Deanmc's blog

San Antonio 48 Hour Film Experience is back!

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:52:25 -0500

Mark your calendar for the first weekend in December - for the San Antonio 48 Hour Experience! Founding sponsor Salsa.Net's front man Dean McCall says "We love this event, it shows the creativity of our film community, and how new technology has made the art and craft of filmmaking much more accessible."

Salsa.Net Public Studio Project

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:36:07 -0500

Welcome To The Public Studio Collaboratory

The experience of digital convergence is exciting and baffling. The development of the World Wide Web and the vision of an interconnected globe is a splendid , constantly shifting evolution of technologies that feels like magic to most of us. But learning how to use it effectively can be a nightmare for people born before 1980. An interconnected global community is coming together. How does our region fit in?

For the next two years or so the Media Lab of SalsaNet, (San Antonio’s oldest internet organization and the South Central Chapter of the Internet Society) will incubate a laboratory in community radio, television and world wide broadband production. A facility we are calling Public Studio.

Public Studio will become an independent non profit multimedia production group, serving the Alamo Area through Broadband Internet and Public Radio and Public Television. Public Studio will provide space, mentoring and equipment to young people and encourage and enable the exploration of community media and interactive world wide collaboration. Public Studio will explore ways non-profit organizations and creative people can integrate this new media into their lives and missions.

Public Studio will assemble a community pool of equipment and crews that will test out new technology and demonstrate its uses.

Public Studio will work to more closely integrate public radio and television with the regional community using local professional grade local production gear and local crews.

In collaboration with Public Radio and Public Television and the Internet Society, we will locate a place near the center of San Antonio and fill it with professional audio and video equipment and bright young people. From here we will go to locations around the Alamo Area to produce demonstration audio and video for broadcast and web delivery. Through the Internet Society we will establish collaborations with people all over the world.

Non profits will learn how to use digital media by helping to select the demonstration projects and participating in the production. At the end of the project (two years or so) we will choose the first employees of Public Studio from among the project participants and have a party and press conference.

The Public Studio collaboratory will enable the next generation of community media professionals to help us share the sights, sounds and challenges of our home region with each other and to link South Central Texas with the global community.

More Information

Pleas McNeel - pleas@salsa.net

Great way to build out forms for your website...just in case you need to!

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:07:29 -0600

Has to be one of the coolest way to build out web forms I have seen in quite some time. There is even a free version of it for peeps who don't want to waste money. You know the whole " pay for something" model that people use to eat;)

Might also want to take a look at the article Chris, one of the founders wrote, about starting your own company. best part for me was:

"To launch our web development magazine, Treehouse, we gave out the
first issue for free in order to generate a little buzz. Even though
thirty thousand people downloaded the free issue in its first week,
only about 300 of them felt it was worth paying for. According to Ryan
Carson, cofounder of Dropsend, that’s a lot closer to the norm than we previously believed."

San Antonio 48 hour Film Festival returns...

Mon, 9 Oct 2006 10:47:45 -0500

What's It All About
The San Antonio 48 Hour Film Experience

The SA48HR Film Experience is a local, filmmaking challenge event in the tradition of other 48 Hour Film Events, which are two-day intensive filmmaking experiences.

Teams preregister to participate, and can consist of as many team members as desired, and the event is limited to 10 teams total. Each team is given specific criteria to incorporate into a film, and then have 48 hours to write, produce, edit, score and master the final film. Films are limited to 8 minutes in running time, and may be shot on any format, but must be delivered on mini-DV.

The rules of this challenge are similar to most other film challenges, and are outlined below.

- Each team must preregister, and pay the $35.00 registration fee (payable to SALSA.NET)

Google Earth pushing great new featured content

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 19:35:01 -0500

As reported on LifeHacker and Arstechnica Google Earth has a new treasure trove of featured content online now to play with. One of the standouts is the real-time reporting and monitoring of earthquakes around the globe. The ability to zoom in on quakes around the globe is great. It's amazing to see how many quakes take place in a given week...more than I probably care to know about.

The CBS Seismic project shows the effects of the 6.0 quake that hit 260 miles of the coast of Florida a few weeks back (read about it here and here) even allowing for overlays of the shake maps.

Great report on using online technology for Social Change

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 11:17:36 -0500

Thanks to my buddy Jon Lebkowsky for passing this along. This report brings up some great point about the obvious pitfalls and rewards of using online technology in non-profit work etc. It speaks at a level where most users should be able to appreciate what is being discussed. Worth the read;)

Manhattan Short Film Festival Returns to San Antonio

Wed, 6 Sep 2006 10:58:55 -0500

For the third year, the URBAN-15 Group has united with The Manhattan Short Film Festival and over 80 other venues across Europe, Canada and the US, to create the world’s largest short film festival to be held throughout two continents this September.

Over the span of a week, venues from Russia to Ireland in Europe, four provinces in Canada along with 35 states will screen a selection of twelve short films that have made the cut into this prestigious event. In the past, the Festival’s finalists, who have gone on to win Oscars and move into the Hollywood mainstream, were judged by a celebrity panel which featured Susan Sarandon, Laura Linney, Eric Stoltz, Tim Robbins and a host of studio reps. This year, the Festival has thrown the judging out to audiences, who will be handed a voting card upon entry to each venue and asked to vote for their favorite film. Votes will be tallied and the winner announced in New York City’s Union Square Park on Sunday, September 23rd.

Open Source Fest in San Antonio

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:13:04 -0500

So the local linux groups in town, among others, are doing their open source Fest this week at Kelly USA. If you get the chance go by and take and look and support Tech in San Antonio.

Here is the information I got:

Hey all,

Tomorrow night the 4 day Open Source Fest begins at the Advanced Technology
Center on Kelly USA:
http://tinyurl.com/jyevo

This event by SATLUG.org, XCSSA.org and ACCD.edu is a three night one full day
(Sat) celebration of Open Source Technologies. The event will include give
aways but will mainly focus on Open Source presentations covering business,
scientific and recreational uses of Linux, BSD Unix, Apache, and similar
O.S./FLOSS software [sic].

The open to the public, somewhat technical sessions will be on the following
topics:
o Linux Newbies Workshop*

Messing with the newest YouTube killa

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:20:24 -0500

It's interesting that a company that was founded in 1998 is now considered a Youtube killer. I assume they must have been doing something very different back in 98...or who knows maybe they were really that smart and are only now getting some prop's...

Flash,iPod, and PSP formats

Who knew it was so easy to upload a video and have it in so many forms ready for use however you choose? I can see a lot of fun uses for this interesting product offering from the boys at Guba...

Great new browser that is too intuitive

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 11:33:20 -0500

I have been using the new beta of the Flock browser for the last couple o days and I have to say that I am really impressed. It's built of the firefox source with some very nice add on's for the "average" mashup'n person. If you say Blog/Moblog/vlog/bookmark or whatever the browser has some very nice ways of integrating all your online services into your browser. Which if you understand the way the web is heading makes complete sense to me!!!

In fact I can tell you that I posted this via the browser with ease that I can only applaud as disruptive at best...

I am immortal combat...or something like that;)

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:08:59 -0500

So since I am soo cool and soooo important it would appear that caricatures are now made in my honor!!

This is the work of ICANNwiki which is a good thing if you want to know about ISOC or ICANN or whatever. I think that some of these internet folks are alright folks when you really get down to it. To take the time to do a sketch of everyone that posts a pic is a pretty amazing thing and I say...good job!

ICANNwiki

Also thanks to Robert and Bruce for helping to keep the content more up to date on the Salsa.Net site;)

Technorati Profile

New advocacy organization forming for Film in Texas

Tue, 9 May 2006 22:09:38 -0500

I would like to call attention to the formation of a new organization, a 501c6 to be exact, called the Texas Motion Picture Alliance. Could mean good things for Film in Texas and something we should all good and listen to fellow Salsa's. Thanks to Drew for the following information:

Visual Production Industry Professionals and Educators:

You're invited to participate in a town-hall style meeting with the new director of the Texas Film Commission, Bob Hudgins, and Drew Mayer-Oakes, director of the San Antonio Film Commission, to discuss an important new development in our industry within the state of Texas.

TMPA Organizational Town Hall Meeting
Monday, May 15th
7:00 PM
San Antonio Central Public Library
1st Floor Auditorium
600 Soledad
San Antonio, Texas 78205

A lack of post a lack of time a Love of Salsa...

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:12:41 -0500

I have been accused of not posting enough to Sasla.Net lately but the honest truth is I have been buried. I will try to get back to regular posts I promise folks...keep the faith. As for what's new I and Salsa.Net are currently engaged in the world congress on information technology or WCIT for those in the know. I have been helping the city of San Antonio with their presence, as well as working with the DCI to do something, and even helping WCIT the organization out with spreading the good word.

Also just recently finished up a long haul with SXSW for the DCI putting together a bunch of panels, putting on a mobile content festival, and pulling together a dual city party at the end of it all. At the end I came down with some bad ass flu bug that knocked me out for almost 2 weeks...my wife says it was just exhaustion...who knows?

"La Tragedia De Macario" picked up for release

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:01:14 -0600

San Antonio's very own Pablo Veliz has really turned the spot light on the Alamo city. His movie, La Tragedia De Macario, was picked up Monday for offical theatrical release at Sundance. Another example that San Antonio is a cultural and technically savvy city that contiunes to amaze the world. Sometimes shadowed by our cooler cites around the state it's nice to see Pablo lead a path for Film in our city. I can only hope that with all his fame and fortune he says in SA. I guess I will lead the charge and offically launch the "Pablo Stay in SA" campaign.

More information here
Here

We gone and started a Festival

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 21:47:42 -0600

Under the banner of the Digital Convergence Initiative we have decide to create a Mobile Content Festival. The purpose of which is to explore the ways in which content is altered or recreated to conform to our mobile lifestyles. We are really excited about some of the pre-buzz and look forward to debuting the winners at our big SXSW party on March 14th. Lots of great prizes with more on the horizon.

Go for it