Four more days until Christmas. So to all you visitors to the Fandangle website, Merry Christmas and a happy 2010 New Year. It has been a while since I posted an article and I appologize for this. The hesitation to write an article is because I felt the Fandangle website was fragmented and didn't seem to fit a niche of popularity. But on reflection, though my interests spread over a wide spectrum of topics, I feel there is a common subject relationship that encompasses digital media production. If you don't keep up with the pace of digital technology as a filmmaker you will fall to the wayside and loose out on a great opportunity that is availble to you.
Digital Media Production
Technology has evolved dramatically and new methods of movie production has developed in leaps and bounds. When use the term filmmaking, some may argue that this term relates only to making films or movies using film stock as a medium. Well the method of filmmaking has changed and now uses digital computer technology in shooting footage (video) editing sound and image (non-linear editing). The new method of filmmaking is digital media production. Youtube has opened up a great opportunity for filmmakers by taking advantage of the digital video medium. You can make films, be they short or long and publish them on Youtube. Rather than restrict the screening of your movie to your local area or film festivals, you can now have it screened internationally to a wider audience of millions of viewers. If your film is hot it will be gauged by the number of hits your movie recieves. After this years festivities, I will be writing articles discussing digital media production and how you can take advantage of its promotional, marketing and publicity potential.
Website Management Using Content Management Systems
As a filmmaker or digital media producer you will want to look at ways to publish, promote and market your movies. To do this in the digital age of information technology, you will need a website that is easy to use, update and manage. Joomla is a fantastic website CMS (Content Management System) for any artist. Joomla is free to use under a GPL license and is open source. It is a Dynamically Driven website using MySQL database which is also open source. There are tutorials on this website helping you cut through the dense forest of confusion, to help you easilly understand and grasp the technicallities of the Joomla CMS.
Building A Media Server
I have built several LAMP servers using open source Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP and used them for a couple years now. It has taken a while to understand how to build a LAMP server because of the complexities of the Linux operating system and learning how to program in PHP to communicate and interact with the MySQL database. Now you may say, Why would I be interested in building a Lamp Media Server? Well here is a senario that you may be familiar with. Youtube has tons of movies, freely available. Each time you watch a movie it is eating up your internet download bandwidth. This is costing you money. If you watched the same movie serveral times you are wasting your bandwidth. Wouldn't it be better to store those movies on a local Media Server where you, as well as your family or friends can watch them as many times as you want on your home/office network and reduce your internet bandwidth. This gives you more bandwidth to look for more new and interesting things on the internet. You might have searched for images, photos or films as references for you coming production or artistic projects and wished you could save them for future reference. A media server can be used as your reference library. I have been experimenting in building a digital media server and it is so easy to do. Well it is easy for me, because I have been doing the experimenting and testing. But for you, it would be a mind blowing mine field. Stay tuned to this website because I will be writing articles on how you can easily build your very own media server using an old PC.
What do you think
If you have any suggestions on how the Fandangle website can be improved or any questions, please feel free to leave a comment. It is free, you don't have to login and if you enter your website address it will be promoted on the Fandangle website. A little promotion goes a long way.
