When Twitter and Last FM had sex they produced Blip.FM, a lovechild graced with the finest characteristics of both its parents. Compile playlists, add friends, chat around tracks, upload music, discover new tunes...I love it!
I came across this thanks to a Twitter from the most excellent Iain Tait and spent a lot of the weekend having fun with it. A lot of fun. I was going to go into the ins and outs of why it was so good but noticed Iain has already beaten me to it.
So, rather than listen to me jibber jabber on about it find out the the 10 things Iain loves about it then come and join me.
If you've not seen 'I Met The Walrus' watch it now - it's wonderful.
"In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a
reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto
and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later,
Jerry has produced a film about it."
I like it for several reasons. The first being it is stunningly beautiful to watch. The second reason is that the impact of the animation makes what John is saying possibly 100 times greater than had we just listened to it on the radio or watched the interview on TV as it happened at the time. If you don't believe me try listening to it without watching, then watch and listen... you'll be amazed how those little scribbles and those well chosen words work their magic on your memory.
Late last year we had a series of Legend Shows to celebrate Radio 1's 40th Birthday. The likes of Debbie Harry, Paul McCartney and Ozzy Osbourne came in, played some tunes and chatted about music. Some of the shows were a little cringeworthy but some were great, and after the 7 day listen again window slammed shut I desperately wanted to do something to extend some of the lives of the shows.
Inspired by the impact this had on me 21 years ago I suggested to Will (Senior Producer for Visualisation at Radio 1) that we remove the music from the shows and try to visualise Paul McCartney's words. The idea was to use animated text and images giving the piece of audio an whole new life, make it more than just a piece of audio, something quite beautiful. It never happened because we were all so busy and it was eventually consigned to the heap of 'ideas worth trying' that I never return to.
The BBC has an incredible audio archive which will (one day soon) be made available to everyone. When it does I hope more of it will be made available in a way that the audience can take away and do some interesting things with - there are already some great examples out there unofficially. Not only will it extend the life and reach of our content but it will also shrink my pile of 'ideas worth trying'. I'm kinda gutted that I never animated McCartney, but if it took Jerry Levitan 38 years to finally animate his meeting with John then I'll happily have my project ready in time for Radio 1's 78th birthday.
You may remember me trying a mobile trick using my phone and a flag pole at T In The Park. Well, here's how I used the idea for Shoot The Summer. It involves comedy legend and writer of The Office and Extras Stephen Merchant.
Half way through pitching the idea to him I realised I was pitching comedy to a multi-bafta-multi-golden-globe-winning comedy writer. Me suggesting my lame gag to him was a bit like suggesting magnolia and woodchip to Michaelangelo.
I'd spoken to his producer and a few members of the team before I approached him and got a really positive response. "Hilarious" said one. "He'll love it" said another with smiles beaming across their faces. Seconds later, as I'm explaining to him that the whole joke is based around his height (he's huge) I noticed that he was staring at me blankly. Not even the slightest hint of a smile. Then I remember this.
Thankfully he didn't throw his Ogg Monster hissy fit and he seemed more than happy to go along with it. Hardly multi-bafta-multi-golden-globe-winning comedy but a decent effort.
As you may or may not know I'm making a film shot entirely on mobile phones called Shoot The Summer. It's about festivals and last week I missed my first weekend in Ibiza working for Radio 1 since 1997 so that I could be at the Cambridge Folk Festival.
As it's a project about mobile I wanted to use my phone to tell my story of the event in a film. To do this I tweeted all weekend. I had to slightly adjust my tweeting style so that it worked in the context of the film, but generally just tweeted whatever I felt like tweeting at the time.
After the weekend I took all my tweets and dropped them in a word document and activated 'Speech' in my Mac's preferences. This turns text into audio. You get to choose form a selection of voices, you can kill a good 2 minutes of boredom with this. I chose 'Vicki' because she sounds like she's hooked on prescription drugs, though I'd advise you to keep away from Princess - she's dark. I then dropped a load of footage into iMovie, sliced up the twitter audio and pulled an Ulrich Schnauss off my MP3 player (my Nokia N95).
I used the annotation function on Viddler in case you can't understand 'Vicki', though I'm not sure if this adds or detracts from the experience. It's all a little rough around the edges but quite an interesting little experiment. It would've been perfect if Electroplankton was playable on my phone then I could have made my own music like Russell Davies has here.
I had an amazing weekend and never missed the White Island for a moment. I met some wonderful people (including Chris from Aylesbury, Ben and Alex and some cranky gay club kids who did something really funny with a phone) so I hope that comes across in the film
I've been thinking a lot recently about different ways of telling stories and where we can go with them given the wealth of tools we have at our disposal. Ever since cavemen chalked images on walls we've experimented with
story telling tecniques that have taken the story from the walls to
books to stage to the big screen etc.
Earlier in the year the genius Hon brothers at SixToStart dropped We Tell Stories on the world. If you missed it We Tell Stories was a project for Penguin Books in which they explored how the 'interactivity, connectivity and immediacy of the internet can enhance and evolve storytelling'. It was superb, groundbreaking and a real eyeopener.
Whilst Shakespeare, Tarantino and Dylan made the stage, screen and song their canvas Johnathan Harris is using the web to tell stories as well as any of the aforementioned Gods.
From We Feel Fine to Universe,10x10 to The Whale Hunt Johnathan'sexperiment with the new interface for storytelling makes him one of the greatest storytellers of our generation. Many of his projects comprise of feeds visualised in a beautiful way that allow the user to explore the variety of emotions raked in from blogs. Breaking from tradition with The Whale Hunt he swapped places with the computer by going out into the real world to collect the images himself. He joined a group of whale hunters in America's most northern point and documented the whole experience taking a photo every 5 minutes. By increasing the frequency of photo's taken during the more frantic moments of The Whale Hunt, and displaying them like a medical heartbeat in a timeline, he has added tempo and tension as the dramatic events unfold in pictures. It's stunning!
A theme of simplicity and emotion runs throughout his projects and tributes to his work such as Twistori strips his method down to the bones. So I started thinking about where the line is drawn between what is a story and a simple line of text? And when we look at ARG's I wonder where is the line between the story and the game? Are Lynetter's Flickr slides stories?
No one tells stories about our brands better than our audience and with so many ways of interacting with them the challenge is how to take their 'stories', mash them with our content, then create something somewhere near as wonderful as the examples above. Answers on a Twitter to Radio 1 Interactive please.
I've been thinking a lot recently about different ways of telling stories and where we can go with them given the wealth of tools we have at our disposal. Ever since cavemen chalked images on walls we've experimented with
story telling tecniques that have taken the story from the walls to
books to stage to the big screen etc.