KILLA APP or paper 4

the tool

while perhaps not its chief concern, deeply entwined within the roots of youtube and web video is a wonderfully idealistic and unabashed disregard for copyright in the name of reappropriation of meaning. What I mean is that ripping and remixing are very close to the heart and soul of our generation, and those concerned with web video should concern themselves with generating some user generated content themselves, given how absurdly easy it is to do so - which leads me to the web tool my 'readers' absolutely cannot live without - a youtube ripper.

I chose this tool without doing any research, relying on my faith in the internet that such a thing would exist when I finally googled it. Lo and behold, there were so many I still don't really know where to start. The difference between something like this and a nifty little widget is that this isn't one unique device created for a nifty little purpose (concrete examples fail me this close to graduation, lets say a visualizer- an especially unique and trippy visualizer) but is rather a concept, as elementary as cut and paste on the simplest word processor.

Before I get ahead of myself though, I should say that there are plenty of rippers that exist as these sort of self-inclusive widgets, mostly for PC. VDownloader and KeepV are examples of decent freeware desktop rippers for windows that can rip into several different formats, with the latter having the advent of a built-in format converter (something a reliable freeware version of can be suprisingly hard to come by). As is the fate of the software spectrum for Mac users, there is all of one reliable desktop application for OS that I have found - GetTube. Whatever. At any rate, I am going to ignore these partisan desktop apps in pursuit of a reliable, unbiased web app - not only because the assignment was to find a web tool, but because it reveals (for me anyway) the beautiful simplicities of digital information that underly all the crazy confusing tangled code that I'll never understand and the possibilities it provides for piracy and mischief.

These various web apps were the easiest to find, yet the hardest to sift through in terms of tangible differences between each one. The one aspect of their simplicity which struck me is that to use all of these rippers, you simply paste the url into a box on the website which then downloads the video to your desktop. videodownloadx.com is probably the simplest to use of them all, but along with KeepVid, the downloaded files have strange extension names that must be changed manually to flv (the extension for flash videos). To sidestep this and the whole flv thing if you want (most editing software doesn't support flv yet), I reccomend Zamzar, an online ripper/converter in one that supports many different video sharing sites and file extensions.

Anyway, now that we've picked one, I can continue making my point. Using something that is essentially metadata (the url) to rip an entire video fascinates me. It is merely a signpost that points to the spot where code is stored and can be copied quite easily. It had never really occurred to me until recently that when I watch a video on the internet, my computer is processing code that it has the capacity to remember, simple as that. This just flips the switch. more on this concept in the next post - lip service time. Zamzar is based out of the UK, and while you can pay for more options and larger file sizes, the best stuff is still free. Their name is inspired by a Kafka character, and on their about page they have a simple mission statement: "To provide high quality file conversion for as many file formats as possible." Perfect.

more thoughts on the tool

As I was saying, using online rippers illuminates certain aspects of the nature of ripping files that are somehow isolated and inoculated when using a desktop program, hidden behind the inherent shiny niftiness that most 'widgets' seem to inherit. Its entirely possible that its just me, but something about pasting the url- metadata, a key part of the framework of the object in question-conjures sensations of loopholes and savviness and beating the system. Many of the reviews of online rippers highighted their usefulness in not only breaking copyright law, but circumventing it altogether by serving as a means to capture controversial or otherwise videos before they are taken down by the powers that be. I find the idea of copyright control and censorship on the internet using traditional media as a model to be quite absurd - hell, the film and television industry tried using legislation to stop the first home video recording devices from being mass produced.

In my mind, if it is part of the media stream in the grand scheme it is fair game, whether that takes the form of graffiti on an especially nauseating billboard ad or a humorously re-cut trailer of a mainstream film. The now-incredibly-popular street artist Banksy has a fantastic quote about why he defaces advertisements (bear with me here): "You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs." Now ripping/remixing isn't vandalism because the original is left intact and not by any stretch are all youtube videos promoting or advertising something, but the idea that someone knowingly put it out there, maybe didn't shove in under your nose, but put it in a public place means I can do what I want with it artistically. Reminiscent of the artists plight: whatever meaning you placed in your work often has no bearing on how people interpret it. Once you put it out there, it is not yours to control anymore - it is the rest of the world's to experience and manipulate and derive meaning from. This is getting long-winded - the fact is with Zamzar and others, not only can you keep your own personal library of videos and have the abilitiy to dodge copyright law, it is absurdly easy and fun to generate remixed or reappropriated content and contribute to the leveling of the playing field. It is your right as a human introduce your own viewpoint to the conversation. Here is a means.

a word on the presentation links

Rather than lead my readers leaping and bounding through a Prezi or Ludovico-treat-them-to a powerpoint, I decided to assemble a few key videos from YouTube to form the cornerstones of my presentation.

eisensteinian collision
Here is a wonderfully graphic and explicit example of a user-generated remix. Using only basic communist film theory in conjunction with Zamzar and a twisted sense of humor, we see the saccharine innocence of kids' TV collide with the violently sexist message of Lil' Jon and as a result - we laugh like hell. Oh the possibilities...

damn copyright hawks
My own attempt at user-generated content feat. Zamzar and Final Cut Pro. The eerie silence you hear is the result of YouTube's copyright hawk - a program that scans your videos for copyrighted songs (it is immune to EQ'ing, pitch-bending, re-recording... essentially all pirate stand-bys) and cuts out the video's tongue. While it is frustrating that I cut the entire video (using clips from Berkeley in the 60's and The Last Picture Show) to the song, it is a perfect example of an obstacle a user-generator may face and also brings up Zamzar's usefulness as a means of capturing soon-to-be-censored videos.

the mother of all funk chords
After my frustrating brush with copyright law I wondered how I could sidestep my way into an original soundtrack and stumbled upon someone who had already perfected this. How about a song constructed entirely of how-to videos for musical instruments. The funk exists in the ether- assemble it as you see fit.

its not where I am - its who I'm with

An old friend with a perpetual twang in his musical tastes showed me this video the other day. While he's usually more country-and-folk-inclined than myself, Dave may be on to something here. Watch the first bit then keep reading and let the song play.



I am enamored with the simplicity of this video - three minutes of one shot of three guys jammin in a gondola in Wyoming. The gondola is key. Close quarters begat claustrophobic camera angles that create an awkward sense of intimacy with the musicians while the background slides peacefully out behind them. The gentle and smooth motion of the gondola is perfectly in step with the rhythym of the song and carries the linear progression of the video so that after three minutes thirty seconds we've hardly noticed any time pass.

The simplicity of the video's concept allows us to focus on little things - like 1.15 where the drummer nodding his head makes it seem like he's walking the gondola up the hill Fred Flintstone style or 1.46 where the guitarist adjusts his capo and the song pauses for a thoughtful second- Rough spots that we catch our interest on as we pass.

The way I see it, everything about this video is organic - the way the harmonies sound in the gondola, the natural scenery passing behind, the minor flaws in the performance and the one thing that I can't quite put my finger on that keeps making me watch it again.

a word on the presentation links

Rather than lead my readers leaping and bounding through a Prezi or Ludovico-treat-them-to a powerpoint, I decided to assemble a few key videos from YouTube to form the cornerstones of my presentation.

eisensteinian collision
Here is a wonderfully graphic and explicit example of a user-generated remix. Using only basic communist film theory in conjunction with Zamzar and a twisted sense of humor, we see the saccharine innocence of kids' TV collide with the violently sexist message of Lil' Jon and as a result - we laugh like hell. Oh the possibilities...

damn copyright hawks
My own attempt at user-generated content feat. Zamzar and Final Cut Pro. The eerie silence you hear is the result of YouTube's copyright hawk - a program that scans your videos for copyrighted songs (it is immune to EQ'ing, pitch-bending, re-recording... essentially all pirate stand-bys) and cuts out the video's tongue. While it is frustrating that I cut the entire video (using clips from Berkeley in the 60's and The Last Picture Show) to the song, it is a perfect example of an obstacle a user-generator may face and also brings up Zamzar's usefulness as a means of capturing soon-to-be-censored videos.

the mother of all funk chords
After my frustrating brush with copyright law I wondered how I could sidestep my way into an original soundtrack and stumbled upon someone who had already perfected this. How about a song constructed entirely of how-to videos for musical instruments. The funk exists in the ether- assemble it as you see fit.

PORTFOLIORAMA

HELLO POST

Hello. The internet knows me as Thurl Chessor and I am a twenty-two year old cinema major in the final lap of an education that began sixteen years ago.

I realize the title of my blog might suggest that it provides of some form of cure. This is unfortunate, as I don't claim to know anything about medicine and for that matter am not even sure that youtube or viral videos are things to be 'inoculated' against. I have, however, decided to live with my last-minute titling decision in the true spirit of "whatever-you-put-on-the-

internet-is-out-there-forever," and treat it as irrevocable. Lets break it down - While a vaccine is a preventative measure, it can, in some circumstances, have the unintended effect of transmitting the disease. I have decided that the title is ironic and that this blog will be a perverse exploration of that possibility. Let me explain-


The difference between youtube and traditional broadcast media is that youtube is just the shit, whereas traditional broadcast media ultimately fails to present any sort of accurate portrait of the human condition it reports on/is inspired by. Humans are strange creatures - if you don't believe me, ride a greyhound. Higher purposes aside, my fascination with youtube stems from its quality as a swamp for this general eccentricity - the runoff of ideas of an entire species. Youtube is an unaltered, unaffected view into the minds of millions - what they find to be meaningful, traumatic, funny, normal (which is often turns out to be very funny) or whatever adjective merits using video as a means to explore it (which is all of them).


I suppose now is as good a time as any to drop all pretense and really set the mood. I was going to continue to pontificate on the humanistic qualities of youtube, but I have a whole blog ahead of me for that. I should let you know I fully intend through this blog to spread my unhealthy addiction to the strangest, most affecting videos youtube and the internet at large have to offer. Through strategic use of my misleading title I will lure unsuspecting, refuge-seeking webgoers to my blog where I will bombard them with strange and hilarious videos. With intent to distribute, I will amass lethal amounts of weird videos - videos weird enough to embarrass even the most isolated viewer. Weird that won't leave. Weird that haunts. I mean weird like when you were a kid and you invented back-stories for all of your bath toys, even the non-anthropomorphic ones. Oh you didn't? Me neither, my point is that anything is fair game in a 'rogues gallery' - something I hope this will become.

Readers may also be subjected to analysis and ponderings on the nature of said weirdness, as informed by 94% of a bachelors in film criticism.


PROFILE POST

While anyone writing about viral video must pull their subject matter from the same wonderful cesspool as all the others, as far as ethos goes, this particular blog and mine share very little. So then- to perhaps gain a little perspective on the phenomenon of viral video and to anchor some of the more enthusiastic claims made in my hello-manifesto, lets take a look at the Viral Video Research Blog. The blog itself is a satellite to the website of Visible Measures, a silicon-valley company that specializes in providing "new capabilities and metrics that allow Internet video publishers and advertisers to understand audience behaviors and more accurately predict and analyze the success of Internet video programs" - in their own words. In other words, they are part of a fairly recent wave of firms that essentially hawk more hits on youtube.
But maybe thats a little harsh. Aside from offering placement options on various high-ranking sites, youtube among them, they also provide very detailed viewership statistics from a database of over 100 million videos on the top ten video sharing sites on the web. While I suppose this is a perfectly respectable example of modern capitalism, I can't seem to shake this feeling that I should somehow morally oppose what appears to be, at its most basic form, the commodifying of a new arena for creative expression. I'm sure there are complexities to the business model I don't understand and any number of salesmen that could smooth over any ideological concerns I might have, but ultimately I'm not here to bleed my heart out or buy anything. My interest in this blog lies in the statistics and research - rigid portraits of phenomena as they happen.


I have a feeling that it may come in handy to have a cold, hard, mathematical point of view to fall back on when attempting analysis of a video's most affecting qualities. One post I found to be particularly interesting features one of the first youtube mega-sensations - Judson Laipply's The Evolution of Dance. Contributor Matt Cuttler, writing shortly after the release of The Evolution of Dance 2, illuminates the possibilites of the sequel as a concept in the viral video world, versus the established model of the sequel in traditional media. Posing a question only answerable with time, Cuttler asks - "Is this evidence of an emerging trend, or a flash-in-the-pan that's destined to be a footnote in the history of our industry?" While he does not (and I assume dares not to) answer the question outright, the statistics provided raise interesting points about online viewing habits. Cuttler points to an incease in daily views of the original after the release of the sequel as evidence of what they call "viral activation," where interest in a new clip "drives a corresponding increase in viewership to related, but older clips."


While terms like "viral activation" certainly point to the commodifying aspect of corporate research I expressed fear of earlier, as with any buzzword, its meaning is often less frilly and ornamental than the word itself. Just think - how many times have you watched Jizz in my Pants, remembered Dick in a Box and then wound up watching the classic Lazy Sunday at least four times? Maybe never, but my point is that we all, as internet viewers, are more familiar than we might think with emerging viewership patterns detailed by firms like this. We invent them as we click about, leaving firms like Visible Measures to speculate about what that could possibly mean. We will be keeping an eye on this one and the trends it claims to capture and categorize, if only for the purpose of juxtaposition against the more cult-like, rabid-fan aspect of youtube I hope to delve into.


VOICE POST

Lets continue to tread the water of other people's blogs and examine the voice and writing style of Alexandra Juhasz in Media Praxis. While this blog is not geared specifically towards youtube and viral video, Juhasz maintains a lightly humorous, intelligent, acacdemic voice in her discussion of media theory and practice at large. Her post Even Obama: Irony in the Time of Youtube outlines a thesis (the theme of which is highly visible in the second half of the title of the post), and presents an interesting display of academic online barb-trading - much more the gentleman's game than the customary torrent of hatred and stupidity that seems to emanate from most youtube comments. Juhasz begins the address of her thesis with a quote:

“The week after the election, in a talk at the New York Public Library, Joan Didion lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an “irony-free zone,” a vast Kool-Aid tank where “naïvete, translated into ‘hope,’ was now in” and where “innocence, even when it looked like ignorance was now prized.” Andy Newman, Sunday Styles Section, New York Times, November 23, 2008.

Quite the scholarly method of commencing to prove a point, Juhasz immediately takes a contradictory stance to such established academic names as Joan Didion and a bit later, The Web Is Us/ing Us creator Michael Wesch. Juhasz does this in what at first appears to be a pejorative maner, casually referring to Didion by her first name - "Joan, seriously (umm…ironically?), have you spent much time on YouTube?" - then quickly and gracefully begins to lay the theoretical groundwork under her taunt - "You of all people must be aware that Barack Obama, heralded by The Washington Post, no less, as our first “YouTube President,” also announced after his election the commencement of weekly broadcasts of his presidency’s “fire-side chats” on-line and on YouTube. While the tone, form, and message of these networked national addresses are decidedly serious, presidential even, Joan, you’re savvy enough to get the joke, to intuit the wink, the implied aside to a history of worn out presidents, tired fires, and cornball communications."


The subsequent explication of her thesis proves to be just as eloquent and cutting, but I'm not trying to re-post the whole thing to rack up my word count. To put it one way - recent worries I harbored concerning my possibly excessive use of commas, adjectives and generally (what I feel like may be) lengthy sentences dissipated instantly upon reading this post in its entirety. Juhasz's masterful use of commas creates an ease of reading reminiscent of completely informal blogs, but without the advent of irritating 'lol's and excessive use of parentheses (although parentheses can be done tastefully. wink). The overall tone created by this provides a legitimate academic backdrop for conversational humor - indeed, the effect of her writing is akin to what I imagine being in a starbucks full of P.h.Ds is like. At any rate, highly evident in this first jab is the effective, balanced combination of casual and scholastic tone (something I'm beginning to sense is neccessary for all blogs and indicative of the balance that life requires in general) that informs her overall writing style.


To neatly package this first thrust of her thesis in a flurry of excellent word choice, Juhasz refers to Obama's fireside youtube videos as "...a new kind of president-talk produced through documentary’s oldest, most eloquent sobriety, fireside-hot, only to be elegantly plopped into his society’s silliest platform. Incongruity-free? Naïve? I’d say not." Ending memorably seems to be a blogging rule of thumb, so in the spirit of this post and the one before it, I will appropriate the memorableness of that last passage and re-post it here, only one sentence later, in italics for emphasis.

His move, like most on YouTube, is irony-full: a regal black American taking up the hot-spot, filling the usually-segregated head-shot, a new kind of president-talk produced through documentary’s oldest, most eloquent sobriety, fireside-hot, only to be elegantly plopped into his society’s silliest platform. Incongruity-free? Naïve? I’d say not.

presentation links

eisensteinian collision
damn copyright hawks
the mother of all funk chords

more thoughts on the tool

As I was saying, using online rippers illuminates certain aspects of the nature of ripping files that are somehow isolated and inoculated when using a desktop program, hidden behind the inherent shiny niftiness that most 'widgets' seem to inherit. Its entirely possible that its just me, but something about pasting the url- metadata, a key part of the framework of the object in question-conjures sensations of loopholes and savviness and beating the system. Many of the reviews of online rippers highighted their usefulness in not only breaking copyright law, but circumventing it altogether by serving as a means to capture controversial or otherwise videos before they are taken down by the powers that be. I find the idea of copyright control and censorship on the internet using traditional media as a model to be quite absurd - hell, the film and television industry tried using legislation to stop the first home video recording devices from being mass produced. In my mind, if it is part of the media stream in the grand scheme it is fair game, whether that takes the form of graffiti on an especially nauseating billboard ad or a humorously re-cut trailer of a mainstream film. The now-incredibly-popular street artist Banksy has a fantastic quote about why he defaces advertisements (bear with me here): "You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs." Now ripping/remixing isn't vandalism because the original is left intact and not by any stretch are all youtube videos promoting or advertising something, but the idea that someone knowingly put it out there, maybe didn't shove in under your nose, but put it in a public place means I can do what I want with it artistically. Reminiscent of the artists plight: whatever meaning you placed in your work often has no bearing on how people interpret it. Once you put it out there, it is not yours to control anymore - it is the rest of the world's to experience and manipulate and derive meaning from. This is getting long-winded - the fact is with Zamzar and others, not only can you keep your own personal library of videos and have the abilitiy to dodge copyright law, it is absurdly easy and fun to generate remixed or reappropriated content and contribute to the leveling of the playing field. It is your right as a human introduce your own viewpoint to the conversation. Here is a means.

the tool

while perhaps not its chief concern, deeply entwined within the roots of youtube and web video is a wonderfully idealistic and unabashed disregard for copyright in the name of reappropriation of meaning. What I mean is that ripping and remixing are very close to the heart and soul of our generation, and those concerned with web video should concern themselves with generating some user generated content themselves, given how absurdly easy it is to do so - which leads me to the web tool my 'readers' absolutely cannot live without - a youtube ripper.

I chose this tool without doing any research, relying on my faith in the internet that such a thing would exist when I finally googled it. Lo and behold, there were so many I still don't really know where to start. The difference between something like this and a nifty little widget is that this isn't one unique device created for a nifty little purpose (concrete examples fail me this close to graduation, lets say a visualizer- an especially unique and trippy visualizer) but is rather a concept, as elementary as cut and paste on the simplest word processor.

Before I get ahead of myself though, I should say that there are plenty of rippers that exist as these sort of self-inclusive widgets, mostly for PC. VDownloader and KeepV are examples of decent freeware desktop rippers for windows that can rip into several different formats, with the latter having the advent of a built-in format converter (something a reliable freeware version of can be suprisingly hard to come by). As is the fate of the software spectrum for Mac users, there is all of one reliable desktop application for OS that I have found - GetTube. Whatever. At any rate, I am going to ignore these partisan desktop apps in pursuit of a reliable, unbiased web app - not only because the assignment was to find a web tool, but because it reveals (for me anyway) the beautiful simplicities of digital information that underly all the crazy confusing tangled code that I'll never understand and the possibilities it provides for piracy and mischief.

These various web apps were the easiest to find, yet the hardest to sift through in terms of tangible differences between each one. The one aspect of their simplicity which struck me is that to use all of these rippers, you simply paste the url into a box on the website which then downloads the video to your desktop. videodownloadx.com is probably the simplest to use of them all, but along with KeepVid, the downloaded files have strange extension names that must be changed manually to flv (the extension for flash videos). To sidestep this and the whole flv thing if you want (most editing software doesn't support flv yet), I reccomend Zamzar, an online ripper/converter in one that supports many different video sharing sites and file extensions.

Anyway, now that we've picked one, I can continue making my point. Using something that is essentially metadata (the url) to rip an entire video fascinates me. It is merely a signpost that points to the spot where code is stored and can be copied quite easily. It had never really occurred to me until recently that when I watch a video on the internet, my computer is processing code that it has the capacity to remember, simple as that. This just flips the switch. more on this concept in the next post - lip service time. Zamzar is based out of the UK, and while you can pay for more options and larger file sizes, the best stuff is still free. Their name is inspired by a Kafka character, and on their about page they have a simple mission statement: "To provide high quality file conversion for as many file formats as possible." Perfect.