Quark Nova (Tumbled)

Quark Mobile!

All the videos at Quark Nova are now available to play back on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad (as well as other excellent mobile devices). I’ve tested them, and I’m completely thrilled with it. Go now and engage your cell phone data plans with experimental film!

(For those who care about the details, Vimeo finally released an embeddable HTML5 player, only 8 months after they first started hinting about it.)

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The Age of Slack?

This article is from March, but it bears examining months later as financial data expands and paints a clearer picture.

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

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Sharing data works? That’s unpossible.

From the NYT: “Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s”

But how can we keep the current system of capitalizing on discoveries alive if these assholes are focusing on HEALING?

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Welcome to UFVA 2010!

August 10, 2010

I’ve been looking forward to this since last August. As I write this, members of the University Film and Video Association are convening in beautiful Burlington, VT. Just walking down to help install art in the New Media galleries, I ran into friends I’d not seen in a year… a few I hadn’t seen in even longer… and I remember why I keep coming back to the UFVA Conference. People, people, and people.

Champlain College is small, lovely, and it’s all ours this week. Karen Klove and her colleagues have done exemplary work setting up this conference. The events you know and love are back in full force, there are a few new events, and maybe a few surprises.

I strongly recommend that you spend some time with the online schedule, and take advantage of the ability to build a personalized schedule with the new “My Conference Schedule” function.

Some things I’d like to point out that might not be obvious to conference attendees this year:

• The Welcome session on Wednesday morning will serve as your orientation to the conference, as well as a marvelous surprise guest speaker.
• Saturday at 3:30pm there will be a “Fond Farewell” session to remember pioneering members who passed away this year: Herb and Bea Farmer, George Wehbi, Skip Landon, and Ned Hockman.
• Saturday at 10:30am we have a new session that we are experimenting with… the UFVA Awards / Kodak Scholarship Screening! At this brunch session we will screen highlights from the UFVA Juried Screening Awards of Merit, Carole Fielding Grant winners, and the Kodak Scholarship winners.

As you go about the conference, I hope you’ll take advantage of some of our social media endeavors:

• UFVA on Facebook
• The UFVA Flickr Group
• Mark your tweets with #UFVA on Twitter

It’s going to be a great conference… I look forward to spending time with you this week!

Simon

—
Simon Tarr
UFVA Conference Vice-President

Original Article

UFVA Social Media

The University Film and Video Conference is an academic gathering, so when it comes to social media, you might expect us to have some strange choices. This is, after all, the industry that not only spawned the dreaded Blackboard, but continues to use it. So what’ll it be? Plurk? LinkedIn? Friendster?

Wrong. It’s pretty standard and widely-accepted stuff:

Twitter: use the hashtag #UFVA in your tweets.

Facebook: The new Facebook page is here. Be sure to like it. Or, “like” it.

And there’s also… Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube

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UFVA 2010 Conference Site

Looking forward to seeing many of you at this year’s University Film and Video Association Conference next week. This is my first conference as the Conference Vice President, so I’m a little anxious for everything to get rolling, but the team at Champlain College has done to fantastic work, and it should be an outstanding conference.

The NEW UFVA website is live. And actually alive, rather than a brain-dead zombie. Jeff Warmouth is a wonderful human being for all the work he’s done with it, it’s a Drupal tour-de-force. Go check it out.

The 2010 Conference Schedule is complete, and it is also online. There will be, of course, a print schedule, but since things have gone to print, there have already been some personnel changes in some sessions. One reason to use the online schedule is to be sure you’re looking at the most accurate schedule. Reason 2: you can build a personalized conference schedule that sticks with your login. Reason 3: there’s a mobile version of the site, formatted for the small screen. Yeah yeah, it’s not an iPhone app. Anyone who wants to volunteer to build one for 2011 for free is hired…

More to come, stay tuned.

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Don’t hate the player

…hate the game.

Funny line, and a strong take on today’s discussion: alex-reid.net

Rest Stop Emergency

Emergency, originally uploaded by SimonDaPieman.

In the men’s room at the welcome center rest stop crossing into North Carolina on I-95. I can’t really express how much self control it took for me to not push this.

Original Article

Bloggy McBloggerson

My new intern, Rachel, is great. I’ve had a lot of luck with undergraduate interns this year… Cecil, Matt, Brian, Danielle. Each has made production easier in one way or another. Typically, I’m not very good at delegating, assigning tasks that have meaning is more difficult than you’d think. It’s immoral on one hand to assign menial tasks (coffee, etc), and it’s immoral in a different way to actually USE interns as primary labor. So, the trick is figuring out meaningful work that is not a.) trivial, debasing the concept of an internship or b.) exploitative, devaluing the market price of a job that should have been paid in the first place. Hello, my old friend pedagogy.

(interesting aside—I’m a professor, but I’m also a licensed business, so when I take interns I do not grade them, I merely evaluate them as an employer and someone else grades them)

Rachel has been interning with me on New Islands Archipelago, moving from Columbia, SC to NYC to work and adventure. Her rotoscoping work (using Adobe After Effects CS5’s new rotobrush) appears in the show’s last shot. She picked up the rudiments of After Effects in about a day, and soon met up with the Great Conundrum. That is, the amount of time you bang your head against something does not correlate to how good it ends up. The corellary to the Great Conundrum being: rotoscoping sucks. After Effect’s rotobrush is pretty great however, particularly if you have eight 64-bit processors and 16GB of RAM. It’s a bit of a dog on an old MacBook Pro, though.

The point is, I’m trying to blog better, because Rachel’s an excellent blogger, a regular Bloggy McBloggerson. At least I think she is. I read her first couple posts, then stopped. They were excellent, but I didn’t want to potentially affect what she writes, not that she’d alter things knowing I was reading. Anyway. She’s been diligent and I’d like to be that diligent.

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