!blog - corey menscher

It’s taken me a while to get this up on blip.tv, but here’s our video assignment from a few weeks ago, “Park Chase”. The audio needs to be cleaned up in a few spots, but that’s it. Enjoy…

For my final assignment, I decided to do another audio collage using a microphone and M-Audio recorder. I spent half the day walking around and riding the subway. Around 4:45pm I wandered into the Natural History Museum, and found a goldmine of audio sweetness. So here is “Natural History”

Seungran, Amanda, and I are working on our three-part video assignment for Communications Lab. This week, we were to come up with a narrative for the video and produce some storyboards. Fortunately, Seungran and Amanda are better illustrators than me, so they did the drawing. Anyway, here’s the initial story and shot ideas for “Park Chase”! (working title)

A short but sweet Flash vid for our Flash animation assignment. I present…Bee (Flash) Movie! Note: I did not do any of the illustrations, they were all found via Google. This is just a simple academic exercise!

I’m gonna put a link to it because I simply don’t know how to make it not start playing automatically!

Click to play!

Welcome to the ITP Equipment Room…where the toys come out and party at night. Sometimes, a little too hard…

Made with Garage Band and a sample of Hugo Ball Sound Poetry (via ubuweb.com)…

For years I had been hearing of this wondrous book by a man named Marshall Mcluhan called “Understanding Media”. It was supposedly the end-all-be-all of treatises on “new” media…a prophecy written 30 years too soon. Since learning of it, I have wanted to read it…and now, I finally had the opportunity.

I think the most surprising aspect of the book was how obvious it was that McLuhan was an English Literature professor. Nearly all of his concepts were backed up by references to literary works. The one piece that he kept returning to over and over was Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Unfortunately, I have never read Finnegans Wake, so most of the references were lost on me. In fact, most of the literary pieces he constantly invoked were unknown to me, aside from some Shakespeare. While this isn’t really important mcLuhan’s underlying concepts, the reliance on his literary background was the most astounding aspect of the book for me. Of course, had I known that he was an English Lit professor I would have been less surprised. But the fact that this seminal book, which has been quoted countless times in reference to the Information Age and new media, bases much of its content on the medium of print itself felt slightly ironic to me. Fortunately, McLuhan appears quite aware of this, and doesn’t try to beat around the bush in any way.

The other most interesting aspect to the reading is his introduction of new terms that seem so commonplace today. This is the most common notion that contemporary readers like to mention, and after having it pounded in my head for so long I expected to read the first mention of these phrases as if I was watching the birth of some historical persons being born. Sure, it was awe inspiring to see Phrases “global village”, “seamless web”, and “hybrid energy” in a book about media published in 1964. He truly was a visionary. I know that’s trite statement, but it didn’t hit me until I was reading. But what surprises me about some of those phrases was that we have altered some of their intended meanings to our own purposes…or, rather, to make them fit better in our own time. His notion of the “global village” had little to do with an individual’s ability to instantly communicate with and learn from cultures far outside his own. It was about the new fangled “jet airplane” and mass media through television. By this I mean McLuhan was considering the fact that SOME people can be transported vast distances quickly, and SOME media can reach vast audiences. But the consumers of these media were not able to respond…they are “hot” mediums, in his terms. It was only the EXISTENCE of these new media, and the effects they have on cultures, that elicited a global cultural shift. The notion that individuals were somehow living in a “village” was not really the point…unlike the way use the term today to describe our ability to interact with distant colleagues as if they were local.

I must say that I am extremely sad that McLuhan never had a chance to experience the internet. Most of his vision was focused on the new media of the time…radio and television. Yet many concepts are far better suited for the World Wide Web than they are for television. I wonder what he would say of it? Only one decade after the initial mass acceptance of the internet has the use of video become prominent. The medium has always been highly textual. His talk of Gutenberg technology being obsolete can now be considered way off base. If anything, the textual nature of the web, email, and messaging has solidified the printed word’s place as the anchor medium of our shared culture. In the end, I think this would make MCLuhan secretly happy. After all, his great love, and the focus of his professional life, was the medium of print.

Local Sounds…

So our assignment was to produce a digital “exquisite corpse” image. That is, we are to create an image from other images in Photoshop, and then pass the final product to one of three people in a group. Each member will do the same, and as we pass along the images to each member, we will add our own touches to the evolving image. Thus, we will each start an image, edit an image after the initial composite has been made, and then finalize a third image. Here’s my initial image…

…and the three images that were used to create it.

Here’s my edit of Eddy’s image…

Here’s Eddy’s original, and the image I used to composite it…

Here’s my edit of Kim’s image…

Here’s Kim’s original and the image I used to composite it…

I looked at three video sites today. YouTube.com…the Goliath owned by Google. Blip.TV, the scrappy upstart with the seemingly most producer-friendly site. And Virb.com, which is more of an aggregator than a video site.

YouTube is great because of its reach. Millions of people view thousands of videos (or even millions of videos) every day. Its content has been aggressively ported to portable devices, including a huge focus in Apple’s iPhone, Nokia’s N800 tablet, and a number of other devices. I even found a Casio Exilim point-and-shoot camera that has a “YouTube” mode that shoots in a specific resolution and file format which is supposedly optimal for hosting on YouTube.

 YouTube’s uploading tools are among the best around. Uploading a video is extremely easy, and they even give you the ability to capture directly to the site with your webcam. YouTube’s “Channels” are a good way to provide regular content of consistent quality, but to be honest they tend to get buried in the sheer volume of content. Only the most popular “channels” get much publicity. However, I’m sure it’s a safe bet that some of the more popular channels get massive amounts of traffic, which alone would put the other two video sites I explored to shame.

 And then there are the advertisers. Paid content permeates YouTube like the massive media blackhole that it is. Unfortunately, a lot of the videos are simply attempts at starting viral marketing campaigns for various products. This seems to dilute the pool of valuable and genuinely interesting content…although it’s hard to call Joe Bob sitting in his dark bedroom in front of his Webcam mumbling a “video response” to some other schmoe’s “video response” compelling content.

 Blip.TV is a significantly smaller site, although it is growing. I’m starting to see Blip.TV posts in more blogs. And it’s certainly polished. But there’s definitely more of a elitist air to it…a sense that those who post to it are posting high quality content, as opposed to the plebes on YouTube. Its interface is considerably more stark, but it has a nicely designed feel that projects a bit more professionalism. This may be why professionals tend to prefer it, even though its audience can not touch YouTub.e

 The other reason professionals may prefer it are its upload tools. First and foremost, producers can access (and distribute) the original file format and resolution that was uploaded. This is a HUGE advantage over YouTube’s mediocre-quality Flash Video player. Users are granted “channels” by default. And they truly are channels. They can be accessed from a simple URL (username.blip.tv). They are given a choice of distribution rights (Creative Commons!) from which to select. They can even make money through advertising. But beyond that, the site just FEELS nicer…right down to the gorgeous progress bar for uploading, and the elegant flash player. Whereas YouTube gives you a cryptic spinning icon with an approximate time to upload, Blip.TV provides a proper “thermometer” gauge. Little things like this, as well as its minimalist design, make it a pleasure to use.

 Virb.com’s focus is more on social networking and music. It allows you to aggregate a number of media within your account, which you can then share among the internet public or among your Virb.com “friends”. When I signed up, I was soon inundated by indie band accounts that wanted to add me as their friends, which gave it a slightly sleazy MySpace feel. Of course, the interface is WAY slicker than MySpace, and the site has some interesting tools. There’s a lot of AJAXy drag-and-drop functionality to move your media into albums, as well as to “pimp out your profile”. Virb’s flash player is of decent quality, but it has no controls other than play/pause. Not even a full window/full-screen mode. You can view the video with a darkened overlay behind the player to hide the site, but I’m not sure of the point.

 Its a well designed and hip-looking site, and works well, but its content is so heavily focused on music that there’s hardly any non-music related video to explore. I haven’t gotten a sense of its growth, but it doesn’t seem like it’s very well known. This may change, but the odds are that it will be bought by a larger entity a lot sooner than it will hit a critical mass.

 Blip.TV is certainly the most promising of the three sites, and has far-and-away the best Flash video quality and player. (Full screen viewing of identical files showed that Blip.TV completely blew YouTube out of the water.) But nothing can beat YouTube in terms of library. You can never get bored exploring YouTube. And you also have many more options of viewing their content on multiple devices. Virb.com’s focus on music gives it an edge in the ever-widening field of video sites, but that focus may also result in a smaller less-generalized library that may be needed to attract many viewers…and content providers. It’s likely that YouTube will remain the King of video for the foreseeable future.