build your own buzz

i’ve decided it’s time to get my first short, that's why you never drink red, out into the world for real. of course this means i have to figure out what i mean by “for real,” but for now i’m working with the general concept of “out into the world” and uploading it to different services and thinking of ways to direct traffic to it once it’s up somewhere looking decent.

first i uploaded it to jaman, which was recommended to me by lourdes portillo, a great doc director who’s in my jean shelton class. the jaman upload went through, no problem, and i like the idea of sharing the short with other filmmakers (jaman feels geared toward the film-fest/mfa crowd). but i’m not thrilled with how twyndr looks as it streams on their player. and since they’re using their own conversion tool, i’m not really sure how to tweak my upload to look better there. i filled out their form for people interested in “distribution” through jaman, which would involve a better quality picture, but until that’s fixed, i’ve flagged my upload private.

next i added a link from my myspace page to the copy hosted on blip.tv, which is the same one i point to from this blog. that one’s a no-brainer. not like my myspace page is flooded with traffic, but what can it hurt?

last night, i uploaded to ourstage. sometimes i’m so busy asking myself why not, i forget to ask why. i have yet to come across anything good on ourstage—maybe the random server just hates me, but voting between two really terrible shorts (and trying to define which is worse and how) gets depressing quickly. unless they come up with a way to improve the quality of what users see—and i don’t see how they can do that—they’ll never be able to retain voters. maybe that’s okay. what do i know?

as i’m typing this, the file’s being uploaded to revver. i’ve seen clips hosted by them that looked decent (most recently on film flap), so we’ll see how that goes.

next on my list: youtube? but if revver looks good, i might just focus on pointing to that one.