Medium Cool: Launching Your Own Video Blog (page 2)

On The Blog Training

Obviously, there's much more to video blogging than one article can hope to discuss. A recent book published by Focal Press, Producing Video Podcasts, by Richard Harrington and Mark Weiser, provides a richly-detailed overview of the topic.

But there's no substitute for personal, on-the-blog training. In the late 1960s, someone asked director/producer Stanley Kubrick, then at the height of his fame, having just come off his epochal 2001: A Space Odyssey, filmed in widescreen 70mm on a 10.5 million-dollar budget - back when 10.5 million was real money in Hollywood - how someone could become a filmmaker. He replied, "The best education in film is to make one. I would advise any neophyte director to try to make a film by himself. A three-minute short will teach him a lot. I know that all the things I did at the beginning were, in microcosm, the things I'm doing now as a director and producer."

Kubrick believed that "anyone can make a movie who has a little knowledge of cameras and tape recorders, a lot of ambition and - hopefully - talent. It's gotten down to the pencil-and-paper level. We're really on the threshold of a revolutionary new era in film."

Like the onscreen visions of 2001 itself, Kubrick may have been a few decades off with his prediction: the "pencil-and-paper level" of moving pictures wasn't quite there then, but it's definitely here now - and just as internet blogs replaced personal diaries, adding video is an easy way to increase your visibility, in more ways than one.

Ed Driscoll is a freelance journalist covering home theater and the media.

Video Sharing Sites

Click here to download a PDF list of Video Sharing Sites.