For five months, I produced a comprehensive video series for the Tufts University Alumni Association (TUAA) to use with their new website to assist Tufts Alumni regional leaders across the world in developing, marketing and managing their local chapters. The idea stemmed from the issue that every two years, TUAA and the Office of Alumni Relations (OAR) sponsors about 20 chapter leaders to return to Tufts to attend seminars to learn about alumni leadership. This symposium is expensive, does not effectively reach as many people as they would like and is heavy on instruction, not leaving much time for interaction among alumni leaders.

I proposed to create four video sessions based on the four major seminars presented at the most recent leadership symposium in June 2009 which included: Data Mining, Successful Programming, Alumni Leadership Development, and Marketing & Managing your Chapter.

At the end of the project, Tufts received 48 VIDEOS with a total of 1.5 HOURS of content.

The process involved:

• Writing four scripts (based on the transcripts of the live presentations)
• Voice-over recording
• Producing slides and screen-capture videos
• Encoding videos for streaming

The aspiration for this project was to act as a hybrid online course with the “learning” occuring online and then the interactive brain-storming and idea development happening offline in the regional chapters or back on Tufts’ campus for a leadership symposium.

NOTE: The video series is private hosted content of Tufts University. If you would like samples, you may request them by email.

In the Fall 2009, I had the pleasure of working with model and television personality Larysa Poznyak on developing her online presence for her music career. Working together with a designer, music video editor, and her music recording partner, I managed and developed the following (All links are available through the main site at LarysaMusic.com):

• A website with blog, photo gallery, several pages, music player, event calendar and custom regions for posting updates
• Twitter page
• Facebook page with custom music player
• Myspace page
• Syndication of three songs on iTunes
• Creation of a virtual music store on Audiolife.com

NOTE: The sites may appear differently as I am not managing them for the client.

I produced a 15 second spec commercial for the Mountain Dew “Dewmocracy” ad competition. It garnered over 35,000 views on the host website in three weeks (http://12seconds.tv/v/DU3M6) and was the most popular video on the site for three weeks running; however it did not make it into the final three for the ad contract. Although, no one really knows who were the real winners as the companies running the competition never displayed nor released the vote counts. Instead, they chose three final videos based on what, one can assume, were “safe” solutions. So much for corporate transparency in the Web2.0 world.

Either way, it was a fun spot to make in one afternoon and I discovered a new technique for creating slow-motion using 1080i60 footage.

Project: “Womanizer” Music Video
Perezcious Records (Warner), 2009
Director: Ethan Lader
D.P./Technical Consultant: George Rausch

Project: “Filled with Dread” Music Video
Client: Nuke the Soup
Meteor Records, 2009
Director/Producer/Editor: George P. Rausch

Project: “SoulWow” Infomercial
Client: Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn
Director/Producer/Editor: George P. Rausch
Agency: Forza Migliozzi
Website: http://soulwow.com

GadgetReview: The AutoMoto Scooter
Director/Producer/Editor: George Rausch
Host: Christen Da Costa for GadgetReview.com

I recently signed on with GadgetReview.com to produce short video segments for their website. As our first major release, we received an exclusive (first) review of the AutoMoto.

This brings me to the subject at hand: Lou Dobbs and his diffusion filter. If you watch CNN for most of the day, when 6PM hits, you’ll be instantly transported to the set of “Days of Our Lives.” There is this soft diffuse glow that envelopes your screen. No, it’s not Lou Dobbs’ silky voice, it’s a diffusion filter. As a result, it softens edges, with a tendency to cut down the signs of aging in the talent. My argument is not that Lou Dobbs should be chastised for using a diffusion filter for purposes of vanity, but more so that it actually makes HD look better for live television. I say live television because produced shows have hours of color timing and (probably) slight diffusion added here and there to improve the overall visual quality. Sometimes, when I’m watching live HD channels with people talking at close range (e.g. news, sports talk ((yeah right)), talk shows, etc.), it’s like the picture is a little too much. It is almost like the edges of the images are so hot that they stress my vision.

I read an article (now pretty old by Internet standards) of an interview with the CEO of the FX Group about how to build HD sets for TV news stations. One recommendation was that talent should  use a more “natural look” as far as makeup is concerned, unlike the past tradition of caking it on. And for cameras, use a gold diffusion filter to soften the hard edges that are native to HD. There were also recommendations on the intensity of light, using ND filters for over lit scenes, as well as the width of the stage to accommodate wide screen TVs.

When discussing the issue of softening HD video with diffusion filters, I am reminded of the first CDs that were produced in the early 1980s. If I remember correctly from my multimedia music composition class, the digital wave form is actually a stepped approximation of an actual sound wave. This is why higher sampling rates are so important for digital sound. The more samples, the finer the stepping (the resolution), creating a smoother, more natural sound. (Read more on Digital Audio on Wikipedia.) The point I’m getting at is that playing a RAW digital audio track sounds too harsh. By way of using filters (this is done through the devices you use to play music whether you know it or not), they smooth out the square attributes of digital waveforms.

Coming back to HD video, once the novelty wears off and producers get used to using it, I hope the common practice of employing mild diffusion filters will become common practice to improve the visual appearance of live, close range television shows. Like early digital audio, there needs to be some kind of filter, whether it is physical glass or some kind of real-time smoothing software, to even out these overlly crisp HD images. Aesthetically, smoothing out the picture gives HD more depth and visual interest. Just look at Lou Dobbs. He’s 63 and still easy on the eyes.

It’s not every day that you fall in love. And today, I fell in love with a new web video viewing program called Boxee. I signed up to be an alpha tester in 2008 and got my official invite in December. It was only after reading an article in the New York Times today that I finally decided to try it. The reason I didn’t earlier was due to several factors:

1. Hulu is amazing. Great content, great interface, and high resolution videos. Why would I need anything else?
2. I had been grossly disappointed by Joost’s debut in 2007 and subsequent web-based version in 2008.
3. MythTV sounds like a good idea for a DVR, but it is rather cumbersome to set up (like most open source projects). I thought this program would be the same.

I signed up for an account, downloaded the file, installed the program, opened it… and fell head over heels for it.

After spending several hours testing the program, I came up with some of my favorite things about Boxee and a list of features that need to be improved and/or added.

Here are the reasons I’m in love:

THE INTERFACE

Dead simple, luscious, intuitive, and fast. Each screen provides you with just enough information without overwhelming you with unnecessary meta info or buttons. The colors and the flow from screen to screen is so visually stimulating that it is fun unto itself. There are little sounds that make you aware that you’re flipping through items (similar to TiVo). Now, when I say INTUITIVE, I mean that Boxee’s development team spent a lot of time thinking about how to flow between different pages. The user is able to control operations (I tested on a computer keyboard) using only the arrow keys (this would be a joy stick on any TV remote), the ENTER key (most likely the “select” key on a TV remote), the escape key (a “back button” of sorts) and the space bar (”play/pause” button). THAT IS ALL you need to control this program. Ditch your mouse when you use it on your computer. Funny story: after using Boxee for two hours, I did a Google search in Firefox. After the results appeared, I wanted to use the arrow keys to move down to the entry! Why isn’t this a standard feature in web browsers yet for search engines? It is perfect.

THE CONTENT

Boxee is able to pull from almost every major video portal you can think of on the Internet. It loads the videos FASTER than if you were to use a web browser and the best part is that you can play then pause something and move to a different system screen to view other material without having to click away from the active video. Right now, you can view Hulu in 480p so long as you log into your Hulu account and have it pre-set to always display high resolution video. YouTube… is getting there. Boxee will support HD YouTube soon I’ve been told (through Twitter by the Boxee team). A really amazing feature is that you can add custom RSS feeds of videos/audio from other sources and then view it from within Boxee. Therefore, while other companies are working on adding themselves to Boxee as actual program buttons, you can just make your own channels using RSS.

GETTING BOXEE ON YOUR TV

If you’ve got a laptop, just get the proper cable to connect it to your television. Ideally, you’d want to get an HDMI or DVI cable that can plug into your HDTV. Boxee can do playback of 720p and 1080p (I was able to watch Apple movie trailers in 1080p on my screen). This system is impossibly simple. Just plug it in and go. The really great part is that you can add “custom sources” to your Boxee profile so that it can draw movies from Torrents, RSS feeds, and even hard drives on your network. Netflix streaming is also possible (however, I have not gotten it to work yet. I continue to get an error when I press play… hey, it’s Alpha testing).

Here are some things that I’d like to see added/changed:

FRIENDING

I’m not sure how this works, but someone friended me right away and there is no way for me to “accept/ignore.” This guy just showed up and now I see his “recommendations” all the time. Go away! I can’t even remove him.

SHARING

At present, the only way to say to someone, “Hey, watch this video,” is to send it to one of your Boxee friends. Of course, you could put out the RSS feed of your recommendations so people can see, but really, who has time to read through your log of recommendations? What really needs to be on the screen is a button that let’s you share the link through Facebook and other services just like traditional web video sites presently do.

YOUTUBE INTEGRATION

The YouTube within Boxee is rather snappy; however, it is NOT easy to see the video content from your own YouTube subscriptions. I just want to see videos produced by channels I subscribe to. Right now, that is not possible. Once Boxee nails that one, they’ll really have a killer app.

…those are actually my only qualms at this time. Obviously, there are some other quirks like how some network video players don’t communicate all that well with Boxee (I’m looking at you WB Network).

The other night I went to an industry mixer for Web TV Producers sponsored by TubeFilter in Los Angeles and got a sense of how web-based production is pushing aside traditional media (or “classic” as the new media people were calling them that evening) to the point that someone, like me, could make a 12 episode show at $10,000 an episode (that’s peanuts in comparison to what real shows are made for) and then use the Internet to distribute it. Boxee IS going to be the program that finally brings the web to your TV.

My only recommendation is that Boxee, for their own sake and for all of the web series producers out there, needs to create a standard video box that people who don’t want to fool around with Linux or plugging their laptop into their TV screen can PURCHASE for $100 or less. (Reading through the forums is a classic scenario of all the boys talking shop/smack about computers.) In addition, get the software on XBox, Wii, and PS3. Unless you have a laptop with a good graphics card (raise your hand if your laptop can’t play full screen 720p without jittering), a DVI output (currently, this is only standard on Mac laptops), Boxee will never get the market share it needs to take off.

As a rising new media producer, Boxee excites me as I finally see a delivery system that can bring web video into the living room (something that the Media PC never did). It’s nice to be in love.

More information on Boxee at http://boxee.tv

The concept was borne out of an interaction that I had with a good friend of mine, Sarena S., who recently applied to a documentary film program at a prestigious university (which shall remain unnamed… for now). She visited the website for the program and was reluctant to apply because it looked terrible. I described the site as “an 8th Grade computer art project that hadn’t been updated in 10 years.” I told her not to go by the site and visit the program director in person. Several weeks later she did and low and behold the program was amazing.

So, what are the lessons to be learned at this university?

Your website is probably the first thing a prospective students sees. Therefore, appearances are very important. I would argue strongly that children grow up these days with much more keen senses of design aesthetic in comparison to even a generation ago. Their understanding of design is subconsciously influenced by the abundance of visually stimulating experiences, the rise of personal computers, and haute design in every day products (see: Apple Computer). In the documentary film “Helvetica” by Gary Hustwit, there is a great comment made by a typographer. He said that if he asked someone 30 years ago what a type face was, they’d look at him with a strange look. However, if you asked someone today what they think about a font, that individual will probably have a lot to say about more than one font that they use.

After working at two universities, I do understand that money can be hard to come by for things such as marketing and the department website. However, before completely abandoning a decent looking site (which is possible for several hundred dollars), that department should really consider options like having a talented student design a site for them. That’s better than doing a garbage Dreamweaver template from hell. Or maybe even buy a templated content management system for several hundred dollars.

All in all, I look forward to producing this show in the hope that it will make people look at websites and their experience online more critically. Web design is a form of art after all.

There will be more on this to come…