This is one of my absolute favorite videos. I can watch is repeatedly and continue to be fascinated:


And here is a great parody of the above video:

It's been an interesting past two weeks here at CultureSurfer.com HQ. Since Brightcove announced that they are no longer going to provide my video players for free, I've been searching and searching all over the internet for a good replacement. The players now cost a mininum of $6,000 per year. Yikes!

Life as a web mistress has been just a bit stressful. I've come up with two possible solutions, neither of which is ideal. Bliptv.com is the easiest solution, but that would mean visitors would no longer be able to link to the videos on my site. But the upside of Bliptv is that they will host all of my videos & I'll have stats on how many times each video has been watched.

The other possibility is to embed my very own players in the site. The best one I've found so far is from WebStunning.com. It's a pretty cool player, but I am not sure if I will get stats on it & there is no way to add descriptions or tags to the videos. This leads to the question of how searchable the videos would be by search engines, which I absolutely need.

I seem to be stuck in between a rock and a hard place.

And both of these players entail yet another (OMG!!!!!)site redesign. Yup. that's gonna be something like number 8 (I have to check) in 14 months. Here's why: I can't find a good player that I like which has channels on it. I will have to create a separate player for each channel on the site. We're talking something like 50 players.

Fun times ahead. But one piece of good news. We are looking at close to 10,000 visitors on the site this month.

http://www.cinemastlouis.org/fest.html

This unbelievably huge, exciting, and exhausting film festival starts tonight, with Humboldt County opening the festival at the Tivoli Theater. The directors will be there & there will be a bunch of super excited film addicts who show up every year for this event. I think there are something like 275
films being shown in 10 days, including the shorts. There are indie films, foreign films, and documentaries. Numerous sidebars (basically mini festivals) include:

AFI PROJECT: 20/20
African/African-American Sidebar
Animation Sidebar
A sampling of classic cinematic works.
Art and Music Sidebar
Asian Sidebar
Cinema for Students
Eastern European Sidebar
Environmental Sidebar
Family Sidebar
Film Noir Sidebar
FilmTracker New Filmmakers Forum
French Sidebar
Global Lens 2008
Indie-Fest
Interfaith Sidebar

I went through the schedule & narrowed it down to 24 movies, but of course I'll only be able to make a fraction of those movies. My goal is to film 12 directors (q&a sessions or interviews), so that I can upload one director interview per month until the next film festival. We're giving Dan, our photographer, our 2nd video camera so that we can split up & hopefully cover more directors.

For someone like me who has loved movies since they became such a huge part of my life back in high school, this is like putting me in a chocolate store & giving me free reign.

Those of you who have been with me on MyOpera since January know that I've been through plenty of struggles & ups and downs with the site since I launched it back in September of 2007. We now find ourselves in the most serious situation with the site since we launched.

Brightcove, the company whose video players you see on the site, informed everyone last week that they are ending their free video service as of Dec. 17, 2008. With over 550 videos on the site, all listed on google with links to the site & most of the videos linking to external sites, you can imagine the tight spot we find ourselves in. It's a serious blow.



We need video players with the following characteristics (basically, something very similar to the Brightcove players on the site):

1) multiple channels or lineups on each player
2) each video could be embedded in other sites or linked to (like you can do with YouTube videos)
3) a playlist on each video player
4) the ability to embed more than one player on CultureSurfer (we need 1 video player on each of 10 pages)
5) the ability to link the video to an external site (preferred but not mandatory)
6) the first video on the player would not automatically play
7) at least 50 gigs of video upload to the video site per month
8) unlimited viewer video streams per month

CultureSurfer is currently being changed over from Windows to Linux because this will apparently allow for more players to work on the site (over my head, just repeating what I understand). This process should be finished by Tuesday or Wednesday latest. You will be able to surf CultureSurfer without any problem while this process happens.

The only site I've found so far that I could use to "store" the videos to put in the new players that will allow me unlimited bandwidth (i.e. a database where the videos would live) is Flickr at $25/year. If we were to buy our own bandwidth on Godaddy, CultureSurfer's host, we'd be looking at about $150/year and we'd have to get someone to write code to create a database where the videos would live because we have no clue how to do this.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks-
Naomi

FASHION
Silver Dagger-at Saint Louis Fashion Week, Fall 2008

Traditional Filipino Fashion-At the fall Asian Couture & Cultural Event at Mandarin.

ART
Sara Parry-artist/adorable bloody bride at Jack’s Show at the Koken Art Factory

INDIE MUSIC
Here-by Elleven

CYCLING
4K To Go-The approach into St. Charles at the 2nd Annual Tour of Missouri, filmed from the Team Bissell car by Dan Elavsky.

Glen Mitchell-Director of Team Bissell

DANCE
Fire Dance, Part 2-Pandora’s Matchbox performs at Third Degree Glass Factory