Here is another video about the cuts, via Indymedia Bristol. While it is very interesting, sadly the talk is quite boring, and hard to not get distracted from. Visually it seems to be some kind of powerpoint presentation.
It’s well worth a watch though! Taking this content and actually making it into a film could be a very interesting start for a project. It’s got all the content, only needs some scripting and working on voiceover, pacing and visuals.
Read More[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx_LWm6_6tA[/youtube]
This one is trying to do what’s on the cover. The sound works really well, I’m not a fan of the colours, but that’s not really the point here. It works heavily with titles, and is well paced. More an attempt to explain very concretely what triggered this specific crisis (and very focused on the States), not so much trying to explain the general concept of capitalism. It works well though, and I actually do get the impression I’m learning something when watching. Although for some reason I don’t fully trust it.
Read More[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqwd_u6HkMo[/youtube]
Another analogy: The market with it’s need for constant growth as a hamster that ends up eating earth. It doesn’t really reference the idea behind the growing markets very much, so while it is very cute, I’m kinda missing something here and watching it leaves me a bit unsatisfied.
Read More[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM[/youtube]
There’s a lot of people who just love The Story of Stuff. The way it’s talked about, you would think it’s the latest movie by the Cohen brothers – but better! I have to say, I find the presenter quite annoying. It’s just a bit too American for me, she sounds like a parody to me tbh.
So this one is using a presenter, interacting with some animation. The animation is fine, and I’m a fan of statistics. But this whole idea stands and falls with the viewer liking the presenter, and that’s a dangerous thing. Because part of the audience will always dislike the presenter, even if they are interested in the content or message of the film.
Read More[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0[/youtube]
RSAnimate is a series of talks made into animations by adding drawings on a whiteboard. It’s an extremely well executed concepts, and I envy the artist’s drawing skills. Very simple concepts: take a talk and make drawings to illustrate what is being said and make it more engaging and entertaining. You should check out the other films from the series, if you haven’t seen them.
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Now, the Frog in boiling water video uses an analogy. While he writes books instead of making videos, Cory Doctorow also works with analogies. In novels. That are free. It’s really too awesome to explain, check out his website and his other novels. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to his books in the future.
It’s an interesting way of explaining the relationship between value and money and how more money leads to inflation. Check out the book, the explanation is much longer than this.
“Sea-level” is a term that refers to the average level of all the world’s oceans. Think of the world as a giant bed-pan, filled halfway with water. You can blow on one part of the surface and induce some tiny waves whose crests are higher than the rest of the water. You can tip the bed-pan from side to side and cause the water to slosh around, making it higher at one end than another. But overall, there’s a single level to that water, a surface height that you can easily discern.
Same with the oceans. Though the tides may drag the water from one edge of the sea to the other — and really, there’s only one sea, a single, continuous jigsaw-puzzle-piece-shaped body of water that wraps around all the continents — though the storms may blow up waves here and there, in the end, there’s only so much water in the ocean, and it more or less comes to an easily agreed-upon height. Sea level.
Same with money. There’s only so much value in the world: only so much stuff to buy. If you got all the money in the world, you could exchange it for all the stuff on earth (at least all the stuff there is for sale). It doesn’t matter, really, whether the money is in dollars or gold pieces or mushrooms or ringgits or euros or yen. Add it all together and what you’ve got is the ocean. What you’ve got is sea level.
So what happens if someone just prints a lot more money? What happens if you just double the amount of money in circulation? Will the monetary seas rise, drowning the land?
No.
Printing more money doesn’t make more money. Printing more money is like measuring the ocean in liters instead of gallons. Converting 343 quintillion gallons of ocean into 1.6 sextillion liters (give or take) doesn’t give you any more water. Gallons and liters are measurements of water, not water itself.
And dollars are measures of value, not value itself. If you double the amount of currency in circulation, you double the price of everything on Earth. The amount of stuff is fixed, the amount of currency isn’t. That’s called inflation, and it can be savage.
The quote above is from his novel For the Win, that you totally have to read. It’s about the IWWWW, or Webblies. You can download it for free, and if you like it, donate a printed copy to a school or library! And of course the actual book makes a great present for your niece or nephew. For the Win is published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license
Read More[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdIA0jeW-24[/youtube]
Another German one, but this one comes with subtitles.
It’s very straight forward, not really dealing with anything too abstract. The graphics are working very well, nice and clean looking. The most notable point is the voiceover, explaining in a creepily hypnotic tone why all the surveillance is necessary and ho everyone is a terrorism suspect nowadays. Obviously, this perspective of pretending to be in favor of surveillance is the main device that makes this video work.
Read More[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diq6TAtSECg[/youtube]
Because the voiceover is German, here a quick summary: If you put a frog into a tub of boiling water, it’ll feel the heat and jump out. However, if the temperature is ok when you put it in, it will stick around. If the heat is now turned up gradually, the frog won’t notice and you end up with cooked frog.
Here it draws an analogy: Our society displays similar responses to a frog. If you would try and install a totalitarian surveillance state, people would protest. But surveillance is introduced at a low level, and then turned up gradually, with the same end result. Because we are getting used to it, we are in danger of not noticing when it’s getting too hot for comfort. A person who is watched adjusts their behaviour to this fact, and this can have severe effects, e.g. on the freedom of speech. If you are worried about being watched, you are more likely to not say what you think, especially if your opinion are not in line with the mainstream.
Simple but effective.
Read More[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Eph6ClpGOQ[/youtube]
This video was a uni project. In our first term at film school, we got the brief to create a one minute video, about where we come from. The title of that project was Place. Years later, I still remember Armen’s One-Minute Guide to Planet Earth. The imagery is very evocative, going far beyond the mundane explanations. Here voice over and visuals create something more than the sum of the individual parts. The short, fast paced clip triggers a wave of associations and ideas each time I see it.
A fun to watch clip, which kinda explains things almost by raising questions rather than answering them. I like the attitude, it’s not very serious, but brings up a very interesting perspective. Also taking a step back and getting a fresh perspective on the everyday.
Read More[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJTLL1UjvfU[/youtube]
The Big Brother State is a very well made video, explaining the use and dangers of cctv and other surveillance tools. Sadly the website at http://www.bigbrotherstate.com/ seems to not exist anymore.
It summarises the arguments for surveillance and then goes on point out some of the downsides. Visually it is very appealing, the pink and grey aesthetics are easy on the eye, the little bombs and hearts visually represent abstract concepts and ideas and make them more tangible, without making them too concrete. The pink ‘wallpaper’ background is a bit sickly sweet, but adds a self ironic element, which counteracts the somewhat dry and depressing subject matter.
It is made from a mix of footage of real people, 3D and 2D animation, creating a well paced, informative and entertaining little video.
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