2013-06-20T06:59:25-04:00 Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=julian-benson Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Julian Benson Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1835599 2012-09-02T19:00:00-04:00 2012-11-02T05:12:01-04:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/

Repealing 50 years of censorship, the Cuban government has quietly informed the country's radio stations that they are no longer banned from playing specific artists. The blacklist, which was never published - as that would be an admission by the Cuban government that they censored their media - included exiled artists like Gloria Estefan and Celia Cruz.

The BBC broke the news earlier this month, saying they had received reports from Havana radio staff that there had been a government meeting and they'd decided the list "served its purpose, but was now out of date."

This may be a sign of Cuba easing its cultural separation from the world but its loosening censorship has not yet been tested by the radio stations.

In the wake of the 1959 revolution, the new government gripped the broadcast community quickly, nationalising all of Cuba's radio stations in 1960. Messages would have been passed down to the station operators concerning what was seen as appropriate and inappropriate for broadcast. Also, with a good many executions of 'enemies of the state', a practice of self-censorship developed in all the country's media.

Cuba's legal system, which carried over from the previous regime, already provided little defense for those that were perceived to attack the state:
Anyone who "threatens, libels or slanders, defames, affronts (injuria) or in any other way insults (ultraje) or offends, with the spoken word or in writing, the dignity or decorum of an authority, public functionary, or his agents or auxiliaries" can receive up to a year in prison.

And following Castro's move into office the law was made harsher. If the target was higher up the chain, say "the President of the Council of the State, the President of the National Assembly of Popular Power, the members of the Council of the State or the Council of Ministers, or the Deputies of the National Assembly of the Popular Power, the sanction is deprivation of liberty for one to three years." In the case of music and radio broadcast, the law is not specific to the artist who created the track and could include someone who promotes it through their radio station. So there was a strong incentive to not oppose the government's blacklist.

In 1963 Soviet-supplied technology was used to jam outside broadcasts from countries like the US, creating a bubble in which the only radio broadcasts were from domestic stations. Rock & Roll, Jazz, and American musicians, whilst not outright banned, were severely reduced in their playtime.

The blacklist ban wasn't simply for musicians who held a vocally critical stance against the Cuban government. Rather some found their place on it due to where they lived.

Internationally-renowned Celia Cruz was banned, despite her popularity in the country, because following the Revolution she and her husband refused to move back to the Cuba from their home in America. This was enough to consider her a political exile and worth banning. Then, over the years, Celia became an outspoken critic of the government and their censorship.

Gloria Estefan's place on the list is a little more political. Her father worked as a guard for Batista, the dictator deposed in the 1959 revolution. He fled the country ahead of the reprisals, taking his family with him to America. For her ties to the previous regime and her American residence, Estefan was banned from the airwaves.

The news that the blacklist has been repealed is symbolically significant. It could be a sign of a cultural opening on the part of the Cuban government, but with the laws restricting free speech still in place, radio stations will still not know if they are actually free to play the previously banned musicians or not.

We were able to speak with musician Alex Cuba, who relocated from Cuba to Canada in the 90s, about what it was like to grow up in a censored society and the effect this had on the music he played. "Nobody called it anything," said Alex, "but when I was about 10 or 11 I discovered a song by Willy Chirino and was only played underground and so I realized some people, like Cubans who left the country, were not played on radio or tv.

"I was around 15 when I first heard Celia Cruz. I may not know many of the musicians that left in 59' and were never played again."

The strength of this censorship was waning when Alex began to record: "It was never said, but you knew that you couldn't write or perform a song against the government. In the 60's there were more rules like no long hair, no cymbals as they represented the capitalist expression of music I suppose but I was born in '74.

"When I became an adult and playing music I was playing Jazz and it wasn't censored as far as I know."

Similarly, despite his next album, Ruido En El Sistema, being largely inspired by events of the Iraq war he has no worries of it facing censorship or limited broadcast because "The political message that my new album includes is the kind of political message that defends everybody and represses no one."

Ruido En El Sistema will be available on iTunes from 9 September and CD from 17 September.

This article was originally published on The Phonograph.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1632672 2012-06-27T19:45:51-04:00 2012-08-27T05:12:06-04:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/

In their debut We Are Poets, directors Alex Ramseyer-Bache & Daniel Lucchesi want to show you a beautiful, rough resurgence in performed poetry. Informed by their environment, defined by their culture, people are finding poetry, recording poetry, and performing poetry to other people. It's potent viewing, even if at times the six poets at the heart of the film can slip into easy clichés more comfortable in inspirational films like Coach Carter and Dead Poet's Society.

The documentary follows six poets, aged 16 to 19 years old, from the charity Leeds Young Authors in the months surrounding their participation in the Brave New Voices poetry slam in Washington. Asserting its focus early, the film opens with one of the poets Joseph Buckley reading "I Come From..." over slowed down tracking footage of Leeds' city centre, parks, and brick housed streets. Viewed through a blurred filter that accentuates the red colours in the brickwork, greys the sky, and brings the people into the fore, it establishes immediately that this is a film that brings people, young people, into sharp relief. It does it roughly but it does it earnestly.

These poets have a voice louder, stronger, and more articulate than is expected or that is ever credited to people of their age. And, by holding the camera slightly closer to their subject's faces than we're accustomed to, Ramseyer-Bache & Lucchesi put these teenagers front and centre, making them inescapable: forcing us to listen to their every word.

They tell us about their upbringings and their interests, their angers and the prejudices they face. For instance,16 year old Maryam Alam tells us when people see her in the street wearing a hijab veil they think they know something about her. But, she turns these thoughts into poems that puncture the perception: "And due to the fact I wear a veil, you assume I'm in some sort of exterior jail. But you fail to understand, I'm like Oprah: a liberated female. And, I'm sorry that I don't walk around half-naked, you see, I believe my body is sacred". Each of them are wry with their words, drawing on their culture, their city, and their politics, and it's fascinating to watch.

Of course, poetry has always been performed. Poets would sing it to other poets, to friends, family, and audiences, it was around before writing itself, but it's easy to forget it if you've never seen it. So as much as We Are Poets is about displaying these particular six it's also dismissing the idea that poetry is boring and dead, only to be consumed in the classroom. The resurgence emphasised in the film is put best by Saul Williams during an interview: "We are returning to something ancient".

These ideas of a strong-voiced generation of poets performing their work loudly are seeded before the transition to America but it is there that we see them excitingly take root. We're told 400 poets take part in the four day Brave New Voices poetry slam. The relatively few that we see are excellently selected to show the range of styles and cultures that inform their work. One girl blends song into her recitation, using the contrast of melody with harsh standard speech to tell a story about her mother who seems oblivious to her. A boy, shouts his poem whilst performing something like the haka dance. Another switches between English and Hebrew, all whilst maintaining the same rhythm. They're things you'll never hear in a school, that will never convey their performance simply in a written version.

So, for the large part the film is compelling viewing. Though, the let down is the journey structure that seems ill-fitting. Taking the six through the contest and trying to show them struggle to learn their poems and go through each round seemed unnecessary when what we're watching for is to hear the next person's poem. Every performance is raw and attractive, like something you've never seen or heard, so to spend time with such a familiar plot was disappointing as it felt like it was depriving us of more poems.

If you have any interest in poetry, hell, even if you actively dislike poetry, you should go out of your way to see this film because it might awaken you to a whole new view of it as an entertaining art. The structural problems are easily forgotten each time someone stands in front of the mic and belts out another beautiful stanza.

We Are Poets is going out on selected release from the 28 June. To find out more about the film and screenings go to the film's website.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1396983 2012-04-02T12:09:11-04:00 2012-06-02T05:12:01-04:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/ Our Crime is a new four-part documentary series that's airing on BBC3 over the next month. Using youth crime as a lens it presents the effect of modern technology on society. It doesn't aim to analyse a connection, and it doesn't make the mistake of saying there is a definitive link, but it does give us an insight on youth crime that simply wasn't possible before video phones, social networking, and internet messaging.

The first episode, Robbed, airs tonight and looks at gang crime in London and Liverpool. Examining three different cases from the past five years we're shown a groups of teenagers - some as young as 13 - committing violent robberies and muggings. Not only are we shown the CCTV of them committing the crimes, but we also see the chat logs of them boasting about it to each other, pictures of them posing with their weapons, and the videos they filmed minutes after the attacks, still on a high from the assault.

As stated in the episode's opening, we're the generation that films everything. Its been allowed by the rapid development of personal technology in the past decade and it's still difficult to comprehend the changes it is having on society. Giving every phone owner a camera has led to revolutionary citizen journalism like the video footage of the 2007 protests that was secretly transported out of Burma. Yet, this is one of the first times that someone has taken such a concerted look at how technology has affected crime. And frankly, the results are shocking.

Keeping what amounts to a video confession on your own phone seems idiotic, but the film makers go to great length to show that these boys aren't stupid, they're naïve. Some of these gangs evaded arrest for months. On a surface level, when it came to their crimes, they knew what they were doing. Wearing masks and gloves, they left little evidence at the scene. But once the criminal act was done their criminal persona slipped. They were so comfortable in this culture of recording everything that they didn't connect it with crime. So they'd video the stolen moped, chat about stamping on their victim's face, plan the next nights activities, and never did it click that they were creating incriminating evidence. They were just doing what was natural.

The gangs themselves are never interviewed, instead the picture we build of them is through a blend of the media they created of themselves, the police who investigated their crimes, and their victims. The effect is strong, if we were to to meet the teenagers who committed these robberies it might be possible to forget about the victims. After all, it was the boys who were the active participants. But by viewing the reverse it is impossible to detach the two. So, throughout the interviews the boys actions loom large. The connection is emphasised by projecting CCTV footage of the assaults onto the interviewee's faces as they speak.

Our Crime is a deftly made documentary that suggests lines of thought rather than making them explicit. Its interviews are far from sensationalist and their purpose is not to make you scared but instead to make you question whether technology is, in fact, separating us, not drawing us together. Over the next month I'm certain the series will expand our understanding of the subject of youth crime, but I don't know if we'll get an answer as to how to solve it.

Robbed is showing each day this week and will be available to watch again on iPlayer. Next week's episode airs on Monday and looks at the London riots.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1117249 2011-11-30T16:25:03-05:00 2012-01-30T05:12:02-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/

Ian Livingstone is the President of Eidos, and also co-author of the Next Gen report, a study that stresses the importance of the digital economy and the role teaching Computer Science in schools plays in its growth.

We were able to talk earlier this month at the Explay Festival where he gave one of the keynote speeches.

What's key to fostering growth and retention in the UK games industry? Is it through government initiatives like tax breaks?

There are five things I concentrate on in supporting the games industry, I call it 'The Five 'P's'.

One is 'Perception', the perception of games to change, with people talking about them in a more positive light, whether it's the media, the government, or whoever.

The second 'P' is 'People', we need a skilled workforce - that's one of the reasons I wrote the NextGen report with Alex Hope - to get a skilled workforce, that can work not just in the games industry but in all the creative industries.

We need 'Pounds', and by that I mean access to finance. Tax breaks are absolutely important and one of the reasons the Canadian, Montreal in particular, games industry has grown at such a stellar rate - they're offering a 37.5% production tax credit for anyone who sets up shop there, but I'd also welcome a more long-term solution: getting investors to understand the value of digital content companies, games in particular.

Startups don't necessarily need the tax breaks for day one, they need smart money, investment capital, so they can bring their games to market. Once they start to grow they will benefit from a production tax break but on a much wider issue I'd like to get people investing in games rather than tax breaks, which are probably seen as a subsidy and preferential treatment. I want people to understand it as an business opportunity to invest, because [currently] games are seen as risky and not as investable as traditional industries. So I think that's a more important issue, tax credits fit within that remit.

The fourth 'P' is 'Property', and by that I mean intellectual property. Our ability as a nation to be one of the most creative nations in the world, to create fantastic intellectual property, but retaining ownership of it. Often you hear stories of people selling their IP too early, or publishers seeing greater value in our IP than we do ourselves, the ambition of some creatives being short-term, they're happy to sell it early. So I think to build the next Twitter, Google, or Zynga, we need to be able to retain ownership of our IP take it to the next level, scale the investment through understanding digital content.

The fifth 'P', 'Pipes', as in high-speed broadband, not just to download content but to be able to upload content to global markets.

Is it domestic publishers that will allow developers to retain IP?

Developers and publishers are one and the same these days in the online world, the route to market has diminished to a virtual pipe. We need to invest in people to be able to scale their own businesses to make sure the IP resides, from a tax point of view, in the UK.

Do you have an image of what a good Computer Science teacher would be?

Let's get one thing straight, I'm not an educationalist or a technology expert. All I do know is that the UK needs more computer scientists that it's got today. All I've done in the Next Gen report is highlight the need for a skilled workforce because the universities are failing the students, schools are failing schoolchildren. If you look at the universities, there are 150 courses around the country with the word games in them. But they're, a lot of them, not fit for purpose. They're generalist courses, essentially media studies courses, and they're teaching the philosophy of games rather than the skills in how to make them. What we need good programmers and animators, not someone who knows the social relevance of Grand Theft Auto. That was one problem area we highlighted.

Then we looked at ICT in schools: whilst useful it's nothing more than office skills. Learning about PowerPoint, Word, and Excel is useful but nobody's going to give you a career in the games industry.

There's been a disconnect of understanding of what people think ICT is. It's largely about using applications, not teaching them how to make applications. It's the difference between reading and writing. We teach children how to read but we don't teach them how to write. What they need is creative technology in which they learn how to build stuff and use technology.

But What age do you think we should start it in schools?

Certainly by GCSE but I think you could start a lot younger. Children I've seen in school who have been given the digital building blocks, you see their imaginations engaged, they're happy, they're creating, it inspires them to want to learn more. So we need to give them those digital building blocks at an early age.

Do you feel we're behind the rest of the world in supporting out technology scene?

Well, we're behind some, and it just seems an obvious thing to do to have Computer Science on the schools' national curriculum as an option within science. Not force it on [students], but give them the option to do Computer Science.

You look at all the countries who are successful in the digital world and, guess what, they've all got Computer Sceince on the curriculum, China, Isreal - some of the best digital IPs in the world today are coming out of Israel. It's not rocket science to understand this.

But we've always had a tradition of people discovering and learning technology by themselves.

We've let an opportunity slip through our fingers, in the 1980s the BBC Micro was the cornerstone of computing in schools and at home the Spectrum was an affordable, available, computing device. Some years later, Schools stopped programming and moved to ICT that taught applications not programming. So we went backwards, I think people are only starting to realise that.

What sort of response are you finding to the report?

Well, we launched Next Gen in February, since February we've been gaining slow support, until recently following the MacTaggert lecture in which Erich Schmidt (Chairman of Google) referenced Next gen in his criticisms of the UK's educational system not having Computer Science on its curriculum. Since then it's galvanized lots of support. We had a ten minute feature on Newsnight about it, we had a debate about it in the House of Lords about it, several Lords recommending our suggestions be implemented, I was at No. 10 recently discussing it with some of the special advisers there. So it's definitely being brought up as an important issue, whether anything will happen we'll have to see but I'm very hopeful.

Do you think the Raspberry Pi is this generation's BBC Micro?

I'd like to see it become the new BBC Micro. The Raspberry Pi is an fantastic initiative, I think David Braben and the other people in the charity are doing something that is fundamentally and potentially brilliant. The Raspberry Pi itself could be manufactured, I believe, for about £15 and potentially given away to schools. You just plug it into a screen or a TV, plug in a keyboard, and, because it comes with Linux software on-board, you're up and running. You can be programming just like that [clicks his fingers].

Is the attitude to gaming changing?

I'm delighted by the way this government is coming round to the games industry as being a core component of the digital economy going forward. If you think about it the manufacturing services are in disarray and the games industry could potentially be one of the main drivers of the economy. We have the creativity, we have the technology, and potentially we have the skills.

What happens now for Next Gen?

We get a formal response from the government later this month and then we respond to their response. With the intention that one day, hopefully in the not too distant future, we'll get computer science in schools as part of the national curriculum because we can't build a digital economy with a nation of digitally illiterate people.

You can read the government's response to the Next Gen report here.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1094514 2011-11-15T08:10:12-05:00 2012-01-15T05:12:01-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/ Frozen Synapse announced last month that they're working on a port of the game for the iPad. At the recent Explay Festival held I was able to snatch a brief chat with one of the studio's co-founders Paul Taylor. We talked about the current state of the port, the challenges it presents, and the future plans for the game (both the port and the PC version).

What brought about the decision to bring Frozen Synapse to the iPad?

The Humble Bundle showed there's a wide audience out there who are ready for a game like this and so many people have asked us about a version of the game for iPad.

What we really want is to get support from Apple because we think it could be a fantastic product to show off what the iPad is really good at doing.

What sort of thing is it particularly good at?

[One] thing that we're doing is you're going to have hot seat. So you can put it down on your table, give it your mate and they can play their turn and give it back to you. It's also going to be cross-platform with the PC. Games that you've taken a turn in you'd be able to do that next turn on the iPad.

Had you always had plans for it to go on the iPad?

I'm a convert now, initially I thought getting the game interface to work would be too hard. I'm thinking about the issues I have with that, and I have a build that I can fudge around with until the interface is ready. It was always a PC game originally but I just think that, if we do it right, it could be this killer thing that everyone has on their iPad. It's very cool.

How are you getting around the interface, some parts of it require quite precise control?

What we have now is a build which is just the PC version with touch for the mouse. And that is one of the first issues that came up, that nexus between the player and the aim and time control. And that's something we're going to have to work out so it's more intuitive on the iPad. Similarly, zooming and editing plans in fine detail.

How else does it differ?

You don't have the mouse-over function, on the PC you rely on mouse-over to inform you about what you're about to do. In interface design being able to anticipate is vital for a user. We've got to find a way you just know in advance what's going to happen and that's so hard to get there, it just requires a load of tweaking. It's not a rational process, it's just kind of intuitive.

We're going to do the interface ourselves and be really hands-on for that and make sure it has that level of polish. That's the thing when you move to a different platform, there are things in porting that can be lost in the interface. So we think that's really important to focus on.

You've mentioned plans for DLC in past, what sort of thing would this be?

Because the system is quite flexible, one of the things we're going to do is game modes. We have some pretty interesting game modes now, like charge and hostage, but there's definitely scope for designing gameplay because we've kept the mechanic itself really simple - there's lots of things we can project on top of that. And game modes don't impact balance.

We are also thinking about new units, but we are really aware that new units are such a massive issue in a multiplayer game and really change balance, making the game really different. So we're going to approach that seriously and have a beta community around that. I'm a big Starcraft 2 player and the stuff that Blizzard are doing is fundamentally changing some things about the game and what classes of units they choose to introduce are really intriguing to see where it goes. And that level of detail terrifies me. But there are things we can do that modulate the gameplay rather than break it.

I'd love to do more singleplayer and extend the story, and music as well, people are always asking for more of that. So just more content really. So we'll test the waters with a small DLC pack and see what people want and what we can deliver.

You can pick up a copy of Frozen Synapse for the PC from the Mode7 site here.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1092139 2011-11-14T08:05:43-05:00 2012-01-14T05:12:02-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/ International Short Film Competition: Part 3
15 Summers Later (Dir. Pedro Collantes) - A ridiculously funny short about two acquaintances happening upon each other after a 15 year gap. One of them becomes insensibly angry that the other has a boyfriend despite turning him down 15 years ago saying she wasn't looking for a relationship. His anger escalates as the film continues becoming more and more comical.

Told through a single long shot the audience watches on as an outsider perspective. A position that affords perspective on this bizarre scene.

Handball (Dir. Anita Rocha da Silveira) - This confusing short is about sexual awakening, coming of age, and... handball? It's difficult to say for sure as scenes of flirting with boys are mixed with sitting in furniture shops. And the film ends in a brawl between to all-girl handball teams. It's a disturbingly violent fight and seems to have little place in the film.

The Barbican (Dir. Bartlomiej Zmuda) - Emil is on his way home to Poland, wage in hand, to pay his overdue rent and return to his girlfriend. At the station he finds he's lost his money. He sneaks onto the train and steals a man's wallet. Trapped on the train till it arrives at the station he tries to avoid the security.

This is a great little thriller, one that captures the panic resulting from getting caught committing a crime. But it begins with a questionable panel: 'Based on a true story'. The story is not so outlandish as to be unbelievable, nor so true to life as to need verification. It adds nothing to the film, and if anything is a distraction.

Checkpoint (Dir. Ruben Amar)- The story of 11 year-old Sulieman is told with no wasted time. His stakes are quickly established, he lives in the Gaza Strip having moved into town following the destruction of his village. There the boys have no school and spend their time thinking about women and how to get rich. Sulieman hears that the Palestinians will pay anyone who gets imprisoned by the Israelis. So Sulieman takes his toy gun and walks up to the Israeli checkpoint to be arrested.

The film is exciting both narratively and visually, 18 minutes is just not a long enough time to be spent in the company of this story. Evidently the director thinks so too. This isn't a short film, it's the first 20 minutes of a film that have been lopped off and served up as a short. The film ends with no foreshadowing, simply a cut to black. The setting and characters have been established but nothing is resolved (and this is not some roundabout way to suggest the lack of resolution the Gaza Strip brings to the people of Palestine and Israel). I want to see the feature that this film is so evidently meant to be.

Ghost (Dir. Dahci Ma) - A man is hiding out in a derelict apartment block after raping and killing a young girl. Our time with him is spent watching him suck chicken bones, draw ejaculate onto a cartoon penis, and even more strangely, watch the chicken bones come to life briefly as a puppet that then mimes having sex. This short suffers from a common affliction: it's compaction has made it very confusing.

Trains (Dir. Pavel G. Vesnakov) - After losing her job as a dish washer because her boss couldn't afford to pay her any more Tony goes to a loan shark to get the money she needs for bills. From there she goes to the side of a motorway to prostitute herself. Why? To get the money to buy her son a birthday cake.

The underlying message of the film is conveyed through news reports playing on radios and televisions that she passes but pays no attention to. They're reports of the growing economic crisis and the government saying that it will pass, people just need to tighten their belts. People like Tony can't afford to tighten their belt. The grim story is nothing new, but the news reports does give it a contemporary spin that lends it relevance.

We Have a Pope
Dir. Nanni Moretti, Italy/France, 2011, 102mins
Beginning just after the last Pope's death, the cardinals descend on the Vatican to elect his successor. After a number of ties a unanimous winner comes in the form of cardinal Melville - not one of those originally pipped to win. As the enormity of the appointment hits he finds himself unable to make his first papal appearance, refusing to go out on the balcony and bless the assembled audience. Instead he retires to his apartments. Until the new pope is publicly announced no one is allowed to leave the Vatican, nor can anyone make the announcement on his behalf. So the cardinals must remain. The psychologist who is brought to assess Melville must also remain. Melville however manages to escape the Vatican and spends the next few days wandering Rome to try and overcome his anxiety and depression.

As a comedy We Have a Pope is never entirely successful. There are some scenes which are well constructed, like the cardinals passing the time between votes by tapping their pens, trying to see each others votes, and generally acting like bored children in an exam, and when the vote is being totted up, all of them praying not to be voted for. But whilst amusing none are laugh-out-loud hilarious.

The occasional stabs at satire show how strong a film this could have been. Having a guard hide in the Pope's quarters occasionally ruffling the curtains to give the outside world the impression he's looking upon the benevolently whilst in his solitude is a great device to show both the figurehead role the Pope plays in the Catholic church but also the emptiness of the action behind the symbol.

A real missed opportunity is the atheist psychologist who's forced to remain in the Vatican. He begins philosophical and theological discussions with the cardinals but these rarely develop before they become distracted by a card game or a news report. They could have been a great chance for a probing look at both Christians and atheists.

Instead the rich setting is somewhat wasted through a weak narrative. It's never explained why all the cardinals vote for Melville and too little time is spent with him for us to see him as a fleshed-out character. Instead much of our time is spent with the distractions, a volley ball tournament set up by the cardinals, the news reporters trying to give 24-hour coverage of something which has no developments, or the other games the cardinals play to pass the time.

We Have a Pope is not a bad film, but it is so clearly not what it could have been that I left quite disappointed. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1089916 2011-11-12T10:58:09-05:00 2012-01-12T05:12:01-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/
International Short Film Competition: Part 2
Beach Boy (Dir. Hannes Hirsch) - An overly long sexual awakening story which has little beyond its looks to carry it. Dimi is this film's flaxon haired model and the perved on girl is his brother's girlfriend. He discovers his sexuality in the bland old way cinema purports is standard: sniffing knickers, sneaking into the showers to stare at her, and the somewhat more caring act of buying her an ice cream.

The Builder (Dir. Colin Hickey) - Brought down by the ambitious scope of the story this eight minute film quickly becomes confusing. However, it's interesting to watch and has a few stand out moments. An early shot sees the main character's hair being braided by his mother, later to convey her death, he sits alone with his hair loose. Similar moments of understatement dot the film, hinting that a long form feature would be in safe hands with this director.

The Choice (Dir. Yasin Erik Bagnar) - Using strong colours and tight close shots Bagnar manages to convey a father's growing acceptance of his Daughter's rapidly declining health. Although confusing at times it was an entertaining and intriguing short.

Cold (Dir. Lisa Marie Gamlem) - Snow, rejection, and close ups do not a meaningful film make. Gamlem's film strings scenes of standing in the snow with children talking about a recent party all to little effect. A dull and unimaginative short.

Until Summer Comes (Dir. Pasquale Marino) - Three boys try to convince their teacher to pass their friend, allowing him to enter the next school year with them. The film quickly descends into horror and at times in its brief running time it's genuinely chilling.

The slow ramp up of tension marks this film out from the others on show. Perfectly controlled, Marino manages to turn a warm Italian beach into the scene of a gut chilling drama by gradually cooling the colours of the film.

The Visit (Dir. Mina Mazzini) - This darkly comic short is bold in its cruel story, a disenfranchised son abuses his senile father by repeatedly telling him his other son is dead. The main reason it stands out amongst its company is that it's the only short film on offer today to be humorous.

Las Acacias
Dir. Pablo Giorgelli, Argentina/Spain, 2011, 85mins
Truck driver Ruben has been asked by his boss to take Jacinta and her five month-old child to Buenos Aires. Not much of a talker, Ruben spends the first leg of the journey avoiding chat. As the journey continues their silence begins to break down and a friendship forms.

The focus on character is stated early in the film as our introduction to Ruben is an unbroken single shot from the passenger seat within the truck's cabin. We sit and watch him drive for a minute or so before the camera eventually cuts. This is a film about people, not landscapes or the journey.

This focus is enforced by two major absences, exterior shots of the truck driving and music. With most road movies there are the shots from another vehicle here though Giorgelli has put them aside in favour of keeping us locked into the cabin with the three characters. We're party to the silence, the dullness, and the relief when conversation begins.

I didn't spot the lack of music till I overheard people talking about it after the film, it had been entirely engrossing without needing music to lead your emotions. It was surprising how little needed to be actively happening on screen to pass the time. And I haven't even gotten to the baby yet.

Jacinta's baby, Anahi, is one of the most entertaining characters I've seen in a film this year. At first she stares at Ruben with wide eyed amazement, then as the trip continues, becomes comfortable around him, eventually sleeping in his arms. You could tell that the rest of the audience felt the same way.

Although slow, the pacing is spot on and makes for a strong and moving film. It reeks of confidence, with none of the decisions only half-stuck to: the lack exterior shots and music are brave breaks from convention and both play into making this excellent film.

She-Monkeys
Dir. Lisa Aschen, Sweden, 2011, 83mins
This story of sexual awakening is often cold but sometimes hilarious in its conveyance of the confusing transition between child and adult.

Opening with teenage Emma training her dog she's the picture of control. Coupled with her next scene, gymnast training, the visual two-step effectively sums up Emma, she's physically aware and not someone who acts out of line but without warmth - a fact reinforced throughout the film as she's told she needs to increase her presence whilst being complimented on her physical ability.

It's at gymnastics that she meets Cassandra, together they begin to explore their power over men and each other... They ask out a pair of policemen, rob them, and split the money. Though this is all under the command of Cassandra. This master/servant dynamic suffers change when Cassandra tries to push their relationship into different territory.

Her younger sister Sara is also going through changes. At the swimming pool she is told she'll need to get a bikini top, despite not yet growing breasts, as it's pool policy. When her dad takes her shopping she opts for a leopard skin print, though the 'adult' choice is immediately undermined as she draws whiskers on herself in the changing room. Though this emulation of adults escalates through the film, ending with her trying to experiment with her older cousin. It's difficult to watch, but at the same time her naïve inquisitiveness is understandable and riveting.

The film's clean visuals and fixed camera style go with Emma's character but against the film's themes. Though this may have been done deliberately to try and create something of the girl's confusion it doesn't make for a visually interesting film. Similarly the pacing of this film makes its 90 minute running time drag at points.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1083935 2011-11-09T10:45:19-05:00 2012-01-09T05:12:02-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/ Sustaination I was able to talk with its creator Ed Dowding. The 'dating site for food', connects food producers with local businesses to foster communities and help small farms exist whilst in competition with the big supermarkets. We talk about the difficulties of making a simple to use system that still has the richness and complexity that makes it useful, how the site came to be a launch project on Peoplefund.it, and what they plan to implement in the future.

The site doesn't just put producers in contact with consumers, it also allows users to form supply chains that allow for transport of goods much further than a producers normal distribution range.

So how did you get involved with Peoplefund.it?
I called up Nick Underhill because they have something called Freerange Review which is a directory site of producers and shops that produce and sell quality local-ish food. I figured that if I wanted to succeed I really needed someone big and with a public presence to work with. There's a big critical mass thing in any public network, especially the food network, that if you're trying to join lots of dots then you really want to join as many as you can as quickly as you can. So I wanted someone a bit more substantial to throw some weight behind it. So I got talking to Nick and he told me about Peoplefund.it as well.

What is it the site offers you that other crowd-funding sites don't?
What's nice about that is because you can volunteer time and skills as well as money. That's really useful to us because we really need people on the ground who can go into businesses and say "Have you heard about [Sustaination]?" It's easier if someone friendly and passionate, and ideally one of their normal consumers can go in and say "This is cool."

Being able to have that explicit asking for time is taking it on a notch. Things like Kickstarter don't do it in and of itself.

Now that the site has launched and people can start lending their support, what are you working on?
What we're doing is concentrating on building the platform and making it easier to extend that. We're going along the approach that if we get a crap-load of really cool data in one place and put in the frameworks to make it useful for businesses then the developers can extend [it], building their own applications and start analysing the data that we've got to add value to it. Then people get to own what they've created. It makes that really firm ecosystem of involvement. A bit like Shopify.

Shopify?
Shopify is an ecommerce platform, people can build extra little widgets and services that they can plug into it. They can then sell to people using the Shopify platform. So, for 50p a month you get a nice little coupon system, or track shares, or something that ties it into Facebook.

So what data do you have entered at the moment?
We've got about 60 - 70,000 businesses in places already.

Wow! Is that from people who've registered interest already?
I wish! No this is from publicly available databases. It's more we've got the data working to be claimed than we've got 60,000 pre-registered users.

Even so, that means you've got a lot of data to visualise.
oh yeah, the maps are looking cool. We've been doing some sample stuff, prototyping, and it's neat.

Are the supply chains visible now?
Yeah, that's the sort of thing we've been doing. Unfortunately we don't know for sure what connections people have got. That's another thing we're asking, for people to pop down to their shop, or pop down to their pub and ask "Can you tell me five people that you buy from?" Then enter those connections in. Then you'll have the pub as a dot linking out to five separate farms, then you can start mapping the food network more effectively. Those we've got look cool, but so far we've only put in dummy data.

What other things can you use the data for, besides creating supply chains?
You can start calculating all sorts of other stuff on top of it: where distribution hubs should be, looking at national averages and regional shortfalls; how to make the local and regional networks more efficient; or if you've got two distributors 50 miles apart whether you can get them to share delivery trips and so on. That's part of the reason that we're building it in a platform style, so that people can extend it to work out lots of this stuff. And save us lots of the programming stuff. Though we couldn't help ourselves, we just wanted to play.

How will you be making money back from it?
Because we're trying to encourage local trading, and the standard definition of local is about 30 miles, if you want to [contact anyone] in less than 10 miles that's totally free. That just makes sure that we help out people with vegetable gardens and people who are starting out and want to scale up slowly over a couple of years. But if you want to be found up to 30 miles away we have a really low rate, we haven't worked it out yet but £20 a year - that sort of thing. If you want to do more than 30 miles, and communicate with people more than 30 miles away then we'll charge you a bit more and so on and so on. Say, if you want to use bulk contact tools and things that make it easier to do your job, managing more clients and things [like that]. It's designed to work to reflect the scale of the operation the business is running. So, essentially, you're going to be able to afford it and it's going to give you value in proportion to your scale.

What difficulties have you come across?
You can see why it's so hard to do, when you start designing it making it simple enough for everyone to use. You've got that trade off between simplicity and that lack of granularity, when you're searching for something you really want to be able to filter it down and put in all the specific criteria like you do on eBay. To get that kind of granularity on the filter side you've got to get that data input as well. And if you're trying to say to the people, who are already too busy running a small farm or a pub that's struggling to make ends meet "Hey, can you spend two hours filling in your profile so we can help you out a little bit?" It's a bit of a hard sell. It's been a challenge making it as possible as we can whilst still making it useful.

How are you tackling this?
We're going to have a very flexible taxonomy so you can put in whatever you like and for every additional term that's added we cluster those names under different types of food, so we know Cox is a type of apple. Which means that we can then start doing suggestions. If they search for Cox's and we don't have it, we know it's an apple and we can suggest a different sort of apple. If you look for mango we can go "Well there aren't any locally grown mangos but there are locally grown peaches"

Because we're using graphing database that allows us to know the distance between geographical locations and the number of nodes and hops between those - in the same way we can give the information to know that a peach is more like a mango than an apple is - so we can make suggestions of availability to people based on what's around them.sustain
Do you want people to stop importing foreign fruits?
We don't want to stop people eating mangos, I mean mangos are awesome, and bananas are lovely. You can import them and that's fine, it's the case of saying let's make sure we import the bananas and not the apples.

You can find out more at Sustaination's website, and you can get involved here.



]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1083503 2011-11-09T06:18:00-05:00 2012-01-09T05:12:02-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/
Today was also the first Northern screening of Inbred. This Yorkshire-set comedic horror has yet to be picked up for distribution but expect to see it in cinemas in the coming year.

International Short Film Competition: Part 1
Swimsuit 46 (Dir. Wannes Destoop)- A simple story of an overweight girl saving money to buy a new pair of swimming goggles. It holds the audiences' attention but its direction is unsurprising.

Bear (Dir. Nash Edgerton) - Opening with a panel stating "Jack always goes one step too far." Setting up the audience to view everything Jack does with the expectation of something a little worse, a little worse, a little worse. It pays off perfectly as it carries the audience into each twist with an unconscious knowledge it was coming. It allows the shocks to turn to laughs very quickly.

Music Box (Dir. Cherish Perez de Tagle) - Telling the story of a deaf woman and a mute man falling for each other, the film never strays from convention. Though, one shot stands out and deserves to be replicated. Avoiding a traditional montage sequence when the mute builds the music box the director instead opts for use of time-lapse. Same effect, but it felt much fresher.

Cross-country (Dir. Cherish Perez de Tagle) - Following a cross-country runner who breaks off from the main pack he runs through the forest discovering vignettes: musclemen training, murderers and their victim, and finally a beach that is incredibly open when compared to the closeted forest. The Film is clearly emulating films like Loach's Sweet Sixteen. Yet, unlike those features, this short seems to be about little.

Aglaée (Dir. Rudi Rosenberg) - A story about teenage sexual awakening. Benoit is dared to ask out disabled girl Aglaée. When she turns him down he can't take the spurn and acts out. It's an interesting film and keeps the audience invovled. But it felt like a misstep on the part of the director to leave the perspective of benoit. By showing the actions of both characters the film's outcome is obvious, showing only Benoit's would have hidden the end and deepened the effect.

Breathing (Atmen)
Dir. Karl Markovics, Austria/Germany, 2011, 90mins
Roman's never known life outside state enclosures, raised in an orphanage before being imprisoned at 14 for killing another child, he has never known any family. However, a parole hearing is approaching and he must find a job to prove that he is able to live in society. He chooses to become an undertaker. The film follows his slow awakening to his prison life.

The film's direction is faultless, but this is because it takes no risks. The plot is predictable, with an orphan there's going to be the search for a mother, for a prisoner there's going to be a yearning for freedom, and for a loner there's going to be a gradual breakthrough into friendships, so to break away from this the director needs to shake up the conventions a little.

Breathing is a fine and enjoyable film, but it isn't memorable.


Inbred
Dir. Alex Chandon, UK/Germany, 2011, 90mins
Two care-workers head deep into Yorkshire with a group of kids for a weekend of team building exercises. Heading off the beaten track they shack up in a cottage on the outskirts of Mortwater. The locals quickly reveal themselves to be less than benign and what follows is the expected whittling down of numbers in a messy fashion. But this film shouldn't be judged by its plot, because, whilst not a parody of the genre, it's definitely one that finds fun in the conventions of horror.

It is an immensely funny film but also more gruesome than any I've seen in a long time. I had a gut reaction to the film. By which I don't mean "I just knew it was good." I mean my stomach felt like it was curling up and retreating as far from the screen as my body would allow. It's not just that the special effects are visceral, or because the deaths are new (filling someone with silage is certainly one I haven't seen before), but because I actually cared for the characters. I didn't want a single one of the characters to die. Unlike other horrors, where the characters are simply walking opportunities for gore, this bunch were funny people. That's not to say they're all likeable but none were annoying to the audience.

The discomfort also derives from something else, something separate to the humour, none of them wanted to go on the weekend away and yet they're having to suffer hideous deaths. Horror often tries to justify itself with moral lessons, some are successful and others aren't. But sidestepping the issue entirely, this film finds great potency in the uncomfortable knowledge we're watching, by film standards, undeserving people die.

Director Alex Chandon sugars this rather unsavoury prospect by filling the film with humour. Though don't expect subtlety, a lot of the laughs come from the blunt nature of it, for instance the village pub is called 'The Dirty Hole'. Director Alex Chandon understands how to shock an audience and immediately capitalise on the tension with a laugh. Following every death was an outburst of laughter from the audience. Time and again he'd twist the tone between horror and humour.

This film deserves to reach the big screen as it is so much better than the plethora of torture movies that fill the cinemas, it is both one of the best horrors and the best comedies to have been released this year.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1081337 2011-11-08T05:39:19-05:00 2012-01-08T05:12:01-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/
Unfortunately, the first three days overlapped with the Explay conference so I wasn't able to attend some of the major events like the Hyde Park's Night of the Dead - a 12-hour overnight buffet of new and exciting horror movies from around the world - as well as the opening gala screening of the new adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

But stay tuned for two weeks of coverage of the biggest film festival in the North of England.

Best Intentions (Din Dragoste Ce Cele Mai Bune Intentii)
Dir. Adrian Sitaru, Romania Hungary, 2011, 105mins

This Romanian film follows Alex, a thirty-something living in Bucharest. Early in the film he learns that his mother has suffered a stroke.

It quickly becomes evident that Alex is unable to cope in this situation in which he's largely powerless and so attempts to assert control in any way he can, even if it's to the detriment of his mother's health. He takes to heart the advice from a friend of a friend who tells him to move his mother to a different hospital. He spends the film determined that he can find better help for his mother, despite her receiving adequate care at her current hospital. Though he does it all believing it is for her good.

Mechanically, Best Intentions is a very competent film. The hand-held camera often takes the perspective of one of the characters talking to Alex, in group discussion scenes the camera will oscillate between speakers as they try to sway Alex, making a tennis umpire of the audience. Sparse use of cuts gives scenes a stability that fits into the domestic narrative.

However, despite that, I never felt the film earned my time. It feels longer than its 105 minutes. Mainly, this is because exceedingly little happens. Alex spends the film making the same annoying mistake of trusting the advice that gives him an opportunity to act and become involved in his mother's care instead of listing to those who say leave it up to the professionals.

There have been some great stories in which very little happens, though to get away with it the audience has to be sated with humour or some other engaging spark. There wasn't enough happening in this film to justify its unconventional and lacklustre plotting.

Love (Szelerem)
Dir. Károly Makk, Hungary, 1972, 88mins

Luca's husband has been imprisoned by the communist government on political charges leaving the care of his mother to her. The old woman lies in bed all day waiting for her son to return, believing him to be working as a director in America, a fantasy which Luca defends whenever the mother-in-law questions it.

As the film progresses the strain on Luca increases, she loses her teaching post, has to take on co-tenants, and is forced to sell family heirlooms to pay for her mother-in-law's care, all rooting from her husband's imprisonment. The strain on her love is moving and director Károly Makk's protrayal of this growing pressure is compelling.

Makk captures his characters' inner voice using sudden quick-fire cuts to still images and abstract vignettes. Visible long enough to be recognisable before returning to the main world, the viewer finds themselves watching a story where the past of the characters is being filled out without expositionary conversation.

The mother-in-law's mind jumps to images of the door to her room - which she hopes her long-absent son will come walking through - and old photos of her family, some of them long dead. Her memory seems to be invading her daily life. Luca's mind is less transitory, conveying her focus on the repressing world she inhabits, her mind is unable to escape as easily as her mother-in-laws. It's an excellently utilised device.

The film, first released in 1972, is being screened as part of the Magyar masterpieces retrospective.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1077536 2011-11-05T05:21:21-04:00 2012-01-05T05:12:02-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/
The first of the these is the mighty Plymatron, an arcade cabinet based on the designs of the Canadian Bit Collective's Winnitron. Hand built by members of the Explay community, the Plymatron is the first of its kind in the UK - Bit Collective's design allows people to make their own gaming cabinet and even supply a batch of modern indie games to play on the system but they require the machine to remain in public spaces and be free to use. After the conference it is going to remain in use at whichever bar hosts the Explay's monthly meetups.

The second game that was drawing the attention of those on the floor was the very nifty R-fidghter, a research project that looks set to evolve the card games market. Taking games like Pokemon cards and Magic: The Gathering as its inspiration, R-fidghter gives players a set of physical cards, each depicting a monster and a set of special attacks The cards could be used to battle like other trading card games, but in each of these cards is an RFID chip, so once it's slotted into the bespoke controller and connected up to the R-fidghter videogame you and your friend/enemy can battle in a virtual arena. It's a great idea, and one which I'd be surprised isn't already in the works at companies like Nintendo, there was certainly something similar Sony tried to launch on the PS2 that used the Eye-Toy camera but was never too successful. Yet there is a simplicity to R-fidghter that's appealing and some of the characters they had on display were charming, so it's definitely worth looking out for future developments from the project.

Distracting games aside the talks began with Dan Efergan from Aardman Digital, his talk, titled 'Sex, Lies, and Video Games', stayed true to it's word: he lied about it containing sex. So what do you say about videogames to an audience of videogame developers? Efergan gave a run down of the told us of how the digital department at Aardman expanded from its original four members to twenty, and how their remit, which was originally just to maintain the various websites for different Aardman products became making games, to the point that they're about to release their first commercial product. The emphasis was very much on baby steps, well, baby steps for Aardman.

They're first game was commissioned by marketing to promote the Wallace and Gromit special 'A Matter of Loaf and Death'. Rather than create the thing entirely from scratch the team - and Efergan wholeheartedly recommends this approach to developers - licensed their engine from Flash Game Licence. Using a small team, only three developers: one coder, one artist, and one producer they made a game that was played over 13.5m times in three years. Using the same formula, their next gam, Suspension Invention, was played almost 17m times in two years. And their most recent game, Home Sheep Home, made in just 12 days, has been played over 105.5m times in two years. So a quick run down of his tips: license engines where possible to speed up your process, don't waste time making pretty prototypes because "you should be able to have a hell of a lot of fun with rubbish graphics, and test loads.Off the back of these free web games they were able to pitch Home Sheep Home 2, their first commercial release, which is set to come out in the next month or so.

The day ended with a keynote from industry godfather Ian Livingstone. Livingstone's been in the games industry since 1975 when he began Games Workshop with John Peak and Steve Jackson, a mail order boardgames shop. He talked about the early history of the company, which for all the his gilding sounds to have been a pretty turbulent time: upon securing the rights to distribute Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)in the UK Peak left the company, they were kicked out of their flat in Hammersmith, spent three months living in a van, and were unable to get a loan from the bank because no one was willing to invest in these so-called "Roleplaying games". Though, through this time they were steadily selling copies of D&D. Eventually they were able to open a shop in 1978 and from then things went up and up for the pair.

Although that covers the start of a company that is close to many gamers' hearts - elvish fantasy having been a mainstay genre of the industry for decades - it wasn't what brought Livingstone to speak to a crowd of developers in front of the world's most distracting screensaver - for those who didn't read yesterday's coverage, the conference is taking place at Plymouth's aquarium in front of a tank full of eels, rays, and sharks - it was what Livingstone worked on after Games Workshop that brought him to Explay. Upon selling out of the business in 1981 he invested his money in a games developer called Domark, makers of Championship Manager. Domark merged with Eidos and was later bought by Square Enix, becoming the Western arm of the Japanese company. So as Life President of Eidos he is at the top of a very influential company in the UK games industry, a company that owns some of the most recognisable brands in the world.

Throughout the talk the point being driven home was the importance of intellectual property (IP), D&D wasn't owned by Games Workshop so after their three years of exclusivity they lost control of it, they could have licensed something else but insteda they chose to create their own game: Warhammer. Owning the IP to this game they had a consistency to their company, they weren't continually hounding developers for new games, instead their strength came from being the exclusive rights holder of the most popular miniatures game in the UK. Similarly, when Core created Lara Croft and the first Tomb Raider game, Eidos, their publisher, held onto the rights. Yes, this first game was wildly successful selling over 7m copies but because they'd retained the rights they were able to licence the image to Lucozade, Hollywood, and merchandising companies, deals that made Lara more recognisable than the Pope. Livingstone repeated "Own IP, I can't stress it enough," just to make sure everyone had got his point.

So that wraps up day two of the conference, tomorrow I'll take a closer look at what's been going on at the Games Jam.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1075226 2011-11-04T01:46:11-04:00 2012-01-03T05:12:02-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/
Nonetheless this is getting sidetracked. The Explay event celebrates developers in the South West of England, from Bristol to Bournemouth: celebrates them, and connects them. The conference is a many layered beast and as such I'll be attempting to give day-by-day coverage but you're going to have to accept that whilst I'm in one room there's things going on elsewhere that I won't be party to.

Layer one is a traditional conference format of industry speakers laying on their wisdom. Traditional yes, but the impressive lineup alleviates any worries of a dry weekend. The two keynotes are Ian Livingstone and Paul Taylor. And if you don't recognise those names I can hardly berate you, I didn't either, but then I saw their CVs. Ian Livingstone co-founded Games Workshop in the 70s - the home of Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, and a myriad of other strategy games. He didn't rest on his laurels though as he also brought Dungeons & Dragons to Europe and went on to become Creative Director at Eidos overseeing projects such as Tomb Raider and Hitman. Throughout that, and up to the present day, he's been investing in British indie developers and has remained a big player in the UK games industry.

Then there's Paul Taylor, Paul Taylor co-founded Mode 7 Games the makers of Frozen Synapse, one of the most nerve-fraying games available. Referred to by some as a turn-based Counter Strike, but that is unfair to the depth of this game. Counter Strike is played best by the empty minded player, the game is over in a flash and thinking only slows you down in the click-fest combat. A game of Frozen Synapse can't be won by playing thoughtlessly. Your are forever trying to guess your opponents moves, planning out your own moves accordingly. Every time I commit my moves my heart skips a beat.

An that's just the keynotes, there are 20 other speakers talking over the weekend.

Layer two is Bootcamp, an accelerator program that aims to foster 12 South West developers under the watchful of veteran industry mentors. The participants will spend this weekend in seminars that will teach them the skills outside of their creative focus that are necessary for a successful business: how to build a team of complimentary talents, how to prepare for future industry developments, and how to create a commercial project from the off. The companies taking part are a varied bunch, some are only months old, others are over a decade. Some a games developers, some audio specialists, some are involved with theatre and interactive spaces. They're brought together by the desire to grow as a company.

The final layer, layer three, is Game Jam. A 48-hour hackathon, the Game Jam participants - at last count 50 - will be work tirelessly through the day and the night, foregoing showers and social contact, to make a playable game by Saturday afternoon. The game will be based around a theme, a theme that will only be revealed at the start of the event. Tonight all over Plymouth coders and designers are sitting in anticipation for tomorrow they jam.

Which brings me to tonight, the quiet VIP event that would kick the whole thing off. Now I said there were to be two keynote speakers, but that's not strictly true. Tonight's proceedings kicked off with a talk from Dr Richard Wilson, CEO of TIGA. I didn't mention him before because his talk wasn't open to everyone, but for those of you without a valid reason for being there, or press passes, here's a summary of what went on.

Most talks take place in fairly dull conference centres, podiums set up in front of beige walls and all that. Explay went a different route, the event is being held at the Plymouth aquarium, so instead of drab décor, Wilson stood in front a glass tank full of massive fish, shark-like fish, manta-like fish, in short, fantastic fish. It was a setting worthy of a Bond villain. Not to imply Wilson is part of a nefarious organisation, far from it, TIGA are the trade association representing the UK games industry. They ask the question why is one of the UK's most profitable creative industries not receiving the same government support as the others. Filmmakers and studios receive tax cuts, government funded studio space, and recognition that the games industry does not. They're working to get developers those same breaks.

Answering questions about sector growth, Wilson pointed to universities as the key to forming local studio collectives. Areas like Dundee and Leeds are fast becoming industry centres because the courses offered at their universities train good developers, many of them relocate to London but it only takes a few to stick around each year to create a net to catch juicy talent from the next year's graduates.

He went on to say that this form of community development is slowing because there are fewer people taking the relevant courses, such as computer science and maths. To encourage this he suggests lower tuition fees for those subjects that we want to drive people into. It's not a bad idea in principle, though it would need to be a pretty hefty cut to persuade people to switch courses or, if they were planning on skipping university, to apply.

Another suggestion was to encourage veteran developers to go into lecturing. If good universities retain developer communities then we can increase the number of developer communities by improving our universities.

I'm going to have to stop there because it's two in the morning and there is a full day of talks tomorrow that I need to prepare for. But I hope this has been enough of a tease to set you up for tomorrow's coverage. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1067683 2011-10-31T13:39:02-04:00 2011-12-31T05:12:01-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/ KEO Digital - the production company behind Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage - about their newest project Peoplefund.it.

Like an ethical Kickstarter, Peoplefund.it allows you to support projects that aim to do something good for the world. But unlike the other crowd funding sites out there, Peoplefund.it lets users donate skills and time as well as money.

With the site launching this week we talked about how the project came about, what their future plans involve, and how the skill donation is going to work exactly.

How did KEO, a television production company, find itself making this platform?
Emily Oliver: KEO sort of stumbled into crowd sourcing with Chicken Out, we got this great number of supporters and then asked people to help out paying for the tabling of a Special Resolution at the Tesco AGM, and the community raised over £88,000 in 24 hours. After the success of Chicken Out KEO digital was spawned within KEO.

Since then we've done Landshare which has 65,000 people in the UK, who are either people who have put up land that they're wanting to share or are people who want to grow and it connects those people. We've recently launched in in Canada and Australia, and we're about to partner with Shared Earth in the US as well.

And so how did this lead you starting Peoplefund.it?
Really, this came about from our most recent project energyshare which is a renewable energy tariff and online community that we've launched in partnership with River Cottage and British Gas. As we were doing that we began to look at the renewable energy sector and particularly peoples behaviour around it. It requires people to engage in a community basis around it to make it work.

We began to talk to people who believe they have solutions in this area, and at the same time we were getting feedback from our community - which is 1.2 million people across each of our projects - all of whom were frequently saying they wanted to get more involved with projects, they wanted to help solutions happen.

As we talked to some organisations who are really well informed about this like Forum for the Future and NESTA is the solution tends to come from unusual places and they tend to come from people collaborating, something that the internet facilitates really well. So based off that original idea we've looked at various other crowd sourcing ideas, we aren't really doing anything that's that crazy or different, what we are doing is providing a platform our community is asking for.

This project is being funded by a grant from NESTA, and one of the things they were really keen to look at is how we can remove some of the barriers to people collaborating to help make the world a little bit better. How can they use their spare cash, time, and skills in order to work together?

So, what's the process of donating your time?
The model that we're using at the moment, and, this is a research pilot for us so we're going to be very reactive to it, is that you need to financially support a project, and that can be from the lowest level of reward, that could be just £1, and then you'll get a message that will tell you if that project is also looking for time and skills. If they are it's really simple and straight forward, they will have them listed - the amount of time and skills they're looking for - and you just select [those you can do] and it operates as a really simple information exchange. [The user's] email address and information of whatever they've requested is passed on to the project owner [who can then get in touch with them].

The reason we've done that is not to try and get money out of people. We were initially thinking about allowing people to just crowd source their skills, time, and money, but the projects said "We really want the focus to be around funding because there are lots of ways we can get time and skills, and that's a really helpful benefit, but we want to focus the messaging on the funding."

Also, we think that once someone is financially invested in a project they're more likely to want to engage further with their time and skills, they've made that commitment so they're more likely to follow through with the time and skills that they've pledged.

What sort of targets are the projects going to be setting themselves?
On Kickstarter the average raised is about £5,000, but the target varies from £500 up to £30,000. Because we're focussing on projects that require higher capital requirements, like renewable energy, we suspect people will be going for larger targets. One of the reasons we're launching the site is because there's a recognised funding gap in the market between £0 - 200,000. For the launch projects we're really only looking for a maximum target of £50,000.

How open is the project, is it easy for people to get their project on the site?
We all know it's frustrating when you submit something and you don't know if it's going to be approved. So we've got various checks and balances that remove that necessity. The key distinction [between us and Kickstarter] is that you have to upload a video in order to post your project. That was just based on our research that showed a project is so much more likely to get funded if it had a video, and that we wanted to try and ensure there was some commitment so there was a sort of quality control in place.

But it's also an open project in another sense.
The source code will be available as one of the conditions of the grant from NESTA, it builds on our general approach which is collaborating with people whenever we can where possible. So it will be integrated with each of our other projects and we're keen to make it available for other projects as well.

If someone wanted to they could rip off most of our site and replicate it elsewhere which is why we're very clear on saying two things. Firstly, we're launching this to our community, because they're people who want it, and secondly, this is what we're launching initially but we're looking at quite a lot of other ways to invite crowd sourcing.

We're developing a learning community online. All of the projects will be archived so people can look back on what's been successful and what hasn't. We'll be uploading resources and we'll have a Q&A forum where people can talk to other project owners and backers because they're your audience and who you want to talk to.

There's a heck of a lot going on at the moment, the issue is that no one is really focussing on things that need to be solved.

Peoplefund.it launches this week and if you're interested in learning more as well as see the projects you can support then visit their site here.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1015883 2011-10-18T19:00:00-04:00 2011-12-18T05:12:01-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/ a number of publishers to dismiss the moves in technology, a decision which will likely impact them heavily later. But we are starting to see some fruitful shifts.

Speaking at the Turing Festival this August, Stephen Dunn from The Guardian explained how the newspaper had developed its online presence into a platform instead of simply a website. It isn't a sign of publication abandoning its print publication any time soon, rather a sign that it has acknowledged and adopted the way things are moving. It's preparing for the eventual change.

But, there is something else that's coming, something that is a bizarre hybrid of the physical print world and the virtual world. A hybrid that, on the surface, has taken the negatives of both mediums. Paul Carr, formerly of TechCrunch, has announced The New Gambit. It's an offline unprinted news source. Unlike other publications, none of its content will appear online. The only way to read it is on an e-reader.

Carr's tired of the Search Engine Optimised (SEO) articles that fill the internet and the tactics websites employ to grab traffic. Take the recent news of Steve Jobs' death; how many of the obituaries were an homage and how many were simply for hits? By removing the immediacy of the internet Carr hopes to retain editorial integrity, they'll only write about the things that they deem important, and they'll write about them in the style that they want to.

It's bold, but it's going to be a struggle. Not appearing online means limiting your exposure. Coupled with the fact that the only way to read The New Gambit is to put money down first is going to limit initial sales. With other websites, such as The Onion's, you're able to read a few articles before you hit a pay gate. Not appearing in print, again, limits the market. Back in the 18th century The Spectator was one of England's most popular dailies. It boasted a readership of 60,000 despite only printing 3,000 copies. There were twenty readers to every copy because it was passed around. It would be left at the pub, at the coffee house, read at the breakfast table by families. This doesn't happen with e-readers, not yet anyway, they're expensive devices, certainly not something to share around. It's not like a copy of the Metro that can be just left on the tube once you're done reading it.

So, it's success relies on word of mouth and endorsements from the ebook marketplaces. If Amazon were to bundle a month's subscription to The New Gambit with every Kindle, or if it were on offer in a high publicity spot in the Apple market place it could well take off. But, as a concept, it's coming out of the negatives of both the physical and the virtual world and for that I'm very interested to see how it works out.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.996300 2011-10-06T06:40:35-04:00 2011-12-06T05:12:02-05:00

Julian Benson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-benson/ Muppets a cappella? This is what's worrying the owners for YouTube. Only a few users in a thousand actually respond to the advertising, a tiny proportion of their views make the site any money.

Part of the reason for this is the difficulty of targeting adverts for the videos uploaded to the site. Should every free-running video advertise trainers, or every cat video pet food? This week saw the news that YouTube are spending $100 million buying content from a number of partners in an attempt to tackle this problem. Unlike the 35 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube, the content from their partners can be watched and analysed for the most effective advert placements. The traditional way of advertising.

This is the problem of the modern media, it's still traditional at its core. We see the old methods being forced onto the new system. 4oD and ITV player insert ad breaks into their online content at quarter hour intervals; video streaming sites put ads at the start of their videos, more and more sites are putting gates between users and what they want to watch.

Since the invention of television, and particularly in the last decade, there's been the push to deliver on demand content to viewers. Ever since there has been more than one channel, there's been people who skip between them when the ads come on. Viewers want the most uninterrupted experience they can get. It's no wonder that users turn to piracy, internet viewers are the network's creation. TiVo and sites like iPlayer have given viewers the ability to watch what they want, when they want, and how they want: able to skip, pause, rewind through their programs.

It is only from the torrent sites that these viewers can get the purest, unadulterated content; stripped of ad breaks and trailers, high quality content for free. It's criminal, yes, but everyone thinks twice when they realise they don't have to watch that patronising "You wouldn't steal a car" trailer at the start of every DVD. Don't the distributors realise that the only people in the world who saw that horribly annoying pre-movie clip are the people who have legally bought the DVD?

Unfortunately, the response has been to shut down, rather than learn from, these sites. All it takes is a tweak of the model for everyone involved to come out from this situation happy. There are two reasons users go to these sites over buying the DVDs and using the online streaming services provided by the networks. The first is price, you can't beat free. The second is experience, an uninterrupted, unbound version of a program is always going to be preferable to ad laden platform restricted version. Looking at that setup it's difficult to think how the networks can adapt to this. But, the solution isn't new.

In 2005 Mark Pesce gave a talk entitled 'Piracy is Good', in it he describes the power of the 'bug'. The bug is that little logo that sits in the corner of the screen during broadcasts. It's usually the network's logo, but occasionally it's a brand's. Potentially, the bug could change television. Pirated video strips out the ads and the trailers, but they don't change the actual content. So if there is a bug in the corner of the uploaded video it will remain there as it is infinitely copied around the world. If that bug is an ad, then it's being seen around the world by millions of viewers, viewers who can't skip it, but don't even mind it's there. It isn't obnoxious and it doesn't interrupt their viewing.

Networks could start distributing their bugged content through torrents, Pesce even suggests posting DVDs out to people's homes for free. The entire operation funded by the advertisers. That's the modern way of advertising, but no one seems to be jumping on it. Pesce gave his talk six years ago, yet we still have obnoxious, irritating, flow breaking ads. ]]>