Site Archive

Imagine a world without free knowledge
Written by David Tames on January 18, 2012
Filed Under Featured, General, Law, Politics, Web
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Right now the U.S. Congress is considering legislation (SOPA and PIPA) that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, Wikipedia is blacking out their English language edition beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. I join Wikipedia in encouraging...  Continue Reading...

Ten glimpses into the crystal ball: the future of documentary
Written by David Tames on June 18, 2011
Filed Under Business, Distribution, Documentary, Film Festivals, Filmmaking, Front Page, Media Technology, New Media, Television, The Media, Web
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I’ve been contemplating the evolution of the documentary this summer and I was delighted to see that The MediaGuardian’s recent Sheffield Doc/Fest 2011 coverage includes ten articles providing a refreshing perspective on how documentary makers are finding new ways to reach their...  Continue Reading...

Thoughts on video on the web and HTML5
Written by David Tames on June 3, 2010
Filed Under Media Technology, New Media, Sound, Tools, Video on the Web, Web
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If your web site has video on it, I believe the time has come to take into consideration viewers using mobile devices if you’ve not done it already. The desktop is no longer the only platform for viewing video, and Flash, long dominant as the web video standard (at least as far as web...  Continue Reading...

Fragments from The Conversation 2010 (March 27, New York)
Written by David Tames on March 28, 2010
Filed Under Business, Copyright, Distribution, New Media, Sticky, Web
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On Saturday I attended the “The Conversation” at Columbia University, a conference focused on “Social Media, Distribution, and the Future of Film.” Related material can be found by searching on the #convonyc hash tag. Here are my notes, not everything here is a faithful...  Continue Reading...

Seven RSS feeds of interest to New England documentary filmmakers
Written by David Tames on November 7, 2009
Filed Under Documentary, General, Web
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Here are seven RSS feeds that I think will be of interest to New England documentary filmmakers. These suggestions come out of the discussion that took place today during theSocial Media Boot Camp for Film Professionals with Sean Fitzroy held at MassArt. There are many good feeds out there,...  Continue Reading...

A postmodern remake of a futurist classic: Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake
Written by David Tames on March 29, 2009
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Filmmaking, New Media, Web
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Video artist Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory project made with contributions from people around the world who upload video clips interpreting Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929), a film that is still fresh today in surprising...  Continue Reading...

Bard’s work is the kind of machine-assisted participatory filmmaking that brings Vertov’s vision into the new millennium and enabled by computers and the net. I’m sure Vertov would have loved it. Man With A Movie Camera was Vertov’s mechanical vision of a new socialist society with Vertov as auteur, Mikhail Kaufman as the cameraman, and Yelizaveta Svilova as editor, and with Soviet society and the machinery of the industrial age as the protagonists. Bard’s project presents a global social reality in the new millennium. Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, or as I like to think of it, “People with Video Cameras” brings the machine and ordinary people into the process of movie production and delivery, providing a collective vision consistent with Vertov’s futurist masterpiece of the modern era but remade in a postmodern setting with the media and tools of our generation: participation, camcorders, the internet, and computation. The perspectives of multiple contributors is consistent with Vertov’s philosophy, Joseph Schaub wrote in his essay, “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye“, “Kino-eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning.” OK, I’m stretching a little, but ideas are fun to play with, I see them as guides to possible worlds.

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake provides a crisp example of the first, second, and fourth characteristics that Janet Murray suggests in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, make new media a powerful vehicle for literary creation: 1. Procedural, 2. Participatory, 3. Spatial, and 4. Encyclopedic. The site does not make use of the spatial dimension (except for some aspects of the interface, which traditional cinema lacks completely), however, It’s pretty easy to see how the project could become more spatial in an interesting manner by adding geographical information related to the video when it is uploaded to the site, underscoring the truly global nature of the effort. Regardless of being light in the spatial dimension, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is one of the most interesting participatory video projects I’ve had the pleasure to experience and points the way to the future of cinema. While theater owners worry over sagging ticket sales and studio moguls fear the audience’s move to net, as creators and participants we can move beyond the industrial practices of the past and look forward to a re-invented, participatory, global, postmodern, Kino-Eye.

This post is based in part on a post written for my Design Seminar II class at MassArt in response to Scott Kirsner’s Media Tech Tonic presentation, “Inventing the Movies.”

--> Four books covering Internet and Web
Written by David Tames on October 14, 2008
Filed Under Business, MassArtDMI, New Media, The Media, Web
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If I had to pick four relatively current books that will help readers develop a better understanding of the World Wide Web, I would suggest the following books. It was hard to narrow down the list to four, but sometimes less is more. This particular list stems from a recent conversation with...  Continue Reading...

DIY DAYS coming to Boston October 4, 2008
Written by David Tames on September 13, 2008
Filed Under Art, Business, Distribution, Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, New Media, Web
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The DIY DAYS conference will be held in Boston on Saturday, October 4th at MassArt, along with screening of From Here to Awesome films the night before, also at MassArt. This traveling conference, recently held in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, explores how independent filmmakers...  Continue Reading...

Distribution in the Digital Age
Written by David Tames on August 2, 2008
Filed Under Business, Distribution, Events & Screenings, Filmmaking, Handout, Web
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With technology changing at a rapid pace and media content more plentiful than ever before, the question becomes, how do filmmakers find an audience for their media and make the best use of online distribution avenues to sell their films? We discussed new and inventive ways to get your film...  Continue Reading...

Podcamp Boston 3, July 19-20, 2008
Written by David Tames on July 15, 2008
Filed Under Business, Events & Screenings, New Media, Video Production, Video on the Web, Web
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Podcamp Boston 3 will be held this weekend, Saturday, July 19-20, 2008 at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center, Harvard Medical School, 77 Louis Pasteur Avenue in Boston. If you’ve not already done so, now might be a good time to register as space is limited this year, the event is...  Continue Reading...

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