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Posts Tagged ‘story’

Mastering Celtx – Book Giveaway

July 25th, 2011

mastering-celtx-cover

Because we are an influencer, innovator, and evangelist in the filmmaking industry we were sent a copy of the new book “Mastering Celtx” by Writers Guild of America member Terry Borst. Celtx is the top product for managing your film and video pre-production, and also any kind of other professional writings you may do.

This fantastic book includes: The Evolution of Pre-Production, Getting Familiar With Celtx, Project Navigation, Creating and Editing Production Film Scripts, Script Breakdowns, Reinventing Project Scripting, Storyboards, Sketches, Calendaring and Scheduling, Sample Projects, Creation and Admin, User Interaction, Sketch Images, Celtx Community, and other related topics. The book is also very visual with lots of great Celtx screen shots, which was a good idea so readers can learn very easily.

We have read it over, gotten value from its contents, and now want to give the book away as a gift to one of our Spidvid members. If you want to win this book, be sure to get a Spidvid account, and then let us know why you deserve this book more than anybody else. You can tweet us, post on our Facebook page, email us, or comment below to enter. Tell us a story and emotionally engage us to maximize your chances of winning! We will announce the winner tomorrow on July 26th so enter NOW!

P.S. We will throw in a few Spidvid stickers (as modeled below by this little guy) inside the book as well!

Hunter wearing Spidvid

If you are a Spidvid member you should be using Celtx for your collaborative projects. Celtx is the perfect pre-production tool to complement your Spidvid projects, and any other film project you want to successfully bring to fruition.

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New Video Creation Tools Creates New Possibilities

May 12th, 2011

xtranormal logo

If someone told me a couple years ago that it was possible to create videos without any cameras I would have thought they were nuts! Fast forward to 2011, and we are seeing new innovative tools being built so new video production possibilities can become realities.

xtranormal is a startup company that’s giving the power to anyone with a computer and internet connection to create video entertainment very quickly, easily, and in a fun way too. How it works: A user selects their desired set, actors, sounds, and writes a script to tell a story then out pops a video. xtranormal even has their very own film festival as sponsored by Microsoft’s Bing product.

While what xtranormal is doing is very impressive for 2011, I believe it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what tools can be built for creating video entertainment with essentially nothing. I heard a quote a few months ago from a studio executive who believes that a future Toy Story movie will be created by a collaborative “amateur” group over a summer. That may be a bit of an exaggeration but truth be told he may not be that far off. Only time will tell!

Below are some short and entertaining animated videos created by xtranormal’s users.

Singles Bar for Bears – A bear tries to pick up another bear without success

Celebz Ranting – Charlie Sheen Goes Off About His Brain and Life (custom created)

Decisions Decisions – iJustine talks to herself inside the Internet

Rainbow Bear has a Frowny

If you are creating a video, or want to create one that can’t currently be done using an online tool, then be sure to get a Spidvid profile and post your project for our community to collaborate on with you. Or if you don’t have a project to post right now, then bid on one that interests you.

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Converting Star Trek Into Reality

November 19th, 2010

I’m going to start writing about new Spidvid projects created by our community that may be of interest to the amazing world-wide video creation talent that reads our blog.

Today we have a project posted by author Rodney Bartlett who wants to see a film about Star Trek about becoming reality. If you are a Star Trek fan and happen to be an actor, producer, writer, director, editor, story teller, or a videographer, then this collaborative project may be for you. See the project details below, and bid on it if you want to join Rodney’s team.

Title: 10 Steps To Convert Star Trek Into Reality

Ideas:

1) In July 2009, electrical engineer Hong Tang and his team at Yale University in the USA demonstrated that, on silicon chip- and transistor- scales, light can attract and repel itself like electric charges/magnets (Discover magazine’s “Top 100 Stories of 2009 #83: Like Magnets, Light Can Attract and Repel Itself” by Stephen Ornes, from the January-February 2010 special issue; published online December 21, 2009). This is the “optical force”, a phenomenon that theorists first predicted in 2005 (this time delay is rather confusing since James Clerk Maxwell showed that light is an electromagnetic disturbance approx. 140 years ago). In the event of the universe having an underlying electronic foundation (hopefully, my summary will make it clear that this must be so – also … an electronic universe is a necessary precursor to scientific fulfilment of Star Trek’s “magic” which becomes clear as these steps are read), it would be composed of “silicon chip- and transistor- scales” and the Optical Force would not be restricted to microscopic scales but could operate universally. Tang proposes that the optical force could be exploited in telecommunications. For example, switches based on the optical force could be used to speed up the routing of light signals in fibre-optic cables, and optical oscillators could improve cell phone signal processing.

2) If all forms of EM (electromagnetic) radiation can attract/repel, radio waves will also cause communication revolution e.g. with the Internet and mobile (cell) phones. I anticipate that there may be no more overexposure to ultraviolet or X-rays.

3) In agreement with the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics, EM waves have particle-like properties (more noticeable at high frequencies) so cosmic rays (actually particles) are sometimes listed on the EM spectrum beyond its highest frequency of gamma rays.

4) If cosmic rays are made to repel, astronauts going to Mars or another star or galaxy would be safe from potentially deadly radiation.

5) And if all particles in the body can be made to attract or repel as necessary, doctors will have new ways of restoring patients to health.

6) From 1929 til his death in 1955, Einstein worked on his Unified Field Theory with the aim of uniting electromagnetism and gravitation. Future achievement of this means warps of space (gravity, according to General Relativity) between spaceships/stars could be attracted together, thereby eliminating distance. And “warp drive” would not only come to life in future science/technology … it would be improved tremendously, almost beyond imagination. This reminds me of the 1994 proposal by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre of a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand. Therefore, the ship would be carried along in a warp bubble like a person being transported on an escalator, reaching its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble. There are no known methods to warp space – however, this extension of the Yale demonstration in electrical engineering may provide one.

7) Since Relativity says space and time can never exist separately, warps in space are actually warps in space-time. Eliminating distances in space also means “distances” between both future and past times are eliminated – and time travel becomes reality. This is foreseen by the Enterprise time-travelling back to 20th-century Earth in the 1986 movie “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” and by Star Trek’s “subspace communications”. Doing away with distances in space and time also opens the door to Star Trek-like teleportation. Teleportation wouldn’t involve reproducing the original and there would be no need to destroy the original body – we would “simply” be here one moment, and there the next (wherever and whenever our destination is).

8.) Another step might be to think of “… the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything” (words used by Stephen Hawking on the American version of Amazon, when promoting his latest book “The Grand Design”) in a different way than physicists who are presently working on science’s holy grail of unification. Recalling the manmade Genesis Planet in the 1982 movie “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”, we might anticipate that the future will actually see a manmade planet (literally forming a planet is merely an advancement of terraforming, where a planet is engineered to be Earth-like and habitable). We might even free our minds from all restrictions and imagine science and technology creating every planet in the universe. The universe’s underlying electronic foundation (which makes our cosmos into a partially-complete unification, similar to 2 objects which appear billions of years or billions of light-years apart on a huge computer screen actually being unified by the strings of ones and zeros making up the computer code which is all in one small place) would make our cosmos into physics’ holy grail of a complete unification if it enabled not only elimination of all distances in space and time, but also elimination of distance between (and including) the different sides of objects and particles. This last point requires the universe to not merely be a vast collection of the countless photons, electrons and other quantum particles within it; but to be a unified whole that has “particles” and “waves” built into its union of digital 1’s and 0’s (or its union of qubits – quantum binary digits). If we use the example of CGH (computer generated holography, which is reminiscent of the holographic simulation called the Holodeck in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”), these “particles” and “waves” would either be elements in a Touchable Hologram – demonstrated by Japanese researchers in August 2009 (search for “Touchable Holography” in Google or You Tube) – or elements produced by the interaction of electromagnetic and presently undiscovered gravitational waves, producing what we know as mass (in September 2008, renowned British astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking bet US$100 that the Large Hadron Collider would not find the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle supposed to explain how other particles acquire mass) and forming what we know as space-time. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, and measurements on the Hulse-Taylor binary-star system resulted in Russell Hulse and Joe Taylor being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993 for their work, which was the first indirect evidence for gravitational waves.The feedback of the past and future universes into the unified cosmos’s electronic foundation would ensure that both past and future could not be altered. (I’m disagreeing with Einstein’s view of weights [mass] causing indentations in a malleable “rubber sheet” called space-time, but the system I’m proposing can yield exactly the same measurements as his and I think Einstein would welcome the chance to consider a different interpretation.) (Our brains and minds are part of this unification too, which must mean extrasensory perception and telekinetic independence from technology are possible.)

9) Elimination of diseased matter and/or eliminating the distance in time between a patient and recovery from any adverse medical condition – even death – would also be a valuable way of restoring health. With time travel in an electronic universe, people who have long since died could have their minds downloaded into clones of their bodies – a modification of ideas published by robotics/artificial- intelligence pioneer Hans Moravec, inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil and others – allowing them to “recover” from death (establishing colonies throughout space and time would prevent overpopulation). Or if the distance between recovery and a patient is reduced to zero before illness or accident occurs (we might call this “eVaccination” – electronic vaccination); prevention of any adverse medical condition, including that of a second death for those resurrected, can occur. Science’s real-life conquering of all disease, and even death, would certainly make the technology employed by Leonard “Bones” McCoy, the Enterprise’s doctor, appear non-futuristic.

10) These paragraphs imply the possibility of humans time-travelling to the distant past and using electronics to create this particular subuniverse’s computer-generated Big Bang (but there’s still room for God because God would be a pantheistic union of the mega universe’s material and mental parts, forming a union with humans in a cosmic unification). We’ve seen several examples of how science fact could equal, or surpass, science fiction. A final example of surpassing is that, in Star Trek, there are many military conflicts with Klingons, Romulans, the Borg, etc. In a real-life cosmic unification, there are no wars between the stars but peace is normal – even on Earth – since nobody can attack anyone in any way without knowing they’re attacking themself.

Story:

The video begins with somebody reading an article in a science magazine about light being able, on microscopic scales, to attract and repel like electric charges or magnets. At first the reader merely thought the article was interesting but, over the next few hours, it develops into ideas for things like e(lectronic)Sunscreen, protection from cosmic rays, a basis for new treatments in medicine, intergalactic and time travel. During the next few months, the reader combines those ideas with his or her love of science fiction (”Star Trek” and Doctor Who’s “Face of Bo”, who is 5 billion years old and can teleport around the universe without any technology), as well as combining the thoughts with his or her love of the idea of an electronic and holographic universe. Then more ideas came – notions about eternal health for everyone who ever lived and thoughts regarding the implications of unification. Reluctantly at first, the reader realised that the later conclusions agreed with what Jesus said in the Bible and supported the concept of God. But he or she still would not go to church, preferring to tackle these new ideas from a scientific perspective.

Additional Information:

Rodney hopes to see this film created as soon as possible. The 2 free ebooks he’s written ( “A New Earth and A New Universe” + “Humans and their Universes” and a video he put on You Tube may be of assistance.

You can learn about the complete project details on its Spidvid project page, and connect with Rodney via his Spidvid profile.



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3 Elements For Improving Your Video Entertainment

October 8th, 2010

We offer useful tips and resources on regular basis on our Facebook and Twitter pages to help video creators in our Spidvid community to consistently produce better quality entertainment. With that, we have taken common elements that we see time and time again and summarized them below.

3 Key Elements For Improving Your Video Entertainment

1. Team – Quality individuals make all the difference when it comes to any kind of production project. Each team should consist of diverse talent, there needs to be some leadership to drive everything forward, and perhaps most importantly everyone needs to get along to ensure project success. Our community has lots of quality members who can help with your next video project.

2. Story – Viewers want to watch videos that tell a story they can connect with, or relate to. You can have the greatest actors and team of all time, but without a story that grabs and holds an audience’s attention, you have nothing. Paying close attention to the script before the shoot happens is so vitally important, and can’t be underestimated. Selling the team with a remarkable story to get everyone on the same page early on is key.

3. Production Value – This element may not matter quite as much as it used to, but quality resolution, sound, and lighting matter. Quality cameras matter a lot, but lighting and especially sound matter just as much, if not more. If your production value needs improvement and you can’t afford the equipment to make that happen, then be sure to attract individuals who have the resources needed.

Have a 4th element to add? Be sure to comment below and let us know how video entertainment production can be improved, or enhanced.

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5 Questions For Two Web Series Creators

September 25th, 2010

I recently tweeted out via Spidvid’s Twitter account that we were looking for talented web series creators and producers to do email interviews with. A few talented individuals fitting that description reached out and wanted to be part of the campaign.

My first interview was a collaboration with Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, the creators behind the web series “Broad City”. I took each of their answers, mixed them up, and turned them into content for you to learn from. Enjoy the interview below.

1. What are the biggest challenges in creating a web series?

Abbi – For one, it’s challenging to create a web series with no budget! I think the most difficult thing is figuring out the relationships between the characters, and how to maintain them in various situations. Being confident that you have a story worth telling is key to getting everyone on the same page.  Any collaboration can be difficult, and figuring out our process as a team has been both interesting and tricky over the last nine months. What roles do each of us have, and how do we brainstorm ideas and execute them to complete the end product.

Ilana – I think the biggest challenge was finding the right director and editor to round out our team. The series started as just the two of us, and so we decided to make the most of the situation by trying out as many directors and editors as we could, kind of like how Six Feet Under rotates directors. This was of course not optimal, but we learned a lot from that experience, and it led us to our third member, Rob Hugel. As much as we wanted to keep it purely us two and our own dynamic, we learned that shit is going to change. In fact, that’s still something we’re learning about, enabling us to focus on the core tasks we’re good at, and letting others do what we’re not quite as skilled at.

2. Was collaboration between team members integral to the success of your production projects?

Abbi and Ilana – Absolutely, collaboration is the project. This process started out as a conversation in a pizza shop by just bouncing ideas off of each other. Creating that dynamic between these two ‘characters’ was something we had figure out by spending a ridiculous amount of time together. About half way through, we changed the way the series is produced. We now meet about 2 times a week to go over ideas about future projects, and how we can reach more people with our story. We have worked with a bunch of different directors, cast and crew, and found those collaborations to be refreshing to the show by bringing in different perspectives. The last couple months have been very interesting, and our team is working better and better together to constantly improve the show with each episode.

3. Is finding talent which bodes well for web series hard to find?

Abbi and Ilana – I would assume that for the average web series creator it would be challenging to find the right talent to work with, but we are fortunate to be based in the middle of the most talented pool of actors and production crew in New York City. If anything, it has been hard for us to narrow down the list of who we want on our team, as we adore and admire lots of skilled people.

4. Is film school needed to become a star in the video or film industries?

Abbi and Ilana – Completely unnecessary, you don’t even need your own camera! However, film school may help with grooming students to understand the importance of telling interesting stories that viewers want to watch. The created content and delivery is most important, so not everyone involved necessarily has to go to film school. Every team needs some technical knowledge and experience though, so whether that comes from a formal education or not is up to the individual.

5. What will the web series landscape look like in 2015, and how will it evolve from its current state today?

Abbi -I think web series exposure will only grow from here, and more and more valuable platforms will become available for creators and producers to leverage. The challenging part is competing for viewer attention against the plethora of new web series released now and in the future. And with everyone’s attention spans increasingly diminishing, that’s another challenging element to take into consideration.

Ilana – I have NO IDEA. Actually, I think that mankind will be wiped out in 2012. If it isn’t though, then I think that 90% of all content on TV will have originally existed on the Internet first.

I thank Abbi and Ilana for the interview, for their insights, time, and kindness. If you aren’t already, be sure to have our future interviews and posts delivered to your email inbox, or get them through your favorite RSS reader.

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