Magnify Summer Updates in Winter

Know your Viewers better with Ease
It's still winter in Australia, yet the Summer updates from Magnify.net are certainly warming. The ability to email members for channel administrators as well as receive email notifications when comments are made will certainly improve the channel owners ability to market their site to their audience and build relationships.
Ads & so forth
The advertising control is working great as previously discussed here. You can select remember me to save logging in each visit. The trash option is more functional.
Creativity
New widgets and colour scheme's are available to tailor your channel more to your preferred style and taste.

Magnify certainly listens to feedback and is constantly improving the ease and control over your video stock. I love it.

Senses of Cinema

Senses of Cinema is a rich and vast Australian online journal. It has to be seen to be believed. If you are serious about learning about the Australian cinematic experience from a range of approaches, you can't go past it. The articles are lengthy and researched and I am so delighted I have found it. The links are extensive. It is the find of the year for me. I can't believe it's taken me so long to find it! I can see literally hours of pleasurable reading and learning from this discovery. So I thought I would share it with you.

Tubemogul - Revver stats

If you make videos and want to track their performance, you want to try tubemogul. This is a chart of my videos performance on Revver for a couple of weeks. If you want to keep this updated there is an option to do that. You can get all kinds of charts. These charts can be embedded such as the example above I like it!

Thank You for Smoking

Watched 'Thank You for Smoking' last night in my friend's home cinema. It was a lovely experience. The home theatre idea is just decadent and lovely enough to totally appeal to me. It's lucky I don't have one because I may never attend work!
Thank You for Smoking was a hoot. It was very funny in a shocking kind of way. It was both light-hearted, yet a little thought-provoking. I enjoyed it. The MOD squad (short for merchants of death) particularly tickled me.

Magnify - Now you can choose your advertisers!

This morning I put some of my latest clips onto my Falling Brick Magnify.net site and noticed that Magnify have a new tab for channel administrators - Ads. You can now select from many of the Ad networks available to monetise your site. This is expanded choice from the past where you could only participate with Adsense and Revver.

There was mention of this on the blog late last month: Should we open Adnet?. Yet I had heard nothing more of this until discovering it today. This is great news to me. I don't have an Adsense account.

If you haven't looked at Magnify, I recommend it. There are so many great videos online now. It's a great place to create and share your collections or your own videos.

Stardust

Amnesty on Switch

Switch TV sent me an email today about this award winning Amnesty International ad. It is certainly powerful so make sure you watch and better still, make sure you sign.

Signature - Amnesty International

Port Welshpool

Click to Play

A fishing village in South Gippsland in Victoria, Australia. It's a windy day.  

Formats available: Windows Media (.wmv), Flash Video (.flv)

Tags: wind, sea, fishing-village, port-welshpool, australia, victoria

Clubland

I saw Australian film, Clubland this week. I laughed, cried, cringed and was enraged during the course of it. There were moments when I just wanted to leave the theatre. I'm glad I stayed for the cheery ending though. It was released in America under the title "Introducing the Dwights".

There was a lot of relationship drama and discovery packed into this film. All varieties of relationships and the range of behaviours and emotions.

Here's a link to an interview with the director Cherie Nowlan. I appreciate the job she did.

Testing TubeMogul

Today I am trying out TubeMogul. I read about it on the Revver Blog a week or so ago. It is a new service that allows you to upload your video and have it put on 6 sites (Revver, YouTube, Google, Yahoo, Metacafe, MySpace) all at once. Then it will track the statistics from those sites and you can look at graphs and get analytics from your video.

I have uploaded a video and although I generally only put my videos on Revver, I have accounts with all 6 places, for viewing purposes mainly. I have uploaded to all 6 for the purposes of checking out how this works.

The latest TubeMogul blog post:Universal Upload Creates Measurable Lift in Viewership shows a report on how a video maker has seen an increase in views using this service.

At this point I can say it is easy to use and get started. I haven't been doing much video lately. I could see this would be a great quicker and easier way to get distribution. I'll keep you updated as to how I find this service.

The Transformers

This week I went to see 'The Transformers'. It was highly recommended by my secondary school students as a must see! It was action packed and adventurous. It was long, however due to the non stop action and amusement, I didn't feel the time so to speak. There was nothing deep or meaningful here, it was a pure escapist time to be had.

Stranger Than Fiction

Emma Thompson is magic in Stranger Than Fiction, as an author struggling with the right ending for her character. This task becomes seriously challenging when the "character" arrives in person, having heard the author narrating his story in his head, to save himself. This is a must see film complete with succulent characters and pretty scenes. I loved it.

Revver Launches Preroll

Revver announced yesterday, it would be launching a new advertising option. Preroll and postroll advertising will be available to advertisers and content owners. Content owners have been asking for this for a while and as has been the case, Revver has listened and responded.
I have had an account with Revver for over 12 months now and have over 400 clips uploaded. I can't speak highly enough of the integrity of Revver and have found them to give great service and be honest and constructive in resolving difficulties and sharing information. They have constantly upgraded and improved their services in the time I have been with Revver. If you have video and are looking for a way to distribute it, I couldn't recommend Revver highly enough to you.

Babel

Babel tells a tale of connectedness between the characters who are mostly unaware of one another and spread across the globe. It highlights how different realities even the closest such as the parents and their children can be. It was an interesting film and I would recommend it.

The Queen

Stephen Frears has made some great films, yet I think 'The Queen' has to be his best. I totally enjoyed it. Great scenery and interesting perspective on historical phenomena most are familiar with.

Helen Mirren portrayed the Queen in an award-winning performance. The film was much better than I expected and I'm glad I watched it.

A Brief History of You Tube

Informative, Inspiring, brief........



I discovered this clip thanks to'How to Live Online'.

Tropfest and AFI news

I got an update today from Tropfest news. An Imaginary Life, the winner of 2007 Tropfest has been nominated for the AFI Best Short Animation Award. The AFI website has more details about the awards.

Entries for next years Tropfest close 10 January 2008, so less than 6 months to go if you intend to enter.

Do Something Real

The Age: Rich Pickings spreads the news of this great YouTube clip that highlights the divide in the world between the haves and the have nots.

Casanova

Director Driven Choice
'From the director of Chocolat' That line,splashed across the top of the DVD, drew my attention to this one. I had overlooked it quite a few times. I loved Chocolat. It was an amazing and beautiful story and the film managed to do it justice.
Romantics Delight
Casanova contained similar delicious moments. The legendary Casanova and the alluring Francesca have their moment of truth and intimacy in a hot air balloon, floating through a sky littered with fireworks over the city of Venice. Romance on a stick.
Action and Adventure
The film contains battles of wit and muscle as well as wild chases and escapades. I laughed and clapped with glee.
Heath Ledger
This is the second Heath Ledger film I've watched this month. Heath has effectively become both Ned Kelly (2003) and Casanova for me. Such diversity, such a delight!

Digital storytelling - File conversion link

Converting your Quicktime to Media Player:File conversion link