Digital Motion dot net

Amie Street

These guys are doing something really smart. All songs are free to start with, and increase in price as they increase in popularity. This is insanely smart for musicians and for music fans. It makes trying out a new band nearly painless. It is also DRM-free, which I have to admit I like as a music fan (but am a bit more dubious about as a content creator).

If these guys can get some traction, this would be a great site for new bands to build an audience. My one complaint is that actually finding music on the site wasn’t as easy as I’d like it to be. I had to search for a band before I could find charts, but even then, I wouldn’t mind some sort of flat list of bands by genre or something so that I could really explore. That is a major nit for this kind of site, but is easily fixed.

One other thing I like about these guys from their for-artists page:
# Amie Street takes no ownership of your music, nor do we ask that you sell exclusively on Amie Street. There is no digital rights management software (DRM) on Amie Street.
# Amie Street does not charge a monthly fee or a sign up fee.

Something that is very cool about all these new web 2.0 music sites is that they are blazing the trail for the indie film sites of tomorrow. Pandora or last.fm could just as easily be customized video channels. Amie Street could sell video downloads just as simply…

Courtesy of TechCrunch

Want to learn about remixing, but don’t want to make the investment in software or hardware? Splice is a nice combo between social network and an online flash-based remixing tool. A great way to get started and get advice and support as well.

I like simple, but well executed, internet art experiments; especially when then combine more traditional forms.

David Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies are little slices of time, capturing motion, but in an obviously artificial way. Constrained to subway shots, he catches people in the quasi-personal-but-very-public times when they are seemingly relaxed, but also very aware. I think that these are incredibly effective at showing the thoughts in people’s minds much more than a single still image could be.

Urban Ghost is similar, yet different. Urban Ghost catches people in motion, on the street (for the most part), not in repose. These are not people consigned to getting there when they get there. These are people doing something, moving forward, even if they are just looking in a store window. Their dynamism is expressed in the single frame rather than in the multiple frames of the stop motion studies. As I said in my post on another blog, it reminds me a lot of Gary Winograd in the journalistic, yet voyeuristic nature of the images.

[via The Long Tail]

The Television Revolution is at the Gates

This article is over a year old and still seems precient. We’re starting to see Indy filmmakers try to raise money this way, but they don’t have the dedicated audience that someone like Joss Whedon or Aaron Sorkin does. If someone at that level decided to go audience funded, they could kick start a whole new industry…

Your Gallery – Show your art to the world

It’s kind of a cool idea/major risk for a real-world very prestigious art gallery to open up its website to all artists, un-juried. It is also very cool and a major risk to have a video section on that site. For the moment, there is a chance for video artists to network and share their world. Get on it before it gets sued out of existence or canceled due to insane bandwidth costs…

xplsv.tv // Forum / General / Motion help list

I like it when other sites create exhaustive lists of cool resources and then promise to keep those lists up to date. Saves me A LOT of time. It is mostly focused on After Effects, but that is the tool of choice for most of us. Works out just fine.

Expanded Cinema is a nice curated collection of experimental or innovative short films that are being hosted round the net. What I like about it is that it is short in scope: 18 days, 18 films, handpicked. It was a manageable project and a quick and delightful watch.

(via Create Digital Motion)

Sites that Pay for Web Video: From CinemaTech

I’m always interested in finding ways to figure out how to monetize content, this is a great resource.