Want to see the cutting edge of crowd-sourced video production? The Uptake, hands-down the best guerrilla video shop in the country (they live-streamed the Wisconsin Uprising), has developed a new video aggregator for the Occupy Wall Street movement that lets you easily click back and forth between feeds from 61 different locations (and counting, there’s even an #OccupyLjubljana feed from Slovenia).

Here’s a screenshot of Uptake’s aggregator.

Pretty amazing…

Traditionally animation has been prohibitively expensive for many groups.  The software runs in the thousands of dollars and requires a highly skilled designer. Well, those days may be over. Several new do-it-yourself programs are now available…and free!  We like free stuff.  Two popular versions are Xtranormal and Moviestorm. They’re designed to helps amateurs write, produce, direct and edit their own digitally animated movies. We tried out Xtranormal and made a simple 2 minute animation in 20 minutes. Here’s how they work:

1) Pick one or more animated “actors” from 12-15 options.
2) Using the text-to-move function simply type up the dialogue.  We used a previous written article as a test case.
3) Drag and drop various editing “tools” into your text. You can, for example, drop in camera angles, changes in facial expressions, pauses, etc.
4) Choose opening or background music.
5) Hit preview, watch, make some edits until your satisfied.

That’s it!  Here are some great examples, including one starring Obama.

Youtube’s nonprofit program now allows organizations in the program to insert personalized external links into videos using the Annotations feature. This is especially big news for anyone using video to fundraise.

The new Call-To-Action capability means that groups can now build graphics within a video that ask people to “Donate” or “Sign Up” or “Sign the Petition” and then use an invisible annotation to make it so viewers can click on the link.  This works both on the Youtube page and with embedded video on your organizational site.

Users can also go back to old videos on the site and add annotations that are visible that can say “Donate Now” and that link to pages on your site.

YouTube has previously enabled users to add text notes and bubbles, links to other YouTube videos or channels, and highlighted areas.  But giving users the ability to control formatting of their annotations (change font size, etc) and build invisible hyperlinks into their own videos is a new important tool for groups to drive people to their organizational sites.

Here’s a screenshot of CharityWater’s use of the annotations tool to fundraise:

And here is an interesting use of the annotations device by droptheweapons.org about the ramifications of carrying or using a knife, where they allow viewers to choose various plot lines as they watch the video.

Frogloop has posted “5 DIY Video Tips” for nonprofits. Here’s their list of ways to “save money and do it right”:

1. Plan Ahead: Equipment and software are not your only cost factors. Time, energy, and re-shooting all carry significant costs. When scheduling a shoot, know what you need in advance and decide exactly what you want to capture. Even if you’re just documenting a live event, have a rough idea of what scenes and images you want to record. If you have these planned out in advance, then you won’t have to waste time going back and getting the footage right.

2. Choose the Right Camera for Your Needs: There are so many great cameras on the market today, but they’re not all going to be right for your organization. If you’re just shooting for the web, we recommend the Flip video camera. It’s cheap, portable, and perfect for online use. And nonprofits are eligible for good deals as part of the Flip Video Spotlight program.  If you’re looking for a solid, inexpensive hand-held, we like the Canon HV30. It allows for external mics and has high quality optics. If you do a lot of your own video and need to make a long-term investment, then go with what we use: the Sony EX3.

3. Get the Gear: Of course, making a video doesn’t end with the camera. There’s all the equipment that goes with it. Look for gear on Amazon.com or New Egg. Sign up for their alerts so you’ll be the first to know when something becomes available. But also get creative. Instead of buying a tripod, use a table. Instead of buying professional lights, use the lighting around you and a couple of clamp lights from Home Depot.  Don’t skimp on the microphones, though! We’ve found that viewers are more willing to excuse poor visuals than poor audio. Good sound makes all the difference.

4. Take Advantage of Online Resources: For many people, Google is their #1 online resource. But for filmmakers and DIY video folks, try Lynda.com and Creative Cow for tutorials and training. For inexpensive music, try Music Bakery. For stock photos, try Fotolia. Check out Creative Commons, too—you might find quality photos that you can use as long as you attribute the source. (That’s how we found the image for this blog post).

5. Create a Media Library: Get your calendar out and mark all the important events you want to capture on video. You may not have an immediate purpose for this footage, but it’s likely you will. If someone noteworthy visits your office, get the camera out and shoot a quick testimonial. If you’re on your way to a local rally, grab a still camera and take some pictures.

YouTube has created a new “News Near You” feature that senses a user’s location and offers up a list of relevant videos, allowing Youtube to “essentially engineer a local newscast on the fly.”  Trouble is that right now there is not enough “professional content” from TV stations so most of the YouTube videos near you come from nontraditional sources: radio stations, newspapers, advocacy organizations, churches, colleges and, in the case of a San Francisco outfit called VidSF, three friends who despise the local TV diet of fires and homicides.

While it lasts, this is good news for grassroots groups. Instead of collecting and ranking web content automatically with digital spiders, Youtube is asking video “news makers” to sign up as a partners and then list their materials for local viewers.  Since the system is driven by location, if your local TV stations are still stuck in the 20th century, you actually have a shot at controlling and framing the local YouTube content stream.

VidSF is a great example of the new breed of local news broadcasters — including ones without broadcasting licenses, the traditional barrier to entry in local markets — that is emerging online . The NYT reports that mobile phones and the increasing demand for citizen journalist content promises to make “News Near You” a dynamic and promising news space online. They point to the new iPhone, for example, which includes a video recording capability with a “send to YouTube” button, suddenly making it simple and fast to upload clips. Rachel Sterne, the founder and chief executive of the citizen journalism site GroundReport, said the feature “trains laymen to be reporters.” And YouTube says it is developing tools to automatically spotlight those citizen videos as they come in.

As we’ve said before on Crib Notes, with traditional news organizations in fiscal crisis, some of us may want to begin moving more deliberately into the reporting void as hybrid citizen journalists/activists. Since we now own our own cheap, fast and simple “printing” presses (blogs, websites), video production stations (Flip video recorders and YouTube) and broadcast networks (News Near You, listserves, Twitters feeds, Facebook, etc), we might expand out coverage of local community and political struggles to include local cultural events, inspiring human interest stories, etc. — but frame them within a larger political context.  Others of us may want to increasingly give our members the tools (and training) to report on the events they care about (this may well include news that falls outside immediate organizational interests) and provide them platforms to reach larger audiences.

Just as the news industry collapses, average people are increasingly hungry for information and news about these extraordinary times we’re all living in. Maybe we can begin to fill the void.

In the 1930s trade unions understood that that cultural organizing was essential to political organizing. They organized interracial dances, reading groups, musical festivals, etc.  Unions understood that social identity and cohesion was essential to building political solidarity.  While unions have largely forgotten this tradition, we are increasingly seeing activists and their allies engaged in a modern version of this type of cultural organizing through the use of online video tools to capture the oral histories of marginalized communities. Some of the best work is being done by filmmakers on the global level. The Global Lives Project, for example, is a network of filmakers around the world documenting 24 hours in the daily lives of 10 people around the world.  Another example is Living Cultural Storybases, a group leveraging digital technologies for cultural preservation  Here’s how Director Paul Rankin describes the mission:

Indigenous peoples are 4 percent of the world’s population, but half of humanity’s cultures. Yet they are the poorest and most disenfranchised. One language dies every 10 days; within 50 years over half the world’s languages will be gone. Cultural diversity is disappearing much faster than plant or animal diversity. We face a cataclysmic loss of millennia of wisdom and knowledge whilst threatened by megacity monocultures, economies of scale, environmental destruction and greed. We all need their understanding of fragile environments, custodianship of biodiversity, sustainable models of cooperative living, alternative approaches to education, health and well being, skills, artistry and ancient wisdom.

Storytelling transmits the essence of any culture, encapsulating deeper beliefs, values and identity, inspiring ways of behaving and believing. ‘Living Cultural Storybases’ helps minority communities build evolving digital repositories in their own language of their cultural narratives and knowledge, i.e. ‘Storybases’.P ilots in Peru and Mali prove that training young agents to record their elder’s stories, using novel appropriate technologies and the resulting community digital resource, empower the community, strengthen cultural identity, pride and social cohesion, reconnect the generations, include their urban Diaspora in an Internet dialogue and create new economic opportunities.

Grassroots groups here in the US that are deeply embedded in marginalized communities are well positioned to revive our progressive tradition of incorporating cultural projects into our into political projects.  Especially since it is now so cheap and easy…Here’s the one of the Living Cultural Clips:

According to the latest number crunching by ComScore, YouTube has morphed from a video sharing site to the second most popular search tool in the US.  YouTube searches in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, after Google. In November alone, Americans punched in 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo.

Here’s an example from the New York Times of how kids are using video for information searches:

Faced with writing a school report on an Australian animal, Tyler Kennedy began where many students begin these days: by searching the Internet. But Tyler didn’t use Google or Yahoo. He searched for information about the platypus on YouTube.  ‘I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats,’ Tyler said.

Similarly, when Tyler gets stuck on one of his favorite games on the Wii, he searches YouTube for tips on how to move forward. And when he wants to explore the ins and outs of collecting Bakugan Battle Brawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series, he goes to YouTube again.

As more video is added to the Web, the proportion of video searches that deliver adequate answers will only grow.  This has the online chattering class asking if Youtube will someday grow to supplant or rival Google.  But since Google owns Youtube, the more interesting question is how far will video go as an alternative to text?

Hard to say. We know that lot’s of online content does not convert well to video and the hyperlinking text remains one of the cosmic powers of the web — so the rise of video probably won’t mean the death of text. But the way in which the two mediums interact, conflict or complement each other will be important to grassroots political education, organizational branding, knowledge networks, etc. (We’re already seeing more and more groups using video to frame and send out talking points).

The New York Times cites the ad for Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic presidential primaries — the one in which a voice asks “Who do you want answering the phone?” at the White House at 3 a.m. during a crisis — as an example of how text and video searches yield different results. A search for “Hillary Clinton 3 a.m.” on Google brings up news stories about the ad and the controversy surrounding it. On YouTube, the same search brings up the original commercial, as well a response by the Barack Obama campaign, pundits’ commentaries.

If you haven’t already, you might want to type you’re top five issue areas and organization’s name into YouTube and see what comes up.  At minimum you’ll see what young folks are seeing when they look for information on your topics or group.  And when you pull up the search, you might also find reason to pull out your Flip Video and draft up some YouTube talking points…

Web-watchers have been debating whether we are beginning to see the internet evolve (or devolve) from a text-based to video-based medium. According to the latest Comscore report about the online video market, U.S. Internet users watched close to 13.5 billion videos online in October, which represents an increase of 45 percent compared to last year. Google’s YouTube alone served almost 5.4 billion videos to 99.5 million viewers.

What might this mean for our work?

1. It’s vital that we continue to experiment with online video and other forms of visual representation of our social movement work. Southern Echo has done this well by posting video introductions of staff and key issue areas front and center on their recently revamped website.  Or check out the way Greater Birmingham Ministries‘ uses their “It’s a Thick Book” video to explain the problems with the Alabama State Constitution.

2. We need to remember that YouTube is not the only game in town. According to a report by AdAge, YouTube’s overall market share dropped almost 10% since July, as Hulu and other online video services are getting more attention from users than ever before. Hulu, for example, almost doubled its viewership from July to October. According to Comscore, Hulu’s users also watch relatively long videos, with an average of 11.6 minutes.  In other words, there are lots of video sites serving different and ever-changing audiences. Every time we produce a short video clip we should be posting it to multiple sites.

3. We need to keep in mind that online video has developed a distinct style of presentation and expectations from viewers.  For example, online video posts need not be high-quality, slick productions; in fact, informal clips shot with shaky Flip video recorders often work better because online viewers deem low-budget videos as more “authentic” and “real”.  Some of us might also experiment with a video “talking points” format to present complex policy issues online. Check out the Center For American Progress efforts to model this form.

Ustream.TV is a free, live interactive video broadcast service that allows anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size.

The service claims that it takes less than two minutes to create your own channel on Ustream or broadcast on your own site (Even though it appears easy to use, it’s well worth doing a trial run with these kind of tools before trying to use them for an important project). The service is currently used for live broadcasting of:

• Major political events such as debates, speeches, rallies
• Talk shows and concerts and entertainment events
• Conference sessions and school/business events and training
• Sporting events at college and high school level
• Personal milestones such as holiday gatherings, weddings, grade school events, parties, even births
• Interactive games for viewers to watch or join

Noticeably absent are community events, protests, teach-ins, etc. Since it’s relatively easy to embed the broadcast into your organization’s website, grassroots groups might begin to use the site to livecast demonstrations or rallies, preceded by a press release, so lazy or cash-strapped journalists can cover events without leaving the office.  Members who are unable to leave home–because of child care duties or infirmity, for example–might follow events from their homes.  Allied groups fighting similar struggles around the country–stopping foreclosures, for example–might tune in to learn new strategies or for inspiration.

Last year, one of the most viewed video clips on YouTube shows a gopher dramatically turning to stare at the viewer.  It’s funny and short, and typical of the most watched videos online.  But in grassroots politics, funny doesn’t always cut it (especially with the world crashing all around us).  To get their message out, groups are experimenting with online story telling, exposé, animation and protest footage.  But how do we visually present complex policy issues? The folks over at Center for American Progress have begun toying around with “video talking points” as way to quickly frame and communicate key points on complex policy questions. Each video:

• is short
• uses a question and answer format
• combines text and video
• is accompanied by a transcript
• and is quick and easy to produce

Here’s an example of a video they recently released on why millennials are more progressive on a whole range of issues. It’s a pretty DC-centric but a format that community organizations might steal and improve on.