videos

videos

Memorial Day Montage

It has been a busy month. I’m way behind in reading emails and blog entries. On the one hand, take the modern approach to Memorial Day and be heading out to the beach. However, as I dig through my emails, I find a lot of material related to Memorial Day.

I’m helping pull together the Citizen Filmmaking track at the Media Giraffe Summit at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, coming up June 29 – July 1.

As I look through various videos, people have pointed me to The War Tapes. David Weinberger describes it this way:

“Five soldiers in Iraq have been carrying video cameras with them throughout the past year. Working continuously with a director via IM, they have produced a 94-minute version of the film set to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 29. It is non-partisan, or perhaps multi-partisan...How could you be a soldier in Iraq and not have points of view?”

This is contrasted with Project Harmony, where students in Vermont went to Jordan and videoblogged some of their trip.

Another friend pointed me to this video made by adding images to the song Dear Mr. President, by Pink. Other People have made similar videos. One person has his own video up with a different, but similar song he had written a while ago.

One final video to add into the mix: As I spoke with friends about citizen videos, Lon Seidman from the Joe Courtney campaign sent me this link about Veterans for Courtney.

If you know of other material, please let me know.

Ned Lamont for U.S. Senate Introduction Video

Today, the Lamont campaign launches its 'Intro to Ned' video. You can see it here.

They are having a viewing up in Hartford, and on blogs around the country.

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Shooting our own Dream Dozen

Back in February, as I contemplated the final episode of The West Wing, I wrote this post about a possible replacement series.

Aaron Sorkin hasn’t given me a call so I guess if this is going to happen, we need to do it ourselves. That doesn’t really bother me. I wasn’t really expecting a call anyway. However, the idea has taken off in different directions.

The Ned Lamont campaign has taken off with videos. The Ned Lamont group on YouTube has really taken off, with lots of great videos of Ned. There are videos of his stump speech, videos of people interviewing voters on the issues, attack ads aimed at his opponent and plenty more.

As I’ve talked with others about this, and a Citizen Filmmaking Workshop and Festival has grown out of the discussions.

So, go back and re-read my ”Dream Dozen” post. Then, grab your video camera and head off and tape some good footage of your favorite candidate. Let’s spread the videos online, create a little buzz about new candidates and roll our own Dream Dozen show.

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Friday Five

Cinco de Mayo brings a special meaning to Friday Five. I’m not sure if this will really end up being five unrelated topics or not, but it will have a bunch of different tidbits, much of it follow up to various things I’ve written about recently.

I just got an email from the Media Bloggers Association giving me an update on the Maine Web Report case. It is great to see bloggers across the politics spectrum work together to defend free speech.

Peter Turner, whom I met at the New Organizing Institute training in DC back in February sent me an email about The Katrina Project. They are trying to keep the Gulf Coast tragedy fully in the public eye and promote a serious national conversation about poverty and inequality through helping rebuild the New Orleans Public Library. A very cool project. Please, check out their site and contribute a book or two.

The schedule for Personal Democracy Forum 2006 is up. I will be on a panel, The Rising Power of Local Political Blogs. Two of the other people on the panel are Liza Sabater, whom I’ve met at various events around CivicSpace, last year’s Personal Democracy Forum, and probably other events, and Juan Melli, whom I’ve met online several places. It should be a good conference.

I’m also gearing up for the Media Giraffe conference. With that, I’m spending a bit of time looking at various video sharing sites. A few quick comments on this: Apparently blip.tv has cleaned up its interface and is easier to use now. For example, you no longer need to create a separate thumbnail. DailyMotion and ClipShack allow loading videos from cellphones. Kim’s cellphone records videos, so I’ll give that a try. Unfortunately, neither of them have a nice feed into other blogs, although DailyMotion does include RSS feeds and group abilities. Grouper has moved out of the ‘Coming Soon’ category, and I should probably explore that a little.

Also, Kim uploaded this picture of Reilly resting in the sun yesterday. It fits nicely for cat blogging on Friday.

So, that’s a little bit of what’s going on with me.

Media Giraffe Grassroots Filmmaking Workshop and Festival

As digital video cameras become more popular, as people start taking videos from their cellphones, and as new sites emerge online to distribute these videos, citizens’ filmmaking is set to take off. Many people will be simply sharing home movies. Others, however, will want to create documentaries, political advertisements, and citizen journalism.

The Media Giraffe Grassroots filmmaking workshop and festival will celebrate noteworthy citizens’ filmmaking and provide workshops for those wishing to learn how to become more involved.

Okay. That’s the idea as it stands right now. Can I pull together this as part of the Media Giraffe Conference I’m helping with? I’m getting interest from various parties. Now, I need to see if I can find some good folks to lead the workshops, a good keynote speaker, people making good grassroots videos, and people interested in attending the festival.

If you have any ideas, please let me know.

UPDATE: Things are taking shape nicely for the conference. Details can be found here:
http://www.mediagiraffe.org/filmmaking/

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