Editor emeritus Joel and I have been writing a movie for awhile, as regular YMM readers (bless your patient, patient hearts) should know. Recently, we decided to jump on the Kickstarter bandwagon with our own project.

Of course, you’re welcome to donate, but this isn’t about us.

This post is about ubiquity though, and whether or not Kickstarter’s ubiquity is hurting the projects it supports. The Kickstarter premise (for those few not in the know) is that it offers a crowd-sourced funding platform where random folks can donate to your project in exchange for rewards (that you set). And there’s a layer of safety: you only get their donations (pledges) if the project reaches its threshold: a set goal that you specify.

As anyone in creative fields can tell you, Kickstarter has exploded, and the number of projects with it. It seems like every day you see a new Kickstarter project appear in your Facebook or Twitter stream. How do you stand out against the crowd with your project? How do you set yourself apart? How do you make sure that you’re the one getting pledges when you’re up against a sea of (often equally spirited) competitors?

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Money...What Money by flickr user stuartpilbrow

In a perfect world, artists and content creators could work without the constant worry of funding and money looming over our heads. Unfortunately it’s not a perfect world, and in an age where content creators are a dime-a-dozen and sponsors are a dying species, you’ve got to have business savvy to succeed in your pursuits.

The City of New York recognized that, and an article in Sunday’s New York Times explains how city government is aiming to teach artists about turning their work into business.

“Does everyone have Excel?,” Peter Cobb, a lawyer and administrator at the New York Foundation for the Arts, which runs the program, asked the class last Saturday. “For next week, your assignment is to make a list of all your expenses for 2009.”

The sighs and complaints that followed were proof of the challenging task Mr. Cobb and his colleagues have taken on: trying to teach people who like to color outside the lines about drawing up business plans, budgeting and making a sales pitch.

YouMakeMedia has talked in the past about various web services and how they help (or hinder) your money-making, but it’s exciting to see a program that delves even deeper, helping artists think more consciously about the business end of what they do. It’s easy to think that it’s as simple as throwing ads next to your content, or selling copies of your output, but having a deeper understanding of business will give you a more rewarding experience (and a more rewarding return) when it comes to doing the selling.

Do you have any tips on learning the business side of arts and content creation? Share them in the comments!

via Make: Blog

Sam Proof shows you how to make your own eight-page ‘zine (I’m continuing the theme from my last post, I guess) using a singe sheet of paper.

While he’s somewhat difficult to watch, and listen to, this is actually a pretty cool project.

And here are instructions to make a 16-page ‘zine with a single sheet of legal paper. Also cool.

The SoCal Film Group is fascinating to watch. They’re a group of people who got together, sort of decentralized, to figure out how to make films.

On their blog, they recently posted a ‘how to get your own film group started‘ entry, which was coincidental for me. I just scheduled a meeting in the library in my town, and sent out invites to everyone I thought might be interested. I’ll let you know how it goes after Nov 7.

The benefits to a film group seem obvious to me. Pooling of resources, pooling of talent, and the chance to grow your skills. Por ejemplo, if I’m filming a zombie movie I wrote, I need actors. Some of those actors are probably working on their own project, and need me to either act, or hold a microphone, or work the camera. Maybe they need to borrow my camera. Or a prop. Whatever. With a low budget and a high desire to work on film projects, getting like-minded people in the room to cooperate and share ideas is a no-brainer.

Meanwhile, I was caught off guard a bit by one point: SoCal Film recommends against doing peer-reviews of finished work.

“With that said, one of the things that works well for us (and is probably the primary reason why we haven’t imploded yet) is that we don’t judge the quality of each other’s work. We used to have formal critique sessions, but they did more damage than good. Some of our members have drastically different ideas of what a “good” film is like, and they’re not going to change each other’s mind. But, since our group is about helping each other make a lot of different kind of movies, we all seem willing to work on *any* SCFG movie, because we know that the people making that movie will help us make our own movies in the future.“

I’m definitely interested in hearing more about film groups in different areas of the US and abroad. Feel free to share in the comments or to ralphhogaboom AT gmail.com.

Audacity is a free, Mac/Windows/Linux audio editor. It does a great job cleaning up bad audio sounds in a relatively straightforward manner. It’s certainly worth having around and knowing a few tricks with it. And it can help your media projects sound better. Here’s how.

Mission one! Audacity is available from http://audacity.sourceforge.net. Mission two! (following the Beyonce theme here), get the MP3 plug in. There’s no need to waste hard drive space exporting to .wav when you can use MP3. For Windows or Mac OS X, follow the instructions on the Audacity web site to get something called the LAME library file and enable Export To MP3. For Linux users, you’re just a lucky little ducky. Our sister site FOSSwire has the skinny on installing it for Linux.

Now that you’ve got that, we can check out the workflow.

Step 1 is importing the video and audio from your camera on to your computer. This is one part that I expect you to know how to accomplish. In Numero 2, we separate the audio track from the import. In iMovie ’06, it’s Extract Audio. In Premiere 6.5, it’s right-mouse click Save Audio As. You figure this one out, too.

Step 3 shows us the extracted audio, and we open Audacity in Step 4 and choose File >> Open to bring this Exported clip in to the program. Here we do the magic to clean it up, then again File >> Export Audio As MP3 and we see in Step 5 that we have our new, cleaner file. In Step 6, we import this back into our video editor! Not shown are the final steps where, due to our low-budget editing prowess, we eventually land that lucrative Hollywood contract.

Okay, so let’s do this crazy thing. We’re going to focus on Step 4, the magic part.

One of the first things we can do is eliminate some background hiss. This almost always makes it sound better, and it’s a two step process. First, find some section of hiss with no other sound. Some audio guys take a few seconds to ‘establish the background sounds of a scene‘ before telling the director they’re ready. Feh. Primadonnas.

Once you find this golden nugget of audio, use the mouse and highlight it. This is going to establish the baseline for the audio you want to remove.

Next, choose Effect >> Noise Removal and click the Get Noise Profile button. Don’t worry if nothing happens; no one saw the car in those old Infinity commercials, either. The, highlight the part (or parts) of the track where there’s audio you do want to capture. Go back to Effect >> Noise Removal, only this time move the slider all the way to the left. Click Remove Noise, then go back and listen to the track.

If you hear something like Transformers sounds or pops and creaks, then you probably removed too much noise. Go back (Edit >> Undo) and try another section for your “Get Noise Profile” selection, and see what you can come up with.

The next step is easier; highlight the silence you’d used for the profile, and choose Generate >> Silence. You’ll be asked how much; just click OK. This replaces the hissy sound with pure silence, and is the preferred way to handle this in Audacity.

There’s two more effects you can try out here: normalize and compression. Normalizing makes the quiet parts louder, and the louder parts quieter. Compressing a track tries to get rid of the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, making the audio more in the sweet spot for a wide variety of equipment. Highlight the various sections, choose Effect >> Normalize or Compression, and check the results. I usually get pretty good results sticking with the defaults, but you might get lucky mucking around. Try, try, try, with your trusty Edit >> Undo close at hand.

Once you’re done, export the file and name it something different to indicate that this is an improved version of the audio you exported FROM the video editing program. Then you’re ready to bring it on in and line it up.

I suggest leaving them both in for a few minutes; mute one and play the other, then reverse. Compare as to whether you actually made it better. If so, delete the original and keep your mod. If not? Git back on the horse and try it again. Happy filming.