• A new project with the CUNY Institute for Health Equity that takes the Photovoice methodology to video: youth filmmakers from community organizations around New York City are using Flip cameras to document the health issues in their communities. We’re doing some video documentation of the overall project and in August will be working with the team to edit the youth participants’ footage as well as some of our own into an advocacy video.

• We hit the road to Washington, DC again for another awesome project with YoungArts (we worked with them last year and again this spring on their In The Studio program in New York City). In DC, Dan worked alongside Benton Bainbridge and a team of very talented Presidential Scholars in the Arts on the video projections for their performance at the Kennedy Center on June 21st. If you missed the live webcast, you can watch the show here.

• On June 15th, we were on location at InStyle magazine, shooting the 5th annual Independent Handbag Designer Awards. This is our second year working with the Handbag Designer 101 team and everything about this event keeps getting bigger and better! Highlight reel coming soon.

• Although our event videography work at The New School tends to ease up during the summer break, we did shoot one very interesting panel for the Environmental Studies program about Biodiversity in Cities.

• And one highlight from May (we start summer early around here): remember in the depths of winter when we said we had one project that really made us laugh? Well, now it’s your turn. We had lots of fun doing behind-the-scenes video work on the new JerrySeinfeld.com, which launched on the 30th anniversary of his first network television appearance.

And last but not least…

Our new logo was born!

Thanks to the talented Chris Jordan, we now have a new logo, the first step on our path to a total redesign of our website. We’re really excited about this refresh of our brand and soon we’ll reveal our new site, which is going to make it much easier for us to share our portfolio and latest news.

We’ve got a few other fun things underway that we can’t wait to share in our next update. As always, follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for more frequent updates and other interesting things…

• Documenting The Photographic Universe conference put together by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Parsons The New School for Design, and Aperture Foundation. There are TEN videos of fascinating conversations over the course of two days between artists and researchers about the changing field of photography.
• Shooting the video of a reading by authors Jonathan Franzen and Jhumpa Lahiri
• Traveling to National Harbor, Maryland to produce a multi-camera shoot for Cancer Research Institute of the Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium‘s interdisciplinary roundtable.
• Editing a video about NESS (Nurturing Effectiveness in Synagogue Schools) for PELIE, which was released in mid-March. We’ve continued working with the Bureau of Jewish Education of San Francisco to produce a special version of this video for their upcoming annual meeting, and we’re so pleased to help them tell the story of these dedicated and passionate educators.
• Shooting several interesting events for The New School for General Studies, including the Story Prize Awards, Food and Popular Culture with Fabio Parasecoli, and a Conversation about Music and Politics.
• Covering two fashion industry events, Reed Krakoff and Simon Doonan at Parsons School of Fashion and New York City Community Board 5′s town hall on the future of the Garment District.

Speaking of working with people who are passionate about what they do…

• For the second year, Dan served as assistant mentor to the Young Arts In the Studio program, working alongside Benton Bainbridge and a group of very talented cinematic artists.
• We documented the Remixed and Remastered Conference, which was a great balance of panels, speakers, and film screenings exploring global distribution opportunities for media makers of color.
• We were behind the camera for several events for The New School Arts Festival, including this great conversation with Frances McDormand talking about her craft.

We also got the rare treat of seeing two performances with ties to our own work:

• In March, we were the most grateful recipients of tickets to see WarHorse, a production that is beautiful for its puppetry, projections, storytelling, and staging. A few weeks later, we documented a talk with the puppeteers from Hand Spring Puppet Company, the creators and producers of the show.
• In early April, the Octopus Project passed through town and played a show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. After lots of long distance, online collaboration with Wiley Wiggins on their projections, it was very cool to finally see their show live, and within walking distance, at that.

• Dan spent several days covering the International Toy Fair at the Javits Center with 343 Industries – the team at Microsoft behind Halo Waypoint – and had a blast with Jessica and John, shooting interviews about many of the awesome Halo-related toys out there.
• We produced a new video for Cancer Research Institute of their Breakthroughs at Breakfast panel, held at the Harvard Club of New York on February 8. Fascinating stuff about how immunotherapy is changing the definition of “cure” in cancer treaments.
• We worked with the Center for Public Scholarship at the New School to document their conference, The Body and The State. You can watch the keynote and sessions from all three days on The New School for Social Research’s playlist on YouTube.
• Chris Burke helped us out with a shoot of India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao speaking at the India China Institute about interactions between those two countries. Here’s the video of that great talk.
• A new video is underway for a new client, PELIE, highlighting the outcomes of a recent meeting on their NESS program – Nurturing Effectiveness in Synagogue Schools – in Philadelphia and the Bay Area.
• We helped the League of Professional Theatre Women digitize and publish online six more videos in their Women in Theatre television series.
• We’ve been doing behind the scenes work on a new project we can’t say much about yet except that it makes us laugh, and that’s a good thing.
• Our office got some major and much needed upgrades – we painted, installed lots of new shelves, and got a new Mac Pro!

And tonight, our last event of the month, is The Military-Industrial Complex Revisited: Eisenhower’s Warning at 50 at The New School. This event will also be webcast live from 7-9 PM EST.

More exciting things are in store for March – as always, you can keep up with us on Twitter and Facebook, where we post links to our whereabouts and to videos once they’re online!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Really-Useful-Media-Company/123421144374447

Dan was happy to help out again for this latest round on some behind-the-scenes design and programming to sync the lighting with the theremin-controlled colorsynth.

It’s always a pleasure to work with visualist Wiley Wiggins. He and Dan first collaborated last March for the Hexadecagon show at SXSW, which was a very ambitious, multi-channel audio and multi-channel video performance under a tent in the Whole Foods parking lot in Austin. Dan pitched in with some design and technical problem solving, like performance tuning (i.e., making all the video software run efficiently), making a multi-animation playback system so that different animations could pop up on the screen in different places, and most exciting of all, making a theremin colorsynth. The band and Wiley wanted a visualizer that would take the audio feed from the theremin and turn it into big, glorious fields of color. Watch the video below to get a feel for the show. For more of the nitty gritty technical details, read Wiley’s Hexadecagon wrap-up post.

HEXADECAGON – The Octopus Project from Zellner Bros. on Vimeo.

For anyone who wants to check all of this out live, The Octopus Project will be playing their next show in Austin on December 3rd.

Check out the entire festival schedule here, where you can also watch a live stream of the festival on Sunday if you’re not in New York but would like to check it out.

RE/Mixed Media Festival, Sunday, May 30: 2 PM-midnight (Dan Winckler and C-tor at 11:30 PM)

Galapagos Art Space, 16 Main Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn

We’re working on the video of the site launch presentation and will post a link as soon as it’s ready, but in the meantime, check out BestSmallBizHelp.com. It’s a great resource for anyone who runs a small business and needs some (or a lot of) help, as well as for those who have a business idea they want to bring to life.

Other exhibitors, all of whom are FastTrac graduates like us, offer services ranging from catering to printing, investment services to interior design, event planning to insurance to career coaching (and those are just a few examples). This event is a great way to learn about New York based businesses and support the local economy.

We first became connected to the Levin Institute this past winter when we participated in FastTrac Growth Venture course offered by Levin and supported by NYC Business Solutions. This course really helped us with our business development — a challenge for just about every small business — and introduced us to an awesome network.

The details:

The Levin Institute

116 East 55th Street  (between Park and Lexington Avenues)

New York City, NY 10022

RSVP:   www.onlinersvpbest.com – Enter Event ID 2540

FORA.tv – Branding Democracy: Barack Obama and American Void.

The design was a collaborative effort with the talented Benton-C Bainbridge (lighting) and Chris Burke (audio).

You can see some of the critical response in reviews from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Time Out New York. Most of them get a couple details wrong; for instance, there were no strobe lights — just ordinary incandescent and fluorescent bulbs that were programmed to flicker (nowhere near as fast as a strobe). We’ll have more details and video posted here in the near future.