Collected Data
Watch: "November 22, 1963" by Errol Morris
In a short film, Josiah “Tink” Thompson, who has been investigating the Kennedy assassination for nearly 50 years, looks to the photographic evidence. Will we ever know the truth?
‘November 22, 1963’
Errol Morris is brilliant.
Watch: "Infinite Schwarzenegger" by Rob Beschizza
RIP Robert L. Drew
Drew's films pioneered a strict journalistic code that allowed no directing of subjects, no set-up shots, no on-camera narrator. The candid footage was edited into a dramatic narrative that gave the feeling of what it was like to be there as events occurred. His technique became known as cinéma vérité or direct cinema, though he liked to call it reality filmmaking.
R.I.P. Robert L. Drew, the Father of American Cinéma Vérité
Watch a clip about Drew from the excellent documentary Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment.
"Following Lindsay Lohan or craft brewers doesn't have the same impact as exonerating wrongly convicted murderers or probing years of alleged FBI bribery"
On the other side of the coin, the reality show — documentary's younger sibling — is thriving both financially and production-wise, with nascent cable channels scooping up endless series about pawnbrokers and extreme truckers. Channels like Oprah's OWN try to give a serious examination of celebrity, following in the footsteps of E! and Bravo, which have been “documenting” the lives of the pseudo-famous for years.
Is This the Death of the Big Screen Documentary?
Reality TV is not Documentary.
Read: "The Great Swindle" by Roger Scruton
The fake intellectual invites you to conspire in his own self-deception, to join in creating a fantasy world. He is the teacher of genius, you the brilliant pupil. Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers. The arrival of fake thought and fake scholarship in our universities should not therefore be attributed to any explicit desire to deceive. It has come about through the complicit opening of territory to the propagation of nonsense.
The Great Swindle by Roger Scruton from Aeon Magazine.
I went to art school. I don’t agree with everything in this essay but the section quoted above made me smile.
Watch: "The Gift Shop Sketch"
Quote: "There’s a difference between choice and decision."
There’s a difference between choice and decision. Choice is an option. Decision is a burden... Not making one-time decisions at the design level forces the customer to make those decisions over and over again at the user level. - John Kirk
Design Is The Difference Between Choice and Decision
"Is my design good design?"
via the Vitsœ site;
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user
Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design
"They are leftovers from another age."
Mrs Page is the last trug-maker left in the village and she knows of only six other people who can make them."I think it will die out, unfortunately," she said.
Are these England's last traditional craftsmen and women?
“Bar chart gauntlet”
They came to preach the value of using Live + 3 stats at the very least, in light of how popular delayed viewing has become – particularly of scripted primetime series, with drama series leading the way. “We all provide projections [for Live + 3 Day]. We understand your skepticism about using our projections,” Poltrack said. “The one thing you can be sure about our projections is that if one of us starts giving you a lot of bullshit, the other ones are going to let you know. You’ve got us to check each other,” he said.
TCA: Networks Urge Press To Abandon Live + Same Day Ratings Reports
"More and more companies are laying claim to expertise in producing transmedia content. But many using the term don't really understand what they are saying."
In transmedia, elements of a story are dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms, each making their own unique contribution to the whole. Each medium does what it does best--comics might provide back-story, games might allow you to explore the world, and the television series offers unfolding episodes.
Seven Myths About Transmedia Storytelling Debunked
eOne buys Paperny Entertainment
Recognizing the increasing appetite for unscripted content internationally, eOne is now turning its focus towards expanding its unscripted & factual portfolio to balance the company's diverse multi-genre overall offering. This deal will see eOne ramp up its activity in unscripted television production across North America.
Entertainment One Acquires Factual Television Leader Paperny Entertainment
I received the company email about this last night. Looks like I now work for a large corporation.
Congratulations to David, Audrey and Cal.
Read: 1939 Hitchcock Lecture
There has been a tendency, I feel, in the past, in this development of character, to rely upon the dialogue, only, to do it. We have lost what has been -- to me, at least -- the biggest enjoyment in motion pictures, and that is action and movement. What I am trying to aim for is a combination of these two elements, character and action.
1939 Alfred Hitchcock Lecture
"The $1,000 fee required to hire a foreign worker is perceived as "a cash grab"
speaking in Vancouver to gathered journalists, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander said the reforms should actually make the process of acquiring a work permit for foreign workers quicker."In those cases where there is a real need that Canadians can't be found to fill, the service will actually be faster than ever," said the minister."Our reforms to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program have been broadly well-received. People want us to ensure that Canadians across the country have first crack at available jobs and that wasn't happening before the reforms."
Temporary foreign worker reforms raise ire of film, TV industry
"There’s money to shake out of that little screen in your pocket"
Right now, most “second-screen” usage is more distracting than it is enriching, but that’s about to change. Soon your tablet will spring to life when you tune into your favorite show, and you’ll have more opportunities than ever to engage. The million-dollar buzzword here is Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR.
In a multi-screen future, phones don’t control TVs, TVs control phones
Watch: "Top 10 Most Effective Editing Moments of All Time"
"Bell Media is cutting 91 employees from its production staff as it makes big changes to programming."
The layoffs are part of a plan announced by parent company BCE Inc. last month to cut 120 jobs from Bell Media's Toronto workforce due to "financial pressure" in its advertising and subscription TV services.A notice sent by Bell Media's human resources department outlined some of the cuts, which included editors and producers at Much, formerly known as MuchMusic. All of the changes will be made before mid-October, the letter said.
Bell Media cuts dozens of staff at MTV, Much and M3
"Where once the CBC's newscasters put on a brave face about doing more with less, now it's becoming clear that the CBC's governmental paymasters expect it to do a lot less with less."
The BBC had planned to clear the online rights to the vast quantities of material in its vaults, and change its commissioning so that any new material would also be pre-cleared. This material – a rich, publicly funded archive of the nation's collective cultural memory – would have been put online under a generous, creative commons-style licence for Britons to download, share, remix and re-contextualise decades' worth of material both beloved and forgotten.
What Canada's national public broadcaster could learn from the BBC
"Media producers are transforming the documentary experience through interactive docs and buzzy transmedia elements."
While broadcasters are using transmedia to reach previously inaccessible audiences, filmmakers are using these devices to create dialogues with viewers ahead of completing projects.
Making transmedia work for documentaries
Listen: "The Axiom EP" by Badawai
"Dub Step? Truth is music is made from only two things: Frequencies and choices. Once you see it that way genre has absolutely no power anymore and can be mutated into any shape imaginable." - Raz Mesinai
"When we speak of the true ‘holy grail’ of content and entertainment, consumers want the ‘Three W’s': whatever content they want, whenever they want it, wherever they want it."
Consumers don’t care where or how they get their content. They don’t care if it comes to them via cable, satellite, broadband, wi-fi, or wireless. They also don’t care who provides the hardware (smart TV, set-top box, smartphone or tablet) to deliver the service that they want. They want an integrated, easy-to-use system to get their content. Period.
The Future of TV Isn’t Apps. We Need All Our Channels in One Place
The Future of Television
"Screens are beginning to absorb some of the cognitive ergonomics of paper."
Now that people have several devices at work—a laptop, a phone, a tablet—they’re finding their way to a similar trick, where they use each piece of hardware for a different purpose. Consider it a new way to manage all the digital demands on our attention: Instead of putting different tasks in different windows, people are starting to put them on different devices.
How Working on Multiple Screens Can Actually Help You Focus
Watch: "Revolution Part One"
Revolution Part One from movies4machines on Vimeo.
Watch: Kraftwerk
"Get used to a lot less CBC."
...the CBC should aim "to avoid excessive commercialism and to encourage Canadian content and the use of Canadian talent" in order to focus on its main goal: telling the stories of Canadians to Canadians.It's those stories that knit a country together. And that's really tough to do when you're readying to cut back evening newscasts and shut down in-house production of documentaries altogether at a downsized public broadcaster.
7 ways CBC helped build the Canada we know today
"Canada’s so-called “legacy media” players are voyaging into the digital space a bit late."
While analysts dismiss these “TV everywhere” offerings as defensive moves geared at protecting the media cos’ ecosystem of cable subscriptions, the companies say they are laying the groundwork to provide more of what audiences are looking for –namely, episodes of a show’s current season stacked in a library for binge-watching and past seasons available at a price...
The battle’s on, everywhere
"Branded entertainment is not an ad. Period. It’s a long-term investment in your audience"
In my opinion, branded content’s main goal is selling, while branded entertainment is inspired by a brand’s philosophy and culture, but created to be authentic, true content a network would commission.
Branded entertainment is not an ad
I hate arguing over semantics.
Quote: "The gut instinct of a few talented, experienced and brave individuals..."
"The gut instinct of a few talented, experienced and brave individuals is worth a great deal more than 500 people ticking marks on a survey." - Ken Segall
Analyzing Apple ads to death
"The channels that will win are ones with strong affinity, exclusive programming and specialized niches."
“In a pick-and-pay world all the channels will potentially suffer subscriber loss,” she says. “But the notion is building channels with programming that people want to see. Original programming is becoming more important because then you can bring viewers to a show they can’t get anywhere else.”
Choose your own adventure: Specialty TV edition
"Specialty TV services made $4 billion for the first time last year."
Money to these services has been rising at a rate of 7% over the past five years, according to numbers from the CRTC.
Specialty TV by the numbers
"If Google really is acting in good faith, as it claims to be, it should only be de-linking content that is very clearly not in the public interest."
If Google is trying to prove that the system is unworkable, then it’s succeeding – only the system it’s apparently operating in isn’t the system the CJEU described. It’s a straw man.
Why is Google really removing links to news articles in Europe?
Google is acting like a spoiled infant.
"The talks have been largely shrouded in secrecy. Negotiating texts are secret, so everything the public knows about TPP has come from leaked documents."
Commercial ratings, platform-agnostic TV and streaming video stats, and measuring the entire consumer experience around screens, all remain elusive.
It’s status quo right now. Everyone says we need cross-platform measurement, and there are ad hoc solutions in place, but no one has a solution for the root of the problem, which is that different companies maintain different data sets.
The analytics dilemma
Watch: "Situationist International"
Read: "The Real Cost of Reality TV"
The study found that violations of New York wage and hour lawsare endemic in the nonfiction television industry. Almost all the writer/producers in our study areincorrectly classified by the production companies as exempt employees, who work long hours butreceive no overtime pay, among other violations.
Keep in mind that the WGA is not an unbiased third party.
"Long hours, stolen wages, and sometimes dangerous conditions faced by workers in the reality TV industry."
while reality production companies like ITV Studios are profitable and expanding (ITV recently acquired New York production company Leftfield for $360 million), the writers and producers who create their shows continue to struggle.
NYC Council Probes ‘Sweatshop Conditions’ for Freelance Reality TV Workers
NPA’s formation comes after the latest round of mergers, acquisitions and consolidation that has seen broadcast companies such as ITV and Discovery as well as major superindies snapping up myriad production companies
In its first statement, the NPA offered the following regarding its formation: “Nonfiction content is a significant part of the programming landscape and, thus, warrants an Association dedicated to the advancement and protection of all those whose talents, hard work and commitment literally created the industry.
Unscripted prodcos form Nonfiction Producers Association
Think of Fire less as a smartphone, and more as a Trojan Horse designed to cater to impulse shoppers on the go.
Along with Fire’s price comes a free one-year subscription to Amazon Prime – valued at $100 – which offers second-day delivery on most products and access to Amazon’s huge library of music, movies and TV shows – all gratis.
Amazon’s Fire heats up m-comm
$200 + $60/month for 2 years. “All gratis” indeed.
Two of Canada's biggest telecommunications companies, Bell and Rogers, are clashing over the future of local television and who should pay for it.
Some concerns within the industry were that the pick-and-pay concept could dramatically increase the price of paying for a single channel, basically pushing consumers into buying specialty channel packages they didn't want in the first place.
Pick-and-Pay cable would mean changes to local TV funding, say Bell, Rogers
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