Re-blogged from the Smashface blog.
We came, we interviewed, we edited! During the three days of PBS's SXSW online video studio, we shot 31 interviews, featuring an all-star assortment of filmmakers, online video creators, and social media visionaries. They're all handily embedded above in the YouTube playlist player (click the control button to the right of the "play" button to bring up a menu). Our interview with Felicia Day has nearly 70,000 views alone!
We're getting ready to leave for Austin, Texas, the site of the biggest party of the year, also known as the South by Southwest (SxSW) conference! It's a convergence of film, interactive, and music panels, discussions, and parties that always has amazing people attending and interesting new things to find out.
This year we're excited to be partnering with PBS! We will be producing a series of interviews with filmmakers, online video people, and social media experts as part of our involvement with PBS Engage. If you're going to be in Austin, come by and say hello at the PBS interactive social media and video studio!
San Francisco held a huge three day concert event in Golden Gate park called Outside Lands. Over 60 artists performed with headliners including Radiohead, Tom Petty and Jack Johnson. I was lucky enough to be there and although I froze the whole weekend (I'm not used to SF weather), it rocked! My favorite part was watching Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. His songs take me back to all sorts of times in my life. And he still knows how to put on a show!
A new element to this concert was Crowdfire.net. Its a new site that wants to give you somewhere fun and cool to upload your concert pix and vids.
Here's a short interview with J. Rick Castaneda, Director of the short film The Golden Egg. See more shorts from Rick and his team at Psychic Bunny.
Reformat the Planet is a documentary about the "chiptunes" music scene and its premiere event -- the annual Blip Festival in New York. Chiptunes music is inspired by video game and computer soundtracks of the 80's and 90's -- when music was synthesized in real-time by a sound chip capable of only a limited number of sounds.
In this interview, Zadi speaks to Paul Owens, the director of the film, and Chris Burke, one of the most recognized chiptunes artists in the scene. Chris also gave us a private live performance, which you can watch in its entirety.
Just before we spoke with Chris Burke and Paul Owens about the Blip Festival documentary, Chris (AKA Glomag) gave us the pleasure of an impromptu live performance in an atrium of a hotel. Aside from being a pioneer in the chiptune scene, Chris is also the creator and host of the Halo machinima talk show This Spartan Life.
Over the next week I'll be posting a few segments that didn't make it on the show. In this first installment, Zadi sits down with the creators of the new film Super High Me, which follows comedian Doug Benson as he pledges to smoke pot every day for 30 days.
Now that we're back from SXSW and Berlin, it's time to catch up on everything that we've been doing.
Tim Shey of Next New Networks organized a panel at SXSW that was titled, "Quit Your Day Job and Vlog."
The video is the full length of the panel, so it's about an hour. Just fyi. If you're interested in online video and know a bit about the people on the panel (or want to know), this was very interesting. I couldn't help but sit in the audience and be struck by what a special time this is for those of us working in this industry. And how open and giving almost everyone is.
On this week's show, Zadi talked about free music from SXSW. Paul Ford from The Morning News went a step further (or many steps, rather) and reviewed all the free tracks available on the SXSW music page. Yes, all 763 of them. He kept the reviews to 6 words each and rated them on a 5-point scale. Not a lot of meat there, but still you gotta give the guy some credit.
