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.