Here’s a neat and easily digestible animation from the folks over at Common Craft.

From the Pangea Day website…

“Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person’s eyes. Details on the Pangea Day films can be viewed here.

The program will also include a number of exceptional speakers and musical performers. Queen Noor of Jordan, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, musician/activist Bob Geldof, and Iranian rock phenom Hypernova are among those taking part.”

Test post

Check out Rebecca Kopycinski’s opening credits for her new show Burly Song. She designed them using Adobe’s CS3 here at the VCAM studio and in the process she has rapidly become quite skilled at After Effects. Burly Song will feature performances by musicians from our local independent music scene as well as special guest appearances from touring musicians performing in the Burlington area. You can look for Burly Song to premiere on VCAM Channel 15 next week!

VCAM, CCTV and RETN are once again collaborating on the Vermont blogging experiment, Exit Voices.

If there was a comments section on your ballot on election day, what would you say? What do you think about the issues, ballot measures and candidates this election? Exit Voices is your forum. On Tuesday March 4th, Exit Voices will host a series of open threads, giving any Vermonter the opportunity to say his or her piece. Some of these comments and video entries will be highlighted on the blog and during CCTV’s live election night coverage on channel 17 and over their live web stream that evening. Stop by Exit Voices and speak you mind. The floor is yours.

Leading up to the 4th, Exit Voices will be aggregating content from all over the Vermont blogosphere and soliciting essays, photos and video posts from Vermonters across the state, discussing Town Meeting Day and the Vermont presidential primary.

Please swing by and lend your voice to the discussion.

Tonight at 7:30 pm Vermont Public Television is hosting a live web chat with Vermont ACLU director, Allen Gilbert, and assistant US attorney, Bill Darrow.  The focus of the chat will be “Civil Liberties in a Changing World.”  In an email, Gilbert writes…

I’m a panelist with Bill Darrow, an assistant U.S. attorney here in Vermont. The topic is “Civil Liberties in a Changing World.” Darrow, as you may know, is pretty aggressive in defending government actions in national security, drugs, death penalty, etc.



The chat on Wednesday will focus on national security, and I’m sure Darrow will try to belittle claims that civil liberties have been diminished because of the war on terror — or that if they have, the Bush administration has structured security programs in a way that minimizes civil liberties impacts while maximizing protection of U.S. citizens’ safety.

Go here to log into the chat — you can comment anonymously if you wish.

A trio of British graphic designers spent four days filming themselves running up and down Omaha Beach in Normandy and then composited the footage to create an amazing, on-the-cheap, DIY D-Day scene. Here is the YouTube clip…

American University’s Center for Social Media has conducted a study about the use of copyrighted materials in user-generated video content.  When YouTubers take copyrighted content and make video “mashups” and put them up on YouTube, are they breaking the law?  The study, which comes from the same institution that published the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, is available for download here.  According to the study’s site…

The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.

Fair use is the part of copyright law that permits new makers, in some situations, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying the owners. The courts tell us that fair use should be “transformative”—adding value to what they take and using it for a purpose different from the original work. So when makers mash up several works—say, The Ten Commandments , Ben-Hur and 10 Things I Hate about You , making Ten Things I Hate about Commandments —they aren’t necessarily stealing. They are quoting in order to make a new commentary on popular culture, and creating a new piece of popular culture.

Unfortunately, this emerging, participatory media culture is at risk, with new industry practices to control piracy. Large content holders such as NBC Universal and Viacom, and online platforms such as MySpace and Veoh are already crafting agreements on removing copyrighted material from the online sites. Legal as well as illegal copying could all too easily disappear. Worse still, a new generation of media makers could grow up with a deformed and truncated notion of their rights as creators.

Documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim (The Control Room) and TED, the invite-only Technology, Entertainment and Design conference held annually in Monterey, California, are teaming up together for something called Pangea Day, and asking professional and amateur filmmakers around the world to submit short pieces for a world-wide film festival with the lofty goal of building bridges between cultures.  The films will be screened in a four-hour presentation in cities around the world and online on May 10, 2008 — Pangea Day.

How to produce and submit your short film:

Pangea Day films are meant to be visual stories, ones that can be understood despite language barriers, and therefore should not rely on dialogue. If dialogue is required, Pangea Day organizers are asking that videos have English subtitles so that all films can be translated. In order to show as many videos as possible, submissions must be 5 minutes or less.

Filmmakers with submissions should upload their films at http://www.youtube.com/group/pangeadaywww.pangeaday.org. and register their film at www.pangeaday.org.

A panel of jurors, led by Noujaim and other renowned members of the film community, will review all submissions and select the winning films to be screened on Pangea Day.

…Build one! The blog over at makezine.com has a list of gift ideas all stemming from open source hardware that are sure to bring joy to the ones you love this holiday season…

…From mp3 players to mini guitar amps to wi-fi bean bag computers (huh ?) Makezine has posted dozens of schematics and how-to pages for DIY extremists looking to take gift-giving challenges into their own hands. Please note: we’d like folks to refrain from bringing the following item into our studio…

High-power TV-B-Gone Kit - Turn TVs off from 100 feet away, the open source hardware way! Tired of all those LCD TVs everywhere? Want a break from advertisements while you’re trying to eat? Want to zap screens from across the street? No one ever says at the end of their life they wished they watched more TV - this is a life saver!

The TV-B-Gone kit is what you need! This ultra-high-power, open source hardware kit version of the popular TV-B-Gone is fun to make and even more fun to use. This version is best used in countries with NTSC: North America & Asia.This kit comes with all parts necessary. Tools and batteries are not included. This is a very simple kit and great for people who have never soldered anything before.

If anyone decides to construct any of these items (Jeff Botas perhaps ??) please consider documenting the process on digital video so we can admire your handy work. As you all know we’re more than happy to provide the video resources for such a project. Happy gift building everyone!