Redrock Micro is a film equipment company that specializes in creating adapters that provide filmmakers with the ability to attach 35mm camera lenses to cheaper more affordable DV cameras. This has always been the holy grail for many independent filmmakers, gaining the depth of field only available to more expensive cameras. I was lucky enough to have Brian Valente answer a few of my questions about Redrock Micro.

Many people do not know this, but the Micro35 was born out of a community of independent filmmakers and their desire to find a solution. This community curated goal and contributions created the Micro35, a competitor to other more expensive alternatives. As Redrock released the micro35, they also released the blueprint and design for the piece for the community to buy giving back to the community everyone’s effort.

1. How did you redrock micro come about and how did the concept of creating the micro35 begin?

We are first filmmakers, and at the time were appalled at the equipment choices available to us. Either they were incredibly expensive (but great) products, or cheap plastic knockoffs that were terrible quality. Even the cheap ones seemed expensive. This seemed particularly true for 35mm adapters, which at the time was the last missing piece to shooting true film style results. Cameras had evolved to offer 24 frames, progressive scanning, and cinema gamma curves, and editing had become powerful and capable, but everything still looked like video. The only available solution was 3x the price of a video camera, which to us seemed just ridiculous. An adapter had to be reasonably priced in comparison to a prosumer video camera. A target price of less than $1,000 was part of our design criteria in the original micro35, and continues to be one of our primary design goals in any new product today.

2. When Redrock Micro was shown in 2004 at NAB, what was the reaction?

The micro35 was originally debuted online, and by the time NAB rolled around there was some buzz already happening. At NAB? Astounding! We didn’t have our own booth, and were showing the micro35 in JVC’s booth. We were absolutely mobbed the entire time 4-5 people deep, and won the show award for best new product. We were absolutely amazed, but thinking back on it, we realized the idea that video equipment could be great quality and still affordable was a fairly revolutionary one at the time. Most folks were used to the “film markup” mentality.

3. I remember, the Micro35 having some roots in the DVinfo forums, how was the involvement among the community? How do you think this common goal of find a cheaper alternative to the PS Technik organized everyone?

The micro35 project was originally founded in the DIY forums on dvinfo.net and Chris Hurd was very supportive of our early efforts. I think there is a shared goal among all indie filmmakers to get the best equipment possible for the least amount of money. Indie filmmakers often have the luxury of time, but rarely the luxury of money. Online communities serve to bring us all together to share ideas, techniques, and gear to create the best possible result.

4. Redrock has from the beginning sold the blueprint to DIY the micro35, what was the though process behind this and how has the community seen this? Also, the community seems to have supported the company a lot, why do you think this is so?

We always wanted to offer something that was ridiculously priced (the guide is only $45) that could get anyone with some pocket change and a little elbow grease to have a 35mm adapter. We felt very strongly there should be something available for everyone, and the Guide is one way to do it.  Since the original Guide there have been many other DIY solutions popping up, and we are really pleased to see others taking up this cause and advancing the state of the art.

Regarding support from the community, I think people are supportive for two reasons: first, they understand and believe in Redrock’s mission to provide great quality products for indie filmmakers at really affordable prices. We also involve the community in which products we build and the feature set for these products. This is a very different approach than simply getting a mattebox from Germany, for example. Second, indie filmmakers love to support an underdog. We’ve grown a lot since our early days, but in many ways we are still an underdog working towards making all critical cinema tools available and affordable.

5. In your experience, have you seen other types of projects such as this where the community is involved to this degree?

Absolutely – People like Stu Maschwitz and his DV Rebel’s Guide is another example of exactly the same mission, except he did this for visual fx and action shooting techniques.

Messaging me through twitter. This is my tweetdeck.

So I posted something about hearing Pure Yoga part-time teachers having an argument in Hong Kong and Pure Yoga messages me on twitter asking for location and what the complaint was. Wonder if I should even care? Though I do find this a bit fascinating, wonder if they have people just trolling twitter of SNS’s for this stuff.

March 18^th 2009, a seemingly regular night on Hong Kong television channel TVB, the popular drama E.U was on. Twenty-one episodes have gone by and ratings have held steady at an average of 29 points a week. However this night’s episode, number twenty-two, would eventually spark a best supporting actor award, a successful spinoff, a city wide frenzy about a character with magazine covers and also one of Hong Kong’s most successful Facebook application.

Eric Chow is a fan of the TV series E.U, closely following the entire series as the drama unfolds. But on the twenty-second episode, he was shocked like the other fans of the drama. The producers and writers decided it would be the end of the popular character “Laughing Gor”. Played by Michael Tse, who later won an award for this character, “Laughing Gor” was the one character most defined by the series and loved by the audience.

Later that night, an idea struck Eric. He personally felt the loss of “Laughing Gor” and thought it would be a good idea to create a digital funeral for this most loved character. This idea would manifest itself into a Facebook application that can be shared among the netizens.

Facebook applications are applications built on Facebook’s platform. Software developers can create applications interacting with Facebook’s API. This gives developers the ability to create applications utilizing Facebooks data and user connections. An example would be the popular game Farmville. Players in Farmville can interact with their Facebook friends for a social experience.

Eric Chow decided to make an impact with his idea, it would have to be done fast. Late into the night over a course of five hours, Eric created the “Laughing Gor Funeral” application. The application allows users to present offerings to “Laughing Gor”. After presenting an offering,  As more users presented offerings, the “Laughing Gor Funeral” would level up an open up more potential offerings. A way for all the fans to act on a collective will.

Eric initially shared the application to four people. Not sure where this would take him, his family and friends also installed the application on Facebook and published their activities on their Facebook wall. To his surprise, the application caught on like a firestorm. Within the first week over one hundred thousand people installed the application.

Then over the next few months, over three hundred thousand people installed the “Laughing Gor Funeral” application. The users in the application presented over seven hundred thousand offerings. Each one of the offerings presented by users created a posting to their own Facebook wall that was seen by their friends. If we took the newspaper industry’s standard of calculating impressions, which is to multiply the number of readers or subscribers by three, the “Laughing Gor Funeral” application created potentially over two million impressions just by spreading through the user’s Facebook wall.

Though highly successful, the Facebook app was never noticed by TVB. TVB instead created an online petition on their own website to revive the “Laughing Gor” character. The petition was signed by over a hundred a fifty thousand people, far short of the number of users created by Eric Chow and his Facebook app. However if we look closely, the hundred and fifty thousand people who signed the petition never shared or spread their own activities among their own network of people. That means those were a static hundred and fifty thousand interactions. If we compare that to the number of potential impressions created by the “Laughing Gor Funeral” app, the TVB petition falls short by almost two million impressions, demonstrating mainstream media’s lack of understanding towards social media. This creates a large potential opportunity for people who understand viral ability and social media to fill a need in the market place.

Update:

Sent this to Brandon Cheung of wwwins and he said the average Facebook user has 150 friends. He thinks the multiplication of three can be higher. I used newspaper as an analog just to demonstrate but I think he’s right. I usually get a few comments on my stupid posts and those are only the people who comment. I wonder what the conversion rate of views to comments is?

McDonald's Ad Buy on Digg.com

Probably not what McDonald was thinking when they bought this ad. But the digg.com stories that are populating this section is a very very funny juxtaposition.

An experience doesn’t have to be tangible. Movies are acquired through a ticket booth but the experience is visual. Music is downloaded or acquired at a music store but the experience is acoustic. Video games are bought in store or through downloads but the experience is designed for multi-sensory experience. With the explosion of social network sites, experiences many times exist in the synthetic world, the online space.

However the synthetic social experience is defined by a variety of factors. The synthetic social experience involves social interaction on top of the visual experiences that come with the other mediums. But how does this differ and what makes this unique? Certainly the social interaction has its benefits and repercussions. What other effects do the means of communication embedded in a synthetic social experience have on users? Social behavior has certainly changed since the popularization of social networking sites.

US Senators are now using Twitter, former vice-presidential candidate is now using Facebook. With over three hundred million users world-wide and a growing number of games, Facebook has become a platform for the synthetic social experience. There are areas of this synthetic social experience to explore and I will attempt to find how reputation, culture and social behavior is changing

Reputation

In a social environment, one interacts with other people. The actions conducted by someone will undoubtedly create a certain influence, esteem, stature or notoriety. In the digital realm “the latent connection can be digitally reconstituted at any time, should the need or desire arise”. (Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities, 2009 ACM, Ellison/Lampe/Steinfield) Connections can be reconstructed and reputations can be recalled.

As people begin to congregate in synthetic spaces, users being to find common interests or develop relationships. As strands of relationships growing and begin to interconnect with each other, people’s reputations are taken into account because the social behavior of the community will depend on it. Looking at MMORPG( Massively Multi-Online Role Play Game) users in the game have to maintain a reputation. If a user carries a reputation of notoriety and disdain among other users, the social aspect of the game will take a step back when goals and tasks require players to work in a social environment.

Many similar aspects found in MMORPGs can also be found in social networking sites. People have been able to create reputations through social networking sites, one of the best examples is Tila Tequila, who is now a reality tv star but first became renown through Myspace. This reputation has been documented in Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and now people are learning to profit through reputation gained through online communication tools.

However people are still learning to the side effects of a public reputation that is retained digitally. As evidenced by sites such as www.lamebook.com a site where users post embarrassing moments on the site Facebook. people are still learning the effects of publicity. Now there are also a growing number of cases of cyber-bullying. It has become a strong enough movement that people have organized help groups such as www.stopcyberbullying.org. In the coming years we will begin to learn more about the evolution of online reputation and how society will learn to cope with its effects.

Emerging Culture

Participatory media and the reduce cost of communicating has created viral movements and memes. Within this movement, culture begins to form. An examples is lolcats, pictures of cats with arbitrary captions using a sans-serif. As Clay Shirky says about lolcats, as long as you have a sans-serif font and a picture of a cat you can be part of the conversation.

But even among the emerging culture, there are rules the community and society decides on. A community may set rules for how the network engages each other. Sometimes these rules are set by someone, in the case of “Linux”, Linus Torvald owns the ultimate authority on what will be included. He also owns the trademark to “Linux”. However the software is created by the community who supports this project.

In viral memes that spread across the web, the rules can be simple. Such as one of the recent memes that have been going across the web, “Angers Hitler”. The rules are simple, find something deserving of a rant and create subtitles matching the movie “Downfall”, a biopic about the final days of Hitler. Some of these will include rants about the US Health Care system, the delayed release of Starcraft II or Lamar Odom, Los Angeles Lakers player. They all follow the same method and rule. In an age when participation and communication is easy and affordable, rules can arise from the community participation.

However, from a legal standpoint, online participation is beginning to lose its immunity and special legal privilege. In many states across the US, cyber bullying laws are already being implemented. And in the UK, there are laws and initiatives to prevent cyberbullying. As social find to see certain social behavior as a commodity, they begin to lose it’s special legal privileges, a point argued by Jack Balkin of Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

In the end, the synthetic social experience affects our lives inside the world and outside of it. But as far as the user, what equations will satisfy a  user? If a user spends time experiencing this synthetic social experience what compensation will they be looking for? Is the user looking for reputation growth? Are they looking for a network growth/maintenance? Or are they looking for both? If we were to formulate this, maybe this is the formula for the synthetic social experience, user compensation = reputation growth + “network growth/maintenance”.