“I’m a Mac…..”
Today we are back at work and back in the studio, shooting the wrap arounds for What’s Your Trip with Andrew Zimmern.
About three months ago, we shot and aired a pilot for the User Generated series with Tony Bourdain as the host.
We received thousands of videos as a result of that one pilot – so we are going to series.
The show pays up to $1000 per video, for those that make air, and we have spent the past month culling through the thousands of submission videos that we received. We expect that as the series starts to air, we will receive many more.
The astonishing thing to me, having done this for a long time now, is the vast improvement in the quality of what we are looking at. When I did the first blown national trawl for video like this for Current.tv, the results were good, but the number of really great videos was small, however impressive.
Now, not so many years later, the quality across the board has improved dramatically.
This is not really a surprise. The technology has percolated out into the general population and more and more people are getting their hands on cameras and edits – it is no longer a rarity. Soon it will be the norm.
Coincidentally, we also had a meeting this morning with the head of a major broadcast group. Where once we had to explain the cameras and edits, with him it was not necessary. “I always take my Sony HDV camera with the family when we go on vacation and I cut on FCP” he said. Let’s cut to the chase.
We’ve shown you Michael Murphy’s videos from Antarctica. Of course, his work will be in the series, but you should do yourself a favor and check out his stuff on Youtube.
We’ll be showing you much more ‘amateur’ video, both here, at ctzn.tv and on What’s Your Trip in the next few weeks.
It’s more than a trend. It’s where the world is going.
And I am quite sure we are just at the very beginning.
What’s Your Trip is coordinated to be the companion show to The Travel Channel Academy. What you learn how to shoot, cut and upload now has a place to air, if its good enough.
