Despite all the creative aspirations and technical skills they share, there’s surprisingly little overlap between the huge populations of VJs & video bloggers.
Nurturing mutual status as pixel underdogs, both VJs & video bloggers are adept at dealing with low or non-existent budgets, and both champion storytelling and/or aesthetics and visual ideas over production values. That’s not to say production values are ignored – in fact, production values probably tie up more than their fair share of discussion time in either community, but a key defining aspect of being a VJ or videoblogger is the joy of just of being able to get those pixels out there.
While all this pre-supposes you have compelling video / stories / pixels to begin with, at least the current state of video play helps level the media playing field to some degree. And the current expansion of mobile video ( phones, PSP, video iPods & many other handhelds ), continues this window of opportunity for bedroom pixelists. And to think of a hybrid army of these pixelists, loaded up with the combined skillsets of the VJ & VideoBlogging massive, is to imagine a continually more diverse and decentralised media. So let’s bring it on.
What can Video Bloggers learn from VJs?
VJs know how to move pixels in real-time. Whether responding to music, or creating live audiovisual pieces, VJs are at home using real-time editing tools, allowing easy compositing, layering, sequencing and effects on the fly. Aside from live performance though, the ‘instrumentness’ of these real-time tools means they are also very effective and flexible video production tools. Creativity can be given a new leash when freed from the constraints of the rendering timeline, and levels of complexity can be explored spontaneously that would take a long time to build up to with traditional video editing software. And VJ software is especially suited to online video publishers, because both VJs & VideoBloggers tend to use 320 x 240 sized clips ( the bloggers because it’s a default multimedia size compromise for bandwidth concerns, the VJs because it’s a compromise between resolution and allowing the speediest real-time triggering and manipulation).
VJs also have extensive knowledge about how to get projections happening, whether on a screen in a club, theatre, projecting from a rooftop, mobile van, shopping trolley, or even the side of a train. This is a very useful amount of technical knowledge to tap into, but should also encourage online publishers to think more about where their work can be shown offline – where can video be seen? Be shown? Where can stories be told? Where can your colours be projected?
VJs also know a lot about codecs, and the ways video is compressed to create the best combination of image quality and speed of playback and ‘scrubbing’ ( moving a file backwards and forwards on a timeline smoothly ). And a thing or two about transitions, visual storytelling, the power of the image, the use by date of the image, effects ( and their ever shrinking use by dates), automated processes ( such as visual manipulation by audio analysis ), video signal routing, capturing, sampling and much much more.
Key VJ community resources & forums :
www.vjforums.com, www.audiovisualizers.com & www.vjcentral.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eyecandy ( mailing list with thousands of VJs )
http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/0xff ( another good ‘live video’ mailing list )
What can VJs learn from Video Bloggers?
Videobloggers ( also known as vloggers) know the online networks inside out, and know the values and pleasures of automated publishing – getting your work out there in appropriate formats, having it automatically archived and linked to from a main page, having it easily cross referenced or quoted and having interested audiences automatically notified when it is published. All of which help make any particularly worthy video rise on it’s merits rather than marketing budget ( netheads love calling this a ‘meritocracy’ ). VideoBloggers also know a lot about compression codecs ( though more focussed on image quality and shrinking file size than clip triggering speed), about getting work out to as many different platforms as possible, about storytelling, about audiences, about online promotion, about embedding hyperlinks and much much more.
Of course, many VJs are already posting videos online, but few are harnessing the benefits and play available with networked publishing. VJ Falk ( Berlin ) continues to clock sporadic VJ created pieces, vjtorrents.com provides ‘BitTorrent and RSS feeds to showcase high quality videos of live video mixing from around the world’ and VJ Bertranol ( France ) posts occasional live mixes and has also created (free) software allowing easy publishing of video within a blog / web-publishing system. Hollywood is catching on though – Clerks Director Kevin Smith has a videoblog and Peter Jackson provides a King Kong video diary – but there is still time to define your niche. Time to carve out a global audience auto-downloading your every (bedroom produced ) episode to their computers, handhelds or mobile phones.
Key VideoBlogger community resources & forums :
www.videoblogging.info
www.freevlog.org ( step-by-step guide to setting up a free videoblog)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ ( mailing list with a thousand Videobloggers )
i would just like to point out my personal answer in my blog (same as in the vjcentral threat):
http://www.prototypen.com/blog/falk/archive/001356.html
i’m more from the film making/editing side, not quite a vj, but these days it all mixes anyway… i agree: there will be this huge shift in “content production” from mainstream (media) to a decentralised, individualised production/distribution… the sites/tools to watch out for: dtv – http://participatoryculture.org/download.php, ourmedia.org and sites like commonflix.org.
maybe useful to read:
“intro to diy internet tv (iptv), indie tv/movie distribution/platforms, vlogs and some useful tools for the r e a l digital revolution”
http://realdigirev.blogspot.com/2005/09/intro-to-diy-internet-tv-iptv-indie.html
and this here is our new video’s blog + download – it’s a film noir remix music video: http://stationvideo.blogspot.com/
we launched a vlog following the release of the Apple video iPod
http://www.motiongraf.com/vlog
the technology is pretty simple… we use WordPress with a plugin to create our podcast and save everything in Quicktime 7 optimized for the iPod (takes care of size and compression)… now the question is… what is the general public gonna do with a VJ Vlog?
What we are hoping is that they get the idea to download our clips to their video iPod… sneakernet the iPod over to the TV… plug it in, crank the stereo… and rock out to the VJ experience in their own living room… for the youth of the future, it would be unthinkable to have a house party without the VJ mix up on the video wall.
heya motiongraf – hadda look at your site – good luck with it… .i think tho – you need to include pictures / stills from the videos so people get a better sense of what they i are… to see how that might work better, maybe check out the sites above from indiworks and falk 😉