Video killed the text blogging star

Well, not really. Text will always have a place in online publishing, but the YouTube generation also expects to watch and listen to online content as much as read it. So Festival Preview is very interested in producing and distributing multimedia content.

So far, we have produced an audio preview of the Chicago Blues Festival and a video interview of Joe Craven, emcee of the Live Oak Music Festival. More audio and video segments are in production and will be posted in the next several weeks. Thanks to Maggie Dilly, our Final Cut Pro wizard-in-training, who is helping us move into this new realm.



For those of you who are multimedialy inclined, we invite you to join our adventure by taking your digital camcorder or audio recorder with you to the festival. You'll have to be careful when shooting the stage. Most artists and festivals actively discourage filming of performances, and performance videos are not the most interesting anyway.

Instead, give us the flavor of the festival--the sounds and the colors and the people. Talk to lots of people--attendees, staff and volunteers, musicians, vendors, the guy in the adjacent campsite. Artist interviews are especially welcome.

Also shoot yourself doing a standup from the site. End it with a sign-off: "From the music meadow at XYZ Music Festival, this is Susie Blogger reporting."

Next your footage needs to be edited. If you have the skills and desire, you could cut and sequence your own finished video. Or we'll do it for you, which will likely result in faster turnaround, especially as we hone our production systems. You can ship us your raw footage as mini DV tapes or DVD discs or other video format. Ideally, you would also send your ideas on what material to use and how to tell the story, and we will work with you to produce it.

Then our in-house multimedia team will produce a finished video, with titles and soundtrack, running about four minutes.

For now we are just experimenting with multimedia content on Festival Preview, but imagine in the 2008 festival season we have a new video every week in each of our five genre pages. That's our goal, and we hope that you can help us reach it by contributing your own audio and video content to Festival Preview.