTube were shocked and surprised by how many people watched online. “This achieved the kind of audience you might see for a television hit show, but it was far greater than you would see for a music show on television in any single country,” he said. “In Britain, they are cracking open the champagne if Later with Jools Holland gets seen by 600,000 people.”
YouTube, owned by Google, traditionally shows short video clips, and the U2 concert was one of only a handful of live broadcasts the website has undertaken. It was persuaded into doing so when Bono, the band’s frontman, took advantage of his friendship with Sergey Brin, one of Google’s two billionaire founders, to force a change of policy.
Previous attempts to broadcast major concerts live on the internet, such as AOL’s transmission of Live 8 in 2005, have proved to be disappointing for viewers because the prevailing internet technology had not been able to handle video well. As household connection speeds increase, transmitting live television online is becoming more practical.
The high viewing figures came as such a surprise that neither the band nor YouTube capitalised financially. Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, said: “YouTube were a little unsure of themselves. They were supposed to sell a sponsorship for the event, but somehow they didn’t manage to.”
YouTube also refused to pay U2, although the Irish quartet accepted the lack of fees because they saw the exercise as a promotional experiment. The Rose Bowl gig was being filmed anyway, so the band could release a DVD of the event early next year as part of their contractual obligation to their music company, Universal.
Mr McGuiness said that in future U2 would consider charging viewers to watch live online when the band comes round to touring again in about four years. “We might do pay per view next time, and we don’t think that will cannibalise any sales of DVDs because the audiences are separate,” he said.
In Britain, few programmes top 10 million viewers. Coronation Street and other soap operas; Champions League and other football finals; and Saturday night entertainment shows are the only programmes able to breach that figure. Last week the X Factor elimination show on Sunday night was watched by 15.8 million, making it one of the most-watched programmes of the year.
U2 were able to exceed the 10 million level because the concert was made available to 187 countries, including China, North Korea and Iran, although a third of the 10 million audience for the Rose Bowl show came from the United States.
After the gig, YouTube is understood to be considering a change in strategy that would turn it into a regular rival to the BBC and ITV and any traditional TV station. A spokesman for YouTube would only describe the event as a “big win”, but Mr Gerrie said: “We think a whole new business model has emerged here.”
A good example of the way taht the internet is taking on traditional media
Tuesday 3 November 2009
History of Internet
A people's history of the internet: from Arpanet in 1969 to today |
Technology |
guardian.co.uk
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/2009/oct/23/internet-arpanet
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Technology |
guardian.co.uk
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/2009/oct/23/internet-arpanet
Sent from my iPhone
Monday 2 November 2009
Web Worker Careers: Video Production and Editing
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Web Worker Careers: Video Production and Editing
Just about every organization can use video to tell its story. Video producers tell that story by creating a product that entertains, educates, informs, promotes, captures or markets.
While video production may involve location-specific elements where you need to go out to capture visuals and sounds, you can still make it a career where you can work anywhere you want.
Is video production the career for you?
Video Production Careers
In video production, some stick to just one task, while others do several things, or even do all the jobs to take a video from start to finish. Here are a few video-related jobs:
Producer: Video businesses vary in the area of production based on the type of videos they create and the topics they cover. Producers may specialize in one or several different types of video. The title “producer” has many meanings, but a producer often oversees the entire video production process.
Post-production: Folks in post-production work with existing video to enhance it, edit it and add to it. These tasks could involve animation, audio, voice-overs, DVD menus, music and graphics.
Editor: Editors compile audio and video to create the final product that meets project requirements. “The editor is much like a cook. We take raw ingredients and combine them artfully into a video that meets the clients’ goals,” says Ed McNichol of EDcetera.
How to Qualify
Video producers and editors are a diverse lot when it comes to how they first entered the video business and gained experience. Tim Clark started on Ken Burns’ documentaries in the editing room. Jack Denver, director of post production at PACSAT, literally started on the bottom floor by sweeping in a studio before and after shoots. After that, he climbed to assistant video editor, editor, producer, director and supervisor. Many folks in video started at the bottom and worked into jobs in the field.
Kim Brame, executive producer with creative illusions Productions, took every job available to her after college to build a network and learn the craft. Her coworkers have degrees and training in audio engineering, programming, graphic design and animation.
Steve Mann, owner of MannMade Digital Video, lost his job in the dot-com bust...
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Friday 30 October 2009
History of Photography Podcasts
Check out this podcast on iTunes:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=94009100
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Sunday 18 October 2009
Saturday 17 October 2009
Friday 16 October 2009
Friday 9 October 2009
Music videos
You could do with getting plenty of feedback on your blogs and showing how your ideas develop. Get some photos up of the type of shots you are planning and get some of the other media students and photography students to comment on them. Compare them to egs of actual videos - do screen shots of these. You could put them on flickr and facebook to get more feedback.
You have got to show you sought permission to use copywright music - you don't have to get it - show evidence you sought it. - myspace pages? Sent from my iPhone
You have got to show you sought permission to use copywright music - you don't have to get it - show evidence you sought it. - myspace pages? Sent from my iPhone
Tuesday 6 October 2009
This week - Music Video Groups
Here is an example of a blog from a different college fro you to have a look at. See how far they have got with their planning and see what ideas it gives you for your blogs and preparation and planning (before you even think it - their stuyle of music is probably different from yours BUT you are lookning for the sort of thing they include)
http://04musicvideo09.blogspot.com/
Also use the Latymer Youtube channel - see links on right to look at examples of student work.
Sunday 4 October 2009
Friday 2 October 2009
Storyboard
You have a new Cinemek Hitchcock storyboard available for download: http://hitchcock.cinemek.com/72c9e9 This file will be available for 72 hours. Cinemek Hitchcock is a trademark of Cinemek, Inc. Sent from my iPhone
Storyboard
You have a new Cinemek Hitchcock storyboard available for download: http://hitchcock.cinemek.com/64bdab This file will be available for 72 hours. Cinemek Hitchcock is a trademark of Cinemek, Inc. Sent from my iPhone
Wednesday 30 September 2009
Tuesday 29 September 2009
Tuesday 22 September 2009
First Post
This is the first time I have used blogger - I mainly want to use it to quickly upload youtube videos for you to see and to easily follow blogs that I think will be useful fro you for your practicals.
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