Welcome to VCAM’s Friday dump of links we found to be of interest in the last week. We hope to bring you a list like this each Friday. These are links that we stumble across during the week that seem relevant to VCAM specifically or community media in general. We tend to post these links to our Facebook and/or Twitter feeds as we find them. We just thought it might be useful (to us here in the office as well as to our members and followers) to collect these in one easy-to-find spot each week. So here goes…
Check out the Open in Vermont booth at the Vermont 3.0 Innovation Jam at the Sheraton on Monday October 26. It’s run by a bunch of Vermonters committed to the free and open source software movement. Stop by and learn more!
There was a lot of buzz this week about tiny Vermont craft brewers, Rock Art Brewery, getting hounded with legal trademark letters from the lawyers at the corporate offices of Monster Energy drinks. The lawyers didn’t like Rock Art’s use of the word “Vermontster” on their recent 10% barley wine release. Green River Pictures (our neighbors!) made a little informational video about the situation featuring an interview with Rock Art owner, Matt Nadeau.
This week the US House Energy and Finance Committee unanimously passed the Local Community Radio Act. Now the bill must go the floor of the House for a vote. Another small victory for LPFM and community media! Contact your representative today to say it’s time to pass the Local Community Radio Act, HR 1147 (VT Rep. Peter Welch is already on board — thank him!).
It’s gotten to the point where we don’t really need to encourage people to stop by the VCAM/RETN studios for Art Hop anymore. We’re pretty slammed with folks all night long on the Friday of Art Hop, and we get a good number of folks through the door on Saturday too. Still, if you’re wondering where to start your hop, the 208 Flynn complex is loaded with art, performances, food and drink. The Flynndog Art Gallery, Outer Space Cafe, Select Design, Propeller Media Works, VCAM and RETN will all be hosting what has become the biggest party of the year in this end of town.
Here in VCAM we’ll have art from more than a dozen artists in many different media, great food (we’ve gotten a reputation for good food at Art Hop) and DJ Disco Phantom will be spinning in our studio.
If you’ve never been to VCAM for Art Hop, it’s worth stopping by. Look for the big lights on the roof!
BHS teen filmmaker Graham Raubvogel has written and directed a short film for the high school filmmaking club that met at VCAM on Fridays during the last school year. We shot the film at VCAM with a cast and crew made up of professional filmmakers and film club students, resulting an a veritable master class in filmmaking. Eat your heart out, Maine Workshops!
VCAM producers Bill Villemaire, Forrest Scrivens and Paul Nichols are featured in this week’s Seven Days, talking about their show, The Advocacy Team. Check it out!
A short while ago, nature-lover and VCAM member, Joanna Cummings, approached us with an idea and asked if she could use VCAM’s free public access resources to get her project off the ground. Her idea was to produce a blog “as a means to create social groups interested in sharing their thoughts, activities, videos, photos and knowledge in the areas of Vermont nature, agriculture and the environment.” Joanna indicated to us that she would likely need video production gear to go out into the community and shoot video content, digital editing facilities, a computer with Internet access, a couple different web-design applications, and access to video tutorials to help her get the ball rolling.
As it turns out, VCAM’s new workstation dedicated to web-design (a new iMac equipped with Adobe CS4 Web Premium) along with our video production gear, editing facilities, and subscription to the extensive Lynda.com video tutorial library, were the essential tools for her to get started. Over the last few weeks, Joanna experimented with different templates for her blog, using free web-based applications including Blogger and Ning, before deciding to go with Wordpress. Her goal was to have enough happening on her blog to launch it today, Earth Day 2009, and that she did. Please take a minute to check out Joanna’s new project, leave her a comment or two, and join in the greater conversation about preserving our natural environment by living thoughtfully on the land.
On Saturday students in the Burlington High School after school film club shot a short film in the VCAM space. The film is called “Art Lovers” and is the brain child of BHS sophomore (and award-winning filmmaker) Graham Raubvogel. Graham and fellow students Keith LaFountaine, Steven Jaramillo and Michelle Martinek were joined by a team of professional filmmakers, actors and technicians for the production day, which was a hands-on master class in filmmaking.
One of VCAM’s security cameras caught all the action, one frame per second. Below is all 12 hours of shooting — from the minute the first crew walked in the door at 8:00 AM, until the last staff person shut out the lights and left at 8:00 PM — compressed into a single minute of video. Enjoy…
We have five MacBooks that we use for training purposes here at VCAM and we have five portable hard drives to go with them. Matt named the identical computer/hard drive sets so we could differentiate them. For the MacBooks, he chose the members of the Jackson 5: Marlon, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Michael. For the drives, Matt picked Norse gods: Odin, Loki, Kvasir, Thor and Heimdall.
Well I (Bill) recently had to get five new drives (because of the influx of many CCV filmmaking students this spring) and I had to come up with my own naming scheme. You can tell that Matt and I have somewhat differing cultural touchstones…
Watch Eva Sollberger’s latest Stuck in Vermont featuring VCAM! Hear many local cable access producers rhapsodize about the magic of television and the freedom of self-expression.
