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The Sony Portapak must have been such a game changer. At the start, when asked “Do you think you could act naturally, with this on”, it’s such an interesting moment. Unlike today, they wouldn’t have had much of an idea with a camera in such intimate space. The only points of reference would be from the existing large media companies and their broadcasts, the closest they could get at the time would’ve be the news coverage of the time. Now the camera was brought right up to the consumer in their own personal circles and the Videofreex definitely saw the capabilities that this device brought.

This was the point, as the Videofreex themselves said, that you could show what was really going on in the streets. The dichotomy between what people saw on T.V vs what was going on (the Vietnam War) could now be bridged. However, when CBS and the Videofreex had a conflict of interest, regarding the death of Fred Hampton, this became an issue again and I feel like it’s been an issue ever since. I thought it was great they they stuck to their principles of having a “political obligation to those people” for CBS to not keep a hold on the tapes that the Videofreex had shot; to the point that they’d go into the CBS building and sneak the tapes out. I believe that having every side (within reasonable bounds, i.e no blind hate) have the ability to get their message out and for there to be avenues to both express and have civil discourse about any given matter.

The Videofreex are a great example of getting the voices of the everyday out over broadcast, if anything is silenced, chances are there’s a skewed perspective somewhere.

However, the operative word here is broadcast; and as they mentioned, funding became an issue and they eventually came to a point where they had no electricity too. Without money or the ability to broadcast, shooting footage does nothing if it goes nowhere. Through having the right people and ingenuity to make do with what they had focused on the drive to shoot and broadcast, the Videofreex really are a great example of grit and determination with innovation coming together both as and with a community to make something happen.

With the advent of multiple and now established streaming site and methods; these days, it takes much much less to get up and running. One thing that remains a constant though, is a sense of community. YouTubers connect with their audience and talk to them, they have names for their fans, they have subreddits, discord channels apart from the YouTube space for them to congregate and strengthen the bonds between all the people involved. Twitch streamers have live chat, people converse to and fro with the people they see on screen and react to them in numerous ways. Social Broadcasting has only grown stronger through this sense of community and connecting people by having the audience through this cyclic system of watching, reacting and responding.

As mentioned in the documentary, there are political, social and artistic outputs of video, but they are not mutually exclusive. There are a multitude of videos in the current political and social climate addressing the issue in their own special way.

A R T I S T I C A L L Y

As an individual going over his thoughts and perspectives

or closer to a Conventional News Show

And the lines between making political statements, social commentary or art are vague which in turn simulates dialogue (though not always civil). Sustainability is always an issue in the world, money needs to exchange hands for the wheels to keep turning. But as they said, the satisfaction of having created something that they truly feel a drive for goes beyond making money and the ability to go live is within reach for most people; a dollar or two could get you an hour in an internet cafe and you can start broadcasting then and there. The technology and methods are changing within the decade, faster and faster, but the aspects, like community are tried and true. As with the Videofreex, hard work, innovation and being ready to go will always lead to something bigger than themselves.

 

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COOKING WITH MAMA

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Alter-Ego

For the alter-ego, I decided to cook (even thought I can’t really). So I set out to film myself preparing some instant noodles!

The idea initially was based off the Mukbang-styled livestream. Mukbang being the korean internet streamers who broadcast themselves cooking and eating quantities of food.

American-based streaming platform, Twitch.tv also has their own corner which promotes cooking streams/shows.

The prep-work behind it took longer than I had expected, which led to certain goofs throughout the video which thanks to the power of streaming didn’t seem so bad, but I’ll elaborate on them later. Setting up the laptop, the usb webcam (which helped me change up the shot from time to time and kept it a little more varied through the stream), the angle of the shot, the music and the “pre”- cooking of the food. Even after all that I forgot to turn the stove on before starting the livestream.

Touching upon the part about music, I was also trying to tie in the idea of those cooking videos with no commentary a la YouTube channel “Peaceful Cuisine”, a channel which they have high-quality videos of people making food in two varieties, with or without music; similar to Bob Ross where sound also played a large role in his painting videos. Those also influenced the sort of livestream I had in mind as well.

Further Thoughts

Livestreaming also presents the streamer with the option how they want things to be presented. As mentioned before camera angles, the streamer is completely in charge of what the audience can and cannot see. Likewise this came in very handy as if you noticed I spilt some noodles during my pouring and some hung over the edge, however, my awkward tidying up seemed to net a decent save unbeknownst to the viewers that there was quite an unsightly bunch of noodle on the stove (hence the cut off). It’d be fun to change it up and keep rolling through the goofs, and furthermore toy with the idea of letting the viewer change the camera angle or perspective.

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First Assignment 17th August 2017

Posted by Nicholas Makoto on Thursday, 17 August 2017

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Posted by Nicholas Makoto on Thursday, 17 August 2017

Intro

This first assignment was pretty interesting. Mainly because I don’t usually use social media to broadcast my life and going-ons most of the time, but I do enjoy shooting video; so this was a fun combination of the two. I felt quite freed while shooting the livestream actually. In my opinion, people aren’t expecting a lot of polish during a continuous amateur livestream and hence I didn’t really bother about stability or aesthetics of the video during the transitional points of my wandering around campus. My only worry was maintaining a stable wi-fi connection.

Thoughts

Generally, my decisions of what to shoot were a very spur of the moment, my only real plan being the visit to the library. Thankfully the lobby was a good point to return to for a variety of reasons; it had people packing up some stuff, it had an easy access to an alternate viewpoint and was also the middle zone for going to other areas, leading to a lot of crossovers and cameos in other people’s livestream. An interesting point that was mentioned was that this sort of interaction would be very hard to script. Bringing to mind the long takes from movies usually requiring numerous takes to get ‘right’. While watching the collage of videos I was also wondering about if we could really sync up the videos and the visual that we’d get from multiple POVs diverging and reconverging over time and the multiple angles we’d get of the same scene (shout out pink Llama aka Kendrick Llama). Visually alone, that’d be pretty neat.

Another interesting point that was brought up was how sound mashes more easily than the visuals, being unable to distinguish which video the sound was coming from for the most part. It was also pretty interesting when the videos were being muted one by one and how nice it sounded, like playing with levels on a mixer. As interesting as the audio is, doing this exercise with only audio would probably not hold as much attention due to the lack of coherence the audience can get from purely audio alone, save for very crowded, bustling audio.

Technicals/Conclusion

Sadly, the video Facebook uploaded to my profile seems to have tanked heavily in terms of quality, with the highest setting allowed on the video being 360p. On top of that the bitrate (depending on the amt of movement) was extremely crushing on the quality as you can see in the screenshot above. I’m unsure if the live feed of the stream looked this janky but to me this is not something I’d personally upload or stream with. Using other peoples uploads as a reference, this appears to be an issue that is tied to my device or wifi connection. Another technical issue is that my phone has a problem focusing which causes it to buzz and get stuck in an unfocused blurry edged image; the usual fix being a quick wiggle of the camera, which you can see occasionally during the video along with the overpowering tinny buzzing noise. Technical issues aside, this was quite the enjoyable experience and I’d be keen on doing this again if I could do with with a higher level of quality.