TechMedia

Even before the Flash-animated movie Waltz With Bashir took home a Golden Globe for foreign-language film prize, I had been interested in seeing it. After all, it rated an impressive 95 per cent Fresh Pick on rottentomates.com

The New York Times has a thought-provoking video interview with the movie’s writer/director Ari Folman in which he discusses how Waltz With Bashir was animated in Flash using 3,500 keyframes, giving the film its unique, graphic-novel style look.

Preview for Waltz With Bashir

You can check out more details on Folman’s innovative techniques in studiodaily.com’s story.

The team used photographs to build realism into the environments, then added the background details.

Waltz With Bashir was made for two million dollars, and took four years to complete. Animators would slave a whole day over a second and a half of footage. That’s dedication, but it looks like their toils were well worth it.

And the paperless one …

Who knows, I may need the USB, eSATA and FW800 cords one day.

CNN, Facebook partner

Interesting story on journalism.co.uk about CNN’s plans to incorporate social media into its coverage of President Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20.

So of course I had to log on and become a Facebook fan of CNN to see what it was all about. The event promo says:

What will your Facebook status say when Obama becomes President? CNN.com and Facebook are partnering to enable you to update your status, and follow you friends’ updates, while you watch the inauguration live online, all on http://cnn.com/live …
Whether you’re at the office, at home, at the library, or anywhere else, you can share this moment in history with your Facebook friends live, as it happens.

The story links to NPR (National Public Radio), which is requesting help with its social media coverage, including

• Mobcasting: audio recordings of voicemails left by listeners about their thoughts and feelings on inauguration day
• An inauguration tag of #inaug09 for Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogs, etc
• Maps of user-generated content

iReport blog gathers news from masses

The maps feature is also prominent iReport, a site run by CNN with the disclaimer: “Only the stories marked ‘On CNN’ have been vetted by CNN for use in CNN’s global news coverage.”

Its world map feature lead me to a report on this fun gadget, a HD Video Recorder Snorkle Mask with Lights, shot at the CES in Las Vegas.

This massive crowd-sourced blog generated 225,003 reports worldwide last month, 1,085 of which ran on the CNN site also. That’s quite a content generator for the amount of resources needed.

LG Electronics made a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show when it introduced a fully functional, touch-screen wristwatch cellphone.

The watch-phone is expected to be available for sale in the second half of the year.

It looks a little clunky from the photos displayed, but has many features, such as:

• a built-in speaker for text-to-speech
• an MP3 player
• a Bluetooth compatibility camera which can be used for videoconferencing

I am not sure that I would want to watch TV on my wrist, but I do like the idea of all-in-one gadgets. How handy to have devices such as GPS, phone, camera, video recorder, all bundled together, like my fetish object, the Nokia N96.

Why carry 10 gadgets when one can do it all?

As well, LG and all of the major television manufacturers are expected to push 3-D technology at this year’s CES, according to a story on CBC.

That could open up all kinds of opportunities to develop more interactive games …. combine that with a Wii (with better graphics of course!) ….

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.ppiwidget.com/campaigns/as3base.swf?inst_id=115013" height="280" width="336" /]

So now I am enrolled in the Star Trek webmaster program. Embed!

This wee widget I grabbed from its site packs in a lot of functions, and acts as almost a mini-website for the upcoming Trek movie (T minus 121 days!), featuring a photo gallery, synopsis, downloads, and of course my favourite movie trailer.

What a great way to promote a movie, get buzz going online. And its cool interface transitions (like the website) mimic the way DVDs transition once a button is clicked, slick.

I would advise seeing Trek’s amazing high definition trailer, give you a taste for the Imax version of the movie, coming May 2009.

High definition viewership online is rocketing according to a recent story on TechCrunch: Move Networks Streamed 100 Million Hours Of HD Video On The Web Last Year.

The article says that Move Networks, which powers the Web video streaming for ABC, Fox, the Discovery Channel, and Animal Planet, streamed 180 million hours of video, 100 million of which it claims was in high-definition. And with Hula and YouTube adding HD services, “you can expect that 100 million hours to be dwarfed this year across all the major Web video services.”

Yeay to less pixelated video offerings!

I remember back in the days of my first photojournalism job at the (now defunct) Nanaimo Times I would spend hours a week in a darkroom, working with toxic chemicals to process photos for the next edition. Now with the advent of new media, not only do I not have to inhale fixer (or try to wash the smell from my hands), but I can add other multimedia elements to my photography projects. Recently I have been working with the Adobe application After Effects, and using the Ken Burn’s Effect to animate still photos to sound in order to tell old stories in a new way.

One journalist using these new tools to great advantage is Globe and Mail photographer John Lehmann, who uses a mix of uses of video, stills, soundcape and interviews in stories ranging from the tragic, such as  Man Behind the Log, about a homeless soapstone carver sleeping on the beach, to the more lighthearted, such as Barely Bowling, with its look at nude bowling nights.

Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen uses stills and soundscapes/interviews to tell the stories of slumdwellers in Caracas, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Jakarta in The Places We Live, which also has book and exhibition components. The website excels at transitions – from scenes of the outside slum (with accompanying city noise) – to the inside, family stories, told in their voices.

But it isn’t the death of ‘static’ photography online. One of the web’s most interesting photo sites is Boston.com’s Big Picture, which showcases the best photos from the news wires for display in a large-format (990 pixels wide) photo blog, with the pictures placed vertically for ease of viewing. Simple yet brilliant.

A recent twitter post by kk that linked to the 2008 Greek riots got me hooked on this site’s large-scale format – these amazing photos need to run this large to capture the drama of the events there.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq_2LiTxhls

So this is the Harry Potter newspaper idea Ron was speaking of … is this a practical evolution step for newspapers?

So much upheaval in the newspaper business this days, 600 recently laid off at Sun Media chain, there is even a website, Paper Cuts, that keeps a running tally of layoffs and buyouts at U.S. newspapers. Christmas parties cancelled all over.

Big media sites have redesigned their websites to accept user content and now use of social media tools. A TechCrunch post cites a Pew Survey that most Americans are getting their news from the Internet rather than newspapers. Although it states that TV still beats both the Internet and newspapers as a news source, it goes on to say, “give it a couple more years and the Internet should overtake that as well.”

But online advertising won’t always pay the kind of cash that a full page ad can. No wonder the newspapers have been turning their photographers into videographers … a 15 second commercial at the beginning of a clip can be a money spinner.

There is some good news on the horizon for media geeks though …  MediaShift states that, “As newspapers and broadcasters slice their senior-level workforce, they are also quietly building their digital and online teams.” And a Fast Company story points to the impending retirement of aging baby boomers and a new tech boom.

Plus for us West Coast Canadians … the 2010 Olympics is rumoured to be creating a job or two …

This blog is my first experience in the world of PHP and WordPress. Dynamic content is what the web is all about, and as WordPress is the easiest Content Management System out there, it seemed like the perfect introduction.

There are many reasons for using WordPress: it’s free and open source, it’s user friendly, it has themes to make your blog look like a regular site, it’s search engine friendly and standards compliant. Now I need to explore more themes and plug-ins to test this out.

As I am a student of new media/web design, and a former print journalist, my blog will focus on issues relating to those topics, with some general nerd stuff thrown in, too (I am a sci-fi fan!).

I am already commenting about these issues on Twitter, now I can go over 140 words