Building Bridges
The past couple of weeks has been quite the blast. After returning from Burning Man, my new videographer friend from Seattle, Ali and I schemed on some video together. The Fighting Kite GETV episode is the result of such schemeing. Ali taught me plenty of new Final Cut power moves for my arsenal. The pen tool! Who knew? You probably did.
This past week I was down in LA with Irina to capture a bunch of interview material for a bunch of upcoming episodes. Thanks to Micki who got us access to the Revver Hollywood style launch party for the new 1.0 version of their service. Revver is a video hosting site much like blip, veoh or ourmedia with the added benefit of revenue sharing for content creators. They tag on a single still frame ad to the end of your video and split revenues with you 50/50 for all clicks. Popular vlogs like Ze Frank and Ask a Ninja use Revver and do pretty well for themselves from what I hear. Blip.tv is planning on offering something very similar soon, though they’re not quite there yet. The idea of giving video content producers a way to make money, even small amounts of money, is a huge incentive for lots of independent creative types.
Back to the party… Revver took over the poolside area of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood for their lavish shindig. Despite my being in the middle of a nasty flu and not being able to drink (much), I persevered. Besides, this is WORK and dammit nothing’s gonna stop me from doing my job! Irina and I got there shortly after the doors opened and Irina immediately spotted her new best friend, Daniel McVicar of the McVlog. Daniel is also notable in the soap opera world for being on the Bold and the Beautiful as Clarke Garrison for the past 20 years. I don’t do soaps so had no context but Irina definitely did. Anyway, Daniel is a very humble and chatty chap I soon found out. He got into videoblogging recently and knows much about the culture, players and technology. He recently interviewed my boss for a segment. Daniel was sporting a Ze Frank fire eagle shirt which was interesting because Ze Frank sported a McVicar Beer shirt on his vlog that same day. Crazy secret vlogger subtextual communications! We ended up interviewing Daniel at a small LA studio the next day.
I then met Zadi and Steve of the Jet Set Show. Awesome, awesome, awesome! These cats have it down and are probably my favorite two new peeps if I had to pick favorites. OK, I’m not picking favorites. I had met Zadi before at Webzine and Vloggercon, but not Steve and I hadn’t ever had a chance to rub brains with them. They invited us over to their home studio the next day where the Jet Set Show magic happens and where the new RSS News show is being birthed. They’ve converted their whole apartment into all things videoblog. Multiple computers for editing, wiki’ing and other general geekery. A set under construction for RSS News. Rita and Ronnie, and other stars of Jet Set Show. Multiple snoozing kitties. Umbrella lights, shotgun mics and video cameras galore. Looking forward to see what RSS News looks like. Check out the Jet Set Show, it’s really slick and well produced.
Since I’m already name dropping, here’s the rest of the awesome peeps we got in front of our lens: Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing, EFF and scifi authorship fame. Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine of Ask a Ninja. All life’s answers as seen through the eyes of a ninja. Steven Starr and Oliver Luckett, the founders of Revver. They were nicely liquified by the time they sat down so I know what we got was good. Norm Korpi, the first gay dude from the first ever Real World (in NYC), the show that’s to blame for all the never ending crap that is ‘reality tv’ today. We don’t blame Norm, he’s cool and was just a tool. Invisble Engine, a trio of dudes that make hilarious shorts. They’re kind of doing the typical LA thing, working lame jobs hoping to break into acting or getting picked up for gigs. Using the Internet to amplify their talents will no doubt pay off for them as they are fucking good and this world is filled with bad comedy. Someome check out these videos and hire them dammit! It worked for the Lonely Island dudes. Oh, Lonelygirl15 was there too, though seemed like for only a second. No one I know got a chance to talk to her or even got a pic. This all on the day when the news broke that she was merely a pretty face with puppet strings attached. Two guys that we thought were the Mentos and Diet Pepsi fountain peeps. We found out we were totally wrong halfway through the interview. That was great.
The final interview we did the next day was with Will Jessup of Kevo.com, a very web 2.0 celebrity database. It’s like wikipedia + digg. Hasn’t even been TechCrunch’d yet. Does that mean we have a scoop?
Fast forward to today, Irina and I go to Golden Gate Park to check out the Segway Polo match between the Silicon Valley Aftershocks and the Oakland Junkyard Dogs. We get plenty of awesome footage of crashing Segways and interview some of the players such as Steve Wozniak and Victor Miller, whom we met at the Maker Faire some months ago. I got my first taste of onboard Segway love after the match. I don’t see myself riding down Market Street anytime soon, but it’s fun to ride on someone else’s dime.