Concordia journalism students François Nadeau and Steven Myers put together this short video documentary with the help of CUTV. It features some interviews with members of Concordia’s baseball team.
Concordia baseball has been trying for years to get the kind of recognition that high-profile sports like football and hockey get, though they say the university has been immensely supportive of their efforts.
Insert your own joke about Jeffrey Loria and the Expos here.
Matt Forsythe points out this video from the NFB’s archives, talking to Mayor Jean Drapeau about plans to improve traffic in the city, which has by now grown so much it’s on the other side of the mountain.
Among the plans discussed are, of course, the widening of thoroughfares like Dorchester Blvd. and Henri-Bourassa Blvd. (but don’t worry, they’ll still have sidewalks) and the creation of a new elevated expressway on the north side of the island, which will be totally awesome and maintain our status as Canada’s largest city.
Oh 1955…
(That sound you’re hearing right now is Richard Bergeron having a stroke.)
The late-night infomercial, which I described as unregulated gambling when it debuted this summer, was a headache for the cash-starved network. The charges to people’s phone bills caused many complaints, and even led to a decision against it by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council on the same day they renamed the network to V. TQS-V’s response was to disown the show, which is produced out of Austria along with similar shows for other countries, mostly in Europe.
Those of you who hunger for such television can, Richard Therrien points out, still watch Play TV Canada, which airs late at night on CIII Global Toronto and CHEK Victoria. For twice the price.
Mitch Melnick, the afternoon host on the Team 990, has begun his own web video show online called Melnick Underground. The first episode was filmed and posted on Saturday. Discussions include music and, of course, the Habs.
The show, which is shot at Hurley’s pub and Melnick stresses has absolutely nothing to do with the radio station, has a very “underground” feel to it (read: the sound, lighting and graphics are all awful), but it’s the content that matters, and it remains to be seen if it can gain a following.
I’m noticing a trend developing where journalists and other media personalities try going out on their own online. In some cases, like Peter Anthony Holder or Jean-Michel Vanasse, it happens after they get fired. But some who are still comfortable in their current jobs are also considering similar moves because they feel they’re not getting something from their current employer (either editorial freedom, exposure or money).
I welcome these kinds of efforts, and hope Melnick finds an audience for his show. In that light, some constructive suggestions:
Your intro is 68 seconds long. Way too long. Like 63 seconds too long.
We can live with the imperfect lighting, but the sound needs to be better. You got microphones on the table, just make sure you talk into them, especially when you’re at a bar with loud music playing.
As part of the upcoming municipal elections all across Quebec on Nov. 1, the Directeur général des élections du Québec decided to pay an advertising agency to come up with a campaign to get people to vote.
Cossette, the agency in question, came up with this parody of a news/opinion TV talk show with an over-the-top anchor, which it released on YouTube (and fed to Dominic Arpin) hoping for it to go viral.
The video is well done and pretty funny, and most who see it will immediately think of former TQS anchor Jean-Luc Mongrain, who now has a show on all-news network LCN. Probably for that reason more than any other, it went crazy viral, with over 30,000 views in under four days.
Here’s the thing: Nowhere in the video are the words “LCN” or “Mongrain”. The show is called “Chouinard en direct” for the fictional network “RDN” (a mix of “RDI” and “LCN”). The set isn’t the same, the graphics aren’t the same, and the host doesn’t look like Mongrain. The only thing that ties the video to Mongrain is the theatrical way the actor acts and gestures.
TVA’s complaint is that the video might negatively affect Mongrain’s reputation. Setting aside for a second whether his existing reputation could be dirtied by portraying him as an over-the-top drama queen, there’s an inherent contradiction in this logic. Either this video is aimed directly at Mongrain because his style is mimiced so exactly, or his reputation is taking a hit because they’re portraying him as something he isn’t.
I can see TVA’s point that this is a government-funded ad for an election, and so should take great pains to be as non-partisan as possible. But despite TVA’s objections, I can’t see how this could put Mongrain in a “delicate situation” in the run-up to the election.
TVA and Mongrain saw a guy acting crazy on TV, and concluded it damages their reputation. That only works if you already know that Mongrain is crazy. And if you already know that, how is his reputation affected by this video?
Former TQS tech reporter Jean-Michel Vanasse kicks off the PodCamp Montreal conference with a talk on new media
On Sept. 19-20 I attended the PodCamp Montreal conference, and a smattering of the 40 seminars given there. Fortunately, bring a technology conference a lot of it was recorded, twittered, photographed (some by me) or otherwise saved. So for those who missed it, I’ve collected some resources below. Some are videos from the UStream feeds that were setup in two of the four rooms. A few are my own videos taken through the iSight camera on my laptop. And others are blog posts or posted slides from the presentations.
The news is devastating and humiliating for CKX, which had been a pawn in a bad-faith sarcastic deal negotiated by way of newspaper advertisement between CTV and Shaw. The latter said it would buy the station and two others from CTV for $1 to convince the CRTC that local television did indeed have a profitable future. Then, when Shaw took a look at the stations, it decided it wasn’t such a good investment after all.
In July, the station’s hopes were raised again when Bluepoint came on the scene, with what seemed like a more serious offer (though for the same nominal amount of $1). But Bluepoint has come to the same realization as Shaw: small-market TV stations aren’t worth it.
Bluepoint’s official excuse is that they couldn’t get carriage guarantees from satellite companies, and since most people in the area get their TV that way, they desperately needed that. I’ll leave it as an exercise for readers to determine how much of the decision was satellite coverage and how much was Bluepoint realizing the true economics of conventional TV.
So CKX is off the air, its website replaced with a thank you message and a link to CTV’s “Local TV Matters” site (as if a message to everyone that more stations will fall unless local TV is saved). CTV had two stories on the closure, both of which mention the larger issue of conventional television and fee-for-carriage.
For those keeping score, here’s how the CTV and Canwest stations threatened with closure this year stand:
CKNX Wingham (Ont.): Shut down on Aug. 31, converted into a retransmitter for CFPL London
That’s three stations sold, two kept running and three shut down.
You may not agree with fee for carriage, or that the conventional television model is even broken, but small-market stations are closing down, and nobody is moving in to even rescue them from the trash heap.
It was seven years ago this month – Sept. 9, 2002 – that a controversial speech planned by a student group at Concordia University turned into an out-of-control riot that became a major turning point in student politics.
For all the media attention it received, the Netanyahu riot didn’t cause much lasting physical damage. There were no serious injuries, and the 2008 Habs riot caused much more in the way of property damage than the two windows and emptied fire extinguisher cost Concordia. But the political and media fallout was enormous. The riot led to an unprecedented ban on all organized events related to Middle East issues on campus. After that ban was lifted a few weeks later, the Concordia Student Union pounced on a controversial flyer and some amateur legal analysis to hastily suspend the Jewish student group Hillel. The next spring, students voted en masse to expel the left-wing radicals in charge of student politics. For the next half-decade, students continually decided that a corrupt moderate student government was still better than bringing the leftists back.
Two documentaries were produced about the Netanyahu riot and the political conflict around it.
One was called “Confrontation at Concordia”, by Martin Himel, which aired on Global TV. There’s no official version online, but it was uploaded to Google Video in its entirety (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) by a white supremacist group (it’s unclear whether they take the side of the Jews or Palestinians in this debate – one would assume they despise both). Himel’s documentary makes Michael Moore look reasoned and unbiased. He clearly takes the side of Hillel, even comparing actions of Palestinian supporters on campus to actions in 1930s Germany that preceded the Holocaust, asking rhetorically how far Concordia’s tensions could escalate in comparison. The film invites experts from only one side of the debate, and includes a lot of voiceovers in which Himel makes bold statements based solely on his own opinion. Himel even appears multiple times to talk into the camera.
The documentary caused outrage among Concordia’s left, and even moderates (such as myself) decried it as biased. It was the subject of complaints to both the Quebec Press Council and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. Both dismissed the majority of the complaints, finding only that Himel and Global should have made it clear to viewers that this was a point-of-view opinion documentary and not a news piece.
The other documentary, called Discordia, was a production of the National Film Board and the CBC. Directors Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal took a radically different approach to their film, focusing it more on three figures involved and the personal, emotional rollercoaster they went through in those months. Addelman and Mallal do not appear in their own film, and there are no voiceovers. Only a few subtitles give dry, matter-of-fact statements. All the opinion is given by the three stars: Noah Sarna of Hillel, Samer Elatrash of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, and Aaron Maté of the Concordia Student Union. Though it is slightly biased to the pro-Palestinian side because two of those three are on one side of the debate, the film makes no grand hyperbolic statements and gives no clue to its directors’ political views.
Neither documentary, of course, tells the whole story. Such a thing would be impossible in an hour-long film. But the latter, at least, gives a slice of the nuances of the debate, while the former shows the real (if outrageously exaggerated) fears that Israel’s supporters had about what was going on at the activist university.
Concordia has calmed down considerably in those seven years, so the closest the younger generation will get to the “viper’s nest” is through such historical documents.
I got a short email today pointing to “a pretty cool video on YouTube”: students from UQAM doing a lip dub to the Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling (a song also responsible for the wiping of all meaning from the term “flash mob”).
My response: sigh.
For those of you unaware of this concept, it all began (or, at least, it grew online fame) with an iconic video by the staff at Connected Ventures (they’re the people behind College Humor, BustedTees and other young, hip online properties). It starts off with a young woman (Amanda Ferri) pressing play on her iPod, and then follows as a bunch of people, one after the other, lip sync to Harvey Danger’s Flagpole Sitta:
The music cuts out at the end to reveal the staff singing the end of the song a capella. The video is well done, well choreographed (you notice it’s done entirely in one take) and creative, but despite all the planning that went into it you get the sense that everyone had lots of fun making it.
Ferri uploaded the video to Vimeo on April 20, 2007, and it has since been seen about 2 million times, not including all the views on the College Humor site and elsewhere. (There’s even a making-of.) That’s far more than is needed to be branded viral (and certainly a lot for a 2007 video on a non-YouTube site).
For some reason, rather than simply admiring the video for its creativity and entertainment value, some people decided they wanted to create their own versions. The first such video I saw was done by Hochschule Furtwangen University last year. It was more professional, and clearly involved a lot more planning than some drunk college kids bored after work. But despite picking a different song, it was still the same concept.
It’s not even that many copied the original idea, they copied the original script. Many copied it exactly, from the single person with headphones to the crowd singing at the end with no music (all in one take). It’s as if they were prohibited from making any changes to that formula.
The result is something that, while no doubt incredibly fun to produce, lacks any originality. And without that spark of wow-this-is-cool, the videos become little more than a bunch of kids mouthing the words to a pop song one at a time. And lip syncing by itself is not fun to watch.
So please, to those people considering doing something like this: Put some of that energy and talent into coming up with something new.
Don’t expect me to be impressed by a bad copy of something someone else has already done, any more than I should be impressed with Wipeout Québec or the new Melrose Place.
UPDATE: Dominic Arpin, Patrick Lagacé and others seem to love them still, so maybe I’m out on a limb here. So be it. I’m not preventing anyone else from enjoying these videos.
Not having been invited the time to attend all the fall launch parties being put on by the radio and TV people over the last little while, I’m pleased to see that most of them are briefly summarized in video form.
But there were also launches for CKOI, Rock Détente, Rythme FM, Musique Plus, Radio-Canada, Télé-Québec, TVA, VRAK.tv and Télétoon, and fortunately the people at WebPresse believe these parties are news.
So here are the launch parties in YouTube format from various sources: