This weekend I was in Huddersfield for a bit of social reporting at the X48 Gamecamp. Social reporting, as I understand it, involves quick and dirty reporting on an event using a variety of platforms (blogging, Twitter, etc) and media (video, audio, photos) while monitoring, extracting and engaging with the conversations that are already happening online.
Like most things this works best when the organisers of the event also get involved but it really helps to have one person who is dedicated to the collection, dissemination and monitoring to pull most of the weight and give those actually running the event the ability to contribute without it getting in the way of their job. At X48 I was that person.
X48 is a marathon computer game coding competition run by Pixel-Lab for Microsoft where about 15 teams of university students have about 27 hours to produce a game for the Xbox platform. As an event it’s potentially not that interesting on the surface. The teams get their theme and then bash out code all night.
But Pixel-Lab need to have something to show from this event, something more than a bunch of games and feedback forms. They need to show that the way they do these things is different and better. Which is where the social reporting comes in, giving a human face to the outside perception of the event. And so they asked me to be their social reporter.
My main tool was the Flip Mino, a relatively cheap video camera with a big red button.
I have an early version of this and I love it for its simplicity. You can’t go wrong with a big red button and the built in USB connector is a real boon. Make the film, whack it in the computer and upload.
My intention was to have everything I filmed edited and uploaded either during the event or within a day of it ending, for two reasons. Firstly I wanted to get it out there when the event was still fresh so that the participants would share it amongst their friends. And secondly I was only on the clock for those two days and didn’t want it bleeding into my other work. The side effect for the client was they also didn’t need to pay me for post-production time, which doesn’t hurt.
In order to achieve this I devised a simple workflow using iMovie on my Mac – a simple top-and-tail with the occasional transition – and used a paid-for Vimeo Plus account for immediate processing and relatively unlimited space. (You could get the same from YouTube but Pixel-Lab prefer Vimeo for some of the additional features)This way footage I took could be online and viewable in about 20 minutes.
All the videos went into the X48 Vimeo group:
Along with this I had the blog on the X48 website to play with. I decided to use the blog posts to gather together the somewhat random stream of videos, photos, tweets and so forth into little packages to give the casual reader something to get a handle on. So here’s a couple of videos of teams discussing amongst themselves and here’s three films of one of the mentors advising the competitors. This stuff is great because it shows the process and the benefits of the event, in this case teamwork and expert advise.
Twitter is, of course, ubiquitous and running the X48 Twitter account was part of the job. This involved relaying important information to the competitors but also keeping the wider community informed of the event. More important, though, was the monitoring of the #x48 hashtag which was gathering various conversations in one place. This gave us another way to measure the mood of the event and, in a practical sense, more media to collect. In this post I gathered the 4am thoughts from a judge and a screen-grab from a team. And post-event people are using the hashtag to flag their reports and reflections, such as this blog post which came from this tweet.
Photography wasn’t part of my remit, which was a relief as I could concentrate on the filming. It was looked after by Pixel-Lab man David Hayward who quickly put them up on Flickr as another resource to be used and shared. David was a handy bridge between myself and the organisers as he was intimately involved with the event but, as far as I could tell, not given a major role. He was the wingman, there to support and troubleshoot. This meant he was able to help me feel part of the event and understand what Pixel-Lab needed, while also producing content of his own to complement mine. And all Pixel-Lab staff had access to the Twitter account. While this did mean it didn’t really have a unified voice and occasionally repeated itself that wasn’t really a big problem given the chaotic nature of the event.
As you’d expect the event got a bit hectic towards the end and I found myself rushing around getting footage of the judges talking to every team. Then the awards happened and it was over, everything was packed up and everyone went home to sleep. I edited down the last videos on the train and uploaded them from home meaning my work was done.
There was still more to do, though – monitoring of the Twitter reactions, searching for blog posts and photos from the participants and other Collective Memory stuff – but Pixel-Lab are more than capable of doing that themselves. What they needed was an extra body during the event itself.
If you need an extra body to do your social reporting, that is something I do. Get in touch.
And meanwhile, here’s a short film I made on Saturday night, filmed during the dinner break and edited immediately after. I call it Seventy Two Pizzas:
Hey there – I’m Galenor, a participant in X48. Seeing this blog post, I’d like to add my own feedback on the social reporting, being one of the people being reported on and all!
I do remember seeing the Flip Mino during the interviews. When I heard we were going to have videos taken of us, big, omninous cameras came to mind – ones that reminded you that everything you do is being recorded. The Flip Mino kept the tension level during interviews low, as it was a very minute little camera that wasn’t invasive at all. I felt more at ease talking about the game to the Flip Mino than I would do with a whopping great camera.
It also seems like it was perfect for the hectic situation which is both a tense coding atmosphere, and a rush for pizza goodness. It managed to get in all the nooks and crannies for those special shots, like in the pizza video.
I would definitely say, from an interviewee perspective, that the Flip Mino was a cool little camera :)