Sourcing Films for your Archive / Screenings |
|
How to source videos for your screenings / video archive Often if you are doing screenings you maybe asked to come up with 30 mins of films on climate change or squat actions. This is made a lot easier if you have a large archive of films. This may take the form of a library of DVDs, CDroms and VHS tapes. It may also involve having a hard drive full of digital films which have been downloaded from the Internet or networked hand-to-hand. Here are some ways of building up that archive. Video Distribution. How to source and distribute video. This part of the chapter serves two purposes. A how-to guide for where to source films for screenings, and a list of possible outlets for Video that you may create as part of a campaign. Offline content Traditionally the best way to get good content for screening is to order
VHS's and DVD's from mail order catalogues, or even get film prints delivered
and hire out your local cinema. In the UK there is an excellent service
called culture shop which hosts many VHS's and DVD's for independent video
producers. Film screeners now often tour with a DVD or their work which they screen and sell. They also send out copies to screeners that they can't visit in person but who find out about their film through their touring. Hand to hand digital distribution has made it a lot quicker to network films suitable for activist screenings. It has become quite common for screeners to spend break times in activist gatherings frantically swapping digital video files and DVD's. In Manchester we have an archive of copy-left films available on a video server in a bookshop and cafe which acts as a social centre. It is possible to connect to the network and either copy these files to your computer or burn them off onto disk to take away. We recently hosted a weekend were we invited other social centres and Indymedia screeners to bring their hard drives and disks to exchange our video resources. We worked on ideas to make this informal screenings network accessible to film makers and to work on a voluntary code of conduct to make sure we don't rip off activist film collectives. “Ruff Cuts”, and the “European Newsreal” are two projects which provide a high quality source of shorter action based films. These projects have produced between them 40 or so CD's of radical video content. The films are all distributed under the copyleft license. This means that they can be freely copied and passed on. It also makes them perfect as a base for a public archive of films. Online content: Archive.org is a project that will host Videos released under the Copy-Left licence free of charge. It's a great source for a lot of Independent Video. Democracy player and Video bomb are projects of the Particpatory culture
project. It combines a free software Video player and an online program
guide. This lets you subscribe to the output of on line video channels,
and then watch them. Imagine a program guide where you choose whatever
program from the schedule you want to watch. You can set the player to
automatically download programs from your favourite channel. V2v is another distribution system with academic and activist content. They distribute out their content with file sharing software so that if the site becomes very popular, then they won't be face a massive bill for over using their transfer allowance (bandwidth). There are now a lot of screening quality activist films being put up online. Sites like http://video.indymedia.org and http://ngvision.org , http://clearerchannel.org have been set up specifically as resources to allow films screeners to download films Video.indymedia.org launched itself as a place which welcomed huge video files. It also aims to be just one node of a network that uses peer to peer technology to create a decentralised Video distribution network. Clearerchannel.org has been set up as a resource for social justice screeners
in the UK. The focus is on films that you would show to an audience of
people. The website ngvision.org In Italy, New global vision is a fantastic resource for a series of Pirate Television stations called Street TV's. The huge demand for new content is reflected in the huge variety of content available. Specialist websites and local news sites like Indymedia will have reports that may be of a more temporary relevance. There is often an upload limit to the size of files to these local newswires. They are a best place to find short clips of things that have happened recently. All of the above organisations and projects are planning to work together
to make the process of uploading and networking videos even easier and
more effective. The next few years should really be something else. |
Clearer Channel Training / Help files |
|
These Clearer channel help files are designed to be as clear as we can make them. They are also used for training sessions. We want video collectives and media activists to be able to contribute Media files themselves. To help make this happen, we run training sessions every 2 months. If you are interested in these training sessions please get in contact - training @ clearerchannel . org >> Index of Training / Help Files |