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Plugincinema was invited to join in the first event organised by Bristol Indymedia Centre. It was aimed at bringing together a wide variety of independent and community media groups, as well as members of the public, to discuss and debate the important area of 'media'. Appropriately enough the event was being held in Bristol's Cube Cinema; an independent venue that pioneers experimental work of both local and international artists and filmmakers. The day promised more than just discussion with workshops on many areas of media practice such as print, radio and of course; film.
 Plugincinema founder Ana Kronschnabl opened the day with a panel discussion on the media. A busy auditorium engaged with the subject and it was not long before a healthy dialogue had developed that involved a wide cross-section of the audience, and covered topics such as the involvement of young people in media, censorship, the role of alternative media in community building and the future directions of both mainstream and independent media. One point of note was when a contributor expressed the opinion that much of the alternative/independent media did not address a broad enough section of society. Others countered by saying that independent media was what people made of it; participation shapes its role.
Following an excellent food break (thanks to the chefs!) Plugincinema were based in the main auditorium along with two other independent media groups; Undercurrents and iContact Video Network. Undercurrents is an award winning group of activist filmmakers based in Oxford and Swansea. They made an interesting presentation arguing that films could be easily distributed using the humble CD-ROM with MPEG-1 video on; this makes it easy to duplicate and would - since the technology used is well established - play on virtually every computer. iContact Video Network are a non-profit making group producing and supporting video work that tackles the issues the mainstream media ignore. They gave a presentation of their experiences of filming and how the camera work could be conducted to make the resulting footage easier to encode for the Internet. Amongst other things, they pointed to static camera shots, using a tripod and avoiding fast pan shot. Plugincinema followed this with a presentation aimed at introducing people to the practicalities of filmmaking for the Internet; why compression is needed (because uncompressed footage is too big), what is a CODEC (an algorithm that compresses and decompresses the film) and what kind of size film you need to make for most people to be able to view it (we showed examples of films at file sizes of 150k and 300k). The day was a great success. It was well attended, with lively discussions and informative workshops. It was also a great opportunity to run workshops with other filmmakers, exchanging both ideas and experience. There was a rich variety of ideas around due to the inclusion of practitioners from various media forms. The mixing of ideas from print, radio, film and others, contributed to a rich environment in which it was possible to discuss the challenges facing independent media groups today. Further Information Bristol Indymedia
http://bristol.indymedia.org/
Cube Cinema
http://microplex.cubecinema.com/cubewebsite/
Undercurrents
http://www.undercurrents.org/
iContact Video Network
http://www.videonetwork.org/ |
