Village Underground Residency
As mentioned in previous blogs I've been doing a consultancy placement at Village Underground. I spent Monday and Tuesday in residence and two very different events were covered. On Monday we had a gig featuring TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone Rain Machine project, with Marques Toliver in support. On Tuesday I was able to catch the ‘get in’ for Collaborative Dance Experience’s debut production Out Of Time.
I took with me 2 Kodak Zi8s and a Flip, my Dictaphone and an SLR camera. I was very happy with the material I shot. My first catch was Marques Toliver performing In The Cab. We were able to grab him between soundchecks and take him to the drivers cab of one of the tube trains on the roof. After his interview he performed an exclusive song. I shot this on all three cameras but put a quick rush on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xJxgFuL2SQ
Village Underground’s Social Life
Following a meeting with Auro and Clément at the beginning of April, I managed to sort some dates to come down and cover activities at Village Underground. Before I came down it was important to have some social media networks more sorted.
Village Underground now has a Twitter Account, a YouTube channel, and a Flickr site. I’ve also been overhauling their Facebook and Myspace presence. At the simplest level this has meant using all the logos and backgrounds so branding is carried across all elements. It also means effectively pulling content from elsewhere and thinking about re-distribution.
To Vimeo Or Not To Vimeo
For my first Multimedia Assignment I'm experimenting with video. But even putting out short chunked segments takes a while to edit, and even longer to upload. In my Production Lab work there's been a lot of discussion about which platform is better, Vimeo or YouTube. Certainly from a time perspective, YouTube is much quicker to upload. It took me a few hours to get three three-minute clips up last night. With Vimeo I had to leave the first clip overnight, the second took two hours this morning to upload, and I've given up on the third after it kept on dropping out.
The thing is I know Vimeo is generally considered the better platform, especially for aesthetically sensitive designers but it appears my allocation only allows me to upload on HD package a week. And besides YouTube now offers unlimited HD. For standard Vimeo there's a cap at 500Mb. Here's the two clips together, see if you can really spot the difference. For extra fun play them together.
[vimeo width="720" height="300"]http://www.vimeo.com/10295461[/vimeo]
What Village Underground can learn from the Barbican
For my MA Online Journalism I'm conducting a Production Lab placement with Village Underground, London. Following the last group Skype meeting, I thought it would be useful to do a case study on a venue that already has its online presence sorted. I managed to arrange a face to face meeting with Maryam Ashgari from the Barbican, a 28 minute edit of the meeting can be listened to below.
[audio: http://dandavies23.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/barbicanedit.mp3]But if you don't have half an hour to spare here are my conclusions.