Still unconvinced by measures to clean up the site, by mid-March 2007 Viacom filed a lawsuit at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against YouTube and Google. Citing Section 106 of the US Copyright Act of 1976, Viacom complained that YouTube was directly infringing the companys exclusive rights to reproduce, publicly display and publicly perform its library of copyrighted works. Although users upload videos, clips are converted to YouTubes own software format, creating a copy that may infringe the right to reproduce. Viacom also argued that because searches pull up small thumbnail images of videos, some of which may come from infringing material, YouTube was violating the right to publicly display works. By streaming content in response to requests from users, the plaintiff also complained that YouTube was engaging in unauthorized public performance of copyrighted works. Alongside these charges of direct infringement, Viacom complained that by allowing users to upload unauthorized copies, YouTube was not only liable for inducement but also contributory infringement. Finally, Viacom alleged that as YouTube had the means to supervise and control infringing content but failed to do so for copyright owners who were not licensed partners, the company was vicariously liable.28 Viacom claimed YouTube was fully aware of infringing activity but turned a blind eye in order to build traffic drawn by copyrighted content. Furthermore, although content that is not provided by licensed partners is unlikely to be positioned with paid advertising, Viacom claimed that YouTube still profited from using infringing content to build traffic and thereby enhance the sites market share. Viacom claimed YouTube not only had actual knowledge and clear notice of this massive infringement, but also that the presence of infringing copyrighted material [] is fully intended by Defendants as a critical part of their business plan to drive traffic and increase YouTubes network, market share and enterprise value. Consequently, Viacom argued, YouTube has built an infringement-driven business. In support of these allegations, the plain tiff complained YouTube had the means to identify and remove pornographic videos and so could filter content, yet did not extend the same controls to infringing content.29 YouTube denied the allegations made by Viacom and the case has yet to be decided.30 What lies behind these arguments is a purely economic evaluation of YouTubes communicative status: will the unauthorized posting of video material undermine the rights of the copyright industries to gain 400 401 Industry
BrandSpace YouTube needs advertising, but to attract advertisers the site also requires inoffensive, non-infringing content. In this respect the content partner program functions as a strategy for legitimizing YouTube as a safe site for advertising. Reciprocally, for producers and owners of content, YouTube can provide a vital means to expand their audience. As the reputation or exposure of videos can rapidly spread through word of mouth, e-mail, blogging, text messages and Instant Messaging, YouTube has become a launch pad for viral video. And it is from this dynamic that YouTube holds the potential to become a platform for viral marketing. If viral video is a statement about the infectious distribution potential of video sharing, viral marketing is a statement about the promotional To consolidate the presence of these sources, the content partner program creates branded channels, mini-sites within the main YouTube site that are built around the content of partners. For example, visiting the channel for Walt Disney Motion Pictures UK opens up to a page entirely dedicated to and exclusively occupied by Disney content. Video content is limited to trailers of currently available films, which play through the usual watch window. At the top of the page a banner ad acts as a click-through link to the external main website for Disney in the UK. Interactive functions are included to cultivate and nurture their viral potential: visitors can subscribe to a channel for free, and options are provided to share a channel or playlist. Branded channels cover a diverse range of content. On the US site for YouTube, video material uploaded by partners includes content that falls under the categories of how-to (e.g. Expert Village, Make Magazine), music (e.g. Bohemia Visual Music, 32 33 Industry
Narrative self-reference: the rhizomatic branching or viral contagion propagating in all directions, while non-hierarchical and flat or lateral in its linkage, nonetheless seems to produce a surprisingly high degree of self-reflexivity and auto-referentiality, no doubt due to the effects of positive feedback. The demonstrations of chain reaction, mechanical concatenation, Pythagoras switches and falling dominoes are performative also in the sense that they either enact their own conditions of possibility or remediate a previous stage of their own mediality, as nostalgic or ironic pastiche and repetition. For instance, via the Pythagoras switch another meta-dimension emerged, which brought one of the core mechanisms of YouTube into view. One of the creators of the Pythagoras switch series is the video artist Sato Masahiko, one of whose installations, called Bubble Sort, I was linked to. The piece, which shows a line of people waiting, rearranging themselves according to size in fast-forward motion, completely baffled me, until its tags led to several other videos, also having to do with sorting. Masahikos video, it transpires, visualizes a popular sorting algorithm, called indeed bubblesort, explained on YouTube by tens of videos, all manually remediating or graphically interfacing the different sorting algorithms (insertion sort, selection sort, shell sorts, etc.), apparently a favorite pastime for first-year computer science students. The cast of characters, as we saw, included some well-known names, such as Rube Goldberg, Pythagoras, James Bond; oth ers become known because they sign their work: Antoine BardouJacquet, Fischli & Weiss, Tim Fort, Sato Masahiko; many more merely present themselves to the camera in low-resolution homemade videos. Thanks to all of them, however, the YouTube ways of showing and telling are ludic and reflexive, educational and participatory, empowering and humbling; in short: they mark an unusually soft dividing line between creative design and hard-core engineering, storytelling and role playing, singularity and repetition. To put this in the terms of another discourse, more germane to the post-human: it is to find oneself in the presence of strange organisms, pulsing, moving and mutating, depending on the tags one enters or encounters, as YouTube sorts, filters and aggregates the choices I am not even aware of making. That they cluster themselves semantically is partly a concession to the human interface, but partly also because of a special heuristic value: it is where the cultural noise of verbal language encounters the information of the mathematical program, providing the constructive instability of performed failure, and throwing the grit of human creativity and dirt of human unpredictability into the machinery of perfect human-machine adaptation. The traditional asymmetry of the single point of origin (the author, the narrator) addressing a potentially infinite number of readers or viewer was already deconstructed by Roland Barthes writerly text and many other narratologists since. Hence, the multiple authorship of the YouTube tales, when joining up with the selectivity and serendipity of the user, make YouTube a very writerly experience. But the mode of address that I am trying to focus on is also different from the writerly in that it creates an empty space of enunciation, to be filled by the anonymous, but also plural me. On the one hand, a site like YouTube is inherently addictive, as one video drags one along to another and another and another. Yet after an hour or so, one realizes how precariously balanced and delicately poised one is, between the joy of discovering the unexpected, the marvelous and occasionally even the miraculous, and the rapid descent into an equally palpable anxiety, staring into the void of an unimaginable number of videos, with their proliferation of images, their banality or obscenity in sounds and commentary. Right next to 12 13 Form
A third point, worth highlighting because it brings the Honda Cog and Der Lauf der Dinge in line not only with each other, but aligns them with major issues in film studies and film theory, is that both are the work of bona fide filmmakers. I already highlighted this in my comments on the Honda Cog and its proximity to the Hollywood blockbuster, but it is worth pointing out that Der Lauf der Dinge only exists as a film/videotape: it is not the filmic record of a performance of machinic self-destruction, but an event staged specifically for the camera. The mise-en-scne in each case is that of an auteur director, who decides exactly where to place the camera, when to move it, how to 14 1 Form
What scripted stories or spatial narratives, then, does YouTube offer, once a user engages with the sites dynamic architecture, sets up a few ground rules (both narratives and games need rules), and then lets him/ herself be taken to different sites, spaces and places: not by the logic of an individual characters aims, obstacles, helpers and opponents, but by the workings of contiguity, combinatory and chance? In other words, what happens when neither the causal chain of action and reaction, nor the temporal succession of locales determines the direction or 1 1 Form
The rough, para-industrial setup, the processes put in motion as well as the materials used inevitably recall many of the key elements of modern sculpture, conceptual art and other avant-garde practices, notably (but not only) from the post-WW II period: the concern for balance and suspension (Suprematism and Constructivism); assemblage art (from the late 1940s); kinetic art (from the 1950s and 60s); trash objects, garbage and recycled materials (from New Realism and Pop); ready-mades and small wasted energies made useful (Marcel Duchamp); and finally, the energies inherent in apparently inert matter from the work of Carl Andre, not to forget the macho-engineering skills of 12 13 Form
Click the Add music button under the Home tab. Click Add Music option to add audio to the entire project. (Here, if you want to place the audio at a particular point in the project, you can navigate to the place in the project and then choose the Add music at the current point.) Select the music file you wish to import and then click the Open button.
Open Windows Movie Maker to get its main interface, as shown below. Now, you can try the following steps to import files to Movie Maker: Click the Home tab and then click the Add videos and photos button in the Add group. In the Add Videos and Photos dialog box, select the photo or video that you want to add and then click on the Open button to continue. You can press the Ctrl button to select more than one file to import. After adding photos to Movie Maker 2012 you can change the Duration of your photos. The default is 7 seconds. Sometimes, you may receive the warning “Movie Maker is preparing your files.” Movie Maker will generate preview files to improve playback of some video file types. If the message appears when you import files, wait until the program has finished generating the previews before trying to edit. Depending on the number and size of files in your project, this might take a few minutes. Windows Movie Maker can also let you create movies by using photos and videos imported from Photo Galleries, DVD’s, digital camcorders or smartphones. You can read this post, “How to Add Pictures and Videos to Windows Movie Maker”, to see more detailed information.
It doesn’t end with shooting. You have to edit the film to produce the structure of the film. Though editing softwares are easily accessible now, but it is recommended that you hire a professional editor to edit your film because they’ll provide aesthetic inputs by using various editing styles. This will make the film precise (which is the ultimate goal) and stylize it. Even if you are editing it yourself, make sure you know about various montage techniques. A well edited film is always a treat to watch.
When you are making a low budget film, obviously you’ll not have Hollywood Gears to shoot. But don’t make it an excuse for poor quality. Technology today has made possible to make short films with a mobile phone camera. As Anurag Kashyap said, “Your film might be low-budget, but it shouldn’t look like one.” So, utilize the gears you have at your disposal and make something that looks perfect and not poor. So, for example, if you don’t have Sound Recording equipments, try to use your creativity to make a film with very less dialogues. But, don’t make the dialogues sound noisy and disturbing. This will affect the quality of the film. Necessity is the mother of invention. If you want some special shot badly, try to execute it with small “jugaads”. A famous jugaad for Dolly is the wheelchair. Also, utilize natural lighting as much as possible to reduce cost of artificial lighting.