I need time to go through these, these look good. I’ll get Alberto to talk about these in class.
http://locusamoenus.wordpress.com/
also my videocasts for this week are:
The Post Show
Basically it’s sketch comedy by a couple of guys in New York. I think they are, or were at one time, roommates and started making this videocast and have since had a great deal of success- according to their news posts they’ve been approached to make a pilot for a major network’s broadband channel, and have been selling dvd’s of their first season for a while. Luckily, they still have their all or most of their episodes on their website. Being sketch comedy, there is no real plot or recurring characters, but it’s still funny and worth the time to look around.
and
lonleygirl15
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=lonelygirl15
This one is pretty interesting, ostensibly it’s the diary of a homeschooled teenager in the middle of nowhere, and she talks about what she’s reading/studying and has a crush on her friend Daniel (who also has a videocast). However, a lot of people doubt whether it is real or not. They site the fact that Lonelygirl is too pretty, her videocasts are too well made, and seem scripted. For more on this, check out the NYT’s Screens Blog:
In fact just go to the main page of the blog, Virginia Heffernan has blogged a good deal about it.
http://screens.blogs.nytimes.com/
Also, I wanted to include my personal favorite, “Que vida mas triste” it’s entirely in Spanish so not everyone can understand it, but the Spanish speakers in the class (or anyone who just wants the practice) may want to check it out:
http://www.quevidamastriste.com/index.html
The title translates to “what a sad life”, and the premise is that the main character Borja a guy like any other, records his videolog every Sunday while hung-over from the night before. It focuses on his daily life and relationships with his friends and girlfriends. Usually it starts with him talking, then cuts to what he’s describing, then goes back to him when he wants to make a comment. The humour comes from the fact that Borja is very, very selfish and a liar, and thus an unreliable narrator- often what he describes and what we see happen are different. Arguably, he’s a modern take on the traditional Spanish “picaro”.
The creator/writer/director of QVMT, Ruben Ontiveros, is a television writer- and this is an example of a very professionally made videocast, in the making of video they show the studio where they film it every Sunday. In fact they shoot, edit, and post it all in a day- the first season has 52 episodes, one for every week in the year. The writing is excellent, and the overall story is very well done. They’ve even managed to incorporate flash animations as dream sequences in a couple of episodes. The whole thing is brilliant.
emac3326 