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No Spin Zone. “Mr Dromi [a former government press adviser and air force colonel] admitted that the administration will struggle to win hearts and minds if footage of those suffering in Gaza continues to be shown. ‘When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath? That is why the television kills us.’” Not only has the Israeli government barred journalists from entering Gaza, they also bombed the local TV station on second day of the assault.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Consulate in New York yesterday held a “citizen’s press conference” on its new Twitter channel and blog, while the IDF’s new YouTube channel is going strong.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Consulate in New York yesterday held a “citizen’s press conference” on its new Twitter channel and blog, while the IDF’s new YouTube channel is going strong.
31 December 2008 | 8 Years Later
This has been blogged pretty heavily, but a friend hadn’t seen it so I’m posting it here. This is my favorite video short of this election cycle. It shows so much in just two minutes: war, Katrina, the economy, housing and infrastructure collapse... telegraphing familiar characters from their past comfort into the present crises, riding humor into pathos and back again into hope. For readers outside the US, the video is based on a short film that became a popular, widely aired TV ad some 8 years ago. More at wikipedia.
Video Your Vote. YouTube and PBS are calling for videos about peoples' voting experiences this November 4. A curated selection will be broadcast on PBS. It's being billed as a non-partisan documentary effort, but secondarily, it's clearly a way of gathering narrative evidence of anticipated problems and widescale disenfranchisement: voter role purges, access inequities, voting machine errors, etc.
Ad Council Creative. Archive of public service announcements produced by pro-bono by ad agencies on issues related to health, safety and education.
screenfont.ca. Discussion of readable type for captions and subtitles from the Open & Closed Project. See, for instance, this critique of existing typefaces for HDTV captioning.
The Open & Closed Project. “A new research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to improve quality by setting standards for the four fields of accessible media – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We’ll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we’ll carry it out ourselves. We’ll test the finished standards for a year in the real world, then publish them. Then we’ll develop training and certification programs for practitioners. ” Not much there yet, but I like this direct approach. I hope legislative advocacy will follow.
Changes. Excellent video montage of the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates pushing "change."
Anti-War Films. A list on Wikipedia.
Sands of Sorrow. Via YouTube, a 28 minute black-and-white documentary from 1950. “On the plight of Arab refugees from the Arab-Israeli war. Dorothy Thompson speaks on the refugee problem. Refugees live in tents in the Gaza Strip, are given blankets and food by Egyptian soldiers, and receive flour from UNICEF. A Lebanese priest conducts services. Refugees work as plumbers, carpenters, tailors, and shoemakers in the city of Jerusalem. Doctors vaccinate refugees against disease. Shows the squalid living conditions in refugee camps, starving children, and emphasizes the hopeless condition of the refugees. Producer: Council for the Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees”
There Are 12 Kinds of Ads in the World. Slate digs up a 1978 analysis of propaganda techniques by Donald Gunn an ad man for Leo Burnett. Posted as a slideshow with associated YouTube videos of recent ads.
