Quaker House interview with Lynn and Steve Newsom. My author video chat. See the Friends Journal post for more, including a transcript.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ video
Quakers and the still small voice
August 6, 2015
An ensemble cast of Friends talk about the inward Light, the new video from Quakerspeak
The PTSD of the suburban drone warrior
June 16, 2015
Something I’ve long wondered a lot about, As Stress Drives Off Drone Operators, Air Force Must Cut Flights.:
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.
I mention this toward the end of my review of The Burglary, the story of the 1971 antiwar activists, and it’s something I’ve been trying to pull from potential authors as we’ve put together an August Friends Journal issue on war. Much of the day-to-day mechanics of war has changed drastically in the past 40 years — at least for American soldiers.
We have stories like this one from the NYTimes: drone operators in suburban U.S. campuses killing people on the other side of the planet. But soldiers in Baghdad have good cell phone coverage, watch Netflix, and live in air conditioned barracks. The rise of contractors means that most of the grunt work of war — fixing trucks, peeling potatoes — is done by nearly invisible non-soldiers who are living in these war zones. It must be nice to have creature comforts but I’d imagine it could make for new problems psychologically integrating a war zone with normalcy.
Are you an enthusiast?
March 12, 2015
Max Carter explains how Friends “named and claimed” a judge’s accusation that they were some sort of quakers.
Festival time in Hammonton
July 16, 2013
This afternoon’s commute home had me walking through the Our Lady of Mt Carmel festival procession through Hammonton. Here’s a little while-walking video montage.
Visual storytelling through animated gifs and Vine
June 27, 2013
NPR’s Planet Money recently ran an article on glass recycling, How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs. The Gif part is what intrigued me. A “gif” is a tightly-compressed image format file that web designers leaned on a lot back in the days of low bandwidth. It’s especially good for designs with a few discreet colors, such as corporate logos or simple cartoons. It also supports a kind of primitive animation that was completely overused in the late 90s to give webpages flying unicorns and spinning globes.
Animated gifs have grown up. They make up half the posts on Tumblr. They are often derived from funny scenes in movies and come with humorous captions. The Planet Money piece uses them for storytelling: text is illustrated by six gifs showing different parts of the recycling process. The movement helps tell the story – indeed most of the shots would be visually uninteresting if they were static.
The short loops reminds me of Vine, the six-second video service from Twitter which I’ve used a lot for silly kid antics. They can also tell a simple story (they’re particularly well suited to repetitive kid antics: up the steps, down the slide, up the steps, down the slide, up…).
In my work with Friends Journal I’ve done some 7 – 12 minute video interviews with off-site authors using Google Hangouts, which essentially just records the video conversation. It’s fine for what we use it for, but the quality depends a lot on the equipment on the other end. If the bandwidth is low or the webcam poor quality, it will show, and there are few options for post-production editing. But honestly, this is why I use Hangouts: a short web-only interview won’t turn into a weeklong project.
Producing high-quality video requires controlling all of the equipment, shooting ten times more footage than you think you’ll need, and then hours of work condensing and editing it down to a story. And after all this it’s possible you’ll end up with something that doesn’t get many views. Few Youtube users actually watch videos all the way through to the end, drifting away to other internet distractions in the first few minutes.
I like the combination of the simple short video clips (whether Vine or animated gif) wedded to words. My last post here was the very light-weight story about a summer afternoon project. Yesterday, I tried again, shooting a short animated gif of Tibetan monks visiting a local meetinghouse. I don’t think it really worked. They’re constructing a sand mandala grain-by-grain. The small movements of their funnel sticks as sand drops is so small that a regular static photo would suffice. But I’ll keep experimenting with the form.
The latest word poetry from +Jon Watts to come to video
January 7, 2012
The latest word poetry from +Jon Watts to come to video. #music
A cute video made from Google streetview
November 29, 2011
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