headbin

Tired and grumpy

I'm feeling time and grumpy today and it's because I can't give Sanctuary the attention it deserves at the moment during the day. Looking forward to completing my Beeb contract in a few weeks and knuckling down to what needs to be sorted. Getting daily downloads from stevep on the fine cut edit and it's encouraging to see Blake's character coming more to the foreground.

Search for the guilty

Despair seems to be over which means... we're half-way there!

Frank here was our lovely camera operator on Sanctuary. He also shot some very cool 2nd footage of fire raging across the valley.

remixablefilms.multiply.com

http://remixablefilms.multiply.com is live.

Suggestions for assets to seed out first can be made here

http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/CommunityAssets

Community hosts chatting here

http://modfilms.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=16

Cost effective filesharing

This might be the best solution for exchanging large files during Sanctuary post production.

YouSendIt: The Leader in File Delivery.

I've been looking at a range of different options for moving around VFX material. The long and the short of it is that I've been using a minimal storage/unlimited bandwidth account for my sites to-date and the cost of acquiring additional online storage for VFX files comes with the caveat that you invariably get charged for bandwidth as well.

I'm still keen to employ Bit Torrent for distribution but that's only useful if a large number of people are accessing the same files. I'm envisaging small clusters of people trading a limited number of files.

Any other thoughts appreciated.

Film Genome Project

Discovered Pandora, the first application from the Music Genome Project - a parallel attempt to do the most comphrehensive analysis of music ever.

Discover Music through The Music Genome Project by Pandora

It's interesting that this is 6 years old effort to do the analysis of tracks manually. I'm always looking for ways in which MOD can avoid this grunt work but it may not be possible - and in a sense, the opportunity to analyse films in this way is something that many people may want to do. We'll see...

del.icio.us Sanctuary

I have to ask myself sometimes if the Net isn't simply going to eat itself recursively aka IBM's original prediction that we only needed about 15-20 computers. All these web services dutifully cross-promoting and cross-referencing themselves with related bookmarks, blog trackbags, etc etc..

but here's a perfectly useful use of del.icio.us -
see how people are tagging their MOD Films bookmark

Star Trek online GUI

The GUI needs to strick a balance between informative, futuristic and accessible to film goers. I reckon this GUI, admittedly aimed at MMORPGers, goes too far.

1.dir (application/x-director Object)

Basecamp

I've opened a Basecamp account to see if using project management software will help things along.

http://modfilms.updatelog.com

I would have installed trac by now on blade but there is some gremlin preventing a straightforward OS upgrade and so that's been deprioritised due to funds. It's working well at the Beeb for software though.

At first glance, Basecamp looks more friendly for non techies but not as useful.

90 degrees

Cheers to Damon for spotting this amazing French animation that sports a messy virtual world aesthetic and a very CD-like figure througout.

modfilms community beta

Alex, Mish and I had a good Skype today re.next steps for the community in light of all the recent interest. We've decided this is a good time to split discussions into a more public space hosted on Multiply (as a beta for modfilms.net) and refocus the modfilms-general list for the more commercially sensitive internal discussions. The feedback from the virtual team seems to be that Alex's weekly mailouts are interesting but the scope has widened well beyond Sanctuary so there seems to be no point restricting these new snippets to people who've signed an NDA.

Notes as follows:

The majority of the people in the virtual team don't really need to be privy to internal discussions anymore if they're not actively playing a part in MOD Films' future. That said, we won't be kicking people off the modfilms-general list, purely suggesting that a new "culture" community space might be more appropriate.

Here's a recap of the three lists in operation and the revised direction for each (as of 17th Feb)

* modfilms-announce (PR)

Semi-regular announcements such as product releases. No change from present.

* modfilms-general

Team Sanctuary discussions and MOD Films in-house conversations requiring NDA. All technology discussions re. RIG and modfilms.net. New footer reminding of list purpose. Closed list. Occaisional update postings (not weekly). Content can be more technical in nature, more commercially sensitive. More technical questions posted here. Cross-postings to remind people of culture list.

* modfilms.multiply.com

Invitation-only community space for pre-releasing Sanctuary assets and allowing the re-mix community to get involved with the project. This will provide a cost-effective safe space in which to gauge public interest and host conversations. This ties in with a refocus of MOD Films on selling online asset management.