I guess it was inevitable.

Back in the 80s, hip designers realized that consumers were willing to become walking billboards for their product logos, all for the sweet, sweet tradeoff of being able to flaunt our ability to buy outrageously overpriced clothing. Slap a big ol’ logo or even just the name onto a t-shirt, mark it up 3000%, and the nouveau riche (but inwardly crippled by insecurity & self-loathing) will fork over fat wads of cash to be able to demonstrate their affluence. And so Guess, Armani, Jordache (remember them?), Dolce & Gabbana and Nike all slapped their logos on otherwise ordinary mass-produced items, and watched their profits soar.

First, from T-Post, an interesting little take on spreading the news, via clothing. These funky designs have actual stories that you can read on the back.

These t-shirts will at least keep the person waiting behind you in line at Starbucks well-informed.

I can see a real use for this kind of thing in places like Egypt, Syria, Russia, China — places where the government not only has censored the TV/radio stations, padlocked the printing plants, but DDoS’d the internet and shut down the cellphone grid. In places like that, just having a few people walk through the crowd as passive human billboards, with the latest information on their bodies, is a helluva tool to spread information.

Upside: It radically boosts your revolutionary chic.

Downside: It makes you a target for camel-riding truncheon-wielders.

Next up is a nifty little device that plays a programmable video loop, and that can be fashioned into clothing or attached to microphones to play sponsor’s messages during interviews before, during, or after big events.

It’s called VideoNameTag, and I took a demo unit with me to Kiev, when I taught a group of journalists and professors at the University of Mohyla’s Institute for the Digital Future of Journalism. You can see them puzzling over how to fit it onto their wrists – although they were certainly interested in the prospect of being able to broadcast the latest news via wireless connection to a couple of people walking through crowds.

They’re gearing up for an especially contentious election season in Ukraine this year; one where the pro-Putin crew is already pulling out all the stops to keep a lid on dissent. Not sure how much something like this could help – but then again, having a person walking through the crowd and playing a loop, such as the famous sequence showing the death of Iranian protestor Neda Soltan – could provide a form of information dissemination that would transcend the attempts at censorship.

It turns out that it was a very unusual experience – we saw two species of cetaceans that are quite rare – especially as close to shore as we found them.

First, there were the Risso’s Dolphins – big honkin’ beasts. Seriously. I’ve swum with the familiar bottlenose dolphins, and been intimidated by the sheer strength of a 500-lb critter that is made out of pure muscle & gristle. Touching a dolphin while you’re swimming is a lot like putting your hand on the hood of an idling 18-wheeler.

A pod of Risso's Dolphins - these guys look like mini-whales. They're white and gray, rather than the familiar battleship gray of their bottlenose kin, and much thicker around.

You just get this deep, thrumming sense of power.

Next, just as we were about to go in (and about time, too, as most of the passengers were starting to turn a little blue), we heard the long, extended “PFFFFFFttttttt!” of a whale breaching about 100 yards away. Turns out it was a couple of Sei Whales (pronounced “Say Whales,” although I kinda like thinking it’s French “C’est Whales”) who were in about 60-80 feet of water. Which is unusual, because if a whale this size actually stood on its head, it could wave it’s flipper out of the water, like a little kid in the shallow end of the pool.

The video is a little shaky, because I’m shooting it with a long zoom from a handheld Canon 60D from the pitching bowsprit of a catamaran, as we chase after the whales.

We were all just ecstatic over seeing these giant creatures moseying along. The best we can figure out is that they eat krill & small fish, and the unusual water temperatures this year, that have also brought so very many Blue Whales so close to the coast, also have attracted the Sei Whales … maybe the same thing that’s brought the Risso’s Dolphins in?

sei whale, dana point, whalewatching, video, watch whales playing,

I’ve been in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the last week, training the local journalists and government information officers (aka PR flacks) on how best to take advantage of the way that “New Media” is creating new ways of connecting with each other, and the world at large. I’m here as part of the same US Embassy program that has sent me to places like Chile, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Costa Rica, etc., to try to bring people the benefits of experience (aka the way newspapers & TV news has imploded in the U.S.), so they can start planning for the Great Digital Migration.

This is my class of TV journalists at Addis Ababa University (AAU). I tried to cram as much about online video and sharing into my short sessions as I could. Here, I'm showing how to use both professional tools like Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, as well as free alternatives like Windows Movie Maker.

The one thing that everyone here agrees on is that Ethiopia desperately wants to change its international image – c’mon, admit it. When you think of Ethiopia, what images come to mind? Deserts, starving people, vultures, Live Aid, right?

Well, it’s not like that any more. In fact, if you look around at the Addis Ababa skyline, you’ll mostly see cranes and highrise towers under construction. The real-estate bubble that burst and devastated the rest of the world never took hold here.

There are still many reminders that the ancient ways of living are still very much in existence here in Addis, but please also note all the other markers of modernity in this shot.

However, they are facing many of the same challenges as the rest of the world, at least when it comes to the emergence of the internet, and the struggles of newspapers, radio and TV stations to come to grips with social media, and the ability of anyone to become a publisher/broadcaster/internet troll.

The very first place I visited was Sheger FM, the one independent radio station in Ethiopia. This is the courageous owner, who is really struggling to walk the razor's edge here in Addis.

I’ve found many of the same behaviors and attitudes I’ve encountered in the other places that I’ve done web/online video/social media training sessions – stubborn insistence that things will never change, toxic skepticism, and even outright hostility.

After a bit of a rocky start, these guys really came around and appreciated the hands-on lessons I gave them on how to do live video stand-up reports and how to compress video into the best codec to upload to YouTube. The Nelson Mandela building is a challenge, though; between the thin air at this 8000-foot altitude, and having to haul my big carcass up 5 (five) steep flights of stairs, the first few minutes of every class were mostly spent huffing and puffing, and hoping that someone in the class had a particularly insightful comment.

Check out this interpretation of Bob Woodward’s book on Obama & Afghanistan:

My larger point (other than getting a cheap laugh, which is never to be, well, laughed at) was that the first impulse of video-makers is to take things that they know and love, and that their friends know and love, and to do their own snarky take on them. It’s what we see when little kids get their mitts on video cameras for the first time, and produce their own home movies.

It’s what Spielberg did when he was a kid and producing his own WWII epics in his backyard. My sisters, cousins & I did this back in the (mumble mumble) decade, with 8mm film, and a script based on what we had seen of ads of movies like Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (we couldn’t get into R-rated theaters in Wisconsin).

For the average user, producing a video is an inherently daring process. Any media creation is, really – but creating a video is so much harder than typing into a WordPress text window (ahem), that it ratchets up the anxiety. As any good comedian can tell you, laughter is the release of anxiety.

Creating funny, sarcastic or absurdist videos is a way to laugh at yourself, before everyone else does (again – check with comedians as to why they became class clowns – something to do with avoiding beatings from the bullies, I expect).

But now these videos are coming into their own. Before the book has really cleared out of the news cycles, already there’s a video (pretty good quality, too), interpreting it in a way that makes you pay attention.

In the attention economy … this is pure gold.

Obama’s Wars, Taiwanimation, online video, parody video, funny video, people formerly known as the audience, larry lessig, content creation, attention economy

Learned some cool workflow stuff from the Adobe Premiere Pro product managers.

Last year, it took 3 days or so to come up with an animated sequence showing a plane crash, using Flash.

Now, only hours after a colorful incident, “machinamation” (done by Next Media Animation in Taiwan) has come out with a short animated video showing their take on what happened on Flight 1052.

Man, I wish I could draw as good as this guy. Reminds me of the UPS commercials where the guy with the whiteboard is illustrating in realtime what he’s talking about. Give me that guy at a board meeting, and I could sell those rubes bags of dirt.

Happy 4th of July, America. Not sure the clock has quite yet struck the hour for another Lexington & Concord, this time with the targets being Goldman-Sachs CDO traders …

RSA Animate – Crises of Capitalism

Hypnotic Motion

The song itself is kinda beside the point – it’s bubblegum synth-disco-pop, about as bland and processed as the stuff the taxi drivers in Moscow used to subject me to on the way back & forth from my gig there. Which may be why it’s getting so many views – this is the kind of stuff that works internationally, since the thumping beat and lyric structure make it sound pretty much interchangeable with everything else on the radio.

Can't wait until she starts marketing the exploding bustier shown here; Madonna's Wannabees all wore their undies over their shirts. Wonder if GaGaEttes are going to be lighting their smokes off their flaming boobs.

But the real action here is in the video to the song. Blew my mind. Didn’t think that people had budgets like this anymore. Costumes that would make Gaultier sick with envy — white latex with “Where the Wild Things Are” shiny plastic crowns, some kinda homage to LeeLoo’s orange strappy outfit in The Fifth Element and a Eastern European mobster/white sex-slave buyer with a steampunk-ish articulated brass chin. Looked to my eye like about a week in production, probably about $500K in total costs of models, locations, crews, lighting, post-production.

The plot seems to be that Lady GaGa wakes from her sleep the way normal people do – by sticking her hand out of a gleaming white Tylenol-shaped coffin – getting forced to drink high-end vodka and the gyrate for & be sold to a bunch of strange pervy dudes.I half expected to see Liam Neeson kicking someone’s ass in the backdrop and telling her, “Here’s the scary part. You’re going to be taken…”

Nobody does these kinds of elaborate music videos anymore, because there is no way to recoup that kinda cash from the moribund music industry.- at least, not until now.As Dan Neil points out in the LA Times

the “Bad Romance” video, which features placements for no less than 10 products: a black iPod; Philippe Starck Parrot wireless speakers; Nemiroff vodka; Gaga-designed Heartbeats earphones (via Dr. Dre); Carrera sunglasses; Nintendo Wii handsets; Hewlett-Packard Envy computers; a Burberry coat; those crazy, hobbling Alexander McQueen hyper-heels; and enough La Perla lingerie to choke an ox.

This isn’t a music video so much as the QVC Channel you can dance to.

I had thought that Madonna and Michael Jackson were about as sophisticated as you could get when it came to figuring out ways to build up a juicy public image, and then squeeze it until rivers of cash started running out. Not so. Lady GaGa has rightly recognized that selling CDs if for chumps; anyone can pirate them, and pretty much does.

No, you need to sell things that people can’t copy – or at least, if they do, it kinda defeats the purpose. So Lady GaGa’s come up with the list of high-end commercial goods to do “Hero Shots” of in the video and obviously done revenue deals with them.

As a business model, I have to say hats off to the Lady. She’s adapted to the draining of value from the content (i.e. nobody actually buys music anymore – at least, not like they used to), and migrated over to where the money still lies.

When advertising no longer works, when information is a commodity in which we all drown for free, then the only things that are left that have any value are physical objects that we can wear, eat, drive or plug in, as well as what cultural anthropologists call “fetish objects” that bestow special status because they signify that we hae enough disposable income so as to be able to waste a couple grand on some gaudy sunglasses.

I’m not sure if this is the way that all news & entertainment is going to have to go in the future. All of it sponsored, with big shout-outs to the guys footing the bills worked into the info-stream every 10 seconds or so.  I do know that if this works, we’re going to see a lot more of these “branded videos” online.

Please excuse the mess: I’ve been wrenching away at the template on this blog, trying to get it to function in IE7, as well as to get the banner to animate (without having to resort to either an animated GIF or a .flv file that slowed load time to a crawl).

This week, I’ve got a great mix of light & funny and experimental & trippy.

First out of the box, the most popular video of the week – the Eurovision winner. A fiddle-playing Norwegian kid, with big soulful eyes that has all the chicas in the comments section swooning.

It wasn’t until I spent a couple of months in Moscow that I realized what a big deal the winner of the Eurovision song contest was. Apparently, this has become the proxy for the landwars of the 19th century, and the combat in the voting and online is as fierce as Austerlitz.

Hey, if this can keep them damn countries from launching senseless wars against each other, I’m all for it, and will encourage it in any way that I can.  Any chance we can get Putin to do a soulful KGB ballad about the sadness & emptiness of life, now that they can no longer yank fingernails out of dissidents.

Eurovision Winner – Alexander Ryback

Julia Dales – Beatbox Champion

Next up is another musical video – somewhat more stripped down. This teenage girl manages to mimic a pretty elaborate beatbox; the comparisons to the dude in the “Police Lobotomy” movies are inevitable, if somewhat trite. I kinda wonder why this was shot in the backseat of a car? Maybe it was where they could find the best acoustics – although the window is open.

Anyway, the talent to sing while still laying down a rhythm track is hot, and the Republican Party should recruit this girl immediately, and send her thru a Cato Institute shake-n-bake seminar on right-wing ideology. That way, when next the reporters start asking pesky questions about the GOP’s alternative to Obama’s universal health coverage, she can leap into the fray and distract everyone from the utter lack of any sort of ideological alternative.

Cute Girl Has Amazing Beat Box Skill – Watch more Funny Videos

Extreme Sheep Art

I guess it’s not as bad as some of the other, more “Performance Art” pieces that could be done with a flock of sheep & some bored shepherds.

Actually, this is quite sweet, and made me think of the movie “Babe.” I had never noticed how predatory the herding dogs look when they come at the sheep; their heads are so low to the ground their muzzles must be damn near scraping, and they look like they’re coiled and ready to go for the throat. Maybe the panicked reactions of the sheep aren’t so out of line?

Anyway – any video that manages to combine sheep in lighted vests, a hillside & the 1812 Overture to good effect gets a thumbs-up from me. And the sheep have obviously been getting their cardio-vascular exercise.

SNL – Will Farrell Returns as Alex Trebek, Still Tormented by Sean Connery

Everytime I see versions of this skit, I collapse in laughter.

Killer line this time: “Is that what the moustache is for, Trebek?”

Why I Want a Canon 5D Mark II: Part 1 – Deep Powder Skiing

I defy anyone to try to get this kind of quality in such extreme conditions with a standard HD camera; the camera is either way too clunky (check out the trippy sequence when the skiiers are weaving through the trees – a larger camera would have smashed into the trunks & not have been able to thread the needle) or too bulky to take along with you during a downhill run like this, over moguls and deep powder.

The shots of the snow were so crisp that I got a brain freeze.

Powder Mountain Perspective from Ian Provo on Vimeo.

Part 2: Great Music Video Cinematography & Color Depth

This is just neat-o eye candy.

wemakemusic* – Dance with a Statue from Sebastian Woeber on Vimeo.

And last, check out this (it’s not embeddable, so you’ll have to click through) - it’s just a camera test, but it feels like the beginning of a 70s-vintage thriller like “French Connection” or something.  The stedicam work done with the 5D is great-it must be a treat to be able to be so nimble in your movements because of the reduced size & weight. The video is a little sticky, so you’re going to have to wait for it to buffer, which can be a pain. (Brief pause to check stats)

This vid is about 116 megs, so yeah, it’s gonna take a while. Obviously fairly uncompressed, which is why the image quality is so high.  Hope I’m not banging your bandwidth too bad, guys… but I do recommend checking out how well the 5D does Panavision with a 50mm lens on it.