February 2011 Archives

New this year, an online film festival and competition for short environmental films.

If you’re between 14 and 21 years old, Bitesize Planet invites you to share your environmental passions by making short films about them. You might demonstrate your experiences of the natural world, show how you see people around you impacting nature, or indeed anything else that fits the competition’s rules.

By entering the competition, you have the opportunity to work with mentors — professional film-makers from a range of backgrounds — who can help you develop your ideas and technical skills. There are prizes to be won and opportunities to spend time on a professional video shoot.

Bitesize Planet’s submission deadline is 30th June 2011.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you making a film suitable for SciCast, and submitting it to BiteSize Planet too. Just mind the submission deadlines!

Fresh today: BBC College of Production. A hugely ambitious website that’s planning to cover the full spectrum of television programme-making skills and techniques. Which could take years, but there’s already an impressive range of material. Some of it’s way over-the-top for SciCast’s approach to video, but there are some gems in there.

We’ll be rummaging through and bringing you our picks over the next few weeks, but do let us know if you find something juicy. It’s well worth a look.

If you’ve visited SciCast’s front page in the last week, you’ll have noticed that it’s (a.) all shiny and new, and (b.) broken. At least, it’s broken if you’re one of the 9% of visitors here who use Internet Explorer 7, and if you’re unlucky enough to be in the 3% of visitors lumbered with IE6… well, it’s very broken.

It’s still broken, but as of right now we’ve managed to fix the video player. Things may not line up quite right still, but you’re no longer missing anything, and the all the links and such seem to work.

Progress!

We’re not entirely sure what’s going on here, quite likely we plain missed an email from someone? However, it looks like there’s a SciCast-related dance event being held at Dance Base in Edinburgh on Sunday 20th February. As I write, that’s tomorrow.

Which is exciting. Also cool. We love it when things like this crop up, even if we’ve no idea what’s going on nor who’s doing it. We suspect the involvement of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, who did something vaguely similar last year, but we really don’t know.

If you want to know more — in fact, if you want to know precisely as much as we do — have a look at the Dance Base page for the session. And drop us a note if you go!

(Image: Dance Base)

This new site’s been up a day or so, and we’re starting to get a handle on what’s broken, what we can improve further, and what’s working better. Those of you stuck with Internet Explorer 7 or (gasp) 6, our apologies, we’ll do our best to sort the video player on the front page. We thought we had it working for you, but found out yesterday afternoon that it’s broken in IE7. We were in an interview at the time, you’ll have to believe us that it was terribly embarrassing.

Another thing that’s a bit wonky is previewing comments here on the blog. Just submit them, they’ll be fine (though we’ll likely have to approve them before they show up for you).

Tweaks and fixes will have to wait a little while, however, as tomorrow we’re heading to a video equipment exhibition. We’ll mostly be drooling over camera gear that’s vastly more expensive than we’ll ever be able to afford, but we’ll keep our eyes open for juicy new stuff to point you to.

Thanks for bearing with us, and we hope you’re enjoying the revamped look of the site. Those of you who can see it, at any rate.

SciCast has a shiny new web server, a whole new publishing system, throughly revamped everything and — get this! — a front page to the site!

Remember that old front page? The one that appeared mysteriously, redirected you to the films, and to which you could never return? Until it showed up again weeks later? Yes? Well, we think we’ve banished it. In its place, a shiny new front page that showcases some choice films and makes the latest news much more prominent. Which means we’ll have to update this blog far more frequently.

We’ve revamped everything else, too — all the pages about the competition, Film School, the works. The best bit? All the films are in exactly the same places, so if you have any links to them, they should all work.

There are bound to be some teething problems, things we’ve missed, typos, and broken links. Drop us a comment if you spot anything, or email theteam[at]planet-scicast.org.uk. It’s worth giving you our email address, as we might have broken the comment system. Ahem.