Proscenia Newsletter - On The DeskTop

On The Desktop is devoted to information of specific interest to those working in the fields of TV, Film, and Multimedia. It includes commentary, news, tips, publication links, announcements, and other resources that have recently come across the editor's desktop.

Commentary: Time is Money.

One question independent web designers ask is, how do I charge for my work on a project? Do I charge by the hour, the page, or the site?
Many professionals would suggest that charging by the hour is the best option. But fairly determining the amount of time a project will require depends on a number of issues, such as:

What does the client want the web site to accomplish? Is it to inform, market, entertain,or facilitate some other function?
A meeting with the client helps clarify site needs. Through pre-production analysis one is able to determine goals, objectives, and requirements.This information will determine if a simple basic html, or CSS site, with text and graphics will do. Or, that something more involved is needed such as special site coding or an extensive database.
How much research, planning, creating concepts and prototypes will you need to do? Is the content provided or do you need to develop it? Are there existing materials that you can use? Is there a clear organizational layout in mind or do you need to start with a fresh design?
How much time will be required in developing the site's architecture, navigation, and visual layout?
How will you deal with client requests for changes during the design and development process? Changes take time and the more you can anticipate client needs up front the less time needed for revisions. Establishing the number of changes allowed and preparing a schedule by which projects elements are to be signed-off will save time and effort.
Will you need to build the site's code from scratch? Or, can you use existing templates or scripts? Adapting existing material you have developed, or purchased, can save you time and your client money. Even if you aren't going to make as much money on a job you'll find time not spent reinventing the wheel is freed up for other clients, and other paying jobs.

Taking into consideration these basic pre-production questions will help in estimating the time involved in the design and development of a web site.
Logging the actual hours you spend working on a project (conceptualizing, design, development and testing) is essential to your learning how to estimate time to complete a specific set of tasks. Your knowledge, developed from experience, will facilitate your making a more accurate estimate of each new project as it comes along.

Copyright and Intellectual Freedom. The Free Expression Policy Project is a think tank on artistic and intellectual freedom at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice. Through policy research and advocacy, it explores freedom of expression issues including censorship, copyright law, media localism, and corporate media reform.
An interesting preliminary report on fair use based on an analysis of cease and desist letters collected by the "Chilling Effects" clearinghouse is worth reading.
The concept of fair use allows students, artists, journalists, and others to borrow and quote from copyrighted material without permission if they are doing it for purposes like commentary, parody, or news reporting. But copyright owners - especially corporate ones - often send threatening "cease and desist" letters to those they think are violating their copyrights or trademarks. To research how well fair use is actually protecting artists, journalists, webbloggers, and others, the Free Expression Policy Project has been analyzing a database of cease and desist letters put together by the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and six law school clinical programs. Preliminary findings indicate that cease and desist letters sometimes, though not always, have chilling effects on speech that might qualify as fair use. Read more at: http://www.fepproject.org/commentaries/ceaseanddesist.html

Microcinema Becomes Political. This year the Internet has become a resource of short political films mostly produced by the left side of the American political spectrum. The most recent is the
Eminem's Mosh Music Video - Directed by GNN's Ian Inaba.This video which probably says in three minutes what Michael Moore said in two hours is interesting to watch to see how emotional elements are integrated into the design of political media.
Other short political films can be downloaded from Films To See Before You Vote.

QuickTime VR Panoramas of Bridges. During the Equinox on September 18-22, 187 photographers around the world created QuickTime VR panoramas of bridges--famous bridges, historic bridges, railroad viaducts, pedestrian bridges, ornamental bridges, natural bridges, swinging bridges, covered bridges, cultural bridges and even the bridges of ships.

Visit Cairo,Shanghai, Sydney, Florence, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco--with these VRs. Enjoy the engineering, materials, setting, history and purpose of the bridges that set them apart from the ones near you. Source: Apple Newsletter.

Digital Photography Tutorials. Those working with digital photography and Photoshop may be interested is a set of tutorials by John C. Russ at the Graphics.Com web site. These include:

Part 1: Lighting Gradients
Part 2: Sharpening Edges
Part 3: Color and Noise - Photoshop for Digital Photographers
Part 4: Light and Dark Edges
Part 5: Working with Edges

File. An online photography magazine that specializes in "alternate takes, odd angles, unconventional observations". As its makers wryly note, "We leave the Kodak Moments to the family album, the glossy fashion spreads to Vogue, and the photo finishes to ESPN". While the site is relatively new, there is a good deal to browse through here, and visitors can start with a trip to the thematic galleries, and also stop by the contributors section to learn more about each individual photographer. One rather intriguing collection is called "Rustfetish" and features the work of Vince Stinson, whose artistic statement notes that "...these photos prove that by celebrating/the love of rust and all that rusts". The site also includes "Karaoke Camera", in which the editors of the FILE offer a photographic theme or trope, and visitors are encouraged to submit photographs related to that particular idea. Source: Scout Report.

Who Owns The Media? Advertising Age magazine has an online chart that has an up-to-date 2004 Family Trees Chart of U.S. Media Companies. Downloads as a PDF.

OneMinutesJr workshop in Iceland. A few weeks ago I linked to the best of the OneminutesJr workshop films done by Roma teens. Now the OneMinutesJr workshop has moved to Iceland. Twenty young people from Iceland, Greenland, the Faroer Islands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland are meeting in Reykjavik to produce OneMinutesJr films on "youth participation and youth democracy". The films will be shown at at the Nordic Council's Conference on Education and Youth Participation in Selfoss, Iceland. The Scandinavian broadcasters RUV (Iceland), SVT (Sweden) and YLE (Finland) will produce a 25-minute documentary on the workshop that is to be shown on public TV later this year. The UNICEF Iceland website - www.unicef.is OneMinutesJr website - www.theoneminutesjr.org

5th International One Minute video festival - Amsterdam, 21 November 2004.This year seven categories and more than 1000 films will compete against each other from 51 different countries. In total 56 films will be shown that have been nominated by the jury members. The One Minutes Junior category was introduced 2 years ago and is supported by UNICEF, the European Cultural Foundations and the Sandberg Institute.

This year's jury member for the Junior category will be Mr. Ferenc Moldovanyi, a renowned Hungarian film maker. He has worked as an independent film director and producer in projects such as "The Way", a documentary shown at over 30 international film festivals and winner of several awards. His last documentary feature "Children - Kosovo 2000" was also awarded and shown at many prestigious festivals all over the world.

Links:
UNICEF - www.unicef.org
UNICEF's MAGIC website: www.unicef.org/magic
EUROPEAN CULTURAL FOUNDATION: www.eurocult.org
SANDBERG INSTITUTE: www.sandberg.nl
ONEMINUTESJR: www.theoneminutesjr.org