Month: November 2008

Tonight, I won’t be at the Children’s BAFTA ceremony. It’s a long while since I’ve been, and I never quite managed to struggle to a nomination (harrumph). However, this year’s nomination list provides some indication of the state the industry is in.

Animation: all CBeebies/CBBC shows.
Drama: all CBBC shows.
Entertainment: all CBBC shows.
Factual: the perennial Nick News, plus three CBBC shows.
Presenter: all CBBC/CBeebies.
Writer: all CBBC/CBeebies.

Now, there are some caveats. Several of these nominations are for shows produced by indies (looks like a good night for Tiger Aspect, in particular). Also, other categories produce a stronger showing for Five, particularly, and Nick does well in the Short Film category (though… who else makes short films for kids?). Plus, one can argue that BAFTA nominations have always over-represented BBC shows, historically.

But is this still a picture of the dire state of the children’s television industry? Heck, yes. It’s entirely dependent on BBC money, and from where I’m standing there’s simply no way back from that.

I know I’ve banged on about this here before, but I keep running into people whose reaction to the story behind SciCast is disbelief. On a couple of occasions they’ve been almost belligerent about it.

They’d likely regard such a BBC-dominated nominations list as evidence that their license fee is being well-spent. But the fact is, in most of these categories, the only contest is which BBC shows are nominated. There is no competition.

Thus, there’s no longer a viable career path in this industry. That is why children’s TV is dead. It’ll take five years to really show – maybe ten, if we’re lucky – but it’s now inevitable.

[Update 1st December: Winners now posted on the BAFTA site. Ironically, a good night for the few remaining indies.]

This should be a good way of wasting an afternoon: Auditorium.

Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that the processing overhead for handling this sort of thing – particularly with high-def footage – is ‘non-trivial.’ Which is to say: cripplingly hard. See also these previous stories, ditto.

Dual-processor laptops are one thing; eight-way desktops with hyperthreading, matched with stream-processing video cards, all coordinated via OpenCL implemented at the system level: well, that’s going to be something else when it comes to heavy-duty video processing.

Personally, I find it more than a little scary. We’re barely used to still photographs being routinely and heavily manipulated; processed video is something we expect of Hollywood, but not home movies. I suspect we’ll adjust less quickly, culturally, than the technology will propagate.

I’ve waited ten years to get a grip on how the various bits of the International Space Station (didn’t it used to be called ‘Freedom’? Ah, OK, no.) fit together. Now, for its tenth birthday, USA Today have made a lovely animation of how it’s grown.

I miss the canteen at Yorkshire Television.

(inspired by this)

Further to the previous post, I think what I’m trying to say is:

“The audience”

how old media projects from old media organisations refer to their most important constituency.

“The audience”

how new media projects from unreconstructed old media organisations refer to their most important constituency.

“Audiences”

how new media projects from old media organisations that ‘get it’ refer to their most important constituency.

“Community”

how new media projects from new media organisations refer to their most important constituency.

“Communities”

how new media projects from new media organisations that are so cutting edge they have no need for this sort of key refer to their most important constituency(/ies).

“Advertisers”

the people who are really the most important constituency for all the above, unless (media organisation) == ‘BBC’.

FindYourTribe is an online survey that claims to work out what social grouping you’re part of. It’s a bit of a giggle. It’s from Channel 4, despite lack of appearance on the front page (roll over the thinly-grey ‘About this game’ to learn that crucial snippet).

I rather enjoyed taking the survey. It’s wittily done, doesn’t take itself too seriously, and some of the questions are unexpected and quite clever.

I also think the whole thing is massive nonsense, and not in a ‘just a bit of fun’ reasonable sort of way.

My impression is doubtless skewed by two main problems: firstly, I’m entirely the wrong age for this thing (though there is a category for ’35+’. Gee, thanks). Secondly, the three options it gave me at the end for ‘my tribe’ were all defined principally by music choice and hair style. Er… what?!

Of course, now I can’t go back and check what all the other tribes were, but I’ve a bigger problem with this: while I accept that youth culture is, to an extent, tribal, isn’t ‘tribe’ just a politically-correct synonym for ‘stereotype’?

Profiling audiences as a route to understanding them is, of course, entirely reasonable. But there’s something insidiously self-selecting about the presentation here, as if I’m supposed to funnel myself down into one of the predetermined stereotypes, or rail against the system for – OMG! OMG! Worst day of my life! – putting me in the wrong one.

Hmm.

Actually, I think what frustrates me most is that we’re seemingly stuck with blunt instrument tools like this, as we explore the intersection of centralised media and dispersed, interpersonal audiences. This feels like a tool from a previous generation. Wrapped in neat design and carefully-appropriate language choices, to be sure, but structurally the sort of thing the BBC might have done with a clipboard in 1986.

The problem with ‘the audience’ is that, to its members, it’s not ‘the audience.’ It’s ‘me, and my mates, and a bunch of people I don’t know but with whom I apparently have something vaguely in common, apart from that guy over there who’s obviously a tosser.’

And that’s only for physical groupings: for broadcast or web media, ‘the audience’ is usually, as far as I’m concerned, me. Just me.

While much of this new social media revolution might be about connecting me with people slightly like me in new and interesting ways, it’s still experienced by individuals. Lots of them. All alone. Simultaneously, but not together. To your servers they might look like ‘the audience,’ but in their heads they’re not.

Tools like FindYourTribe might be useful after all, if they help spot patterns of behaviour, broad groupings, and give a sense of the individual variation within groups. They can work as ‘pull’ models, where the media producer uses the stereotype labels as affordances to help understand audiences, and grapples with how their media might affect people within those categories.

Too often, however, the stereotypes become the targets for ‘push’ models, where one assumes the stereotype works and mercilessly tunes one’s media and its delivery to suit. That worked for broadcast TV, where the stereotypes were very broad-brush and the audience scale was immense; we have neither of those factors on our side with the sorts of things FindYourTribe is meant to inform.

It’s high time I introduced the regular reader to another project of mine, namely this blog: Why is science important?

Well, I say ‘mine.’ Really I mean ‘Alom’s‘, since the project is his. I just threw together the blog. Alom’s a TV producer and physics teacher (odd combination, roll with it), making a film trying to explain to his students why science is… er… important. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, so there must be something in it.

The list of contributors so far is quite impressive, with more to come.

Join in.

Having been impressed by this ‘behind the scenes’ video, I found myself a little underwhelmed by the advert itself. Partly because I found it rather hard to track down. Go to this site, click ‘explore the site’, then ‘view the ad’ in the top menu.

Damned clever, but too clever, maybe?

[Update: good links and discussion on this at Metafilter, which led me to this article about kinetic computing.]

Following on from my previous post about the MinoHD, I happened to write this in an email for Vinay, who’s about to do some video policy work for an NGO. It might be useful more widely too:

The major limitations/trade-offs with the Flip concept are:

1. No microphone jack. You have zero options for good sound, unless you count off-camera recording, clapperboards, and post-sync.

2. Fixed screen means you more-or-less have to shoot from head height. You can’t easily shoot sitting subjects, or people interacting with props. It can be done, but handling in these situations is poor.

3. Close focus is limiting; big close-ups will always be blurry.

The Flip can do what it does in part because it makes a huge assumption: that 80% of what you shoot will be somebody speaking to you or the camera. That is, a mid-shot of some sort. Most of the time, this is a reasonable guess.

But it’s not a valid assumption for demo-based filming – the story is often told by the detail of the prop you’re showing, and the Flip starts to break down here. There are good reasons people use cameras costing £500, £5,000, or £50,000, and they’re not all about raw picture quality.

Example: want to film a mosquito? With a Flip you’ve no chance. The best camera I have for this is the £225 FS100, which close-focuses down to about 1cm (which is bizarre, actually, but I’m not complaining). It captured the image you see attached to this post. You can tell it’s a female, for heaven’s sake.