Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

By Wendy Levy, BAVC Director of Creative Programming

I went to an interesting conference yesterday in San Jose, the Web Video Summit - first one in a national series sponsored by Jupitermedia (www.webvideosummit.com). Conference Oranizer Dave Burstein is a funny guy, he kept the second floor of the San Jose Marriott buzzing, interrupting panels whenever he needed to say something, but seemed to genuinely care about how everyone was doing.

Audience was mixed, mostly commercial or wanna-be commercial producers, one or two indie folks looking to crossover, general digital media industry people, CEO-types, no other nonprofit orgs that I saw. Panels were a mix of production/distribution — no content discussions. One very technical panel: Stanford professor John Cioffi who developed DSL talks about the new DSM (don’t ask me, I can’t explain it). Some entry-level production-focused stuff, how-to shoot the best video for the web (HD, lots of close-ups, minimal camera movement, lots of faces, keep it simple, stay on message), what codecs to use for what platform, etc. Smartest, most dynamic presenter was Alex Lindsay from Pixelcorps, right here in SF. They are producing some of the best podcasts around - www.pixelcorps.com. (more…)

Angelo Sacerdote, Preservation Specialist
Did you know that scientists at St. Louis University have made a fuel cell that is powered by sugar? This news is a few months old but I just found out. Soon we can just squirt some sugar water into our cell phones. Maybe we can make cans of soda that refrigerate themselves using their own sugar as a power supply. On the same note, but creepier, scientists in Japan have come up with fuel cells that run on the sugar -in BLOOD! Sure, they say it is for implanted medical devices, but you know what the next step is!

Or you’ll have electricity hungry vampires trying to power their ipods off of your BLOOD! Or we can just charge our mobile devices from a USB jack in our arm or something, or even better, implant our mobile devices in our bodies, never lose your cell phone again!

by Debra Schaffner, Media Arts Senior Technician

This week in the innovation lab, We had a couple of interesting challenges regarding the conversion of HD media. The first involved converting 24P media to 29.97. This one was pretty easy… we ended up going to Episode Pro which allows you to make a variety of frame rate conversions. The results looked lossless except for a slight gamma shift which may have more to do with the HD codec we used than anything else (more research to follow on this). So far, Episode Pro has proved itself worthy of it’s hefty price tag. Also, did I mention the speeeeed! It’s fast. Compared to Cleaner, it’s like Roadrunner vs. Wile E. Coyote.

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Sage Mandzik, Innovation and Media Arts Program Manager

The work really began on Day Four of the BAVC Producer’s Institute - well, I think some of the players of the Go Game, which took place the day before, may argue with me about that, so let me rephrase - Day Four was when the project work really began.

The morning was full of inspiration/information with workshops led by Michelle Halsell from Missing Pixel and Tony Walsh from Secret Lair. After lunch the teams were given the run of the place. Each group chose a lab to work in that best suited their technical needs. With nine groups of 2 - 3 people, plus the incredible mentors and team TIMA (BAVC’s Technology, Innovation and Media Arts tech staff), BAVC was packed. The mentors and staff bounced from lab to lab assisting each team simultaneously - broadening horizons and providing design ideas, encoding tips, editing assistance, a shoulder to cry on (I actually never saw anyone cry), and much more. (more…)

by Sage Mandzik, Innovation and Media Arts Program Manager

As you probably know, Google Maps recently created “street views” of a few major US cities. I live in Oakland, which I guess Google doesn’t consider a “major” city – so after unsuccessfully searching my home address I moved on, looking up my home away from home – BAVC, where I spend many of my waking hours. I typed in 2727 Mariposa Street and up popped a street level view of the Mariposa and Bryant intersection.

I took a few moments to ascertain that I was not outside on the street in front of the building, before navigating around, checking out KQED, MUNI, and BAVC’s other neighbors. Nope, I was nowhere to be found. (more…)

Sage Mandzik, Innovation and Media Arts Program Manager

Day Two was hosted by KQED - in the morning we invited the Producer’s Institute participants and a few other noncommercial media arts orgs and producers to attend the awesome panel discussion “NEW MEDIA/NEW MEANING: Multi-Platform Technology, New Media Innovation, and Documentary Storytelling” moderated by Scott Kirsner of Cinema Tech. Check out what he had to say about the discussion.

The panel was great, very interactive, and the podcast will be available soon. (more…)

Angelo Sacerdote, Preservation Specialist

We are transferring a large number of tapes from The Kitchen’s archive. The Kitchen is a non-profit performance and media arts organization dedicated to providing artists opportunities to create and show new work. It was founded in 1971 and continues to grow to this date. BAVC has been preserving parts of The Kitchen’s archives for several years. Artists we have seen on these tapes include Laurie Anderson, The Talking Heads, Fab Five Freddy and the Rock Steady Crew and many others.

One highlight from this shipment is jazz composer and saxophone player, Julius Hemphill performing “Ralph Ellison’s Long Tongue”. Ralph Ellison was an African American author best known for his excellent book, “Invisible Man”.

Here are some informative links about Julius Hemphill:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Hemphill
http://www.gallery41.com/JazzArtists/JuliusHemphill.htm

Julie Lantz, BAVC Education Technician

I was at the Bjork concert a few weeks ago (and who do I run into, but a few BAVC employees The next work day, we were discussing the AMAZING never seen before instrument that we saw Bjork’s band members playing.

The instrument was a brightly colored round table that looked like it was filled with water with bright colored blocks on top that the musician moved around to create sounds. The other interesting instrument we saw was a control surface computer screen with touch sensitve faders.

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Louis Juska, Lead Project Developer

Yeah, what about Ruby? I did say I was going to talk more about Ruby (and Rails) a couple of weeks ago. Guess what, I got sidetracked again.But this wandering is still in the ‘multi-platform’ programming vein. (You’ll see soon enough, that, for me, *anything* falls under that category.) It’s tangentially about a plug-in by Microsoft’s Live Labs for, get this, Firefox! A plug-in to uninstall Firefox, you’re thinking, right? Oh Ye of little faith. (more…)

Wendy Levy, BAVC Director of Creative Programming

Our heads are spinning from from the crazy amount of information, inspiration, and paradigm-shifting going on at BAVC right now. Nine teams of documentary producers and public broadcasters from all over the US (and Canada) are in town to develop interactive and mobile projects based on their doc content. The first few days have been a full-body-and-mind immersion into the industry, and the next few days are intense work days in the BAVC Innovation Lab, classrooms, and postproduction suites (along with mentors and instructors) to prototype their project models to present to funders on Friday at Adobe.

Who’s here? (more…)