In response to Jeff Swain’s video asking, “Why Do You Tweet?”

I have to say that personally, I don’t see how a sixteen year old kid playing a Prince song on his ukulele and sharing it with friends over YouTube in any way threatens either Mr. Nelson’s or WMG’s intellectual property or record sales. Most of these claims are against the SPIRIT of copyright law– as it is outlined in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution– if not the letter of the law. But the letter of the law is on their side, at least in those cases. Less so with other claims that fall very solidly under fair use protection.

And then there’s the claims that show not just that WMG is tone-deaf when it comes to the Constitution, but to basic principles of irony, like when a copyright claim on a small clip of music was used to silence a video of fair-use advocate and lawyer Larry Lessig. These are the transgressions that really point to the cluelessness of large groups of people following bureaucratic dictate with no larger guiding principle than profit.

I’ve gone on this little rant because I’ve finally gotten my first copyright complaint on YouTube.

Almost four years ago, I created the below video for a class project. I was trying to familiarize myself with basic editing programs, and to create a little video about US Labor History, with a slightly IWW sympathy.

I chose Billy Bragg’s rendition of The Internationale for several reasons. The song itself was a natural choice for a video on Labor History and looking at radicalism within the producing classes. Bragg’s version was in English, sung more like a folk song than an opera, and his revised lyrics emphasize a humanistic syndicalism that I feel represents some of the best aspects of American Labor in the periods between the Civil War and WWII.

The song is very much in the public domain here in the US– though apparently not in France. I found Billy Bragg’s version on a website of public domain music, and I’ll admit, I didn’t do my full due diligence, but as this was just a class project, I felt it was sufficient to do a bit. Finding it on that site, and then tracking down that the original version was recorded by Bragg on his Utility Records label, I felt safe. Even if the strictly educational purpose of the video– created for a class as a primative attempt at digital pedagogy– didn’t qualify my use as fair use, and even if it wasn’t viewed– as I feel it could be– as protected political speech… I just figured that, as the copyright holder, Billy Bragg wasn’t going to go after me for making a rather lefty student project about labor history.

But it turns out that Electra re-issued the album that this appeared on, and since Warner bought Electra in 1970, yes, WMG may indeed have some sort of claim on the music. I don’t have the particulars, and it depends on the nature of the reissue contracts, etc., but yes, they may have some claim.

And yes, nearly four years and nearly four thousand YouTube views later, they may well be within their rights to give me a copyright warning. Although given their scattershot approach, I’d really love the right to ask them to show me the paperwork before I believe it.

And I’m lucky, I guess. My video hasn’t been silenced or taken down. I just got off with a warning. As the little automated copyright imp inside of Youtube tells me, “No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases ads may appear next to your video.”

But that’s when the second shoe falls, irony-wise. Yes, WMG is challenging my right to use a piece of music that is really the property of a body of people who don’t believe in corporate personhood or private property. Yes, they are saying that they are the corporate owners and protectors of a song that features the lyrics:

When we fight, provoked by their aggression,
Let us be inspired by life and love.
For though they offer us concessions,
Change will not come from above!

…But I expect this sort of tone-deafness to irony. What shocks and delights me, however, is the idea of ads appearing next to my little video about the resistance and dignity of exploited workers. I wonder what products they might use to subsidize my use and pay off WMG for my use of the song. Because no matter what it is, there’s a good chance that it’ll be a product that is producing an unsafe product, or outsourcing American jobs to countries with fewer worker protections, or using sweatshop labor to keep prices low.

And I think, yeah– I wouldn’t mind having these images, this music, used next to such an ad. At all. Maybe it’ll make people think about where their Nikes or their Chinese-built electronics come from. Maybe this ad placement will actually, despite the intentions of the corporations involved, raise consciousness a little tiny bit about the machine of production in an international economy.

Or maybe they’ll eventually silence it, and I’ll just have to upload it again with a crappy MIDI file of the song.

ETA: Apparently, YouTube has silenced yet another Lessig video.

Good to know you’re not alone.

Goofing around with video editing software yesterday, as I’m trying to make a habit lately as I take Digital Storytelling this semester, I decided to recycle those photos. The result was this:

As always, I’m not able to highlight all the blog posts I felt were particularly good or interesting– there’s just far too many of them. What you have here, then, is a selection from two weeks’ worth of solid student work… With extremely brief commentary from me.

Kristina Wade gives us a very nice introduction to WWII propaganda cartoons– Education for Death and Der Fuerher’s Face are two classics that no student of 20th century history should miss, and it was especially instructive to compare them to the Soviet anti-Nazi propaganda cartoon she included.

Andrew Steward presents us with a fascinating peek at what could well be the first crossover of animated characters from (very) different continuities, with a cartoon that combines two of the Fleisher Brothers’ most popular properties– Superman and Popeye. An unlikely but entertaining pairing, even if it’s not one of the best Fleisher Popeye cartoons out there.

Justin Pangilinan blogs about a topic that touches on concepts of international intellectual property, fair use, digital “piracy,” and fandom– some of my favorite topics– in his discussion of fan-subtitled (“fansubbed”) anime.

Elliot Meek discusses The Snowman as an example of a longer-form silent cartoon… I hadn’t seen this cartoon since I was a kid, and I’d forgotten how much I loved the art when I was little. It’s a little treacly now, but it holds up as an interesting cartoon. Definitely not as good an example of long-form silent animation as the first forty five minutes of Wall-E, but at the same time, this one ends before you get the ridiculous weird fat humans in hoverchairs and the HAL-9000 rip-off baddie.

Samitra Denardo gives us an excellent introduction to John Sutherland’s industrial animations, including Rhapsody of Steel, which is another can’t-miss piece of animation…definitely worth checking out.

James Benjamin Davis blogged about the recent feature 9 that touches on something that I wish more students would explore in their blogs– the assumption that just because a film is animated, it’s aimed at an audience of children. Seems to have started up a bit of a discussion, too.

Finally, two really fascinating posts about Pixar: Scott Bell made me think about the way Pixar makes movies by pointing out something I’d never really thought about: Pixar movies are almost all “about” one animation problem– Monsters, Inc. is essentially a movie about hair, for example. Jeannie Hilleary discusses the Easter Eggs that Pixar animators have left in their movies. Pixar plans their projects so far in advance that you can actually spot Wall-E in Toy Story.

In movie-making, a pitch is usually an oral thing– the short written version is a “treatment.” And given that the project that I want to work on would involve in me taking video of myself and putting it up on the web, interacting with people via sites like YouTube– something that I am not at all accustomed to or particularly comfortable about– I figured that doing my “pitch” via video would be particularly helpful.

So yeah– here’s my pitch. Do you think it sounds like a worthwhile/interesting/achievable project? Are there pitfalls I haven’t thought of that I should think about?

I decided to do a very brief sketch about the life of Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards– best known today as the voice of Jiminy Cricket, but a superstar in his own right in the 1920s.

I don’t know what to think of Animoto. It’s a nice tool in that it makes things quick. The video I made looks, to my eye, far more professional than the amount of time I spent on it would indicate.

That said, a lot of that “look” is somewhat distracting flash, and honestly, it PAINS me to sacrifice so much control. There are some transitions that work quite well– I especially liked the one between the cartoon of Edwards and the picture of Jiminy Cricket. But some others were far less effective– and a couple were just downright ugly.

The trick, of course, is to have lots of tools, and to use the appropriate tool for the appropriate task. Don’t go after a lug nut with a hammer, or what have you. And Animoto is a nice tool for turning out something quickly with a good deal of flash and apparent polish. I wouldn’t trust a tool like this for anything that I wanted closely related to my name, though– or anything on too sensitive a topic. It seems like a good tool for working fast and loose, and less so when a sensitive hand is called for.

At any rate, it was a fun little project, and I’ll definitely try to use the site again before the end of the semester.

It’s not a really shocking revelation to say that the pacing of animation has gotten more and more rapid over the last 100 years. Cuts have gotten quicker, scenes shorter, exposition has gone from painstaking (and painful) to nonexistent.

But the extent to which this is true becomes quite striking when you look at the change over time of a single, specific thing. I decided to look at the quickening of pacing in animation somewhere where you might not expect to find that much change– in breakfast cereal commercials.

A few examples tell the story better than I could ever hope to.

From 1939, a cartoon featuring the “Breakfast Pals”: Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

From some time in the 1960’s, an ad for Sugar Crisp Cerial (later renamed Super Golden Crisp.)

A pair of Fruity Pebbles ads, the first from the 70’s, and the second from the 80’s.

…I expected to find ads getting shorter, cuts getting quicker, exposition getting more minimal. But I was honestly shocked at the extent to which they did. From a minute and a half commercial, we move in a few decades to a fifteen second commercial. It’s a really amazing transformation, when you think about it.

Part of what happens is that audience expectations veer toward the rapid-fire approach. Simultaneously, audiences become used to the conventions of the genre– of animated cereal ads. These ads have a certain set of tropes, of conventions– there is a trickster, who wants the cereal, and there are those who try to keep the trickster from the cereal. The trickster utilizes subterfuge, misdirection, cartoon physics, or even violence to claim the cereal, proving that the product is so good that it requires extraordinary measures to attain it– so don’t be afraid to throw a fit if it makes your parents buy it. As audiences get used to the conventions, less explication is necessary.

The difference is striking, and it makes you think.

Bonnie Hansen explores the business side of the House of Mouse, looking at the selling of Disney’s famous princesses– not to young girls, but to grown women. Specifically, she looks at the marketing of Disney-branded weddings. It’s a view of a small but no doubt lucrative market that I was unaware of; one that, while I would never want such a wedding myself, I find fascinating.

Sandra Kellerhals historicizes and contextualizes The Jetsons, in terms of the futurism and optimism of the 1960s “space craze.” I was taken aback to realize that a show that– however fanciful– so influences our views of what “the future” might look like only lasted a single season.

In a pair of posts that work best taken together, Alissa Potter and Megan Pettry discuss the use of the Xerographic process in the first two Disney features to implement it, Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmations.

And finally, Erica LoMonaco looks at Pixar’s Cars as a paen to Route 66 as the “Main Street of America,” before the advent of the interstate highway system. Any blog post that makes me even consider watching a movie that features Larry the Cable Guy deserves some special kind of kudos.

Now, a lot of students are probably going to want to do a zoetrope or another persistence-of-vision toy, because it seems like the most accessible, simple technique. There’s no software or camera concerns– it seems like something a kid could do:

But just because the basic principle is simple doesn’t mean that the application of the principle needs to be simplistic. The following film uses the basic zoetrope technology to create something really powerful and beautiful.

(Watch it in hi res for maximum effect.)

Animator Eric Dyer, of Baltimore, spent a period of time biking around the city of Copenhagen, shooting things he saw. He then took the images and built a series of zoetrope-type devices using them. Finally, he filmed the results.

Here’s what his set-up looked like:

I think the project is amazing, both just because it’s visually beautiful and moving, and because it is such a fascinating reinterpretation of an old technology. In the below interview he describes his next project as involving hand-painted objects designed on a computer and printed out using a 3-D printer, and finally animated using the zoetrope technique. It’s a fascinating idea that, if it’s executed as well as “The Copenhagen Cycles,” will likely be stunning to see.

It seems to me like we’ve got one of those blind-men-and-an-elephant problems, here. I’ve been playing around with trying to come up with a working definition of “digital storytelling” for a couple days, now, and honestly, anything I can come up with is simultaneously:

• So broad as to be meaningless.
• Still far too restrictive.

This does not bode well for the prospect of coming up with anything that even resembles a “definitive answer” to the question of what “digital storytelling” is.

Which makes this class seem a bit amorphous.

The best I can come with is this: “Digital storytelling” is the use of digital (non-analog, usually computer-based) media to create (or suggest) a narrative (or set of narratives or narrative possibilities).

I could unpack that a little, but I’m afraid to do so too much, because the more you do, the more restrictive your definition becomes. So let me just sort of ramble about a couple of the implications of this.

The use of digital techniques alters older technologies by lowering barriers to use in both cost and necessity of technical skill. While techniques like sophisticated 3-d rendering are still prohibitively difficult for amateur users, digital photography, videography, sound recording, and image alteration have continued to get cheaper, faster, and easier. Looking at a the technological forces behind this, things like Moore’s Law, Rock’s Law, and Nielson’s Law all suggest that this pattern will continue. All things digital will continue to get faster, cheaper, easier, and better, as long as research and development continue.

Not only is this true with individual digitized media, but it is also true of the ability of computers to integrate various forms of media into a coherent whole. Digital technology continues to make it easier, faster, and cheaper to put together still and moving images, sounds, and written words, to combine them into new integrated wholes.

And just like the words and pictures of a comic strip, each of these elements gains something in combination with other elements– it’s a synergistic relationship. Looking at just the words or just the images of your average comic strip, you realize that either element is less meaningful when not interacting with the other. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. It’s the same thing with digital stories that incorporate multiple media.

While words, pictures, sound, and video are all clearly important building blocks for digital stories, it is important not to exclude the “natively digital” media that can be incorporated into digital storytelling projects– the two that spring immediately to mind are simulation and databases.

Both of these technologies present us with some of the most dramatic possibilities of digital storytelling: they do not necessarily follow– and indeed can be used to actively undermine– the traditional notions of narrativity we have from old media. Storytelling is no longer necessarily limited to a single beginning, middle, and end. Instead, creators have the ability to chart various paths that audiences can take, indeed– audiences are no longer limited to “passive” intake, but can actively guide their own user experience, taking the driver’s seat or even helping to build and extend the story itself.

Of course, audiences have never been particularly passive, and have always re-purposed, remixed, and reinterpreted the media they consume. The difference now is that we can construct stories that encourage or even force audiences to do just that. It can be built into the medium itself, now, rather than just being built into how humans consume stories.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) this week, there’s too many to choose from. A rundown of just a few of the posts I enjoyed, thought were good, made me think, etc…

Amanda Cole’s post looking at “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” as an homage to the greats of early short-subject animation does a nice job of linking a work with its predecessors.

Ian Crawford’s post does a very nice job of looking at a nontraditional source– a promotional video from the Cartoon Network– and using that to look at a moment in the history of the business of cartoons.

Joe Gayk’s post tries to go past the specific and to ponder some of the reasons for animation’s popularity. While the example Joe uses is markedly contemporary, I think his model of animation’s excess as a release valve to urban stresses could be particularly interesting when applied to the first twenty or thirty years of animation’s history.

Carlyn Pocalyko gives an almost encyclopedic view of “Rock-a-Doodle,” a colossal flop that I have to admit I’d forgotten about entirely, historicizing it as a watershed moment– as the movie where we can see Don Bluth’s relevance slip through his fingers.

…That’s just a few, and there were several other really great examples this week. Good work, guys– keep it up!

Below is my attempt:

I have to admit that, while many of the examples of “digital storytelling projects” that my classmates posted to the class blog were quite interesting and well-done, and some where quite thought-provoking and evocative, they felt a little… old media?

Basically, they were just low-budget, one-person documentary shorts.

One of the really fascinating things about new media technology, however, is the interactivity of it. If you use the internet in 2010, you are almost certainly not just a media consumer. You are a producer. The most successful sites on the internet– from Youtube to Facebook to Twitter to Google itself– are not content creators. They are frameworks that host user-generated content, sort it, make it manageable, encourage discovery. From the moment Tim Berners-Lee began to conceptualize the World Wide Web as something interlaced, hypertextual, navigated by users, the web has challenged models of passive viewership. The web is interactive. New media is interactive.

So where’s the interactivity in digital storytelling? Well, it seems to be coming. Though it is still pretty primitive in its application.

A sidebar of sorts:

Is it still storytelling if it’s interactive? If the author relinquishes some degree of control to the audience, is it still his or her story?

I would argue that it absolutely is. While a was a voracious and omnivorous reader as a child, one of my sisters’ and my favorite series of books was Bantam’s Choose Your Own Adventure series. Essentially bound hypertext, the book would take a forking narrative format, where the reader was, at key moments, presented with choices. The reader’s choices determined the outcome, but the author’s vision remained at the center. Forked stories could fork back into themselves at time– especially in a time-travel story.

While most video games are admittedly thin on narrative, some of the best follow a similar course– allowing player decisions to influence the chain of events within several forked narrative outcomes.

That digression over, I have to say, I haven’t found exactly what I was looking for. I haven’t found any single example that illustrates well how exciting this possibility is. But let me run through a couple examples– all imperfect in some way– that illustrate what kind of thinking I’m talking about. All of these take advantage of Youtube’s fairly recent annotation feature.

“B-Boy Joker” is very well-implemented, though it’s more of a game than a story. Even by game standards, there’s not much narrative: The Joker and Batman are having a dance battle. You have to match your opponent’s moves or he will defeat you. Not really a story at all. But the action is compelling, the use of annotations is highly effective, and the stop-motion animation is top-notch. One could imagine making a project that was more narrative along similar lines.

Similarly, “Youtube’s first weekly game show” Truth or Fail, is pretty lacking as a narrative, being more of a game. But while B-Boy Joker was more like a video game, Truth or Fail resembles a (highly eccentric) quiz show. Nevertheless, there is a beginning, middle, and end, and since many of us if not all of us are interested in the informative and pedagogical uses of digital storytelling, I thought it bore mentioning because it’s pretty easy to see how such a framework could be used educationally.

Finally, I found two more traditionally narrative interactive videos that unfortunately seem to be experiencing technical difficulties. Annnotations on some of the videos in these series seem to be broken, so clicking on the screen doesn’t always work. But go and check out The Time Machine: An Interactive Adventure and Choose Your Path: Find Sparta! and try to imagine them actually working.

At any rate, it seems obvious to me that interactivity is a pretty exciting possibility in digital storytelling. And that, unfortunately, we might not be quite there yet.

Last week, I had the opportunity to give the introductory talk of the class on the first day. After trying to go through the syllabus, cover the basic questions, etc., I got to show a cartoon and discuss it. I chose 1951’s Gerald McBoing-Boing.

I’ve loved this cartoon for years, and when I saw it wasn’t on the syllabus, I knew I wanted to include it as the subject of my introductory talk. I think it worked pretty well…

I used “Gerald McBoing-Boing” to discuss two approaches that students might want to use to avoid “animation appreciation” style blog posts. You may have loved Snow White as a kid, and that’s great, but it’s of limited scholarly value to say that. So I tried to talk about how we can use “Gerald McBoing-Boing” to look at American history through animation, as well as to look at its place within the history of animation.

As a historical artifact, “Gerald” is a fascinating piece. Created right as the heat was turning up on the 20th century America’s second great Red Scare, this is a parable about conformity and the price paid by those who cannot fit in. While the company that produced it, UPA, was created after the Disney animators’ strike, and while the cartoon rejects the forced conformity that immigrants, gays, leftists, and others felt so strongly during the years of HUAC and McCarthy, it’s simultaneously distinctly not a socialist/communist picture. Gerald’s escape from the persecution of conformist America wasn’t a rejection of capitalism, but actually finding a place within capitalism. Once Gerald’s difference can be commodified, it is respected rather than rejected.

At the same time, it’s a great cartoon to use to discuss the history of animation itself. It’s a great early exemplar (and trend setter) of what some have described as the cartoon modern style of heavily design-oriented 50’s animation. Moreover, it was one of the first cartoons to gain attention for its use of limited animation. UPA cartoonists started using limited animation techniques in reaction to the regime of naturalism over at the House of Mouse, as an artistic decision. However, when the technique became more and more popular, it quickly became obvious that it was a faster, cheaper way to do animation. In this way, the look of the Hannah Barbara cartoons I grew up loving was very deeply influenced by this cartoon.

I picked “Gerald McBoing-Boing” for exactly the same “animation appreciation” reasons that I urged the students to avoid, and I copped to that: I mostly wanted to show this cartoon because it’s cute and it’s visually striking, and it has funny sound effects.

But once selected by those criteria, it’s necessary– and even rewarding– to slip on the “critical historical analysis” colored glasses, and see if they deepen the reading. In this case, it certainly did. Looking for an excuse to show this cartoon made me realize what a fascinating cartoon it really is.

“Crowdsourcing,” for any reader lucky enough to not be thouroughly immersed in the world of New Media buzzwords, is something we all instinctively understand these days as web users: it’s aggregating the “wisdom of crowds,” using the knowledge of many and putting it into one centralized repository. It’s why Amazon has more reviews of a given book than anywhere else, and why Wikipedia has an entry on everything.

Anyone who keeps up at all with Digital History can name a few projects that attempt to crowdsource Historical Memory. CHNM’s September 11 Digital Archive or the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank are two great examples, projects that seek not to create consensus about Historical Memory, but to serve as repositories, places where those who have witnessed history can contribute their memories, their voices, to the historical record in a way that might serve to enrich the scholarship of future historians.

Which is a great and admirable mission. But while they are very different in impact and gravity, both 9/11 and Mozilla’s rising from the ashes of the browser wars as a viable Open Source alternative to Internet Explorer are Big Events, events that warrant the time, money, and effort that building an online database represents.

But one of the really great things about the internet is its ability, in its near-infinite expandability, to meet niche demands, to offer up a space for any topic under the sun. There’s no topic too obscure to find a home in some far corner of the World Wide Web.

This means that the internet presents an opportunity for groups of loosely affiliated people to navigate common memories. We can crowdsource the details of even small, personal memories.

I came across a really great example of this phenomenon when the multi-talented cartoonist Dave Sherrill recently posted a comic strip that loosely recreated the plot of a fondly– but vaguely– remembered children’s book from his youth in a LiveJournal community that helps people find the titles of half-remembered books.

Within a couple hours, a community member had recognized the description and pointed Sherrill in the right direction. The book was Grandpas Ghost Stories by Jim Flora.

The book seems to be out of print, but there is an animated version of the story on YouTube:

Sherrill’s description of the book seems to be decent but spotty. The comic is awesome, but I doubt Sherrill would have found the title if he had simply went to Google, or even to a children’s librarian, with the vague description he was able to produce from memory. But given the ability to access a large enough aggregate of people with disparate memories, he was able to quickly (if you don’t count the time taken to draw or color the comic) find someone else who was able to help fill in the gaps in his own personal childhood memory.

With the very deeply personal way we connect with our favorite books as children, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a small revelation to Dave, something that set him off even further into other memories he had not accessed in years.

Without having to even exchange introductions and niceties, Sherrill was able to harness the collective memory of a group of people in order to supplement and enhance his own, personal memories. That’s something you’d very seldom get from old-tech systems like the reference section of a library or calling friends to see if anyone happened to recall it. It’s certainly more efficient, and less place-dependent.

To anyone who enjoyed Dave’s comic, I would encourage you to click through to his LiveJournal account– I’m a big fan of his art. And check out his band, 100 Damned Guns, as well– they’re one of the rockin’est roots-country bands out there today.