Winter Solstice at Newgrange

In this era of video streaming here is a particularly brilliant (literally) application – sharing the Winter Solstice at the Newgrange passage tomb in Co. Meath, Ireland. I first went there in the early 80s when there was no visitor centre or formality and the nearby tombs of Knowth and Dowth were largely overgrown. Now it is (very deservedly) a World Heritage Site and this morning’s live broadcast via YouTube was brought to the world by Brú na Bóinne / World Heritage Ireland and Oifig na nOibreacha Poiblí / the Irish Office of Public Works (OPW). Starting as the sun rose over the horizon behind the loop of the River Boyne we were enabled through live streaming to witness the entrance of the sunlight into the passage of this neolithic tomb and watch its advance down the passage to illuminate this house of spirits and mark the rebirth of the sun after the darkest days of winter. Particularly resonant of course this year.

The live commentary by two authoritative and warm Irish experts explained that this area is an”inland island” being separated by a huge loop of the river. The whole area is rich in neolithic remains and traces. They showed some aerial photos from 2018, enabled by that other important new camera technology, drones, revealing crop marks and patterns in the countryside in drought showing the presence of huge perfectly circular constructions (a henge) on a grand scale, unknown until that driest of summers.

The ability to share in real time sights which are not otherwise accessible to the world at large is one of the fundamental benefits of streaming video.

08:48 Just before the sun emerged over the horizon

08:55 view from the ‘light box’, the aperture into the tomb

09:00 the line of fog marks the River Boyne

09:03 the light in the tomb from above on the sandy passage floor

09:05 the sunlight enters the passage into the tomb

09:06 the passage starts to be illuminated

09:07

09:12

09:16

09:16

09:17

09:20

09:31

Wishing Simple Pleasures Part 4 readers and the world at large light after the darkness and Simple Pleasures galore in 2021.

TV producers are no good at making YouTube videos

Picking up on the last post I’m glad to see my thoughts on YouTube-type video…

The new YouTube channels are an area where TV baggage is damaging. Some have squeezed out everything that’s really good about YouTube. You want that energy that comes from someone being able to record, edit and bang something out in three hours.

…broadly confirmed from the front line. Hank, one of the fellas behind Crash Course and SciShow, summarises the Lessons Learned from YouTube’s $300M Hole (its first tranche of  ‘Original Channel’ investment) thus:

1. Spending more money to produce the same number of minutes of content does not increase viewership. Online video isn’t about how good it looks, it’s about how good it is.
2. People who make online video are much better at making online video than people who make TV shows. This probably seems obvious to you (it certainly is to me) but it apparently was not obvious to the people originally distributing this money.
3. When advertising agencies tell you they want something (higher quality content, long-form content, specific demographics, lean-back content, stuff that looks like tv) it’s not our job to attempt to deliver those things. In a world where the user really does get to choose, the content created to satisfy the needs and wants of viewers (not advertisers) will always reign supreme (thankfully.)

He concludes “Of the 114 channels that YouTube funded as part of this initiative, my educated guess is that exactly one earned back its advance…”

No real surprise there gauging by the UK channels which are broadly made as cheap TV which looks …cheap – but not cheerful. Cheerful is the energy referred to above, in a world where there is no such thing as a jump cut and individual personality is what communicates the joie de vivre.

Thanks for the warm-up

Some cheekiness from Channel 4, literally picking up from where the first #Superhumans trailer for the London 2012 Paralympics left off…

How wonderful is it to see a pretty much sold out Paralympics? London, you’re a star

Jump London – and then some…

Seven Days trail

Today’s The Day Today

Gotta love this one really (Brooker’s take on how TV news items are constructed). It prompts fond memories of working with The Day Today‘s Jan Hallett and his legendary ‘trouser tape’ in the beer and curry fueled bowels of ITN.

And now back to the studio, Chris…

(Jan did all those mental graphics)

Big Unstoppable

Mark Earls the Herdmeister showed this vid at b.TWEEN 09 in Liverpool the other day (his keynote, which almost got us chucked out the venue for bouncing around, was one of our best decisions on the b.TWEEN Advisory Board this year, a good active, participatory, embarrassing-for-the-English kick off [James Estill, sorry for kneeing you – accident …honest])  – I love rewatching this for insight into human copying and community…

Where, do you reckon, is the tipping point?

Adoption Experience

Britain's Forgotten Children

Yesterday afternoon saw the launch of my latest project – Adoption Experience www.channel4.com/adopt – this is the thinking behind it:

“Adoption is an area of childcare and family life shrouded in misconception, myth and confusion. The best way to untangle the realities from the rumours and hearsay is to focus on real people’s real experiences.

Adoption Experience shares valuable first-hand experience of Adoption from every perspective – people who have been adopted, adopters, social workers, siblings, people left in the system, potential adopters, every viewpoint that helps give insight into the realities of Adoption.”

Now those of you familiar with the peripatetic, seemingly random wanderings of my oeuvre will notice distinct similarities between Adoption Experience and Sexperience. Here was the thinking behind Sexperience:

“Sexperience enables people to share their first-hand experiences (as opposed to opinion or theory) of a broad range of sexual issues, problems and solutions in video and text form, thereby recognising the complexity and individuality of the subject through multiple perspectives and transcending the easy, often over-simplified answers of self-help manuals.”

When it came to the subject of Adoption, it struck me that the same grounded insight brought by a focus on direct experience to the realm of sex and relationships might really help to shed light through the fog of preconceptions obscuring my understanding of this other subject. For me what first sprung to mind was a nightmarish, intrusive process; social workers telling you you have too many books in your house or are too pale for your own good; a recent tale of an adoption imploding and tearing apart the family and marriage of my friend’s sister; compelling tales of retracing birth families; happy sorties filming childcare projects with Emerald Productions and ArkAngel Productions for Barnardo’s; various celebrity stories headed up by Mia Farrow (recently on hunger strike over Dafur – good on her), Angelina Jolie and Madonna; and a few lovely, sometimes quiet kids at my sons’ schools. So what I decided to do was to lift the infrastructure of Sexperience wholesale and reapply it to the subject of Adoption.

The production company/digital indie, Mint Digital, said it would probably work but they’ll be a 5% difference in the structures. I stuck to my guns that it could work as a pretty much 1-to-1 match and that’s what we went with. So, in effect, it’s my first attempt at an online format. (Another class implementation by Mint in the wake of Sexperience and Osama Loves. Video content by Betty TV. Reminds me, Sexperience has just been nominated for a Broadcast Digital Award [Best use of Interactive] and the Osama Loves documentary, Osama Bin Everywhere, is up for a Rockie Award at the Banff TV Awards in Canada.)

Now Sex is of universal relevance whereas Adoption is something of a niche concern, so I wasn’t sure what kind of take-up to expect. The signs so far are good and I feel like we’ve found our clear blue water. There’s little out there on the Web which captures first-hand experience of Adoption issues in a non-textual, engaging form. The first two hours, from a standing start, saw:

• 29,448 pageviews
• 5,578 visits
• 5.3 pageviews/visit (promising since the user-created content which drives the creative concept was very limited, starting empty that very afternoon)
• 170 experiences and questions were posted by viewers, many very illuminating and detailed

This came in unsolicited from a recent adopter today: “I think the site’s great – fantastic that it’s open to the public to post questions and responses about their experiences. This is what the adoptive and adopted audiences really need I think!”

The site was created out of the Channel 4 Cross-platform dept. as part of the Channel’s Britain’s Forgotten Children season broadcasting all this week. It springs from the themes of the documentary series Find Me a Family, commissioned by my equally mad-haired colleague Dominique Walker. This is the striking trail created by Brett Foraker of 4Creative to communicate the thrust of the season.

Where’s that kid gone?!

WATCH THE VIDEO: Jesus, where’s that kid gone?!

Britain’s Forgotten Children on Channel 4 from 11th May

UPDATE 23.iv.09:

Hi Def embeddable version now available:

Big Art Mob

Violence erupts in the Art world

Remix of a video made by students at Kingston Uni inspired by Big Art Mob