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A long list was presented onscreen during Stuart Cosgrove’s (Channel 4, Director of Nations & Regions) presentation during the ‘4ip Pre-launch briefing’ yesterday morning in Birmingham. It listed the type of projects that Channel 4 and Advantage West Midlands’ new £10million funding pot (to be managed by Screen WM), and the first of its kind in the UK, was aimed at. But despite the seemingly long list, the remit for funding seemed surprisingly narrow.
4ip, it transpired, is essentially a funding scheme targeted at projects that wholeheartedly embrace ‘new media’, particularly those geared in some way towards online social networking or related technology (whether it be ‘mobile media solutions’, online journalism or serious games). What it is not however, is a film funding pot:
“If you’re sitting there thinking, ‘Ah, another way to fund my short film.’ The answer is: ‘No it’s f**king not!’”
Despite this brilliant use of obscenity by the Channel 4’s Director of Nations & Regions, it seemed bizarre that a room predominantly full of film and media types were being encouraged to pitch for projects that primarily demanded a talented team of web developers.
An example given was that of Central Station, a Glasgow-based cross-media project described as an “artists’ social platform” within the social networking site Ning, which featured “viral fictional narratives,” based around Glasgow School of Art. Part of the project also involves making the TATE Gallery archive more accessible to the public.
To help run the scheme , Channel 4 is currently looking to employ a Commissioning Editor to work in Birmingham alongside Screen WM’s new Head of Innovation, Jason Hall on 4IP. Those interested in applying for funding that ranges from £20,000 to £1.5 million, should contact either after carefully ensuring they’ll be able to meet the following criteria:
Applicants must set-up or have a new company (or “Single Project Vehicle”) within the West Midlands.
...and either:
At least 70% of the projects budget (excluding on-screen talent, archive material and copyright costs) must be spent in the West Midlands.
Or:
At least 50% of the projects off-screen talent (by cost) must be usually employed in the West Midlands.
Although those are the main requirements, there’s unsurprisingly a wealth of other information to consider that I don’t have room to go into here. Presumably more details will appear on www.4ip.org.uk as the scheme is officially launched in autumn 2008.
As for the rest of this blog entry, were you at the event, and if so, what did you make of the scheme? Some I spoke to at the event dismissed it as not really applicable to their line of work, whilst others seemed to be bubbling with ideas.
Granted, Screen WM already has a separate funding pot for film production, and stated that they can act as a ‘broker’ for “skills alliances” (e.g. helping artistic groups to find web designers), but why are so many support schemes across the UK seemingly obsessed with ‘new media’? There’s a wealth of potential that ‘web 2.0’ and the latest interactive technology offers, but is there also a danger that the stated goal of “delivering real change in peoples’ lives” gets lost amongst jargon such as “delivering digital innovation in a new media landscape”?
David Allen
I stumbled across this entry on the Online Journalism Blog – ironically through an application on my Facebook profile, yesterday:
Today’s tool is one of a number offered by Dapper, a company which aims to “make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website.” The tool is the Facebook Appmaker.
As the name suggests, the Facebook AppMaker by Dapper allows bloggers, site admins and just about anyone to create their own RSS feed applications for Facebook without any developer knowledge. Apparently it even allows users to combine several feeds into one app, and filter the news by keywords.
Anyway, having been excited (well, moderately interested anyway) by the prospect of my own irritating, little Facebook app, I tested it out using Animation Forum WM’s RSS feed. Of course, things on the web labelled ‘easy’ aren’t always as easy as they claim, here’s my diary of woe…
- Users first have to set-up a ‘Dapp’. A relatively pain-free experience, although the lack of an image (logo) upload service is a tad annoying, as it means an image has to be uploaded separately to a server, then linked to. A bit of a faff.
- Dapp neatly allows the user to un-tick the rather ugly bits of information from the displayed feed – such as a link and publication date. Which is nice.
- Annoyingly, despite the seemingly useful screenshot guide on Dapper’s site on how to use Facebook’s Application Developer tool, there is no mention of a character limit for the ‘Callback URL’. This means the name I originally chose for my app is now too long to be used, which might mean changing something somewhere in the earlier Dapp stage.
- Not only this, but the screenshot that comprises the guide on Dapper is a bit out of date, quite a few extra nubs and buttons have been added since the guide was made.
- Oh dear... a dialog box of death has appeared when I’m asked to enter Facebook data into the Dapper website: “Canvas Page URL in Facebook should contain 7 or more lowercase latin characters only”. As the guide has just told me to insert the ‘Canvas Page URL’ with dashes in between, this is a little odd.
It’s all going wrong; I must have submitted an incorrect Canvas URL on the Dapper page, and now it’s crashed. Refreshing the page requires me to re-enter the link to the logo and application description. Frustrating.
After much fiddling about, it’s still not working. I resolve that might need to restart the whole process from scratch to get the thing working properly, so fling the mouse down in disgust like some middle-aged dad befuddled by MS Word. Wasn’t quite as easy for non-developers as it seems then…
David Allen
Animator/Director David O’Reilly recently made an interesting post on his website about the pointlessness of the ‘safe area’ or TV cut-off. Being that, “all design for television is made with an invisible border which clips about 20% of the image. It’s a long established rule that all movement must take place within one border, and all text within another.”
Aimed at image makers and viewers alike, he stresses the importance of utilising all areas of the composition window without restriction. With the constant increase of video being viewed digitally, online and on modern screens, he correctly points out that the rule is outdated, and lacks any practical value.
“I really believe we ought to be questioning every rule we are told, especially with animation, when – as trite as this remark will always sound – you can do anything.”
Take a look at David’s 2008 Showreel to see his rule breaking in all its glory here.
Richard Coldicott
I was recently asked to create a guide for a work experience kid on how to write features for the web.
Although I’m not a trained journalist and have grasped almost everything I know about the trade from experience and learning by lawsuits; the web seems home to many such desperately unqualified people lacking the relevant media qualifications, so I decided to give it a go anyhoo.
Yet as I tried to prize apart the differences between writing for print and web, hundreds of similarities between the two mediums were also thrown up. Good practice is, after all, good practice, and the familiar mantras of readability, accuracy, purpose and audience can be applied to both spheres. We live in a bloated, fast-food culture these days and with the masses of material already floating around the web, readability (even if paradoxically, it’s a bit of a clumsy term) seems to be take precedence over all else.
So what makes material on the web readable then? Well, here’s the start of my list, hopefully you can finish it in the comments…
- Be concise (something I’m currently contradicting with this verbose blog entry); a cursory glace at the average site’s stats will tell you that most folks don’t spend enough time on sites to read long, arduous features. The longer the scroll bar the more that you, as a writer, will need to concentrate on drawing people in with your inextricable wit and charm.
- Which brings us on to personality… ensure features have a natural and entertaining flow, be it through mild sarcasm or frequently re-reading passages to make the same point with fewer words, greater impact and less repetition.
- Break up the text; hyperlinks and embedded videos break up long blocks of text that lacks the snazzy typefaces and layout of print. It also helps build relationships between sites.
- Be accurate, bit obvious really. But allow time between the deadline and completing the feature to send a draft to the interviewee, and all relevant parties.
So that’s the start of my list that I contradict on a daily basis. But what are your golden rules for writing news and features for the web? Is it really that different to print?
Dave Allen
Finding that perfect laser gun zap, or exploding head splat can often be a painful and frustrating task. Whether having to trawl the net for fuzzy substandard wav sound files that just don’t do the trick, or trying to capture the sound of that melon hitting the floor yourself (although very entertaining, harder than you’d think to get it right), I found there to be a lack of decent content out there.
However on one such search the other day for some beautifully nasty 80’s retro sounds I stumbled upon www.soundsnap.com. A free site full of professional quality SFX and music loops, where the content is generated by the users. Originally started by a small group of sound people from around the world it has grown into a much larger community and has become a platform for sound designers, sound artists, web game developers, filmmakers, music producers, hobbyists and home video makers [take a breath] to upload and share original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD's – legally.
Needless to say I found that nasty 80’s zing I was after and went happily on my way.
Along similar lines and also definitely worth a look is, the stock photo exchange, www.sxc.hu. Very much a favorite of mine, it is full of fantastic user generated stock photographs and vector artwork that you can download for free for use in your projects. It is also affiliated with www.stockexpert.com which sells its content, and displays examples from here too when you search. So if you can’t find the perfect shot on sxc, there is a good chance there will be something on stockexpert worth paying that little extra bit for.
Stephen Tew, Video Editor and Camera Assistant, Notion Studio
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