Director Mike Rotman celebrated Star Wars Day this year by uploading his documentary feature Star Wait as a series. Filmed in 2002, the show consists mostly of interviews filmed with Star Wars enthusiasts waiting in line to see Episode II.
[show=reservationshow size=large]Comparing a web series to a TV show isn’t something I love to do, because the playing field is pretty uneven. But in the case of the indie series Reservation, when compared to the NBC drama Heroes, I don’t mind doing so because Reservation wins.
Directed by Matthew Balthrop of g14 Productions and distributed via Blip, Reservation tells the story of people with extraordinary abilities — and the government agency hunting them.
The approach, though, is pure character with little narrative, with each tightly-paced episode focusing on either someone with supernatural powers and how it affects their lives, or one of the agents hunting them. The closest the show has to a central protagonist is Alec Silva/Agent Pearce (Al Ghanekar), a reactivated agent whose decision to return to duty deeply complicates his personal life.
But in between vignettes about his domestic drama come portraits of people dealing with their special abilities without resorting to cliches like crime fighting or villainy. What would you do if you saw the future and it held tragedy? What’s it like to live life at sonic speed? Read More about Reservation Brings an Intimate Touch to Superheroics
Last fall, I interviewed Pixar CTO/indie film producer Oren Jacob for a GigaOm Pro piece about using online data in the offline world. At the time, Jacob was considering the idea of putting his latest project, the Spellbound-esque documentary Ready Set Bag!, online in full for free, as a means of figuring out how to target audiences who might subsequently go to theaters to see the film again.
Since then, though, Jacob and his team have revised their strategy considerably, and today, at the Tweet House SXSW event, Jacob announced the launching of a new Blip channel for the purpose of spreading the word about Ready Set Bag!, enlisting an eclectic yet well-known team to create content about the film, including Auto-Tune the News creators the Gregory Brothers, mash-up artist Mike Relm, animation studio Jib-Jab and Pop17 founder Sarah Austin. Read More about Viral Hitmakers Team With Indie Doc About…Grocery Baggers?
A Comparison of Legal Terms from Different Hosting Services; what rights do you give up when posting to services like blip, Flickr or Dailymotion? (Advancing Usability)
Report: Adobe’s DVRCast Launching Within a Week; product makes live video events instantly available on-demand, so you don’t have to miss anything shown. (Zatz Not Funny!) UPDATE: An Adobe rep wrote in to clarify this story. From their email: “At the Streaming Media East panel, Kevin Towes discussed an upcoming offer for a free sample piece of code (DVRCast), which will help Adobe’s customers use the DVR functionality feature available in FMS 3.5. That code will be available later in the month at www.adobe.com/go/fms_tools.”
Web Video Coming to Verizon FiOS TV; subscribers will be able to watch vids from Veoh, Dailymotion and blip (not Hulu or YouTube) on their big screen TVs; will require software installation on PCs first. (Multichannel News)
Nielsen: 3.3 Million Homes Not Ready for DTV Switch; that’s down from 3.5 million just two weeks ago. (Broadcasting & Cable)
Hulu Releases Video Panel Widget; new tool allows users to post an entire series or a group of videos to a blog or personal web site. (Hulu blog)
VideoSurf Opens API to Developers; video search company encourages people to build tools around finding and retrieving video. (VideoSurf Blog)
