This year we decided to enter the second in the now annual Birmingham creative community’s 48 hour film challenge, Filmdash.

The idea of making a stop motion animation is one we had last year, but beyond doing a test shot of two seconds with Tailycat – our lead in The Quest – we hadn’t got around to taking it any further. So when Filmdash 2010 was launched, with the general theme of ‘happiness’, we thought what better than to revive our animation idea with the two happy Jellycat toys!

As per the Filmdash rules no scripting, shooting, or planning was done in advance of the start of the challenge at 7pm on Friday – the only thing we did beforehand was to make the decision to do the animation using the toys. At the 7pm start time we got our criteria, containing a mandatory line of dialogue (“you’ll feel it in your blood and guts”) and a mandatory prop (a scarf).

Our process over the weekend was:

Friday evening

Initial ideas for the plot, deciding which characters would be used and how, and drawing up of the basic storyboard.

Saturday all day

Principle photography, rendering all the still photographs for each shot into a motion .avi file, first (very) rough cut of all the shots into one continuous video.

Sunday morning

Starting to do the special effects in photoshop (an idea which was immediately abandoned!), starting to do moving subtitles for the dialogue (another idea which was immediately abandoned), replaced by doing silent-movie style caption slates.

Sunday afternoon

Incorporation of background music soundtrack into the film, a series of rough cuts (three in total) in order to get the timing for the caption slates right, followed by exporting the final cut and uploading to YouTube.

Not only was this our first film with a story (I’ve made a number of YouTube films which are more documentary), it was also our first animated film – and after the fact (well during the fact on doing the postproduction work on Sunday morning) we can see all the errors we made – some of the focussing is a bit off, had we known we were going to use caption slates we should have left each shot before each slate linger just a touch longer, the special effects (which were going to be the kiln getting hotter, and the dalek firing its gun) were dropped, the penultimate scene (shot at the end of the day using fading natural light) with The Oracle really could do with having been re-shot entirely, my tripod, whilst smooth enough for normal use isn’t really smooth enough for panning and tracking the micro-movements needed for animation, and the scenes we shot right at the end of the day really did start to have bigger movements between each frame (thus becoming jerkier) as we started to get tired and wanting to ensure got it completed and uploaded by the 7pm Sunday deadline. And due to a whole day of crouching for extended periods of time in awkward positions to take each frame, I’ve twisted my back a bit!

But these are all things we would have done just the same had we spent two months making the film rather than two days – and that would have been well annoying! We were also a bit compromised by having a bit of a rubbish computer – about five years old and not the fastest processor available even at the time, using the free software which came with my hand-held video camera  (Adobe Premier still seeming to be a bit temperamental on this computer), the best thing about which can be said is ‘well it sort of works’.

But in the process we’ve learned an awful lot in a very short time about how to make an animation, meaning for Tailycat’s next adventure things should hopefully be a bit smoother. Many thanks to Chris Unitt and Ian Ravenscroft for their work in organising it, and also thanks to all the other Filmdash entrants for helping make it such a fun challenge to participate in!

The complete set of Filmdash entries are now on YouTube.

Just as the country was unfreezing itself from our unaccustomed lengthy period of snow and ice, Dave Harte, as part of his taking over the running of the hyperlocal blog in his local area, laid a challenge before Birmingham City Council to make freely available – in an easy importable and mashable format – the data of which roads the gritting wagons go down.

Sounds a bit dull when described like that, but the point of it being in a mashable format is that would allow other websites to easily import that data for their own use – to produce a map of the routes just for your own local area, or for the whole city. Dave’s point was that he had to do a whole bunch of unnecessary work in making a new map by drawing lines on Google Maps taking the text information on the council gritting routes pages, when surely since the council already has the mapping data from its own mapping systems, why can’t it just make that data available from source?

Which is a reasonable question, if you don’t know the answer! Actually, most councils (or at least the people within them who use or have other interests in the data themselves) would love to release this data – after all, as Dave points out, at its crudest it’s a way of enabling community volunteers to do useful things with it instead of the council having to do (and therefore pay for) it.

The sad fact is, much as councils would like to release this data, central government, in the form of its various quango agencies, won’t let them. The mapping data for the gritting routes is derived from mapping by the Ordnance Survey – ie, the mapping .kml (or whatever) files are generated by somebody clicking on an Ordnance Survey map in a piece of mapping software, which then makes that data subject to OS’s rather restrictive licensing conditions – meaning that if those councils were to release that data, they’d get sued by the OS. No ‘might get told off’, most definitely will get sued – when it comes to protecting their intellectual property, the OS make Disney look cuddly. And sadly, over 90% of local government geodata (especially the interesting stuff) is compiled in this way – not by council workers walking around with handheld gps devices doing their own survey.

“But wait!”, I hear you shout, “OS are due to make their mapping free from April 2010!”

Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that – OS are indeed making the maps free, but any data which is derived from those maps (ie, by somebody clicking on it) will still be restricted.

So the target for ire about the inability of local activists to easily produce a map of, say, local lollipop operatives – aka School Crossing Patrols – should be central government, not your local council.

You’d think, though, that with the launch of www.data.gov.uk – central government’s new open data repository – we’d be seeing the Dawn of a New Golden Age of Peace and Prosperity, with the possibility that this extra data will be in the second wave to be freed?

However, it looks unlikely, with the announcement that the petition to free the Royal Mail’s postcode data, which a number of interesting online applications were using until the Royal Mail threatened to sue them, has been rejected.

Don’t forget, all this data which the government continues to prevent us from using in our own applications, we have already paid for. We have a moral right to it. In the USA, not usually known for its free, open, and uncommercial attitude to things, absolutely anything which is created by a government employee is free for others to use, on that very basis that the taxpayer has already paid for it.

The other day my friend Pete Ashton posted an article in which he declared he was no longer a Social Media Consultant. Sort of.

Or rather, it’s not that he’s no longer doing what he’s been doing for a living for the last couple of years to go and do something else, rather, that – cutting a long story short – he’s not going to be describing himself as such any more.

Those of us who’ve been doing this thing for ages (especially those of us who have been doing it since long before the term was coined) have never been particularly comfortable with the term ’social media’, but we’ve grudgingly accepted it on the grounds that it doesn’t cause share prices to tumble on the stock market, nobody’s harmed by it, and the horses aren’t frightened by it. And nobody’s been able to think of anything better that’s caught on in a snappy way. Myself, I thought the term collaborative media might have legs (since that better describes what we do), but nobody else has nailed their colours to that mast.

Anyway, part of the point Pete makes is that whilst it was an OKish term for a while, it has now become polluted, as the PR people and the Marketeers and the all the other people have moved in thinking they need to have a ’social media strategy’ for their organisation, fundamentally missing the point about what social media is. It’s media, that’s social – that’s collaborative, interactive, and conversational. You’re having a conversation with your audience, not making a speech to them – and in a conversation you listen and respond, not just talk. And the ‘professionals’ moving in singularly fail to realise this – they want to have a Twitter feed, but want to have every post to their Twitter feed signed off by a manager before it goes out!

Some time after Pete published his article, he posted to Twitter giving a real-world example of why he wrote his post:

Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as ‘paragraphs’.

It beggars belief how anybody writing for what’s supposed to be a respectable technology blog could possibly think that.

To think that Twitter might have killed blogging because it’s easier to publish a sentence than it is to publish a collection of paragraphs is like saying that crisps might kill tartiflette because it’s easier to get a packet of Walkers than it is to get hold of Reblochon cheese. If I post to Twitter, it’s not because it’s ‘easier’, it’s because it’s frankly silly of me to log into Wordpress and faff about trying to come up with at least 200 hundred words for a narrative just to say that the water level of the canal by the NIA is quite high.

Admittedly, myself and my friends have often commented to each other how we all seem to be blogging less since we’ve been using Twitter more – but that’s not in the sense of microblogging killing fullblogging, it’s in the sense of a combination of the way we’ve repurposed our use of Twitter itself, and also that we send the appropriate communication to the appropriate channels. When I write an article here, I’m writing for the world and aware that some of my friends will be reading. When I write a post to Twitter, I’m writing for my friends and aware that some of the world will be reading. It’s as simple as that, and it’s not a competition.

So there.

(Pete’s article also raised a couple of other interesting resonances for me which I may well write about in a future post)

In the best traditions of lazy journalism where the answer to any headline posed as a question is almost certainly ‘no’, the answer to this question – the title of the Big Debate Birmingham (hosted jointly by the Birmingham Post and Birmingham City University) – is almost certainly ‘no’. Fortunately in the course of the afternoon we didn’t even bother trying to answer ‘yes’ to the question and instead got on with the business of discussing our creative industries in relation to ourselves rather than trying to save the rest of the country.

Five key points which emerged for me were:

The days of the global media corporation are over

In the olden days, the media industry was dominated by just a handful of ‘boulder’companies – such as News International, CNN, Associated Newspapers, Guardian Media Group, the BBC, etc. When Channel 4 launched, and when Eddie Shah launched the Today newspaper they were big, national events, because there were so few other media brands. Today, all new media companies are ‘pebble’ companies – small start-ups, with small costs & consequently small profits. New digital television stations come and go almost unnoticed; for most people literally unnoticed, as most people rarely update the channel lists on their televisions / set top boxes. There will be no more new boulder companies.

The paradox of the media industries in free-fall

The media industries – especially those of journalism and of music – are in free fall; profits for record companies and newspaper companies are plumetting, as people turn their backs on their offerings. The paradox of this is that now there is more music, and more journalism (and yes, some blogging should be counted as journalism) around now than ever before. It’s not ‘media’ itself that’s in crisis, but the notion of making a lot of money out of creating media. The ability for media customers to get their media for free (whether via piracy or legitimately) is only part of the story – media creators now take their product to market themselves, bypassing the middleman who used to pay for the creation of the media product, and accordingly take a cut of the price of the product. When you can create your album in your home studio and distribute it across the internet yourself, what value is the record company adding?

For creativity to thrive, experimentation needs to embrace the possibility of failure

This is clearly an obvious statement when written down like that; as with most obvious statements it never occurs to anybody until they see it written down. Common sense, innit? In the olden days, the music business was just that – a business. Record companies invested in artists, and took risks. Sure, manufactured pop has been with us since the beginning of popular music, and the number of experimental pieces even getting in to the hit parade, let alone topping it, can be counted on your hands. But in the olden days record companies used a bulk of the profits they made from chart-topping artists to subsidise artists which were unlikely to be vast earners, because they recognised that a healthy diversity of available music was good for society, good for their own portfolios – and consequently good for their own ultimate balance sheets. Similarly in newspapers, press barons of old saw newspaper proprietorship almost as a civic, philanthropic, duty – they didn’t want their newspapers to make losses, but conversely saw the provision of news and information as having primacy over the provision of profit.

In the modern era, with the boulder media companies, media businesses have become media industries – no longer do they invest in new, experimental talent, no longer do they take risks; by focussing solely on maximising profits they have lost the souls of their industries, with the consequence that their customers are deserting them in droves. Pebble companies are in the best position to experiment – such as BooneOakley, having made their whole website as a series of YouTube videos!

Quality, not quantity

Question – was it worth £6bn to make the Eurostar train journey between London and Paris 40 minutes faster, cutting the travel from 2 hours 55 minutes to 2 hours 15 minutes? Would that money have been better spent on improving the user experience, so passengers didn’t notice the drudgery of spending three hours on a train? First class carriages (with the food and drink to match) throughout the whole train? More cheaper fares (or more cheap first class upgrades)? Does three hours even feel like a long time to spend on a train to Paris anyway?

Don’t underestimate the propensity of users to re-purpose things

There are plenty of objects on Twitter, such as Tower Bridge. It’s cute – it posts a message every time it lifts, and then when it drops again. But what started off as a cute gimmick has actually turned into something useful – if you live in London & need to travel around the area, it’s actually a bit of an inconvenience when the bridge lifts, because it holds up your travel – but if you know it’s lifting, you can re-route your journey. Which people in London are increasingly doing.

Other themes

• The current creative revolution will be as economically & socially disruptive as the industrial revolution – and we’re woefully unprepared for it. Our education system does not encourage creative thinking, significantly unchanged as it has been for the last 200 years.
• The physical space will always matter for making connexions – we should be using the digital space to feed the physical space.
• Always design a thing by considering it in its wider context – a chair within a room, a room within a building, a building on a street, etc.

And finally…

…can you remember a world before smartphones?