Break-Out Box

For 7 days during the spring semester 2007, we set up a camera microphone, lights and background, ala Errol Morris, and asked people coming in to the media center to answer a few questions. We accumulated over 4 hours of footage. Here’s a condensed 6 minutes or so. The media center at Swem is officially cool.

We’ve finished up production on our “How I use the Media Center” video. The concept was simple. We have people who come into the Media Center. Why not ask them, while they are there, what they are doing and have done.  The production piece was inspired by Errol Morris’ video for the Oscars. We set up a wall divider, a white table cloth, some lights, a shotgun mic on a microphone stand, a camera, tripod and a monitor and asked them a series of questions. It took only 45 seconds of their time. We shot it in wide screen in color and have been working on tweaking filters in Final Cut Pro (in conjunction with experimenting with 24p presets in Compressor). It should look hot.   We got about 4 hours of footage to edit.  More to come on this.

In a multicast tactic that would make Guy Debord proud, we’ve started putting up some of our profiles up on several video streaming services. We have them on our web site and iTunesU, and now Blip.TV . A quick unscientific test revealed that the same movie uploaded to blip and youtube looked better on blip. Blip also allowed me to upload the entire 20 min. movie. Blip also has some other cool features as well.

We have some more in production right now as well as an Errol Morris inspired experiment in propaganda (stay tuned). You can get to our YouTubified vids here.

BlipTV sample:

Click To Play