for videoblogging week 2011

shot, cut and posted from my ipod touch with imovie app

(view in HD on YouTube)

I just found out it’s videoblogging week. Starting today. Usually I’m on top of these things. At least to begin with.

So here’s one I made last week, when I got my iPad2. The girls had just watched a video of Amy riding a donkey on holiday, and as soon as it finished and reverted to Camera mode, they wanted to make their own. They didn’t need instructions.

The last minute of tonight’s Ravenscourt Park fireworks, seen from outside the park, on the way home with two very tired girls. A single clip for Day 6 of Vlomo. I was going to cut together a story about tonight, but then I remembered what I’d said. You see? I’m learning. So here’s the text version:

We had a party at our house, which was great – and then went to the park en masse. We agreed that we were going to stand outside the park and watch the fireworks from Starch Green – because they look just as good from there, and it’s hell inside the park: dark and crowded and expensive.

But some kind of zombie sheep effect took hold and we all kept walking into the park and paid £6 ($10) each. All of the children immediately wanted £5 lightsabres. I refused to get Amy one – and then felt like a douchebag. Luckily, we’d managed to smuggle in some booze in a child carrier backpack [classy]. So while we watched a small children’s firework display, I poured everyone an illegal glass of wine. This was the highlight. (Mostly because it reminded me of drinking Thunderbird on the beach when I was 15.)

Trying to atone for the lightsabre douchebaggery, I made the rookie mistake of loudly agreeing to let Amy go on the fairground Carousel in front of all the other children. Cue group Carousel expedition. We left before the main fireworks display.

It kicked off as we got back to Starch Green, where we’d intended to see it all in the first place. Amy was half dead. Lila was insane. The fireworks stuttered on and off for ages – from outside the park it felt particularly like a recession era display. But we did have this big ending, before we dragged ourselves home to clear up the mess from the party.

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This was shot with a Nokia N8, which Womworld/Nokia just sent me for testing, and which I assumed was set to HD video quality by default. I was really looking forward to seeing how it recorded the fireworks in HD, but was too stupid to check. Turns out it ships set to 640×480, so that’s all you’ve got here, I’m afraid. Spot the metaphor.

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Quicktime H264 Podcast file

This video was broadcast live from my cellphone at Speakers Corner today via Qik.com/twittervlog

Shot on my Nokia N93 phone

iPhone video file link

I was at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho last night for Scuttle (after-work social media meetup). Tom Hall from Nokia Womworld, who sent me to Helsinki & Bucharest a couple of months ago, told me was going to turn up with some friends to make a ‘personal delivery’.

Please excuse the advertising. It’s just that I don’t get serenaded in a crowded pub very often.

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iPhone MP4 Podcast File

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Formats available: iPhone Podcast File (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

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MP4 podcast file

I used this music on Vlomo Day 3 last year, too – but tongue in cheek, at the start of The Placenta Video.
I know it’s schmaltzy, but sometimes you find a piece of music which fits a video so perfectly that you just can’t not use it, even though your cheese alarm is waking people up three streets away.

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iPhone video & podcast mp4 file

It’s taken me a week to find the time to sort through the footage and cut it down to a watchable size – but here are 8 minutes of highlights from the 18 or so hours of non-stop filming we did on Day 1. We had some technical hitches with uploading, so I didn’t post from the road as much as I’d wanted.

@philcampbell, @vikkichowney and I were sent by Nokia & Womworld on an 18,000 mile tour of Twestivals last weekend, with instructions to document the trip on the new Nokia N86 8MP – we started in Helsinki, and then headed off in different directions – me to Bucharest, Phil to Dubai, Vikki to, um, Birmingham – where we handed our N86s over to @bvlad and @freshplastic who continued the tour – all of us reconvening in Oxford on Sunday night.

Twestivals are essentially meetups of Twitter users in scores of cities around the world, to raise money for local causes. Each city’s cause was chosen by an online vote.

Nokia sponsored our trip (as well as carbon offsetting our miles) by giving a Euro for every 5 miles we travelled. So in the end, we raised around €3600 for local causes. Plus we carried with us a free Nokia N86 for each Twestival we visited to raffle or auction.

More to come – and I’ll post some links to all the media that I and the others generated.

Formats available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4), Flash Video (.flv)

London.

iPhone / iPod compatible mov file

Click Image Above To Play
Or click here to play/download higher quality Quicktime (MP4) file

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I hope this rainbow brightens people’s days all over the world. Please share this with any of your family or friends who’d appreciate a little magic in their day

And I’m making films for the Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Awards at the moment, so if you like this film, I’d love it if you could rate it and/or comment on the Pangea Day channel to help me out, and I’ll return the favour on your videos/blog/podcast.

Of the 200 or so films that I’ve made with my phone in the last year, I think this is the one I like the most.

We went on our favorite London walk for the last time yesterday with our friend Lucy – along the River Thames at Hammersmith.

In two and a half weeks, we’re moving to Canada.

So I started filming a plane in the clouds with my phone, thinking about making a video about us leaving, and suddenly something magical happened…

…and kept on happening! Instead of fading, they got brighter, and more intense!

In mythology, religion, art, literature, music and film, the Rainbow is a powerful symbol – a sign of hope and life and new beginnings.

I grew up in Christian boarding schools, so usually the first thing I think of when I see a rainbow is the rainbow that God sends Noah after the great flood in Genesis:

“And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.”

Yeah. It’s either that or The Wizard Of Oz.

See you on the other side

Shot and edited on my Nokia N93 phone – excuse the lip sync – combination of the phone editor and Ovi’s flash video conversion.

“The next person to inspire me”: Mrs Patel from our local Post Office, about to be closed down by incompetence and greed in government and the privatised Post Office. After 35 years of service to our community – what does she get? An OBE? No. Termination.

This is today’s entry for the Pangea Day Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Awards.

The brief is to make 2 minute films about:

- The next thing that makes you smile.

- An act of kindness.

- The next person to inspire you.

- The best part of today.

They don’t stipulate in the rules that it has to even be shot on a phone, never mind a Nokia, but I’m doing what I always do and shooting AND editing on my N93. Hopefully that’ll give me extra brownie points with the judges! (if I get that far)

Please go here to the Pangea Day channel on Ovi and give me views and comments and favorites to help me out. You need to sign up for an Ovi account to comment, but if you have a spare two minutes, *please* do (also, you should upload your own)! It’s only the most popular films that will get a chance to go in front of the judges.

I should say that aside from the main competition at Ovi, the remarkable Mr David Howell has been appointed by Nokia to run his own Pangea Day competition at http://davidhowellstudios.com – post a link to your film in his comment section by May 2nd.

ANYWAY, enough selling

as for today’s film…

The Government are currently engaged in a disgraceful act of cultural vandalism. I believe that in 10-20 years – and beyond – they will be remembered for two things: The Iraq War, and the loss of the Post Offices.

For the sake of a mere ¬£200m per year, they are closing the last remaining centre of community in thousands of towns, villages and urban neighbourhoods. This is a brief interview with Mrs Patel, who has run our Post Office for 35 years. Two posts offices within half a mile of here are closing. Seven in our Borough. (and of course thousands throughout the country.) We have a higher density of older and disabled people in this ward than anywhere else in the borough Рpeople who will lose vital services.

I’m glad that I’m not going to be in the country at the next election. I’d be in a real dilemma at the ballot box. I couldn’t bring myself to vote Tory, but nor could I bring myself to reward the current bastards for everything they’re doing. Every day, more reasons to emigrate.

The Post Office issue is a classic case of everything that’s wrong with a) blind Privatisation and b) our party-based representative democracy. The local MP, Andy Slaughter, who lives opposite me, was fiercely against the closure of the Post Offices. But he couldn’t express that view in Parliament, where he represents us, or he’d lose his job. He was forced to vote for something he knew to be wrong, because his weak, venal party leadership had decreed it as policy.

Anyway, you probably came here to watch me making my usual arse of myself, not listen to my political opinions, so I’ll stfu and let you meet the lovely, inspiring, discarded Mrs Patel.

Original File: MPEG4 File