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In Milwaukee doing Spike’s work

I’m in Milwaukee for a couple days on Nokia’s dime attending Summerfest. They sent me out here to help guide people attending the festival to participate in the Spike Lee film project. Since the project theme is HUMANITY as it revolves around music, it makes sense to go where people are taking in the tunes. Nokia has a booth here and I think they’re going to have something set up where you can just walk up and contribute a moment, a video clip or photo to the project. I’ll also be roaming the grounds in search of stuff to capture on a Nokia 5310 they’re bribing me with.

Today is the last day for submitting content for Act II “Life”, so be sure to get some stuff up there and maybe Spike will be so impressed he’ll drop it into the film and fly your ass out to the premiere. Wouldn’t that be swell? I think so.

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Help me make a film with Spike Lee and Nokia

Nokia Productions film project with Spike Lee

I’ve been asked by Nokia to help with a pretty cool collaborative promotional project they’re doing with filmmaker Spike Lee. They’re encouraging people like you to use your cell phones and send in snapshots of moments from your life that fits the overall theme of HUMANITY. Spike also wants you to think of how music helps to tell the story of HUMANITY. These snapshots will be edited together into a coherent film, directed by Spike Lee himself. Well, not just himself. I’m one of five “assistant directors” who are here to help guide people in sending stuff in. As part of that, Nokia has setup a group blog for us assistants where we’ll post examples of what to submit, answer questions and help identify the pearls in the sea of submissions that are sure to flood in.

The project is broken into three Acts. The first Act BIRTH, has already come and gone. Act II is LIFE and it just opened today for submissions. Act III has yet to be announced, though it may not be too hard guess what it is. Now through July 2nd, you can submit text, pictures, music or video via the Jumpcut platform that Nokia Productions is using to build this thing. It has its limitations and the main Nokia Productions site isn’t very well integrated into the Jumpcut platform but don’t let that discourage you. As the kids say, there’s plenty of win here!

What’s really encouraged is using your crappy old cell phone to send stuff in. Take a photo or a low-res pixelated video. Do a lot with a little. This won’t be Cloverfield, but if you were being attacked by a big space monster, how would you capture it? This doesn’t mean you can’t use more pro gear. Content from any device is totally acceptable, it just needs to fit the theme of humanity in the context of music telling a story. They’ve even sent us assistants older Nokia 3555 phones to challenge us to submit stuff with low end cheap technology. No streaming N95s here! Once I figure out how to get stuff off the 3555 on to Jumpcut, I’ll post some examples to the group blog.

This NY Times article from April digs into the project a bit deeper, addressing how it fits into the greater world of social networking and “user generated content” (I really hate that term). Check the Nokia Productions site for more details and point me to anything you’ve submitted. I’d love to check out your stuff. Oh yeah, you can also win stuff.

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Boing Boing TV

The past few weeks have been a treasure chest of amazing freelance video production work. Xeni at Boing Boing brought me into to shoot a few episodes of Boing Boing TV at the recent Maker Faire. Here’s some of the results.

I was also tasked with riding along in the back of kidnapper van, destination Google, to capture this collaboration between the BLF and monochrom of Vienna, Austria. This just happened to be the day of Google’s shareholder meeting and there was a bit of controversy around Google’s censorship with China. Behold the “Great Firewall!”

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Groove is in the Heart of the Internet

I was asked by my fine friends at digg to shoot this wee little project for them. It’s in response to a lip dub that Revision3 had brought. Yeah, the lip dub meme is a bit old in Internet time, but it’s a great team building exercise and shows what you can do when you get a bunch of silly people in room together. Mark Trammell masterminded and organized the thing, and most all of the digg staff participated. This was easily one of the more fun video projects I’ve done in awhile.


Digg Dubb: Groove Is In The Heart from Trammell on Vimeo.

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Epic Win in SF

Irina and I went down and covered the Anonymous protests of Scientology in San Francisco. This was only one of dozens or hundreds held simultaneously around the world on Feb. 10th. Not much mainstream media coverage which is fine because our coverage rules, obviously.

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A Cheap Date with Veronica Belmont

The second video I did with pal Veronica for Mahalo Daily is up today. It’s on everyone’s favorite subject, cheap dates. I was lucky enough to be Veronica’s cheap date and run around town to places like the SF Giants ball park, the wine bar (cheap if you sip slowly!) and Alamo Square park for a picnic and some hawt geocache action. Yes, that’s me playing the voice of a dork named Bobbie who V rejects flatly like a square of toilet paper stuck to her shoe. 🙁 I know, keep my day job.

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Interviewed for Adobe Edge

I was asked to come up with a couple questions for Adobe Edge, a monthly newsletter aimed at users & developers of Adobe products. I asked about the compatibility of Quicktime in the new Adobe Flash Player now that is supports h.264. They gave me the right answer. No embed in their player unfortunately (!!), so you’ll have to link through to see it.

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