Go With the Flow!

[Mike Leigh Cooper]

At our media workshops at Headlands School as part of Musicport 2010 I've been talking about editing, but also about the importance of sometimes letting go of wanting to edit everything.

When we post something online, it's imparting a bit of our personality in the language we use, the pictures we embed, and the tone of our voice if we use audio or video.
Media is prevalent in all of our online usage on a day to day basis, the equipment to make produce content for the internet is so affordable we even have it in our phones.

Ok, so that's not new news (but imagine if you went back to even 1990 and told people what we have these days - they would assume we have hover cars by now).

The point being that we're all very used to video and audio now, we put hours of ourselves online doing silly things, and those videos get millions of hits. Some event make it onto TV with Alex Zane presenting them to the world, on shows such as Rude Tube. (to listen to my interview with him at the 2009 RTS Student TV Awards on the benefits of shooting your own media click here)
If we can see that it's not a big deal if we do something silly - in fact, it may even earn us some money, why are so many of us camera shy? We really shouldn't be.Video is one of the most powerful medium that we have, if not THE most powerful, and it's on projects like Musicport where young people like you can take control, and show people like me (who to be fair, might be getting closer to 30 than I like) how it's done "these days".

Lets look at the facts - you guys have so many advantages over even me, who might be juuust under 10 years older than some of you I'm teaching.
You've never had to sit through 30 minutes of a PC loading a web page (yes that did used to happen) and count yourself lucky you never used Windows 95, let alone Windows 3.1. You've all had cameras around your for years, and they don't cost quite so much as they used to, and you've made up your own language online. (we got their first with text messages, but wasn't quite so refined).


Young people could do so much more by raising your voices a bit, turn on that camera and get your point across, and to demonstrate this, I turned on my camera on our media session without telling anyone and walked around.
I didn't plan it, I didn't think about what I was going to say; I'm sure you can tell, and I sure as heck didn't edit it.

But I bet you have a better idea of what our sessions were like by watching it? (look below)

Find more videos like this on not just noise

So what do you think? Have I made a point? Did anyone do anything silly? Maybe, but who cares - the message is still there, and that's the point.


So get using your camera more....Or if you don't like your good side (or your bad side) then use an audio recorder :)

Like this, from a similar media project in York...