It’s been awhile since I posted to this blog, it appears that it was before I took off for SXSW. Well a lot has happened since then. I filmed a bunch of stuff on that trip naturally, enjoyed the offerings of Austin Texas and met some seriously cool folks. It was a whirlwind trip that ended with me getting back to start a whirlwind 12-episode weekly public access TV show here in Portland called “Truckerspeed, in 3D.” The show consisted of me sitting around with my guests, talking about music videos (both from our Penny Jam series and live video shot each week.)
Before I left I set up a greenscreen studio in my basement where we filmed all of the interviews and whatnot. This picture is before I got crazy amounts of lighting in there, currently there are 9 lights similar to the one shown. When the lights are on and the white sheets are hung on the sides it really does feel like a studio.
During the series I was pretty much sleep deprived at every moment so I’m thankful for my health that it’s over. I’d consider doing something like that again if I could get a crew consistently together – although I do have to acknowledge Jon Manning and Sean Whiteman for helping out a heck of a lot with the filming aspect.
I’ve slowly been getting the episodes online. Since they run about 30 minutes each I had to host them with Daily Motion, which is kindof like YouTube, but French. Here is Episode 7, my guest is an old buddy Jon Hurst, who I used to work with.
Episode 7 of Truckerspeed in 3D
The video is a little janky, but as you might know if you’ve ever tried it, getting longform video onto a free service is kindof a tradeoff. Daily Motion’s 1GB limit (unlimited length) is generous, but there are limits to the magic.
Along with this show “Truckerspeed, in 3D” I’m in ongoing development of the site (which I’ve owned for a while) http://truckerspeed.com. It’s a work in progress but the idea is that it would become a content-rich site featuring the video work that my circle of friends has been producing, as well as a general forum to spout off about music, film and culture, which is intentionally open ended. At some point in the near future we’ll be offering audio/video/photo services in the Portland area through “Truckerspeed Productions”, which will be incorporated into the site.
The goal in that is to eventually have a way to work on AV projects that are outside of the scope of the Penny Jam, which is an inherently free project. Rather than entangling The PJ in commerce we’re billing Truckerspeed as the production company, with the PJ as an ongoing Truckerspeed project. Hopefully it will also allow us to expand the style of projects we’re involved with.
Case in point: the video work I did for Dave down at SXSW is credited through Truckerspeed rather than the Penny Jam. I put out a special episode, number 8, focusing entirely on stuff shot at SXSW.
Episode 8 of Truckerspeed in 3D
Anyway, the future is promising, we have a couple of secret, awesome projects on the horizon. If you have any video work and you need a crew in Portland, feel free to touch bases with me. And be sure to check out Truckerspeed.com – I’m building a team of contributors and so far we’re up to a couple posts per week.
Miraculously I’ve been given a ride and ticket to South by Southwest and will be there from Saturday the 14th until the following Saturday, the 21st. I’ll be tagging along with Dave Allen who runs a fantastic music blog called Pampelmoose – I’ll be rolling video and posting a daily update from Austin to that blog.
Aside from that I’ll be trying to pop into as many Interactive events, and possibly hit a movie or two if time allows. But since the event is such a networking reacharound, I thought I’d put out a proposition to anyone out there that is interested in Instant Rimshot, Headset Hotties, or the project I really care about, The Penny Jam The Penny Jam is a music video podcast set in Portland, the spoils of which are leading me to Austin in the first place. Anyhow, if you want to get at me:
Cell: 503.871.4120
Twitter : http://twitter.com/edwario
Email: scottcarver [at] gmail [dot] com
cheers,
Scott Carver
I was just poking around on my computer came accross this:
It’s not exactly a masterpeice, just something I did over the course of a couple hours with a Wacom tablet sitting in front of Flash, rotoscoping some low res video. What is awesome though is that I am one of the 2 people in said video. My friend Rob Yee and myself were practicing the fight scene as part of an assignment for an Effects and Compositing class at the University of Oregon and just happen to record this on his digital camera.
In the course of uploading it Vimeo gave me this:
This video is the result of some wacky codec malaise. I’m curious to see if I can reproduce the effect with a longer clip.
Many of you know about my ongoing series “Headset Hotties” which I started months back on this very blog. After getting good responses from many random people I decided to turn it into it’s own site. Plus, I was drunk off of Adsense revenue from Instant Rimshot and was strategizing on how to expand my empire.
So with a little development time, along came headsethotties.com!
One fun little sidenote is that the background image I used on the header is actually a pic taken by Joe Mansfield during the most recently released episode of the Penny Jam (see previous post.) Click here to see what I’m talking about.
Traffic has been good (about 12,000 unique visitors in 7 days) and it’s been mentioned in some hilarious situations online.
My favorite comment thus far is from Jeffrey Zeldman in his Wednesday Link roundup. Zeldman says:
“Imagine loneliness so intense that you begin to notice the attractiveness of headset wearers in stock photos. Imagine time so heavy on your hands that you create a website dedicated to your sad little obsession. Imagine no more. Discover Headset Hotties. (From those wonderful people who brought us Instant Rimshot.)”
Burned. Oh well it’s still flattering.
After a couple of weeks I’ll probably write up a synopsis of the greatest hits of such occurrences. In the meantime, if you come accross any Headset Hotties in the wild, send them my way!
Episode 18 of the Penny Jam features World’s Greatest Ghosts performing “Magick Words” at Matrix Networks down in Milwaukie (which is Algonquin for “the good land”). Normally we don’t venture that far south but our good friends Kyle and Jennifer (after seeing many episodes of the podcast) offered up the place – which they both work at. Going into it we didn’t know much about the location aside from a few pics on the website – there turned out to be an overabundance of cool locations, including a big ol’ warehouse space.
We ended up setting up the band in front of the server room, which is unusually placed in the communal area of the business. Rather than hide it they’ve made it a centerpeice. We’d forgot the clamp lights back at Balloontown USA (though it had yet to be christened such) but over the course of complaining about it Kyle offered us two oversized umbrella lights that were on hand in the building. You can see them reflected in the glass near the end of the video and in the photo below.
One weird milestone for this episode is that it is the first episode of The Penny Jam where I wasn’t a cameraman. Sean, the other videographer who’s been around since the beginning and Jon Manning (who joined us on episode 14 and has since filmed a few) took care of that. Meanwhile I was feeling useless and hungover so I went to play pinball in the back room.
Be sure to check out the pics by Joe Mansfield in what is perhaps the best Penny Jam photo sesh to date on flickr.
Episode 17 of the Penny Jam features Narwhal vs. Narwhal performing “Don’t Take” at Cherry Sprout Produce Market. You would never know watching this that we’d filmed the exact same band in the same location on a Sunday 7 days before. In a twist of random weirdness, our sound engineer, James, had his laptop stolen from his truck the following Monday night.
So with some heartache and a little explaining we set out to refilm Narwhal vs. Narwhal. Luckily we were able to get back into the Cherry Sprout Produce Market through saxophone player Amanda Mason Wiles, who is also in a cool band called Pink Widower (whose CD has been in heavy rotation in the Mustang.)
I first saw Narwhal with Joe about a year ago at the Someday Lounge performing with Alan Singley and the Pants Machine. I thought they were pretty cool but I didn’t reconnect with them until recently for the Penny Jam, though the timing was good, with the release of their album “Wipe the Sweat from Your Words.” It’s worth checking out.
Here are some pics from Joe Mansfield on the first shoot (Sunday 1 of 2.) See the whole set on flickr.
Hot? Not particularly. Mysterious? Oh heeeellll yeah. You can’t even see the eyes, they could be off getting laid or doing a drug deal or something. Mystery is sexy in some circles, so I’m going to count this one anyway. I just can’t turn down a customer service rep wearing a headset on a corporate website. More Headset Hotties.
Not feeling well? You need a Health Insurance Headset Hottie! More Headset Hotties.
Welcome to episode 16 of the Penny Jam. We filmed this episode during first Thursday, on Sept 4, a date and time requested by EWF Modern owner Rene Russo (not the movie star). It turned out pretty well as we got some intro footage of the foot traffic on a busy street in the Pearl, including a glimpse of the Ascetic Junkies banjo player, Graham, picking away on the street corner.
Our musician for the week, Ryan Dolliver, usually rolls with a posse called the Double Dragons (the DBL DRGNZ to be exact) but some key bandmates were elsewhere, likely playing shows with other bands as part of Music Fest NW. But Ryan brought in two backup singers to help him fill out “He Called Me Baby” by Patsy Cline, though we’ve erroneously titled it “All Night Long” in the video credits. Maybe we’ll change that in the future. Regardless, Mr. Dolliver brings the soul with his performance, check it out.
Since a friend asked me to summarize how thing’s are going with The Penny Jam (for a pitch he’s giving on spurring interest in local music through video in his own area) I thought I’d take the opportunity to blog about the subject since the numbers are not something that we get a chance to talk about often. As you’ll see as you read on and check out the screenshots from Google Analytics.
My analysis will include data from 2 sources, visits to our website – http://www.thepennyjam.com and total views of our videos as reported by Vimeo, the video service we use to host our videos. The project began with our first filming on March 1st of 2008 – our first video came out a month after that.
Between our 16 videos thus far we’ve totaled 9,385 views, according to Vimeo. Unfortunately Vimeo’s statistics are fairly limited at this point, the visualisations need to come a long way to get up to the graphical standards of Google (and Youtube.)
Much to my delight, Vimeo is about to launch “Vimeo Plus” according to their production roadmap. This is slated to include a revamped analytics package – and as of 3 days ago they claim it is 99.24% complete.
According to Vimeo referral statistics (which I painstakingly ten-keyed together) all of our videos combined have been loaded a total of 211,877 times, a huge number of those from our most viewed episode, The Ascetic Junkies at St. Johns Bridge, weighing in with 68,124. A total of 55,394 from that episode came from City Commissioner and Mayor Elect Sam Adams’ website http://commisionersam.com where the video loads on top right of the main page. It is important to note with this larger number that these are not play counts, simply page loads on pages where Penny Jam videos are embedded using the Vimeo player. These are mostly from artist Myspace profiles, blogs and online publications where there are lots of page loads, but the reader doesn’t necessarily watch and finish the video. Once Vimeo enhances their statistics package it’ll be possible to extrapolate more, but for the time being the options are fairly limited.
Google Analytics provides a more full-featured graphical statistics package, which is helpful – but a sizable portion of plays come from the Vimeo.com internal community or from embedded videos elsewhere on the internet, and those aren’t included here. Unfortunately Analytics doesn’t include play counts at all, just page views, though some valuable information can be deduced by the visitor data.
For example, we can tell that of 11,535 total page views we have had 2,535 Absolute Unique visitors. The average time on the site is 3 minutes and 2 seconds, which is less than any of our videos. But as we’ll see later it is made up for by the fact that some people are watching lots of videos while some visitors might leave the site without watching any. Normally a Bounce Rate (visitors leaving after viewing only one page) of 57.61% would be a little high but considering the newest episode is always on the main page it is possible that regular viewers are just checking in, watching the newest video and leaving. The following graph shows that while we do in fact have a lot of one-time visitors, there is also a contingent of rabid repeat visitors.
The group who have been to the site between 9 and 14 times seem like a mentally balanced group, they return to the site regularly, approximatley once per episode – there are 215 of them. There are also quite a few folks that check back in with the site more often that we put out episodes, with the most extreme group, 107 of them (2.4% of overall visitors) that have been there more than 51 times, which is surprising.
Considering we are based in and promoting the music scene in Portland Oregon, the next few graphics seem pretty much right on. First, of 4,385 visits, 4,192 – or 96% come from within the United States.
2,992 visits are from Oregon and we’ve only had 3 states with no visitors – Wyoming, South Dakota and Mississippi.
According to the graph above 81% of Time on the site comes from within Oregon.
Within Oregon, most views are coming from the Portland Metro Area. The statistics in for cities within Oregon are a little janky, for some reason Portland is on there twice. In counting the Portland Metro Area (Portland + Beaverton) There are 2,705 visits to http://www.thepennyjam.com.
So with all this in mind it is unsure how we’ll fare in the long run, the project is still relatively young and has not exploded, but slowly grown into the local scene. Our project has succeeded in some measure on a local level, finding a passionate Portland audience – though to a lesser degree on the national and international level. We have just scratched the surface of bands to collaborate with so there is plenty of time to expand, and clearly a need to expand into new audiences.
