Crowdsourcing Feel-Good

As with Where the Hell is Matt, I sometimes need a video like this to reassure me that it’s not all bad out there.

It’s also noteworthy that this was produced and mixed with a laptop and a couple microphones, but…well, I’ll intellectualize it some other time. For now I’d rather just let it brighten my day.

(via Gizmodo)

Songsmith is the new Swede

Thankfully, something to lighten the mood a bit from this morning.

For those not familiar with Sweding, it comes from the Michel Gondry film Be Kind, Rewind, referring to a popular film re-created in approximately five minutes via blatantly low-budget means (the characters in the film claim that the films are imported from Sweden, hence the term). 

Sweding became briefly popular on YouTube, but has since become somewhat rare. But now a new, similar meme has sprung up around Microsoft’s latest crime against creativity, Songsmith. 

A few months ago, the following ad appeared on the interwebs. The only reason I was able to get more than ten seconds in was that I thought it was from The Onion. But some quick research and I discovered that this is an actual Microsoft advertisement for the product. 

See how far you can get into the video without having to stop it and take a few deep breaths. 

You probably still don’t believe me that this is real, and I don’t blame you. But you don’t have to take my word for it: here’s the official Microsoft product page.

The game hasn’t changed — you just noticed we were playing

So the blogosphere has been aflame with conversation about Escape from City 17, a film based in the Half Life 2 universe. I actually saw it on Friday, a coworker showed me. I figured I had until at least after the weekend to blog about it — obviously I still haven’t gotten in the habit of being “cutting edge,” so now it looks like I’m late to the party. So I’m going to fix it by rubbing other peoples’ faces in being late to the bigger party. 

Here’s the description of the film from the YouTube page: 

The Escape From City 17 short film series is an adaptation based on the Half Life computer game saga by Valve Corporation. Originally envisioned as a project to test out numerous post production techniques, as well as a spec commercial, it ballooned into a multi part series. Filmed guerilla style with no money, no time, no crew, no script, the first two episodes were made from beginning to end on a budget of $500. 

And here’s the video: 

Ultimately it’s a five minute short with no plot to speak of and a bunch of FX work. But more than one blog has referred to it as a “game changer,” primarily because they only spent $500 on it. Thing is, to people in the fan film community it frankly comes as no surprise. We’ve been seeing this kind of stuff for years.  

Bale-istic Remixes

Welcome to this wonderful thing we call the web. Within 24 hours of Bale’s outburst it has already been remixed several times.

My favorite so far is Christian Bale vs. Bill O’Reilly.

And from master celebrity re-mixer RevoLucian, who during the campaign season brought us Sarah Palin Remixed, we now have Bale Out.

Turn-around is fast on these things.

UPDATE: RevoLucian has put up a link to download a high-quality MP3 of Bale Out. Get it now!

Viral Marketing — ur doin it rite

Okay, so I lied about not posting about Watchmen no more.

But this viral piece from Watchmen comes on the tail of a disastrously failed viral marketing campaign in Australia, of which I was aware because I follow a number of Aussies on Twitter.

Viral marketing is hard to do right. It’s hard to predict what people will latch on to and really start talking about and pass on to their friends. I get a lot of people asking for advice on how to make their video a viral hit, and there are factors you can look at. High-quality content is likely to get passed around. Content attached to some kind of celebrity will probably get passed around. Funny or uplifting usually has a better chance than somber. But beyond that, I dunno. The RvD films are a total fluke — it’s not like we planned for them to be smash hits (although we hoped, on the second one), and I’m not sure you can plan that kind of thing — although the Ask a Ninja guys might disagree with me.

It seems you can’t go wrong with cute animals acting strange. You’ve seen the sneezing panda? Of course you have. Everyone has. Fucking bear has 30 million views on YouTube. I don’t even know how many views the frigging dramatic prairie dog/chipmunk/gopher has, because it’s been uploaded about 4000 separate times — but most of the search results have half a million hits or more.

But trying to actually make an ad badass enough to catch on? It happens. Usually when you’re dealing with Superbowl spots, you can be guaranteed people are going to seek it out, and if you do other spots throughout the year like that, there’s a good chance people will talk about it and they’ll look it up online. But that’s more word-of-mouth from traditional advertising than viral marketing, which seeks to make the audience do the work. They spread it around, they show it, they talk about it and it becomes part of the zeitgeist, at least for a little while.

The Tracey Fragments

So, I just became aware of this film called The Tracey Fragments. It’s an independent Canadian production starring Ellen Page (Hard Candy, X-Men 3) as a girl telling the story of how she came to find herself as we find her at the beginning of the film: naked beneath a shower curtain at the back of a bus, looking for her little brother, who thinks he’s a dog. Though I haven’t seen the film as of yet, it is apparently shot and cut in a “multi-pane” format sort of like Ang Lee’s Hulk.

By now you’re surely thinking “Social thread”, and I would normally agree, but for one fascinating initiative. If you go to the film’s website there is a “tab” labelled “Re-Fragmented”. If you go to this tab, you will find the entirety of the raw footage for the film, everything that was shot (approximately 20GB), available for free.

That’s 100% free, no strings, non-commercial download. They expect, and in fact encourage, other filmmakers to edit music videos, trailers, or even an entirely new cut of the film. They have also made the film’s score available for free under the Creative Commons license.

Also included in the bundle is the Final Cut Pro project files for the filmmakers’ version of the film. So if you have Final Cut, you can examine just how the film was ultimately constructed by the filmmakers.

This is, of course, a big deal. Imagine if other filmmakers jumped on this kind of share-and-share-alike bandwagon. Imagine what YOU can do in a creative community like this. And if nothing else, imagine what you could learn. Want to be an editor? Here’s an exercise for you to practice with: Download the files and the script, but do NOT watch the final film. Instead, use the footage and the script to create the version you, as an editor, conceive. Then compare it to the final project. Find out what you like better than their way, and what you think they did better than you did.

There’s also a contest, the best UGC (user-generated content) entry will win a Final Cut Pro package. I’m not entirely sure what value that is when the people getting the most mileage out of the files already use Final Cut, and only Canadian residents are eligible, but there you go.

I know nothing about the film or its content besides what I’ve already told you, and the film has not been rated by the MPAA. So there’s a chance there will be offensive or inappropriate material in the film. Almost certainly there’s language, and from the trailer it appears that there is some sexual content as well. Be aware of that possibility going in. I’m not endorsing the film itself, but I definitely endorse the initiative and possibilities the film represents. They follow directly on from yesterday’s post regarding the democratization of content and the rebirth of the read-write culture.