It can be hard to predict whether summer will be hectic or breezy. Thankfully, this summer has been a lovely balance of both. We’re working on several exciting client projects, as well as making time for business development and labors of love. Here is some of what we’ve been up to so far:
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…
Putting the month in the title of our last update might have been a bit misleading. We can see how it might have given you the idea that we were going to start posting these round-ups on, you know, a monthly basis. Well, that was the idea. It’s just that March and April were like a mega-month that ran together. We barely noticed the page on the calendar turning with all this awesomeness going on:
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.
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.
We can hardly believe that it will be March tomorrow – not only has this month been short, it’s been busy! Here’s a quick roundup of what we’ve been up to:
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.
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!
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!
Check out our new Facebook page, featuring a number of recent event videos we’ve shot this fall. We hope you will “like” Really Useful Media Company so you can keep up with our latest videos and projects and leave a comment to let us know what you’d like to see more of from us on Facebook. Thanks!
We can’t wait to see video from The Octopus Project‘s show in Dallas last night!
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.
On Sunday night, Dan Winckler will be closing out the RE/Mixed Media Festival at Galapagos Art Space, performing live visuals with DJ c-tor. Starting at 2 PM, this free event has some really great panels, films, and performances exploring the issues of “media mixing as legitimate practice” and the implcations of copyright law on digital media. But pace yourselves (especially with those free afternoon mimosas!) so you still have energy to dance it out when Dan comes on at 11:30.
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
Congratulations to Dawn Fotopulos on the launch of her new website, BestSmallBizHelp.com. This site is the culmination of three years of hard work, and we were thrilled to help with some post-production at the end-of-the-beginning, pre-launch stages and to produce the live webcast of the launch event last week at Barnes & Noble Lincoln Center.
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.
Next Saturday, May 1st, from 1-5 PM, we will be exhibiting at the FastTrac Spring Small Business Expo, an event organized by The Levin Institute. We hope you’ll stop by to see us and learn more about what we do and how we can work together.
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)
A video we shot for the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School is in esteemed company, having been selected as one of ten videos for FORA.tv’s Best of 2009 series. This was a fun event to shoot — Professor Simon Critchley spoke to a full house, keeping the audience engaged while putting forth a lot of big picture, cultural studies ideas about Barack Obama and democracy. See for yourself:
One of our recent major projects came to a close last weekend. Throughout the month of September, we directed the video, audio and lighting design for Yard (To Harrow), William Pope.L’s reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s seminal Yard installation. This piece was presented as part of the opening of the new Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York.
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.
One of our recent major projects came to a close last weekend. Throughout the month of September, we directed the video, audio and lighting design for 