Image from BobbyPromFor those of you who prefer your internet-musical-extravaganza soundtracks sans DRM, the Amazon MP3 store is now offering Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog soundtrack. We’ve talked before about Dr. Horrible before, and I am a fan, but I do think it’s a little strange that the soundtrack costs $8.99 when the entire show could be had for $4.99 on iTunes.
I guess that’s the price you pay for convenience. Honestly though, who would pay $0.99 cents for the opening 9-second track? Joss, I think you missed the mark here. Amazon lets you set variable pricing (one of their major distinctions over iTunes, as far as labels are concerned). Take advantage of that and pick some reasonable prices rather than just going with the default. Your fans will thank you.
Image from dbkingPBS Engage is offering an opportunity for viewers to ask documentary filmmaker Ken Burns five questions as part of the ongoing “Five Good Questions” series. This is a chance for all you budding documentarians to get your burning questions answered by one of the best known documentary directors in America.
“As [game] technology has risen, it has been harder and harder and harder for ordinary people to contribute,” said Raph Koster, the founder and president of Areae. This has driven budgets up “and the result is less creativity, less innovation, and fewer worlds,” he said.
“So we want to democratize this by doing what the Web has managed to do, which is push content creation tools to a much lower threshold,” said Koster.
The vision of bringing the technology behind virtual worlds to a level that allows non-technical users to easily create new content is akin to the dropping prices and lower thresholds in video equipment that fuel YouTube and other UGC video sites.
Image from fdecomiteThe difference, of course, is that democritizing virtual world creation is a matter of software design and usability, not governed by Moore’s law. Most modern computers are already powerful enough (rendering time aside) to create and run a virtual world. The difficulty is in designing the tools. Given Raph Koster’s previoussuccesses, we’re optimistic that the future holds a signifigantly lower barrier to entry in the virtual world department.
Recently saw the trailer for Cartoon College, a documentary by Tara Wray (who also made Manhattan, Kansas). The subject of the film is the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT. I love documentaries about people who are very passionate about something very obscure – so this should be just my thing. One part of the trailer that excites me is the idea of incorporating the art of the cartoonists into the visual medium of the film. I’m trying to come up with other documentaries that use an artist’s work to tell a story about the artist. Who has done this really well of late?
DIY DAYS – fund :: create :: distribute :: sustain
How do we sustain ourselves as filmmakers and storytellers in this day of shifting film distribution systems? How do we monetize our film and get the word out without studio support? Presented by From Here to Awesome and Current TV – DIY DAYS aims to answer these questions with a day of panels, roundtable discussions and workshops: A look at how to fund, create, and distribute and sustain.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Anyone wanting to make creative work – film, music, games, art. Self-Identified Independent filmmakers, Creatives and Tech-philes.
THE EVENT
The day flows through a mix of both structured and free form activities to encourage open discussion and the opportunity to break into groups and get everyone talking to each other. Pack a lunch and network offline with fellow creatives.
Best of all, this shindig is FREE. Looks like they have scheduled DIY Days in NYC, SF, LA and Boston (hurray!). But if you, like the Producer, do not live in one of those places, it looks like you’ll be able to sit in via streaming video sessions. Exciting, no?
Our special agent in New Jersey gave us a tip on a new web and television fusion project from a major network:
Image from *L*u*z*a* return to nature
Earth 2100 is a “television and internet event” set to debut this fall on ABC [Editor’s Note: The site now simply says “Coming in 2009”]. Here’s how they describe it:
The world’s brightest minds agree that the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could converge with catastrophic results.
We need you to bring this story to life — to use your imagination to create short videos about what it would be like to live through the next century if we stay on our current path. Using predictions from top experts, we will feed you detailed briefings from the years 2015, 2050, 2070 and 2100 — and you will report back about the dangers that are unfolding before your eyes.
Your videos will be combined with the projections of top scientists, historians, and economists to form a powerful web–based narrative about the perils of our future. We will also select the most compelling reports to form the backbone of our two–hour primetime ABC News broadcast: Earth 2100, airing this fall.
They have a few sample “reports from the future” up there already. Kudos to ABC for trying to combine documentary, fiction and user-generated content all in one go. I see some problems with the approach. . . for one thing, the “reports from the future” are bound to be depressing and bleak – because that’s what all the experts are describing. There is also the problem of combining gorgeous HD footage of experts with cheesily shot, low budget versions of Children of Men. I don’t want to be a wet blanket here – I love documentaries, and I love cheesy, homemade science fiction. . . but I don’t know if I can take the leap to watch both at once.
This project STILL doesn’t solve the “can’t I just get it on YouTube?” problem. Meaning, if you bother to make a movie that’s as clever as the sample clip with the snorkel and the pink walrus – why would you let ABC decide whether or not to distribute it for you? Why would you go to the ABC site, rather than google video or YouTube?
The fact that ABC is going to put some of these in a national broadcast is certainly a draw, and I am all for educating people about climate change and public health any which way you can.
If you are a true fangirl or fanboy, then news of “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” will be old hat by now. Bear with us, we’re excited: Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly) is about to release what he’s calling an “Internet Miniseries Event.” You can watch a trailer via vimeo, or you can read his comments on the Whedonesque blog.
The premise looks hysterical: Neil Patrick Harris is a supervillain, Nathan Fillion is a superhero. They sing, and potentially fight over a girl. What more could you want? The answer is, of course, to watch it free, streaming through your interwebs starting July 15th.
The format looks gosh darn revolutionary: 3 episodes, staggered throughout 1 week in July, free to watch. After that, they’ll be sold online for a “nominal fee,” then they’ll potentially go to DVD.
According to Whedon (or Joss as he likes to call himself), this all started during the writers’ strike, when he and other writer/producers started looking around for alternates to creating studio fare. Joss Whedon has a history of working in mixed media: Buffy was originally a film (a flop), then a TV show (a success), then a comic (wildly praised by pretty much everyone) [Editor’s Note: We’ve even seen the musical episode produced for the stage]. Science fiction in general seems to be ahead of the curve on this yes-people-watch-the-internet thing: Battlestar Galactica has released web-exclusive content, as has Heroes. But no one has ever tried to launch a potential brand from the internet, using known actors who are creating original characters specifically for the web. What’s more, Whedon’s “make it on the fly, on the cheap” concept makes it better matched to the bulk of current web content.
I’m sure this is not the last post we’ll do for Dr. Horrible, since (a) Teague is eventually going to get jealous [Editor’s Note: So jealous…]that I got to post about Joss Whedon and he didn’t and (b) This is pretty much the content we’ve been waiting to cover: Big names with big ideas experimenting in free web formats, rather than running around trying to shut them down.
The Center for Social Media at American University has a story about Turnitin, a site used to catch plagarism, citing Fair Use to win a case against students who sued them for taking intellectual property. The irony was not lost on Patricia Aufderheide, who concluded:
So let the students—and the teachers—take a real lesson from Turnitin. Quoting from other people’s copyrighted work is sometimes, even often, fair. Not all copying is cheating, or copyright violation.
The Center for Social Media at American University is hosting an MP3 of the (somewhat contentious) panel discussion on DRM entitled “The True Cost of DRM: What Can’t We Do Now?” which occurred at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. Digital rights management and what to do about it is an issue that affects media producers, distributors, and consumers. Basically, if there’s media in your life, DRM affects you.
In light of Avid’s recent price cuts Frank Capria at Pro Video Coalition answerers the question “Can Media Composer at $2,495 compete with Final Cut Studio?” The short answer? It doesn’t have to. He talks about his favorite premium features in Avid (Animatte, FluidMorph, and ScriptSync) and makes suggestions for attracting more students away from Final Cut Pro.
Image from BobbyPromFor those of you who prefer your internet-musical-extravaganza soundtracks sans DRM, the Amazon MP3 store is now offering Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog soundtrack. We’ve talked before about Dr. Horrible before, and I am a fan, but I do think it’s a little strange that the soundtrack costs $8.99 when the entire show could be had for $4.99 on iTunes. 
