Instant joy

Hurrah!!

Good news on the Polaroid front, there’s still going to be some film made for the large format cameras … And now the bad news, the large format cameras are really large format; a company called 20X24 Holdings LLC have an agreement in principle to produce the chemicals and papers etc for the few 20×24 Polaroid cameras that exist. You can read the full story on the Wall Street Journal’s site.

If you don’t know, the Polaroid 20×24 camera is a beast!

Rose bud on Polaroid Type 57 film

Designed to create large format copies of works in museums, it soon found use amongst the arts community, with artists such as Andy Warhol,  ChucK Close and Neal Slavin ( I had thought David Hockney had used it too, but I’m led to believe he used the much bigger 40×80 version!)

Because of its size, it stands about 5 feet tall, and weighs in at 235lbs, its normally studio based because of this – but in the early 1980 Neal Slavin toured the United Kingdom with the Polaroid 20×24 to produce his book Britons.

This was a series of location portraits of various groups of British people at work, rest or play.

So now we just need someone to step in and save the rest of the Polaroid film line … So why not join the Save Polaroid campaign or the Facebook – Save the Polaroids petiton?

Thanks …

… To Andy Dickinson for the link-backs this week to my article “Why branding your product is so important in the online world“.

He’s linked to it twice in his reviews of how the UK tabloids use video on their sites (Daily Mirror and Daily Mail).

So thanks Andy, nice to know that some one’s actually reading some of the junk I write, and thanks to anyone else, who may have stumbled upon the article and read it too.

It ain’t archeology …

… but I like it!

BONEKICKERS – it’s been kicked to death in the press, and to be honest it’s deserved it! But …

Look away from the obvious plot holes, the “put in place from episode one” MacGuffins and the complete disregard for any rational, and it’s not too bad …

The Scooby Doo team ready fo action

… Apart from the rampant nationalism, the Arthurian ‘carrion call’ and the total bollocks of the stories.
Avoid these and you’re getting on to Scooby Doo territory: “Shucks … We would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those pesky archeologists”

Aside from that it it’s quite a laugh, working out who’s had who; at which point Hugh Bonneville ’s character’s going to go for a drink and miss all the action; or when Magwilde is going to go ape-shit over some inconsequential detail.

But best of all is working out how far wrong they are with Excalibur … It is far more than they realise, far more than they know … and I assume thay have done their research ( tho’ the episodes so far don’t really show that!)

Excalibur is just one of the Hallows of this Isle (according to legend) and as such is of equal import as the … OMI god no not the  … you can’t do thi.. as|~@p,,,,,,,,//  … ERic no ….”

Why branding your product is so important in the online world

Just read an article on the Daily Mirror website, about a house that has been built “upside down”. Nothing earth-shattering in the story or what it was about, just your everyday magazine type feature.

The interesting part is the video report embedded in the page … taken from YouTube, it’s a recording of a BBC news report about a similar house, made by a third party and then uploaded.

Now, whilst the ideal is to embed video of the story in the page (see Andy Dickinson’s guide for newspaper videos) making it much more relevant to the words, actually using someone else’s “stolen” work, might just be pushing the point!

As to the branding … you can barely tell it was a BBC video, just the onscreen Astons giving the game away. Most people will see the Daily Mirror or YouTube branding, and probably not notice the BBC brand, and what’s worse, the Daily Mirror doesn’t even acknowledge the fact that it is a BBC video.

I suppose it’s the ideal for newspapers wanting video for their sites, take what they want and give backas little as possible.