cowbite.org

Teller on patterns, expectation and the psychology of magic

 

OK Go: This Too Shall Pass

Looks like enormous fun

Alfred Hitchcock on mystery vs suspense

The American Film Institute have been releasing clips from their interviews, speeches and seminars archive to their site and youtube. There's loads of stuff in there, and they have the usual filtering/discovery/display problems. The difficulty in hunting for gems is you don't know what to look for until you stumble over it or someone send it to you. So until somebody installs a "give me wisdom" button, here's Alfred Hitchcock:

The Periodic Table of Videos

Chemistry brought to you in handy video form, fresh from the University of Nottingham. I love this, not only because of the high boffin content and genial style of delivery, but also because they're watching the comments their youtube channel gets and responding.

Osama Loves

My colleague Adam Gee has something of a knack for interesting projects. Osama Loves is the latest - a hunt for 500 Osamas across the world in collaboration with the folks at Mint Digital. It's a fun proposition - a Dave Gorman-esqe laugh with bigger, subtler messages sneaking in under the radar. Adam writes about the whats, whys and hows in more detail here. I really like the use of video galleries as a way of getting an instant snapshot of the project and a fun way to navigate. It's all hugely clickable and the heart motif adds extra cute points.

Fourdocs refreshed

Hey hey! Fourdocs has had a refresh. It's languished for some time, with a virtually impossible to use upload system and difficult to update site in general. But a nifty combination of blog, brightcove player and simple webpages has cut out some of that weight. Now hopefully we can leave some of the technical headaches behind and get on with some great content. Keep 'em peeled for bursaries, guest editors, screenings and of course some great grassroots docs.

RSA does video

The RSA organise some great talks, and they've uploaded three so far to RSA Vision. Although I've seen cameras at other sessions so I assume there are more to come. Is this a little TED? That would be v cool. Sadly you can't embed them, that would be even cooler. But here's some Clay to be going on with.

Channel 4 News video

It's taken a while to get there, but at last you can now catch up on (almost) all C4 News online. So that means almost all of the 1hr long 7pm  broadcast (we can't put it all on the web due to rights issues, unfortunately), and clips of key news items embedded into pages. And of course it's embeddable for full distributability (yes that's a real word).

5th Anniversary of war in Iraq :: Google map

There's a huge amount of coverage of this anniversary, both broadcast and print media. C4's "Happy Birthday Iraq" season starts today - a week long look at the past five years of the conflict. It's been very difficult to try and manage the scale of all of this. It's a subject that expands beyond your reach the moment you start thinking about it. Online we've got tons of content, both written and video, news footage, personal accounts and film clips.

One of the things I was keen to do was give some kind of geographical context, and to try to promote C4 as an editor of choice - point to where the interesting content elsewhere on the web is. I wanted to help people find content beyond the usual news sites they might visit. So we've put a considered selection of C4 and non-C4 content into a google map. You can start with Baghdad and zoom in/out, and we've chosen the satellite view deliberately - I don't know about you but being able to see the streets of places I only associate with news footage somehow brings it home.

See what you think. I don't think it will change the world, but as a way of navigating content I think it's interesting.

V cool videos about urban gang life

AJ Nakasila is a very talented guy. He's made some films (with True Vision's help) about his and his friends' experiences of gang life in London. The results are stunning, and feel really authentic. There is so much debate on young people, gangs and violent crime flying around in the public domain, often driven by feral beasts, politicians, police, educators etc. They're experts in their field, but come at it from their particular perspective. They're outside, or on the edge of it, and looking in and they're often talking to other adults. What I love about these films is the feel of authenticity, and the sense that these guys are talking to us in their own language. I don't pretend they're going change the world, but they're a brilliant (and sometimes bleak) view of a small and troubling section of it.

I'm also massively impressed with AJ! The music is also by him and Jamie Perera. Stills from the shoots are on flickr and the videos are available to download on the Channel 4 Dispatches site.