Back To The BBC
Back to The BBC This week we are in Manchester, England, running a full blown, hands-on video bootcamp for The BBC. There are 40 producers, writers and technical people from The BBC’s Drama Unit. They are all learning how...
Read moreYoutube Hits 1 Billion Subscriptions
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g9PiEgYYUU[/youtube] There’s Something Happening Here… Yesterday, Youtube announced their one billionth subscription. That is, the one billionth time someone has hit the yellow ‘subscribe’ button on Youtube. Youtube is only 5 years old. How much is a billion? It’s a...
Read moreThe Curse of the Focus Groups
Look out Grommit! It’s Hollywood ! The Guardian reveals today that a)Nick Park is back in business on his own terms, about to release another Wallace and Grommit feature and b) things did not work out so well with...
Read moreMy Birthday Surprise
Taken with my iPhone.. needless to say, not the Hasselblad My wife just surprised me with my birthday present – a new Hasselblad H4D digital camera. It is quite literally the best camera in the world. It gets a...
Read moreOK Go Video Beats Robert Altman
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w[/youtube] A few years ago I read In The Blink of an Eye, by Walter Murch. It’s the behind-the-scenes story of the making of Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola. Murch was the editor. In the book he talks...
Read moreWhat I Learned at BET
Pretty much everyone knows that television news is terrible. It is unwatchable. It is crap. The people who know this the best are the people who are actually in the business. They aren’t kidding anyone, least of all themselves....
Read moreVideo Saved His Life
Now we’re democratizing the medium… All this week we have been working with BET, the Black Entertainment Television network. Like always we’ve got a group of producers and reporters that we’re teaching to shoot and cut their own stuff....
Read moreGrads At Sea
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T687IdXpCwc&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] could be on Nickelodeon or an After School Special… Two years ago, David Besemer took our TCA course in Santa Barbara. He did a pretty good video on Toot, the water taxi in the Santa Barbara harbor. When...
Read moreBy The Numbers
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz OK Here’s a sobering statistic The average American spends 4.5 hours a day watching TV. And as video migrates to iPads, iPods and the web, that number is going to increase. Good for us video makers Now, here’s...
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