Team culture pays off

It's just over 12 hours to go now until the final deadline for submitting films for assessment for the course, and some of the students are clearly under a bit of pressure.  This is not helped by the somewhat complicated compromise we negotiated with exams and LTS to keep the submission options as wide as possible and deal with the bottlenecks and limitations of OpenStudio when it comes to directly hosting video (as opposed to linking to external media).  Definitely something to attend to for the next presentation, but for now there are a number of things each student needs to do to make a complete submission and not everyone is finding it straightforward.

The team culture of the course is making a real difference though, as evident in this exchange in the forum:

Many large organisations would be very happy to have help at hand on technical issues with such a quick turnaround time.  It's certainly making my life easier as a moderator as this is the kind of query that does need to be picked up.

Our students are getting noticed

It's the start of the last week of the course, and tunnel vision is getting very easy for me: It matters how many students submit an EMA and I know there are some emotional barriers involved. There's been some really good films posted up on OpenStudio, and if you're just starting out it gives a deceptive idea of the standard required.  It's not necessary to be brilliant to pass or even do well in the course, but it can be harder to see that when really good films are being shown.  I'm thinking about how to handle this better in the future, but for now the focus is on the forums and making the point whenever possible that good is good enough and even OK is OK.  For a beginner making something and posting it publicly is a big step.

So the fact that some of our students are getting external recognition is on one hand good evidence that the best we're seeing is very, very good indeed.  On the other hand it's a welcome reminder of the incredible resources that come from getting a group of students to open up what they're doing to one another.  Here're two examples of films that most of us could learn something from:

Conan Coatsworth has been one of the course characters and the humour and energy in his films makes them a treat.  His parody about barefoot running is getting hits on YouTube and I'd say it's down to a good script, sound production values, an excellent actor and all about a popular topic online. Near 4,000 hits in 4 days and the shape of the curve looks good too.  I'm very interested to see how the interest and reaction shapes up and if he did another film starring Rory there'd be a fanbase out there already.

The second example is from someone who's had other stuff on his plate than the course and I'll make no claims at all about the relationship between what he's done and anything that we've taught.  The point though is that he shared this with us through the forum and gave thought to what his experience might say to the other students.  Adrian Petty's film won first place in the Disposable Film Festival, and it's not hard to see why.

Bigger tasks

The students are in the depths of their main productions now, so it's a good time to give you an idea of the sort of work they're producing.  Two weeks ago was their biggest task to date,  and the options were either to cover an event, or to make a sock drama parody.  Here're some of the results:

Covering an event



The first of these was very interesting, because it's hard to pin down.  The music is very well chosen and something about the blend of natural sound gives it an air of childhood wonder to me.  The second is a good demonstration of the use of titles to move a narrative along, and the final one was a very interesting and personal piece showing that sometimes handheld camera is just spot-on.

Sock puppet parody



This option provided some real play time, and these three show off different techniques for producing drama without the trouble and expense of hiring actors (although the voice acting was superb).  The first two are remakes of scenes from feature films with a few twists (look out for the water skier in the second), while the third is a parody that uses the format of a daytime TV show to have some fun.

A new twist on student-centred learning

This week I'm feeling very smug, as the course seems to be going well and we're getting good feedback. There has however been one particular development that I think is well beyond what you'd expect to see on a level 1 introductory course. The students have been fantastic with helping one another and got into the spirit of student-centred peer learning: An active enquiry into a subject with support where it's needed and plenty of room to learn through shared discovery.

We've shaped some opportunities to get them thinking about giving others opportunities to learn through tasks and an EMA option that relate to making tutorials in their own right on subjects they choose. However they're going well beyond that now, and we've seen some great examples of spontaneous tutorials being posted outside of all that, specifically made for other students on the course. Hence the smugness, and I'd like to share 3 examples with you here. The first two are quite technical and relate to specific enquiries that were posted in the forums:

These are interesting in their own right, and a great example of the 'hero' spirit that's developed.
The third though, is different and a I think if anything more special: A tutorial about film-making that one of the students made for herself, and which she then shared with everyone else:

Digital creativity

One of the options for last week's task was to make an advert for an item on Ebay.  In general the idea is to allow more scope for pre-production than before and to think about narratives and audiences.  The top 3 rated posts demonstrate that parody rules when it comes to internet video, and also that creativity can be expressed in many different ways:

Set and music: The Rollling stones

Character and acting: Wii bag

Script and shooting: Peeves 

Week 4 Infomercial from David Wright on Vimeo.

Acceptance speeches

We just announced our 5th hero of the week, someone who really embodies lots of the qualities we wanted to celebrate.  He's often at hand in the forums with help for others and gives encouragement there and on OpenStudio from a solid enthusiasm for film-making.  I wanted to share his response on the blog because it's a good example of a tradition that's emerged in response to the whole hero/honourable mentions thing: acceptance speeches.  Well perhaps not so grand, but some really interesting responses from some great students, and here's what one of them has had to say:

Well thank you Chris and the team, I'm honoured and very pleased to pass on useful information that I've only discovered myself after making countless mistakes and overcoming obstacles in my own filmmaking work.

I must say that I am enjoying this course so much you wouldn't believe! and I've learned such a lot in the past three weeks, especially through refining my own workflow and thought processes, as well as becoming more focused in my work and discovering abilities that I never imagined I possesed!. Week 3 introduced me to an area of filmmaking that I've never previously encountered, and definitely one that I will be revisiting in the future. Also the tips, info and resources posted by everyone on the forum has been absolutely invaluable.

It's also great studying alongside those who are starting out in filmmaking as there is so much to share and filmmaking these days is definitely open to all.

I haven't had as much time for the forum or open studio this week due to working on the task, but I'm hoping to have it completed tonight and spend a relaxing few hours tommorow checking out and commenting on everyone's work.

Well done to all the honourable mentions, and the Bavarian beer sounds wonderful Chris. Looking forward to recieving my badge! 

Dave

Hero of the week

One of the things I've wanted to learn about in doing T156 is how much of what works for creating a good environment in workshops works in an on-line environment.  It's not a trivial question, because Rick and I have developed a very strong set of practices now that I like to think deliver results in workshops.  You can't please everyone all of the time and sometimes individuals bail out or cause trouble, but generally you can deliver a very good overall environment for learning that's constructive and fun.  The result is that people can willingly venture out a little further from what they know already and enormous amounts of progress is possible in a very short time.  So what's possible online?

Forums, I would say, are a challenge.  They can easily be dominate by a few individuals with the time and inclination to post a lot.  There are issues with tone, and my experience elsewhere is that they can become quite negative or stop functioning altogether quite quickly.  Part of the trouble is the medium, with big lags compared to face-to-face work and far fewer opportunities for feedback.  It's also harder to pick up on emotional tone.  Think about it: if you're standing in front of someone who's expressing irritation, you can usually tell what they're after with that and perhaps deal with it skilfully.  In writing, unless both they're very articulate and trying to help out with your understanding, it's often hard to tell if someone is irate, trying to reform things, teasing or just puzzled. It's very easy to get judgements about such things wrong.

Having said that, online environments have proven themselves a place to be social places too, and so we're experimenting to see what works.  One of the ideas we're trying out in the T156 film-maker's forum is to have a hero of the week, along with several honourable mentions.  The 'hero thing' is awarded to the person who in our judgement makes the most valuable contribution to the module during the week, and they get a small badge posted out to them.  We're clear that it's totally subjective, but I'm also careful to demonstrate that there's something behind the award by pointing to things that they've done.

The idea gives a whole set of important opportunities.  One is just to sum up what the week has been about and to point to some of the interesting things that happen.  Another is to give feedback on important positive contributions - not just to named individuals, but to anyone who does similar things.

The starting point was recognising what you'll see on many courses - a group of students who will go to amazing lengths to help others, often from a profoundly skilful basis.  We've got several very experienced film-makers studying with us and they're incredibly helpful in sorting out technical hassles.  There's also a very good culture of encouragement - I suspect Henry V studied with the OU before his big speech at Agincourt.

We've just named our 3rd hero (of week 2, because there was a week zero too), and this is where the fun and sense of making it up as we go along comes in.  We've jigged to the side and named a hero who asks good questions, along with a set of honourable mentions who have started good discussions.  The point is that exposing what one doesn't know takes guts and is an essential part of making a forum work too.  I'm optimistic that it won't put off the dedicated unsnaggers, and that it will help to pull the group together  a little more.  I can't wait to see what we do next week :)

Student introductions

We've now got 160 students signed up and studying the course and they're a really interesting bunch.  Many of the people we imagined might take it, and it's been great to read their introductions and see what their ambitions for the course are.
Last weekend was the official end of week 1, and an opportunity for students to post a video introduction.  Here're the top 5 that the other students have most highly rated through OpenStudio:

Moderating the forums

I'm more than a week into my new role as a moderator (having been a student, lecturer and tutor), and it's been fantastic to see the first cohort of students begin to explore the material and to post to the forums.

We've set up 2 forums:

The first is the film-makers forum, which is for posting queries and discussions about the course.  We've been quite interventionist to start with, because it's important to show the forums can be useful, but we've tried not to answer everything straight away.  Good questions are just as important, and we're here to facilitate good discussion rather than dominate it.  I'm still learning the ropes a bit with this especially as it's easy to be enthusiastic about the whole thing, but the experiences the students have to draw on between them should cover a lot of ground.  For example, there's been a cracking discussion of DSLRs and I've been very pleased with the tone and level of the forums compared to some of the courses I've worked on in the past.

Second is the social forum, which really belongs to the students to do whatever they want with.  Our formal role there is stamp out flame wars (even at the OU they can take off) and keep an eye out for things that can enrich the film-maker's forum. In practice there's been a lot of crossover and we might need to do a little work to separate things out a bit. One of the benefits of having all the things that people can learn film-making from in the film-maker's forum is that it's searchable.  Already, there's some great stuff on using DSLRs, equipment and editing software, books and organisations.

Chris

Open access media available

John Sinton has been working away to get the course tutorials available across the various channels the OU uses.

So as well as on a playlist on OULearn's YouTube



We're also on iTunesU - http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/digital-film-school-for-ipod/id467054715

Next stop, I'd quite like to talk to Vimeo.

...and we're live

The first students logged in today.  It's a big moment after years of pushing the project and then 9 months of actually building the site.  I'm so grateful to the LTS team who've been plugging away at it over the summer.  Everything is looking fab and now it's being used.

OpenStudio's ready

After more than a year of dreaming about and months of going back and forth with the LTS team, OpenStudio is pretty much in it's final form, and it's great.

I think this is where some of the best learning will happen on the course as students learn to look for things themselves.  The engine for rewarding this is getting feedback from one another about what's useful or interesting, and it all happens in the same space as where the students put their own work.

The interface is looking fab too:

Partnerships II

We're keen for collaborations, and have designed the course and its resources to support many other kinds of initiatives.  The link with People's Voice Media in Manchester is particularly pleasing because they came to us on the back of a successful project with the Digital Photography course, T189.

I've been fitting in a few other meetings around the tail end of the production, and I hope to have more news of this kind in the following months.  If you've got something you could use the course for, please get in touch.

Assessment

Have just submitted the assessment for the course, and I think we've managed to find a fair way of looking at what students have learned during the course.  Here're a few things about it:

• The final project will consist of film made to one of 8 briefs, a behind the scenes documentary and a treatment.  This allows the student to present information about how a film was made, as well as the end result.
• The grade will be based on 4 components.  The first three are the core skill areas for the course: creative, organisational and technical.  The last is looking at the production as a whole and includes the question "Would we spend money on this or on more like this?"
• The briefs range from making a tutorial to making an ident to give as much scope as possible for individuals to follow their own interests.
• Marks will be for work that is appropriate to the genre - a DIY tutorial to play in a store has a different aesthetic to a TV ident.  We're looking for evidence that students are making work that matches the audience.
• The whole thing has been designed to be as manageable as possible.  Total run length of both pieces of media is no more than 5 minutes, and the treatment is up to 600 words with a template and worked example provided.
• We get students to look at the assessment early on in the course so that it's at the back of their head while they're learning.  The last 4 weeks of the course are given over to producing the project, with plenty of help and guidance on making the different parts.
• We've left the door open for students to collaborate with one another or others if they want (film-making is social after all).  The behind-the-scenes documentary and treatment need to be their own work and describe the role they took in the production.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how this works out now.

Working with professionals part II

Another true pro we could draw on in making the course was one of Rick's friends and associates, Neil Oseman.  Neil is film-maker in his own right, with several features under his belt and and really interesting project in train (http://www.darksideoftheearth.com/).  He also edits for Rick on Catcher projects, and we asked him to do the viral - because he'd do it really well, and because we could then interview him for a piece of course media.  The result was this:

A film school for professionals

One of my personal ambitions for T156 is that it should be something useful to people in their professional lives as well as for personal interest.   This doesn't mean that we're aiming squarely at entrants to the film industry, although I think the course will be a very useful quick introduction to anyone who like to get a feel for what different roles do.  But video isn't just for the creative industries anymore, just as typing isn't a specialist administrative talent.  I don't think the OU is unique as an organisation in the way that a cottage industry of media makers has sprung up in the last few years.

A good example is teachers, who have an increasing need for IT skills in their professional role - it's part of the classroom and of the skill set that children are expected to develop.  Even better, it can be fun.  So learning to make videos and being able to share those skills is something that's not just for the IT specialist in a school, but instead a way of working across many subjects. The advantage we have in developing the course is year's of experience of using video in group work.  Rick has spent a lot of time in schools working with teachers and their pupils and this has informed what we do.  As well as the approach, the resources are designed to be lifted and re-used in different settings.

The Media's done

Rick, John and Joe have done sterling work to get all the media ready and handed over.  There're a mass of files, ranging from one-shot General Views for the students to use to example pieces of media to tutorials.  They'll all be available on a creative commons basis once the course is up and running, and here's a preview for now:

Two day film school, or 10 weeks?

Just saw an ad for this intensive 2 day film school in June in London: http://www.raindance.co.uk/site/index.php?id=565,7382,0,0,1,0

It looks very interesting and I'm tempted to sign up.  It's for a completely different market than the Digital Film School - a rapid introduction if you want to make feature films, rather than starting from wherever you are and giving a grounding in actually making short films (for the internet).  I'd like to think they'll be quite complementary, but that many more people will value what we have to offer.

One of the eye-catching differences - It costs £249.95+VAT for 2 days in central London.  You can study T156 for less than that if you live in the UK from your own home without having to add in travel and accommodation.

Unstructured authoring

The media team and our text editor are now engaging with the material, and there's the rather unholy task of pulling together a lot of material that was written at a gallop.  At the same time I'm going back to feed in what the critical readers have come up with.  Sections are moving around and titles changing and it was a little challenging this week to go through things section by section and see just how rough some bits are.

The good side of it is that this is all stuff the OU cares about.  There'll be at least 2 more passes through the material to ensure that it's good enough to go public between now and October, and a lot of effort to make sure things are consistent.  Of course even then a few small things will slip through, but I'm sure we'll be able to present students with material we can be proud of.  I can't wait.

The magic of filmmaking

So here it is at last.  Watch it fullscreen in HD - it's lush. 

Neil Osman, has done a fab job with Rick of pulling all the footage together and making it work. Neil's very talented, works very fast, and has hidden a few quirks in the video to find about the course.

He's also working on his next feature - see http://www.darksideoftheearth.com/.  He's on his way to Cannes right now to drum up some investment.

We're going to spread a few different versions of this around, and if anyone would like mash it up a little themselves, get in touch.

A preview

The viral is edited and ready to go.  Here's a little preview:

It's done with a split screen - the camera is fixed on a tripod and the scene is shot twice, with care to keep the moving elements on either side of a line across the screen. A nice bit of magic and plenty more to come...

Full drafts for all the weeks handed on

There are still some rough edges, but I just passed weeks 9+10 on to the curriculum assistant to put into the correct template for the website.  This is quite an arcane process and full of pitfalls as it falls somewhere between an author's job, an administrator's job and something an editor would do.

It's been so great to have someone else who can take care of this, not least because the laptop I've been using to write on doesn't work with software that's needed for the job.

In related news, I've now got glasses.  The eye strain from long hours of fiddling with text finally got to me and I got a prescription while I was in Hungary.  So here's the new look for T156.

Coming up soon: The viral has been edited and I get to look at it this afternoon.

Gadget Show Video

Here's the film we made at the Gadget Show.  Great camera work from John in difficult conditions, and a credit to his microphones that we can hear anything at all.l  I do regret that we couldn't spend more time filming: the whole place is heaving with great stories. I'm going back tomorrow, but just to be on the stand this time.

The Gadget Show

I’ve just spent 2 days at the OU stand at the Gadget Show, which has been quite an amazing experience. It’s heaving with technology, not all of it very serious.  There’s a good spirit, and I’ve even managed to pick up some good tips on the Panasonic cameras I want to buy.

Yesterday was all about exploring, as well as spending time on the stand, signing people up to receive a prospectus.  We’ve also had a sheaf of the T156 leaflets to hand to show people.  

Today we did some filming and I spent part of the afternoon editing it.  My first AVCHD project and some early snags left the footage looking a bit blurry in preview (Sorry John – you filming was as good as ever).  Will finish it tomorrow if there’s time, but some course writing looms tonight still. We’re getting through it and the hard week’s are done, but it’s not all in the can yet and it should be.

Live at the Gadget Show

We're sharing a stand at the Gadget Show in 10 days time with the Digital Audio course, and we'll be there from April 13th-17th.

The plan is to make a short film about the event (using a shot list from one of the course projects, of course), and then edit it at the stand.  Please come and visit us if you're at the show.

The OK Go One Take Mystery

One of my favourite videos is OK GO's music video for their song "This too shall pass".  It's not a bad song either.

The whole thing takes the idea of a labour of love to new heights.  Here's one of the band talking about all the things in it.  The question is - was the whole thing done in one take?  That is, did a single camera follow the action all the way through, in a miracle of timing?

It's certainly meant to look that way, but according to FreddieW, it's not quite what happened:

A little more digging has one of the band members confirming the edit, though claiming there's just one in an article for Wired.  A nice collection of behind-the-scenes interviews there too.

So the verdict is: Not one take, but it was clearly meant to be.  They did such a great job that I'm going to accept the story that the whole machine worked three times, and that the camera did actually manage to follow almost all of it through at least once.

Red letter day

Looks like we'll have to finish making the course now, as we are now officially on the OU website at http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/t156.htm.  If you're interested in studying it, have a look.  The fee is likely to head upwards from next year as the changes to higher education funding start to bite.

Given that it's going to happen now, it's lucky that we've made good progress today, finishing up the text for our first handover - weeks 2-4 - on time.  I wish I had time to tell you some more of the nice little twists we've built in as we went along. Instead to celebrate we commissioned a special panel of photographs.

I've been living in Rick's house for pretty much the whole week and spending my days sitting in this corner. Nice to have a break for the weekend, even if it only means sitting in my own corner while I get on with things for the next handover.

A week ready for handover

Another milestone today, with the second week more or less ready for handover to the editor.  I'm a little nervous of letting it go quite yet, because the way we've set it up may prove slightly constraining as we move through the rest of the course.

On the other hand, we've spent as long on week two as most of the rest of the text so far, and it's paying off as we're getting quicker and quicker, with a strong model to work against.  Week 3 is not far behind and I'm up late with week 4 tonight after Rick's first pass today.

We've not got the media and pictures ready, and we're indicating place holders for now, but we have managing some bells and whistles like glossary terms as we go along, so I think karma is about balanced.

Coming up soon - our course description goes live and you can sign up to study the course :)

Working with professionals

In last week's shoot we drew in a whole bunch of friends and contacts as cast and crew.  Some were there for experience, others were doing us a favour and I hope that everyone enjoyed a break in their daily routine. Our central character was played by Therese Collins, an actor friend of Rick's who has worked with him on all sorts of projects.  It was very interesting watching how she approached the shoot - not just in terms of her role (in which she was fantastic), but her effect on everyone else.

Another of our heroes was Jude, who fitted two appearances around her working day as a researcher at the OU.  She was more than willing to help, but I suspect felt a little ambushed to be pushed in front of the camera straight away in the infamous bus stop scene.  She was great in that, and came back later for the 'friends in a bar scene', which we filmed in the old Venables cafe.

It's cranberry juice, honest. But Therese lifted the energy levels until they were laughing their heads off like two old friends.

Filming activity to try out

I've spent part of the weekend tweaking the first week we're going to hand over.  Well kind of.

We pass what we've done on to the course administrators who style it and dress it up in a set of XML tags called structured authoring.  This is then passed on to the editor who makes his changes and then renders it out to the course website.  There're a few other details, but it's late and you'd do better just to come and study the course if you're really interested.

As a taster, here's the first filming exercise to have a look at: Activity 2.1

It's minus some of the bells and whistles the students on the course will have, like a glossary and the opportunity to find and share relevant resources with other people.  But if anyone fancies having a go, we'd love to know how long it takes you and what you make of it.

Filming - Walton Hall, 9/3/11

We spent Wednesday filming the main piece of media for the course - a publicity film that we will also take to pieces to show students how we made it.

It was great, we pulled in all sorts of contacts and had a big cast and crew to play with.  Everyone was fantastic, but the biggest stars were those who were with use for the whole day: Therese, a great actress who works with Rick a lot, and four lads from the local college who came along for some experience for their media studies course.

We managed to pack an awful lot into just one day and managed to cover the script.  I'm really looking forward to seeing the first glimpses of the edit now.

Glossaphilia

As I love words I know glossophilia doesn't just refer to glossaries, but I think I'm allowed a near-miss meaning.  We're racing to get the first week (week 2) completely ready to hand over for styling on Monday morning.  Today I set up the glossary and made the first entry:

We're going to use the glossary to hold some of the 'theory' for the course.  In general we lead with an activity - part of the preparation for that is checking the list of glossary terms that will be used in the activity to see if there are unfamiliar ones.  If you don't understand those, students are encouraged to search for and share relevant resources (such as this fantastic one on film grammar).

Activities are followed by the course team's reflection on what has been done, allowing us to make teaching points.  The idea is that these will be more interesting and make more sense once students have something to build on.  Once again, the glossary is important, because it helps us to keep those sections light - students who want to know more can follow the trail into the glossary, which also helps them to build up a functional vocabulary for working with other people.

Drafts

Got going on writing course material again today after a week that focussed more on admin and the media.  Deadlines are tight, but we have the advantage now of having sketched everything out before the halfterm break, as D0 (D-zero or D-nought) outlines and now we've got something solid to work with as we race to get our full draft done.

So for example in week 2, the introduction has gone from:

Introduction

• Meet and greet

• Report back on wk1 ‘homework’ – If you had all the time and money in the world what film what you like to have made

• Share and comment and rate

• In this week we will take a step back and look at the building blocks

• We’ll still hold on to the idea of driectors vision – but applied to individual elements

• We’ll work on getting the best shot 9or best piece of sound with the equipment you have in the conditions you have

• Sound is just as important if not more so than video

• Something about motion?

• Your most basic equipment is what you were born with

• Look ahead at the activities and think about how they will fit into your week.  Can do ex 1 and ex 2 in the same place, for eg. But make sure have equipment for both.

• Description of tasks and what they need to accomplish them

• Choosing which warmup to do…

to

Introduction

There are many steps in the long process that culminates in someone watching a piece of media and enjoying it.  Creativity is important all the way from the first glimmering of inspiration, to the director at work on a set realizing their vision, to the editor assembling everything into a final form.  There is a challenge in getting everything to work together well, but a good film is one where all the building blocks are solid.
Think back to the homework we suggested last week.  Is it realistic for you to set out to make that piece of media that you liked?  Even if as a whole your choice looks beyond your reach, what can you learn from breaking it down into its parts? A good simple image like a train leaving a station or a fleeting smile can be very powerful. A few well-chosen notes of music or a door creaking all carry meaning.  How do you know which choices to make when you record something? In fact it’s easier than you might think because you do have the experience to make good judgements about the building blocks.  Living in modern society means you’re exposed to audiovisual media all of the time and you can trust your gut feeling about what works – it’s based on a lot of experience.
This week we’re going to look at the sound and vision in very simple terms. How to set up and capture individual shots, and how to record clear, natural sound.  We’ll come on to assembling these later, but a basic proficiency in shooting and recording is fundamental to expressing yourself in video.  So we’d like to give you the time to explore how your equipment works and how to find all those magnificent shots that are out there waiting for you.

First print publication - publicity lealfet.

Another landmark - this time the first piece of published material associated with the course is through the hoops and looking quite pretty: Publicity leaflet

The next step is to get the course entry on the OU website up and running and we'll be taking registrations.  Any takers?

Watching rough cuts

Rick and I have spent the week in Herefordshire, knocking out D0s - outlines of the different weeks study in the course.  More on that later when we have one a little more tidied up to show, but in the meantime here's something a little rough:

http://podcast.open.ac.uk/feeds/T156Development/20110215T110414_Getting_Your_media_in_to_your_computer.m4v


It can be hard work watching yourself on a rough cut - Why didn't we mention the mobile phone at all in the script, and why didn't I smile more?  The little miracle is the next stage - a fine cut will throw out unnecessary bits and fix the timing to flow much more smoothly.  Looking forward to it now.

Social Media

Cheap cameras and enough processing power were game changers in video.  Social media is the next.

The sequence went something like:  

i) Joe Smith hears I'm working up a proposal for a video course and gets in touch.  The resulting conversations leads to a partnership between the course and Joe's Creative Climate initiative.

ii) I blog about it (http://t156-dfilms.blogspot.com/2011/02/partnerships.html), posting an interview with him.

iii) That's posted to facebook by a Hungarian friend

iv) A friend of their's sees it and goes on to look at the Creative Climate site and then posts those links up too.

and so it goes...This kind of thing is changing distribution.

First bits of media starting to appear

On Wednesday we (well Rick and John) filmed a podcast with Julius Mugwagwa from Development Studies, and it's up at:

http://podcast.open.ac.uk/feeds/T156PictureLock/20110210T134537_JuliusMugwagwa.m4v

The idea was to make a piece on how the podcast was made as a learning resource - that's not edited yet, but watch this space.

Julius was a complete star - agreed to do it the afternoon before, and showed up in the morning with a short script and ready to go.  It was done in front of a bluescreen with an autocue.

I am a (Hungarian) exchange student- tropfest

This is a great piece by an exchange student. It's an effective script, and she's clearly got some help in - someone dealing with the camera and some extras for bits and pieces. Guts too - takes a little nerve to wander around a foreign country in your pants, especially for something you're going to post up online. I'd love to think our students will be capable of this kind of thing after studying with us.

Hectic Schedule and a Big Cheer for Pond Skaters

So last week we began making the media in earnest - it started early last Tuesday with me pulling out some scribbled storyboards (see pics) and then John and I setting out to film some fairly mundane but crucial shots of cameras, studio lights, laptops etc for a set of media clips that will allow students on the course to create their own DFS T156 Montage in Week 1. We wanted the students to get a taste of editing as soon as possible as this is often the subject that is left until later but some basic understanding of it affects the whole approach you take with your ideas, scripting and filming.

After that though things really got going and the two days in Milton Keynes at the OU were spent in a fairly hectic rush of studio based filming. This ranged from nerve-wracking as both John and I had to present to camera and deliver lines we'd not long written to very comfortable as I read straight from an auto-cue. We also recorded voice-overs and scripted as a team which was good fun and then we convinced Joe Smith from the Geography Department to appear in one of our videos which discussed doing pieces to camera and included Joe's work with Creative Climate. Chris has posted a clip in relation to that.

In between all of this Chris and I managed to grab a bit of downtime and visited Cineworld in the Xscape complex to catch "Barney's Version" which is a lovely film with a great cast and a well-judged script and direction that left you wanting to spend more time with the characters and feeling happy that not everything was spelt out in BOLD letters and underlined twice. I'd recommend it.

Chris and I de-camped to Catcher Media's base camp in Hereford for Thursdays session of course-writing and more media scripting, including the script for the iSpot/Composition media clip which we filmed in the Herefordshire fields just outside of Chris' house in Pembridge on the Friday. Friday was probably one of the windiest days I have ever attempted to film in - the wind was trying to pull the camera out of my grasp on occasions and some of our plans at recording voice-over on the day had to be re-thunk and annoyingly some of the wildlife we were looking for obstinately refused to leave it's trailers for their moment in front of the camera - so a big cheer for pond skaters who were happy to appear at the last moment and save the day. It was great fun to be sure and I feel the footage will have the footprint of that wildness (which is a good thing) even if the camera-work wasn't perfectly composed (my stuff not Johns) - the rhythms of the wind also spurred me on to complete a short story as well at the weekend so I'm generally feeling quite pleased with myself.

Friday was rounded off with John and I filming a cup of tea sequence (including many different angles & lit with three Lilliput lights with gels to balance the daylight from the windows) to illustrate some rules of editing and it's compression of time and finally Chris did a sterling job of delivering his Pre-Production Pep Talk (we each have one to do) with what was commonly agreed amongst us to have contained the least amount of gaffs. Onward…

Partnerships

Two key tenets of the Digital Film School are that it is i) social and ii) tied into real applications, so it's been natural to think about who we want to work with.  This extends beyond the OU, but the easy ones have been close to home.  Two projects in particular have stood out as potential partners, Creative Climate and iSpot.

Last week we were in the happy position to be able to film some of the media that will link them in - we're going to use the making of media for them as worked examples for our students - how to do a video diary for Creative Climate, and how to shoot a subject on location for iSpot.  Both sites are designed for the public to upload contributions, and in the 2nd and 3rd weeks of the course, T156 students will have the option of uploading pieces of media to the sites.  Our course media will also be available for the projects as a resource for other contributors.

We interviewed Joe Smith, Jonathan Silvertown and Mike Dodd, some of the academics involved in the projects about the linkup:

Getting it in the can

We have had a really productive week as we shot the video based on the media plan. Tuesday and Wednesday allowed us to complete the core scenes.

Traveled to Herefordshire last night. Just woke up (Friday the 4th Feb) to finding it blowing a gale outside, gloomy and wet! Not a good day for shooting outside. We will have to fall back to shooting inside. Luckily we have a couple of short interior scenes planned out for this location. Then it will be back to planning and final scripting for next week.

Scripting video

Friday saw two big jobs through.  One was pulling together a production schedule for all of our media, where, when and how.  We managed to simplify some of it, and it's feeling quite do-able, whereas the text is still feeling like a big, big job to fit in.  The other task was sketching out  a script for our flagship piece, a viral/publicity piece about the course and film-making. It went rather well:

Starting to write

Today was a really good day for two reasons.  The first is Rick and I sat down and sorted out Wk 2 of the course, which will be about getting good shots and sound. It needs another pass really, but we typed it all up and it made sense at 5.05pm when we stopped.

It gives us something to use to talk about templates and is not very far from a D0 - a structured outline of a piece of teaching. Even better, we wrote down all the phrases and ideas we wanted to get across.  It's such a pleasure writing with Rick, because he gets what I'm talking about and vice-versa and then it's not so difficult to find a really sharp way to put it across.

The other exciting thing is the LTS team have set up the course web site:

The Open University's VLE is based on Moodle, and has really come along since I first knocked up against it in 2006.  Then it wasn't so easy to even look at your own course site while it was being constructed. 

Now we can use it as an outline - write things straight in as we go along, and get an idea of how they're going to look from the students point of view.  I'm really still learning my way into the interface, but here's the outline for week 2:

Film School archive media is off the starting blocks

Here we go. I have started to load up the archive we are going to use, namely Cast and Crew. We have the rights department thumbs up. We have checked out the paperwork know as a PasC (Production as Complete) and the contracts created in the OU/BBC co-production.

Thinking about this as a potential resource?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00xpnz4/Hollywood_The_Sequel/

I am handling the media centrally on Final Cut Server (FCS). I am able to digitise from Digital Betacam or trans-code from the high definition camera sources directly to this server of 28 Tera Bytes. The studio has a 2Gbps link directly in to the FCS. I have a main T156 production in the root of the server and all respective individual projects will be under this header. These projects will be checked in and out as they are worked on by myself or Rick. I am able to edit footage from the studio Mac Pro, or from my office workstation on my MacBook pro. I have a single bound 1Gbps network connection from here. When editing locally off the server i check out the project file only, not the media so my laptop is not tied up with 10's/100's of Giga bytes of footage.

Tomorrow is finalizing the media plan with Rick and starting to script the video clips we are creating. Also some thinking about a Viral.

Next week we start to record and this is a great feeling.

T156 and rights

I finally found where this video was online, probably one of the first times the course was mentioned in public. I was interviewed nearly 2 years ago as part of a case study on the OU and the way it deals with rights for moving images.  The interview is about 3.30, and moves on from my trial by fire about rights with a film competition, to our thinking about how we'll deal with rights and students submissions for this course.



So the aim is to build in a creative commons culture from the start - introduce cc licences and the implications of different flavours of it for media making.  The brief for all the student tasks will be to only use 3rd party media they can licence on a cc basis, and to clear all their own work with consent forms etc.

Apart from being the right thing to do, it provides some potentially exciting resources for the university, like a growing library of stock footage and sound effects from the exercises in the 2nd week, which would be a very good eye-catcher on the web for what we're doing.  It would be fantastic if the OU became one of the top 10 sites to look at when you wanted cc resources to use in a low or no budget production.

A course that updates itself

One of the biggest challenges with writing an OU course on digital video is that course production takes at least a year, and that's a short one. They go through several drafts, out to critical readers, to an editor and back, media gets made and everywhere you can expect deadlines to slip.

This means that we're writing in January-March for a November course and that feels really tight.  By then some aspect of the technology: hardware or software will have moved on, and if we were trying to nail down everything that a student should use with the course, that would feel unlucky - time to start thinking about updating the course if the student numbers warrant it, or to cancel it if they don't.  By the expected end of the course (May 2016) we've no way of sensibly predicting what technologies will be in vogue, never mind how the software will look or feel.

So the idea is to throw the job of updating the course over to the students. We'll show them how to research all the things they need and provide them with a place to effectively share and compare resources.  If we can effectively bring what they find back into the course we're ahead - well maybe we're keeping up. It all hinges on making doing that kind of research and sharing rewarding enough to be sustained through 10 weeks of study.

One of the things that the whole Web 2.0 fad obscures is that it's easy to do this badly.  Looking at Facebook (and seeing as we're here) Blogger, we see things that work.  But there must be a long tail of lame almosts that never got the development time or failed to be base on how people work in the first place. There's a lot of description or normative stuff written about it all, but I'm not finding anything too helpful on how to trigger and sustain social learning online.

So suggestions welcome, and in the meantime some ideas are:

- Publicly recognise good behaviour - student of the week kind of thing.  We could use the moderators to pick out and thank students who help others resolve issues.
- Open Studio - We're using an OU developed platform called Open Studio for students to catch, tag and share media  (including their own projects) or websites.  It already has comment facilities, but our fantastic developer Jane is going to add a rating system for us - so students can give each others' finds a rating of between 1 and 5 stars.
- Task driven - each time Open Studio is used, it will be for a specific task - "Look for the best tutorial on the editing package you use" etc.
- Ratings and comments to be against specific rather than generic criteria - For each task, we'll give guidance on what to rate on.
- Forums - Use forums for generic discussion, but also build them up as a place to get help - just like the students can if they continue to work out media making after the course.
- Reputation system - The course is too short to warrant this, but definitely worth thinking about for something longer.

What the course media should do

We're at the stage now of setting lots of things up and are going into pre-production with the media. We've been talking about doing some partnership activities with UCMK and their media students which should be interesting for all. One of the main things I am currently thinking about to focus on is what kind of media should be in the course. There are a plethora of different tutorials on the web as Chris has already mentioned but we want the media in our course to really grapple with the truly different areas of film-making which is as much about working with people and organisations as it is about having the latest model of a particular camcorder.We think the media should approach the whole area of film-making holistically in the sense that you are constantly having to negotiate a multitude of things when you attempt to make a film: creative, editorial, technical and logistical. So we'd really appreciate any feedback about what you've seen out there that you think really works and what is the kind of balance you think we need to strike in terms of the teaching that is delivered through the media.

Planning The Media

Hi everyone, it's Rick here. I haven't posted anything so far but I just thought it'd be worth letting you know where we're at with the course. Alongside many of the meetings already outlined in the blog, a large part of this week has been about fine tuning the media that will be part of the course. I've been working very with Chris now for a number of years on participatory video and training projects as my own production company Catcher Media which has been doing video using participatory methods for over 14 years and we've been pulling in our knowledge of working with a very diverse range of groups to help shape the media for the course (as well as the rest of the content). In the course of my work I've worked with primary school-children, teachers, third sector workers and academics amongst other so as we're drafting the course I'm always trying to relate the materials to a really wide set of media needs.

It's been great linking up with John Sinton at the OBU too and he has been bringing all of his film-making and training expertise to bear on our thinking, which after the long gestation of the course is now moving at quite a pace.

The primary challenge for me at the moment is to ensure that the media contains all of the elements necessary but doesn't feel overloaded or too technical (in the first instance). Alot of the thinking behind the course has been to try and bring in those people that aren't interested primarily in the technology (or are afraid of it to some degree) but are keen to communicate using video, as well as setting enough challenges to people that are fairly happy with talk about codecs and shutter speeds. Much of the media will focus on generic video exercises and film grammar with much of the work of future-proofing the course done by social media content - forums and rating systems, so that as new technologies, new kit etc come online students can pick their own way through to some degree.

The competition?

Well this was bound to happen.  When we first proposed this course, there was nothing like this around:

NYVS  is  the  World's  Top  Online  Film  School

NYVS provides anyone with a video camera an easy and affordable way to learn to make films and videos like a Hollywood professional.

As a NYVS member you'll have access to video courses, critiques, tutorials and a learning community that will help you quickly become a master at video editing, video production, videography, iMovie, Final Cut Pro and much more!

http://www.nyvs.com/

It's video tutorial driven on a subscription model (not a bad annual rate at all), but there are some real parallels with T156 - a good dose of social media learning, a practical focus, and aimed fairly and squarely at video production for the web.  I'm certainly curious enough to subscribe, and I suspect I'll get as much out of it as a film maker as the time I put in.

Looks like it's been going since about August last year, and a lot longer than that in previous forms.  It's a bit disappointing not to be the first large scale attempt in this mode, when we've been marking time to get the go-ahead. But given their introductory tutorials have around 2,500 hits in less than 6 months, I think it's a good demonstration that there's a market there.  The interesting figures will be the hits per tutorial behind the paywall.

So given there's some similarities between what they offer and what we plan to - the obvious next question is what are the differences.  Any opinions?

Negotiating deadlines

We're starting to get into a rhythm with the production - Rick and I kicking off on Mondays in Herefordshire and then parachuting to Milton Keynes for a slew of meetings and anything else we need to do here.  By next month we'll be in full flow, filling a website and knocking out video, but for now it's all about pinning down details around a succession of tables (and sometimes floors).

Progress Meeting with LTS

Today's most important meeting was one of the big ones, sitting down in all the extended team of creative  professionals that will help us to roll out the course in October. These guys are a central part of why the OU had such a good reputation for it's teaching materials, but sometimes you'll find different professionalisms pointing in different directions.  The result can be quite a gulf between a team of academics producing content and an LTS team whose priority is form.   A good way through is to take the time to appreciate one another's professional expertise and judgement, as well as to make sure we're sharing what it is that's exciting about the project.  Luckily we've some very good people to work with, always worth listening to.

Building up trust is important, because we have different points of responsibility in the workflow and different sets of other projects we're dealing with in parallel.  So if deadlines slip, things can get tetchy.  There's no accounting for really bad luck, but personally I'd rather head of problems before they happen if possible.  A colleague last week told me "Until this comes back, you can tell me anything, as long as it's not a surprise" about £25,000 he was effectively lending me to get a conference off the ground.  It's not a bad approach and one I hope we can deliver on.  The schedule is tight, but tomorrow's first job is to look again and see if we can tighten it up again to make the space to get the very best support we can.  Setting realistic and real deadlines and meeting them is a good way to getting there, and will get the job done with less suffering all around.

The harvest of the archive

I have been researching the Open University audiovisual archive for background material to be used on the digital film schools project, T156. The Open University has an audiovisual archive that spans its history, over 40 years. With this in mind I started a search. I wanted to find some film archive that was focused on the processes involved in film making. I would to hear from the production team, actors or crew. Using the OU/BBC database I soon focused in on two programmes.

The first and most inviting is called 'Cast and Crew'. This sounds absolutely ideal and on closer inspection I found that it was specially created for The Open University. In these programmes we hear perspectives and debate from the production team. The format is that of a studio based discussion between the cast and production team. A behind the scenes perspective for the following iconic 20^th Century films.

The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

My Beautiful Laundrette

The second is called the Joyride. We follow a Scottish production team through the process of creating their film. We follow the members of the production team through the process of creating a scene and the difficulties they encounter such as negotiating costs and dealing with authorities to get various permissions.

Now I have identified the archive it is now a matter of working with the intellectual property (rights). We will treat the footage to remove and third party rights costs.

All programmes are stored in the archive on Digital Beta-cam. I will need to remix the audio track to remove any music.