OT: Animation Fans Rejoice! The Disney-Pixar thing.

Image courtesy Pixar/Disney

Sorta off-topic but hours after the Disney acquisition of Pixar, John Lassiter scrapped the Toy Story 3 project.

A bitter idea, where the partner who didn't create the original films (Disney) decides to make a sequel "because they could" without any regard for story, the original creators (Pixar), and purely for financial gain. Let's be honest, with the run of Cinderella 2's and Lion King 2.5's and I'm sure there is a 3 in their library somewhere, plus the rash of remakes, it's heartening that Disney now has an animation soul once again. I loved the quote from the link, above:

"sequels should only be made if there is a really great story that demands it, and should be the domain of those who created the original film."

Does anyone have any Champaign?

Where's the Content

A number of articles in the NY Times have caught my attention, plus a bit of Podcasting news in general.

First the links. Convergence. Copyright.

...registration may be required on this NY Times page.

And even a middle school is getting students and teachers hip to video content on demand

And those are just the new stories I picked up on the GO train this morning.

Funny how we talked about interactivity and convergence of technology in my Media Business course at Ryerson University in Toronto in 1990 with our instructor Interactive Bob. Everyone had a long time to get ready for this and now everyone's scrambling. What's everyone been up to over the past 15 years? I'm just happy to have this window of opportunity open up to make a show I always wanted to make.

On a sidebar, Adam Curry's Daily Source Code and Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech have started taking advertising for their podcast. It's remarkable how quickly the ad world has warmed up to this phenomenon. I'm happy we got out there early on. To paraphrase Andrew Currie, "we need to pay our mortgages with this stuff now".

Now, what's up with Disney buying Pixar..?

Project Management for Dummies (me)

Very early on in the production of the podcast we realized two things: video podcasts and managing a virtual office are both tough.

I think it was the second day of deciding to do this, someone, I think it was Cam, suggested we find some way to link everyone up on some sort of web-based contact manager. Maybe not even that descriptive. It didn't take long before we found Basecamp from 37 Signals in Chicago. These guys make a number web-based aps including Writeboard (collaborative writing tool), Backpack (personal organizer) and Basecamp, their professional-strength project management tool that has the same charm and efficiency of Google. It's that good!

I'm not a Project Manager at all, in fact this was my first gig post-TDIF where I pretty much ran the show. I swore when I wrapped the Festival in 2001 I'd never take on another project alone again, and this was my first big chance. Gladly, Basecamp appears to have worked extremely well.

You can set Milestones, and make comments on a blog-styled editor that is tracked to the Milestone. We booked camera guys, talent and producers here. You can create a contact list, and companies within a contact list, that allow certain members particular or full access to the Project. I especially liked the Writeboard where we would work on scripts and our press release in a collaborative fashion. I like how it tracked all the changes and you could roll back to any point in the creation of the document. You could assign projects or to-do lists to particular people and those people get individual emails advising them of their responsibilities. As you can see here:


...near the end of the project my responsibilites dropped off a bit. (c:

Best of all for one project it's free. You are limited to only 2 writeboard docs and all your notices are branded by Basecamp, but it's a wonderful tool that I highly recommend. Once our Podcast goes Pro we're definitely signing up for the paid account which is less than $20USD/m for an unlimited number of contractors/people.

Everything you wanted to know about video podcasting*

*but didn't know how to ask!



Man where was this tutorial about a month ago?!? (c:

And yes, they are on iTunes!

Bidness of Podcasting

A few thoughts on, oh, completely rewriting the rulebooks of sponsored media.

Listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code 304 talking about advertising in podcating. "If we wind up recreating radio and podcasting but leaving advertising the same we've pretty much failed". He went on to talk abouta the standard way of advertising on radio and mentioned fees of $5-$25 per thousand listeners. He went on, and I'm paraphrasing his podcast, "Listeners have a special connection between the podcasters and hosts of the podcasts and themselves. That is valuable. Advertisers will have to audition to be a part of a podcast. Podcasters have the potential to work much more closely with the creative side of advertising."

"Not only big brands but small guys as well, audition in the same manner. Podcasters and ultimately the audience will decide what is applicable and what is not".

There's that relationship between the podcaster and the subscriber again!

We have to be careful, simply introducing advertising as it is now will only get everyone angry. It's an interesting thought that is definitely in my mind ... all the time!

How I Relax

OK this has been a busy couple of months. The project looks great, I am starting to move out of production mode and into promotion and business mode. How about a game of Scrabble?


...Ahhhhh!!!!!

End of a good run .... the start of something really fun

We just finished the last shoot for the last show of our three episode pilot run. We are becoming pros at this, it's kinda sad we have to pause for a bit to see if we can do podcasting as a business.

More on that later.

Here are some pix of the day!