Here's an interesting offering.

It's a huge array of different stock shots available from web-friendly to HD all with high quality alpha channels.

They sell the box set but far more interesting is their online search engine and their affordable price structure. (US$10 - US$50 per shot)

The search categories in particular are very production friendly. You can tick boxes for number of people (or animals) in shot, as well as wide, close and a tracking shots.

video | business | post production

On Tuesday Tony, Alex and I went to the Digital Entertainment Leadrship Forum over at Cyberport.

To  be honest the 'Forum' felt like a pitch/presentation from the Wellington Film Council rather than a properly interactive discussion. Trés old media.
Also would have been more impressed if everybody hadn't referenced the Lord of the Rings.

Some of my notes:

You don't have to know how to do something at the start.
Lot's of the people at DELF were interested in their techniques and workflow as IP. Any sizable problem solved could be a product.

? What is Hong Kong's signature disaster movie?
Dave Gibson's crew made a TV movie about Wellington Earthquakes. A good example of understanding the preoccupations of your audience.

Collaborative Individualism
Team work is an over-used technique that can lead to group-think and stagnation. Better to create loosely coupled networks and alliances.
More here:
http://tinyurl.com/cf7om6
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/streeter/fl1999ehrd690/overheads/oh5.html

Still only 12% of cinemas are digital
This is change in progress.

Narrative environments
Meaning museums or exhibitions. Seem like the point where programming and events overlap.

Small community -> non-zero-sum game
One of NZ and/or Wellington's advantages is the sense of being 'all in it together'. The Hong Kong industry is small enough for this.

Boing Boing alerted the world to sad lack of Bill O'Reilly Soft Porn Mash-Ups in the world yesterday.

Here is my contribution to the good fight:

YouTube | mash-up | fun

 The Center for Social Media have released 7 page document detailing best practices for use of copyright material. They've done it in part as a response to a perceived culture of restriction leading film-makers to be unnecessarily cautious about the material they are able to use. 

The suggested situations in which Fair Use applies are:

1. Social political or cultural critique.

2. Quotation of popular culture to illustrate a point

3. Capturing copyrighted material in the process of filming something else.

4 Using copyrighted material in Historical sequence.

video | documentary | history

http://www.minutemenarcade.com/uk/ 

This is kinda fun for us comic geeks. It's deep into the Watchmen canon referring to a previous golden age of superheroes. To fit the theme they've made is a super-retro arcade style game. 

Which is cunning because it makes the trailer at the end look all the more tech-tastic. 

web | fun | time-waster | Fanboys | comic | movies

 I'm a big fan of Quicktime VR and I've made a few panoramics of Lamma Island and other scenic Hong Kong spots but this really takes the cake.

David Bergman has made a 1474 Megapixel image of the inauguration.  He goes into detail about how he made it on his blog. 
It's fascinating zooming in and looking for details.There's a guy in a wheelchair and you can read the serial number off the back. Can you find it?

obama | pixel | Quicktime VR | geek | speeches

Mac World is in progress and little geeky trinkets are beginning to trickle out. The keynote isn't until tomorrow but here's one of the most talked about so far:

 It's an online photo management tool. It stores and organizes pictures mostly (but can work with videos as well)

There's also some basic picture editing and captioning tools. In particular you can lay out and decorate your collections (called albums) and it integrates with the rest of your Gmail suite. It has easy and controlled sharing tools built in.

Could be good for delivering and/or collaborating on storyboards.

It's been available for PCs for a while but you can now get the Mac version here.

apple | photos | google | blog