You Suck At Photoshop
Fragments, snippets and viral videos abound online, but occasionally these are coalescing into larger forms. There’s immense opportunity for creating online video niches, and a few stand out in recent times. You Suck At Photoshop is now up to it’s second season, having tallied some 40 or so episodes now, based around the simpler premise of an embittered cubicle worker recording some screencast tutorials in his spare time. The familarity of the interface somehow reinforces the humour, part of the appeal, seeing the ingenious ways he manages to use otherwise innocent features of the software to highlight problems with his ex-partner.
Auto-Tune The News
The Gregory Brothers from NY have now pumped out 7 episodes of their musical news satire and show no signs of stopping. Formula seems to go something like : find some topical news segments, break it down into possible riffs, work a song structure around those, composite characters to appear onscreen beside the news hosts, offer alternate opinions / back-up vocals / harmonies, then shake it all up. Again what seems cool is reminder that ideas are more important than money, and today establishing a globally popular video channel is possible from anyone’s bedroom.
Collaborative Projects : Where Are They Now?
“The kind of motion picture I am interested in will be like creating the modern LP record. It will be mixed into ways of thinking rather than cut linearly” – Francis Ford Coppola, quoted at nowthemovie.com.
There have been a few notable attempts over the years to try and harness the network to create large collaborative works of video and cinema. Cold Cut spearheaded a UK attempt to facilitate a global network of film-makers contributing footage to an audiovisual collage feature film. The eventual feature film and ninjatune DVD release hasn’t eventuated though, apparently because of some promised UK funding not coming through. Also from the UK, A Swarm of Angels tried to transcend this problem by crowdsourcing the funding component as well as the creative aspects. As it currently stands, their site states they are ‘making a transformation’, and asks for patience during the site hiatus. “With members now in the four figures we are reconfiguring our web presence to simplify involvement and clarify all the project developments.”
The Age of Stupid documentary has already been completed with funds crowdsourced from many individuals and groups, but perhaps funding a large collaborative project is the easier part after all. Other group cinema projects on the boil include : Open Source Cinema hosts several collaborative documentaries, and Star Wars Uncut breaks the movie up into 473 x 15 second clips for *anyone* to remake. So far 143 have been finished. Should make for a hilariously disjointed viewing when finished.
Resolume 3.1 Now with Flash playback
A recent upgrade to Resolume adds Flash playback, which will appeal greatly to motion graphic creators and animators everywhere. Their Flash playback includes full alpha channel support so transparaceny looks great, and is Actionscript 3 compatible which allows live control over your animations with custom slides, buttons and text input from within Resolume. And they’ve conveniently added a new Flash chapter to the Resolume manual on how to get this going. There’s a bunch of other updates too including a video beat looper, a keystone plug-in for mapping onto objects, a dedicated AV slider, and a master output audio delay to compensate for the difference in time between video hitting the screen and audio hitting the speakers ( audio is generally quicker ). More at resolume.com. Elsewhere? A step sequencer for Resolume.