ARTICLE

Buzzing with the Digital Crowd at Vidfest 2006
as featured on the TAXI Design Network and blog.industrialbrand.com

Conferences like Vidfest (the Vancouver International Digital Festival), which took place last week in Vancouver, Canada are excellent venues to meet people, nurture future business deals and, of course, pick up the latest industry buzz words. These valuable phrases are guaranteed to catch the attention of coworkers at the next production meeting or, better yet, stop short the next diatribe by your Design Director. As much as we jest here, buzz words are usually a very good indication of cultural zeitgeist, neatly packaged in a manner that makes them instantly adaptable when first overheard, and equally loathsome two months later when everyone is using them.

One of these gems that we picked up over the three-day conference will serve us well here: microchunking. This is essentially the idea that if you are going to be putting content up on the web, it is best to do so in small installments rather than overwhelming your visitor with media overload. For instance, if you have an hour’s worth of film footage, try releasing it in easy-to-digest 5 minute segments. Or, if you are writing an article that reviews a media conference, consider breaking it up into clever, witty and sometimes critical highlights. And with that, here is what we took in at the Festival.

A Digital Buffet
Our experience at Vidfest started appropriately with a screening of an international selection of digital shorts, animation, and music videos. Very eclectic, often bizarre and sometimes ingenious, this sampling included the Vidfest Award winners linked below for your viewing pleasure:

Trailblazer Award: Backbone Medley; Director: Pius Jung-kit Chan (Canada)
Best Music Video: War is Beautiful; Director: Alex Rupert (Canada)
Best Animation: The Paguey River; Directors: Ramon Pairs & Tere Castillo (Venezuela & Spain)
Best Experimental/Mixed: TRANSREC; Director: Patrick Doan

You played his games, ate his pizza and now he's going to set you up.
We all have memories of breaking the high score on Missile Command back in the Eighties as our mothers called us to dinner. Chances are we are still somewhat bitter about that lost opportunity to get an even higher score.

Until the keynote speech that opened Vidfest, the Atari 2600 game system Nolan Bushnell invented was just a little black and woodgrain game console that ruled our lives as pre-teens. Now we have met the man behind the box and his appearance is just as you might imagine the father of modern video gaming to look: middle aged, somewhat relaxed in that mega-success-I-don't-ever-have-to-work-again kind of way. Afterall, the guy invented PONG and then revolutionized children's birthday parties with his chain of Chuck E Cheese restaurants.

Now he's bringing these worlds together with a concept called uWink, a restaurant based as much on social lubricants (other than alcohol) as it is on the food. Imagine a place filled with "scrumptious i-candy and a hip ever-changing environment". It's not clear if the "i-candy" refers to hot babes or technology, my guess is both considering the intention is to create a place where singles can meet other singles over games of six-player PONG. Seriously. Given Bushnell's previous track record of success, maybe it'll fly. It seems the various technologies being developed for the concept are the real genius, and their potential isn’t to all be stuffed into one (test) venue, but rather each could find more mainstream applications and spawn another half dozen enterprises on their own. But what the hell do we know, we have yet to make it to our first million.

The Blogging Scene
If we learned anything from the Bloggers at the conference it was that Flickr is a great way to document events like Vidfest in an almost real time fashion. Pictures can be captured on cell phones and uploaded to the site within minutes. But the other thing that we quickly learned is that the photos generally tend to just be pictures of other Bloggers.

To be fair, there is nowhere on the internet that is evolving faster than within the social network apps such as Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, Blogger and anyone with a vidblog or podcast or, in the case of Roland Tanglao, over 25,000 images posted on Flickr, is truly breaking new ground. Tanglao, who is the Chief Blogging Officer at Bryght.com and Robert Ouimet of At Large Media presented a seminar on “Everythingcasting”, or “putting yourself online”. The idea is that if you have content, chances are that someone out there is going to be interested. Or, in the case of the anonymous videographer who shot The Evolution of Dance, over 25,000,000 people are interested. Such viral phenomenons represent a major paradigm shift in the way the public is viewing media and advertisers and corporations are finally sitting up and paying notice. The problem now is one of quantity vs. quality: with so much content available to us online, how do we sift through the noise to find what we really want?

“Zed’s Not Dead, Baby!”
That was the message that the CBC delivered on the closing of the second day of Vidfest. Indeed, after a long hiatus last year by the precedent-setting CBC Radio 3 and ZedTV, during which time terms like blogging and podcasting became household words, it has returned stronger than ever. They demonstrated this with a screening of original Zed content called "Burning to Shine". Billed as “Two Musical Worlds Collide” this documentary explores the friction, struggle and ultimate redemption over the course of 43 days when Canadian hip hop artist K-os collaborated in writing a song with the CBC Radio Orchestra. The film is shot in stark black and white, perfect for capturing the cold harsh climate of the Toronto winter and contrasting beautifully at the end of the film when the song finally comes together in a full colour performance.

The screening was followed up by an after party featuring the turntablist mastery of the three man hip hop squad, No Luck Club.

More Buzzwords
Terry McBride, head of Nettwerk Records made no new friends during his Keynote Speech with ex-head of Electronic Arts, Don Mattrick when he introduced the following buzzword to the design-centric audience: crowd sourcing.
By 2010, McBride predicted, the record industry will have fired all of their graphic designers. A band’s artwork will be designed by their audience in a competition in which whoever gets the most votes receives a monetary award for their efforts. In essence, this crowd sourcing is just a fancy term for spec work, currently a very touchy subject in the design community.

This comment immediately produced from the audience a new buzz word: fan-based sweat shops. And it got more than one of us thinking that McBride had it totally wrong: in the future, with music available online in a totally flat hierarchical system, musicians will more than ever need a good producer and a good designer to help them stand above the rest; what they won’t need is Terry McBride.

Give it away now
On a similar note, while speaking on a panel about digital content, the punk rocker of Flash design, Joshua Davis referred to an emerging band he was working with. He describes his reaction to the band telling him they were planning to give away all their music online. He was incredulous until they explained. "You see", he said, "the band realizes that the reality of signing with a record label is that they are on the hook for all costs the label incurs promoting them, and frequently ends up owing the label money." Hence, bands make most, if not all, of their money touring. So, they build up their own audience and then go on tour to make their income.

Perhaps the only shortfall in that model is that the band will have to find their own source of financial support for the tour, but there are other places than traditional record labels to get that. As content moves more and more into the digital realm, bands and individuals are gaining a level of power like never before. In fact, if you develop a strong social network and a sphere of influence, your potential is limitless. Surely bands can tap into this in order to promote themselves as the next big thing. If they have talent, it will be recognized.

In Tight with the Programmers
For an event called Vidfest, there actually weren't all that many screenings, less than a half dozen. So, one has to wonder when even a single one is mediocre, or worse, how that happens. In the case of The Synchronized Dance of the Magnetic Peanuts, we left this particular screening shaking our heads trying to knock loose the tumour that was obviously blocking our ability to comprehend the film,

One can take a certain delight in writing a scathing movie review. It taps some dark, angry place we all have inside ourselves. However, in doing so you also have to admit that you wasted time watching the damn thing. So, where to direct the rage? How about to the filmmakers who produced such self-indulgent and juvenile pap? In this case I'd rather blame the festival programmer. We just couldn’t believe this stuff gets an audience. We wanted to make a couple calls to get to the bottom of it, but figured we'd already invested too much time.

Boom Boom Sabotage
We will admit that by the end of the final day at Vidfest, we were too beat down and overstimulated to make it to the big Gala event. But we ended things appropriately with the world premiere screening of Mainframe’s animated feature Tony Hawk and the Boom Boom Sabotage about an evil has-been circus owner who kidnaps pro skateboarding legend Tony Hawk in an attempt to win back his audience.

Over the last decade, Hawk has explored the various avenues of multimedia as fearlessly as he would a backside air. And he has generally landed all of these exploits flawlessly, always seeming to push the boundaries in the process. It would appear that this new movie “Boom Boom Sabotage” is no different. The skateboard scenes were filmed in the Mainframe studios and the motion capture process utilized more than 40 markers on body and board creating some hyper-realistic sequences. Producer Ben Burden Smith explains:

“The animation you see in the movie is actually REAL skateboarding. The exact movements of the skater drive the mocap of the animated character. So when Alex Chalmers did that huge booter stale-fish transfer in real life, our 3D character Kud is completely driven by the mocap from Chalmers. So it's real life in a 3D environment. It's pretty sweet to see the guys’ styles in the characters.”

Pretty sweet indeed. It is always best to end a conference on a high note. And so, with evil circus music swirling in our heads, new buzz words poised on our tongues, and an early summer sun setting over English Bay, we took our leave of Vidfest and bravely set out into the future. 

 
 
 
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