Our winners take away a giant bar of Toblerone, the losers will get run over by a combine harvester, just as soon as we can boost one from the local farmer!

Roll on 2012!

by Martin French

Video on the web has become as ubiquitous as fast food on the high street. Chances are most web users will watch at least a few videos per week online. Whether it's a full length TV show using on the BBC's iPlayer, an interview feature here on Article19 or something terrible on YouTube.

This widespread availability of video may lead some to believe that delivering the moving image on the internet is easy for websites like Article19 and all the others.

That belief however couldn't be further from the truth.

Allow us to explain.

Up until about 10 days ago video on Article19 was delivered using a format called QuickTime (developed by Apple). QuickTime is a so-called "plugin". This means you, the user, have to download a separate piece of software to plug-in to your web browser (Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc) so you can view the videos we publish.

If you don't have the plugin you can't watch the video, it's as simple as that.

The other popular video capable plugin used by the vast majority of web sites is Flash (published by Adobe Software, the people that make Photoshop, among other things)

Websites like YouTube and Vimeo use Flash to playback the vast majority of their content.

Choices Choices

The video above is in HD Flash format, try it and see how it plays.

Publishers have to make a choice as to which video format to use on their site both for the convenience of their users, the technical requirements of their site and the cost and time involved encoding, uploading and serving each video.

The easy choice is to use Flash because it is, by a wide margin, the plugin most likely to be installed on a users computer by default. Since it is more likely to be installed then a user is less likely to be inconvenienced by having to download it.

Flash however does come with a myriad of problems not least of which is when playing high quality video material the plugin uses a lot of computer processing power. Depending on the computer and the operating system you are using you might experience poor quality playback when watching certain videos.

In our tests Quicktime uses 60% less processing power compared to Flash when using an OSX (Apple) based computer.

The QuickTime plugin is also not without its problems. Although it comes pre-installed on all Apple machines the same cannot be said for Windows based computers. The installed user base for the QuickTime plugin is also dramatically smaller than the Flash plugin.

Bizarrely, Apple's own iPhone and iPad devices, which do not support Flash, struggle to support QuickTime video material unless it is prepared in a very specific way.

Codec

Now, QuickTime and Flash are not actually video formats. You should think of them as "wrappers" that encase the actual video material.

All online video is compressed and encoded from its original format using what is called a "codec". This is an acronym for Coder - Decoder.

We encode the video and upload it then your web browser, via a plugin or other means, decodes the video so you can watch it, simple.

The particular codec we use is called H264, what that means is not at all relevant, and up until very recently we encased that H264 video in a QuickTime wrapper to deliver it to our readers.

The Third Way

There is a third way however to deliver video material to users thanks to the developments of modern web browsers and a little thing called HTML5.

Without bogging you all down in inane technicalities, HTML is, simply put, the computer language Article19 uses to display web pages to you and it is now in version 5 of its long and torturous development.

A big part of HTML5 is a zero tolerance for plugins, especially when it comes to multi-media, especially when it comes to video.

All the new versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer and the mobile web browsers used on the iPhone, iPad and some Android based phones, support HTML5. They all support it to differing degrees but that's another discussion and one that you are probably not at all interested in.

These new browsers all support the direct playback of online video material without any plugins at all. As long as the video is correctly formatted then you don't need to download any additional software.

What this means is that we no longer feel the need to use QuickTime to serve any of our video material. In fact all of our HD material has been switched to HTML5. The older videos will be switched to the new format over time.

So that's great, no more plugins, no more hassle, everything will now "just work"?

Unfortunately not. Remember the "codec" thing we talked about before? Well, in their infinite wisdom the makers of the web browsers have all decided to support different codecs for their particular browsers.

Safari, iPhone, iPad and IE9 support H264, Firefox supports something called Ogg Theora (not making that up) and Chrome (made by Google) supports another codec called WebM.

Chrome initially supported H264, and at the time of writing still does, but Google, in their infinite lack of wisdom, didn't like playing with the other children and switched their support to WebM. A format that they, coincidentally, own the rights to.

As a footnote, IE7 and IE8 don't support HTML5 video at all.

The video above is in H264 format using Sublime Video Player

Same Old Problems

So for us, here in TheLab™, what does this mean? Well the HTML5 specification makes it really easy for us to serve up the video that works on the browser you are using.

All we have to do is create a video in each format and all will be well. So if we take the bgroup video 'The Lessening of Difference' as an example we just need to create an H264 desktop version, and H264 mobile version, an OGG Theora version, a WebM version and a Flash version (for IE7 and 8).

Instead of creating 2 versions (H264 desktop and H264 mobile) we now have to create 5 versions which would dramatically increases the amount of time it would take to create a feature to say nothing of the uploading time and the storage costs. You can't store video online for free you know!

So how is HTML5 helping us out then, why not stick with QuickTime?

Step forward a small company called Jillion and their brand new service modestly titled "Sublime Video Player".

This player is a so-called "cloud" service which means that the video player itself is not stored on Article19's web server at all. Every time you load one of the videos in the HD section the player is actually loaded from Jillion.

Why do this?

First of all it means that the player itself stays constantly up to date and nobody, especially the user, has to download anything. No plugins, no updates, no nothing.

Secondly, thanks to some clever coding the player will automatically detect which browser or mobile device you are using and make the video play.

Here in TheLab™ all we have to do is make our usual two versions of the video (H264 Desktop and H264 Mobile) and the Sublime player does the rest.

In our tests it works seamlessly across all browsers and mobile devices no matter what their level of support is for HTML5 or particular video codecs.

All Is Well

Sadly all is not well. The Sublime Player is very clever but really what it's doing is trying to sort out the mess that is video format support across different web browsers and mobile platforms.

If you look at our videos in Firefox then the Jillion player has to apply a Flash wrapper around the H264 video to make it play because Firefox doesn't support H264 and we don't support OGG Theora. We don't support it because, to be blunt, it's crap. The same goes for IE7 and IE8.

It also adds another layer of complexity to watching video material. The player has to be loaded from a server that is not under our control. If Jillion's server goes down then the player will not load and you can't watch video material.

HTML5 and Sublime Video also can't fix the myriad of idiosyncrasies of the web when it comes to delivering content to your computer from a remote web server located thousands of miles away.

There are still a lot of things that can go wrong which might stop you from watching a particular video and, sadly, there's not a whole lot we can do about it.

[ Jillion 'Sublime Video' ]

Coming soon to an application form near you is Arts Council England's secret plan to fight government funding cuts to the arts with a £40Million philanthropy push. The plan is a secret because they won't talk about it, at least no yet, so we, here in TheLab™, thought it might be a good idea to take a look at the potential pitfalls of the funding monoliths latest big idea.

We should point out that this plan is not actually ACE's at all. It's been pushed on them by the coalition government via the Department for Culture Media and Sport. ACE didn't do a whole lot of pushing back though so they're fair game.

The £40Million in funding, imaginatively titled "Catalyst Arts", will be broken up into the three parts but, essentially, it's all about "enabling" arts organisations to enhance their fund raising abilities so they can plunder the hitherto untapped vast wealth of private individuals and corporations. Or at least that's the theory.

The Fundraiser Gambit

One possible hypothesis is a dance company, let's say a mid-scale one, get's a £25,000 grant to employ a specialist fundraiser for 12 months to, you know, raise some funds.

If the fund-raiser manages to score £25,000 then the whole thing has been a waste of time because ACE could have simply handed over the £25,000 to the company for their artistic work. To make the whole thing finically viable the dance company would probably have to raise double the amount it cost to employ the specialist, if not more.

Since the mid-scale dance company is not living in a bubble then they will have to compete with all the other arts organisations out there for the same limited sponsorship money that is, allegedly, available. Unless the specialist has a "no compete" clause in their contract they could, potentially, be working for more than one organisation at a time.

From the specialists point of view they could care less who actually does well out of employing them since they get paid anyway, have no long term commitment to any company and they will only ever brag about their success stories, not their failures.

It's also not clear if there is a significant pool of fund raising talent available for companies to hire. We feel sure that many will come out of the woodwork when they get the scent of free money in the air but the quality of their skills will almost certainly be untested in the arts arena.

If their skills have been tested then where have they been all this time?

The David and Goliath Gambit

Large scale organisations like Sadler's Wells and the Royal Opera House currently spend hundreds of thousands of pounds every year on fund raising. Organisations of their size have entire teams of people devoted to doing just that and only that.

Does ACE imagine that these large-scale players are all going to step back and make way for all the small and mid-scale companies who, thanks to the cuts, are going to be looking to the same corporate sponsors for support?

Also, does ACE imagine that Sadler's Wells, for example, is going to give up all its fund raising tricks and their list of contacts to anybody who asks?

The idea that the large-scale is going to come across as all magnanimous to help the smaller fish in the pond is completely laughable especially if the big fish are going to get hurt in the process.

Additionally, more often than not, large-scale organisations have the one thing that corporate sponsors are really looking for when they give money. Big shiny buildings with meeting rooms, conference halls, caterers and splashy shows with expensive programs for them and their corporate buddies.

Dance companies, for the most part, don't have those things, so what are they going to offer in return for the corporate shilling?

They could try offering dinner dates with their dancers, as Scottish Ballet did a few years back, but such things are not recommended unless you want to be hauled across the coals for the rest of your life.

The USA Gambit

Much has been made of the way the USA deals with the arts. Public funding is relatively low while private giving is relatively high but the UK is not the USA, not even a little bit.

That might sound blindingly obvious but bear with us here. First of all the United States is a vast country that covers four time zones with more cultural and socio-political differences than you can shake a few million sticks at. California is nothing like Illinois which is nothing like St Louis which is nothing like New York which, in turn, is nothing like California.

Ask a theatre company in Minnesota or Connecticut if they find it as easy, relatively speaking, to raise funding compared to a theatre company in New York.

Covering that vast country you have a plethora of state and federal laws that help or hinder cultural organisation to raise money from private sources, mostly in the shape of tax incentives. The UK has few such incentives and thus far the DCMS and the Treasury have announced no firm or coherent plans to introduce any.

Size also plays a part in the competitive nature of actually raising money. A mid-scale theatre company in New York State will be unlikely to try and tap the same funding sources as a mid-scale dance company in Washington State, some 3,000 miles to the west.

In the UK it's safe to say that arts organisations in Liverpool, Newcastle, Brighton, Manchester and Birmingham are all going to be going after the same potential sources of sponsorship. To put it simply, this country isn't big enough to stop everybody from every art form bumping into one another as they seek out private sponsors.

The We're Gonna Ignore The Fact That Companies Already Do This Gambit

If you have ever filled out an application for funding from ACE then you will be well aware of the fact that the funding monolith does not fund any project to 100% of its cost and they never have.

Even if your company is an NPO/RFO you don't get all the money you need to operate.

All arts organisations raise money from other sources, in some cases dozens of sources, so they can carry out their activities.

Most of this money comes from local authorities, charities, foundations and development agencies. It's somewhat ludicrous of ACE and the DCMS to think that for the last twenty years or so everybody has been willfully ignoring the £25Million ACE claims they will be able to raise over the next four years when Catalyst Arts starts running.

The Match Funds Gambit

Some of the money from the program is going to be used for match funding. If you get money from a sponsor then ACE will, if your application is successful, match that sponsorship money with some of their own. So far so good.

What's not clear is why this match funding is going to act as incentive to the potential sponsor. Why do they care that your company will get more money from ACE if they give you some of their money?

There is certainly an incentive for the company trying to raise the money but it won't make it any easier for them to get the sponsorship in the first place and that's the really hard part of the equation.

No More Gambits

From what we know at the moment Catalyst Arts doesn't seem to address any of the fairly serious issues outlined above never mind the fact that the arithmetic doesn't add up. Spending £40Million over 4 years and only guesstimating that you'll make an additional £25Million for the arts across a country of over 40 million people is a pretty poor investment.

Companies that recieve grants to employ fund raising "experts" won't be able to retain those experts without additional funding year on year. If the fund raising "expert" is raising money just so they can retain their own job then........ well, you get the point.

We feel sure that ACE will be able to explain all of this when and if they ever put somebody up for interview. Given their track record on NPOs, RFOs, Sustain and lot's of other big ideas there's probably not a great deal of confidence that the answers they give will make any sense.

(we recommend you watch in full screen mode)

by Martin French

Social networks are supposed to make sharing easy but they only work if everybody actually shares material and does it with some consistency. Reaching a lot of people should be a very simple task.

To illustrate the point we've made the above video which you might like to share with people, or not if our theories are correct.

We, here in TheLab™, have pointed out before that the wide world of dance was quick to share information about Google and their brief sojourn into the wacky world of dance with a short Martha graham doodle on their homepage.

Google is a multi-billion dollar corporation with a staggering global reach and needs the publicity about as much as a dog need instructions on how to chase a cat.

When it comes to sharing information about, you know, dance, the profession retreats back into its clamshell and says nothing. National Dance Agencies, dance companies, ACE, you name it, there is no end to the amount of information they won't share about each other no matter what it is or how important it might be.

Companies and organisations are also not really adept at getting their own staff in on the sharing game using their own social networking connections.

It's just an awful lot of people talking about themselves all the time. There's nothing wrong with talking about yourself of course but if that's all you ever do then people can and do get tired of you very very quickly.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this issue is that all that is required to make it work is the will to do it. It doesn't cost money, you don't need training, you don't need to hire a specialist, you don't need to fill in an application form and you don't need anybody's permission.

You just have to do it.

In the old country we often describe trying to get someone to talk to you who is being particularly intractable as being an experience akin to "pulling teeth". It's messy, painful and getting people to sit down and take that pain is getting harder and harder even though it might actually be good for them.

Over the last several weeks Article19 has been trying to get various people to talk about various things with little or no success. They either outright refuse to do it or fall back to their default position of suggesting we ask them the questions via email.

Start Pulling

Take Arts Council England (ACE) for example. The London based funding monolith has announced its plans to boost philanthropy in the arts not once but twice, the latest announcement coming a little under two weeks ago. The first announcement was in December last year.

While the practical plans for the project, called 'Catalyst Arts', seem straight forward enough the actual thinking behind how it works appears to be completely non-existent. The second press release from June 29 says this about the £30Million section of the scheme;

"It is anticipated that the £30 million fund will enable arts organisations to generate around £25 million of new money from private giving by 2015."

Throughout the rest of the release there are words like "develop", "ideas", "capability", etc, etc. No actual details on how ACE came up with the numbers, how the £40Million in total funding was split into three sections and how or why anybody should believe that any of this is actually going to work.

From the press release the whole thing looks like a gold mine for consultants and advisors. Another pot of money that has nothing to do with creating jobs for artists and has a lot to do with creating another layer of bureaucracy.

And by the way, if you're spending £30Million, essentially on administration, and only getting £25Million back by 2015 that seems like a bad investment. Why not just use the £30Million and invest it in actual arts projects?

So we asked ACE for an interview with the person in charge of 'Catalyst Arts' because it might be good for ACE to talk about this and explain the missing details.

A spokesperson at ACE said this in response to our interview request;

"As outlined in the release, the fund is still in development and last week's announcement was an update on our current thinking.  More information and details of criteria and how to apply will be available in the autumn.  In light of this there is not much more detail we can give at this point."

Apparently in the last 6 or 7 months the only things ACE have come up with is how to distribute the money and some numbers evidently pulled from thin air.

Tapped Ideas

When the website IdeasTap, kind of like LinkdIN for young arty people, announced they were associating themselves with the Sky Arts Ignition Fund we, here in TheLab™ , naturally enough, and any intrepid journalist worth their salt is going to pursue such an announcement with questions about associating yourself with Newscorp.

Of course Newscorp is owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns News International that owned the now defunct News of the World along with a lot of other charming news outlets like The Sun, Fox News, the London Times and of course Sky Television.

No dice there either unfortunately because their editor James Hopkirk, who used to work for The Sunday Times coincidentally, and is also a journalist wouldn't be interviewed on the phone, only via email.

We don't do email interviews for the fairly obvious reason that there is no way we can verify if the person writing the answers is the person we're asking the questions of, it's too difficult to do follow ups and it actually takes a lot longer than spending 10 minutes on the phone. And, yes, it's far easier to squeeze people when you're talking to them.

The list goes on and on.

NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) either wouldn't talk about or seemed completely incapable of discussing their "£1/2 Million research fund to stimulate digital innovation in the arts and culture" which they are launching alongside ACE and the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council).

In fact they initially asked if they could see what we were going to write before it was published so they could edit their responses. (say what? Ed!) We of course refused that request.

ACE, again, wouldn't allow any journalists into their Building Digital Capacity for the Arts seminars lest we ask some awkward questions of the protagonists that might just expose these things as nothing more than a talking shop (they told us there wasn't enough room in the venue).

ACE also declined to provide interviews with senior staff about the funding cuts and what their level of responsibility/involvement was in that process. The funding monolith is particularly adept at not giving on the record interview about its programs.

The Green Room in Manchester, which recently closed down after losing its ACE funding from next year, declined to be interviewed about why they were shutting the venue down so quickly (they were funded for the rest of the the current financial year). From the outside it looks like they just locked the door and left town.

Over at the BBC they refused to put Jan Younghusband (commissioning editor) up for interview to discuss their train wreck of a documentary about contemporary dance or in-fact the entire train wreck of a contemporary dance season on BBC4 that featured very little actual contemporary dance.

Dance UK, the advocacy organisation for dance, wouldn't answer questions about funding cuts even after they themselves were cut completely. Such is their displeasure with Article19 they point blank refuse to link to anything we publish because pretending we don't exist is far easier than having to deal with our impertinent questions. So much for providing information to dancers.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

Perhaps the most puzzling or disturbing realisation to come from this culture of silence and obfuscation is that many of these people, and dozens more like them, are the ones responsible for pushing and promoting dance and culture in general to government, policy makers and, ultimately, the general public.

It should be alarming to all that when asked questions about the reasoning, operation and viability of a particular project those responsible stutter and stammer and stick their fingers in their ears and shout "la la la la la I am not listening to you".

The recent debacle with Opera North canceling a community performance, making a spectacular mess of explaining why and then humiliatingly re-instating the performance is perhaps the most graphic illustration that the management/administrative side of the arts are just holding on way too tight.

If you don't talk it looks like you're afraid, that you have no confidence in your project or the capability of that project to deliver its goals. If you only communicate via email then all that illustrates is that you lack confidence and are petrified of making mistakes. If we we're being more blunt we could call you a coward.

We've said this before and we're going to have to say it again. Just because you don't want to talk about the potential shortcoming of your work doesn't mean those shortcomings will magically go away.

Many working in the arts are beginning to resemble failed US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Ms Palin doesn't give interviews (unless they are on, of course, Fox News, the cable news network that pays her to appear).

Ms Palin feels, even though she seeks high public office, that she should not be accountable nor pressed on important issues because, in her eyes, the media will distort what she says. All the media will actually do however is report what she says, her own words and ideas are the things that constantly bring her down.

Making mistakes is not the end of the world so we strongly urge you all to own what you do and own what you say and take some responsibility. Being compared to Sarah Palin is not something you really want to be stuck with.

We've all been in a theatre, before a show or after a show and perused the messy, confusing mass of publicity flyers for other productions "coming soon" to the venue you're standing in.

They vary in size and quality but they all have one thing in common. They are completely impractical and most of the printed space on them is taken up with things you don't want to know or don't need to know.

One flyer we viewed recently, for a theatre production, was nothing more than pull quotes from critics top to bottom alongside the most boring photograph you have ever seen. Far from encouraging us to come and see the show it was more like a crucifix to a vampire. "Flee", it screamed, "save yourselves", so we did!

So what happens when you make things small, neat, portable and, perhaps, even desirable?

Shrink Wrapped

Let's imagine that upon entering a theatre you are presented with not a cheap flyer rack with a bunch of badly designed scraps of paper in them but a far nicer and cleaner display as illustrated below.

What we have here is simple. A large(ish) poster illustrates the show itself with what we call a P-PoD (pointless picture of a dancer) along with the associated marketing blurb.

Next to the poster we have a small holder that contains the actual flyers. Except, they're not flyers at all, not really. They're simple little cards (the same size as a credit card or a business card) that the interested theatre goer can pluck from the display and take with them.

The cards are simple, robust and easy to slip into a pocket unlike the current crop of handouts that need to be folded a dozen times before they can be put away.

You use the poster to get the attention of the masses and the pull-card to give them something to take away. We'll get to the "QR" code thing in a bit.

So what about the card designs themselves?

We've put together a mock-up (below) for the front and back of the card. The company is fictional, primarily to stop anybody getting upset.

Front

Back

Although the cards are very small, relatively speaking, you can fit more than enough information onto them for your prospective audience. In fact the size works in your favour because the less space you have to fill, the less likely you are to go crazy with lots of gibberish that nobody cares about.

The bottom of the rear of the cards would be left blank for over-printing by the receiving venue.

Some of you are probably thinking, "those things will be too small", "nobody will be able to read that!"

Our response? Do you have problems reading the information on your credit card, or a business card or your cell phone? Because those are all the same size as the designs shown above and the most important pieces of information (the date and time of the show) are nice and bold and very easy to read.

Who knows, if the cards are well designed, maybe they'll become collectable?

QR What

The back of the design, in the lower right corner, features something called a "QR" code or Quick Response code. They were developed back in the mid 1990's by a Japanese car company, of all things, and they work in much the same way as the barcodes on everything you have ever bought.

You read the code using a cell phone running a QR code reader. Such applications are available for all the major smart phones currently in the wild from iPhones to Android to Windows 7 Phones.

All you do is run the application on your phone, point the camera at the QR code and the software will scan it in less than a second revealing the information the code holds.

Go ahead, give it a try, the QR code on the demo design actually works.

The codes themselves can hold various types of information including plain text, phone numbers, etc. Generating the codes is easy (and free), you can use a number of online resources to get the codes saying exactly what you need them to say. The QR code itself is just a graphic that can be easily built into any design.

A code is also included on the poster so people don't even need to take the card with them. They just zap the code and they have all the information they need.

Once the information is on the users phone they can keep it for themselves or easily forward that information to others via text message or email. It's almost too easy.

Playing the Advantage

For a company or individual dance maker, this type of advertising presents a number of advantages. First of all the cards are cheaper to print and transport, through the mail, than bulkier flyers. 10,000 of them can be had for about £300 and that's double sided in full colour, less than half the cost of a double sided A5 limp lettuce affair.

Posters are still going to cost you but you do need a lot less of those to begin with and 10 A2 ones are going to hurt to the tune of about £90.

Venues will be more visually appealing with neat poster/card combos rather than the messy flyer farms they have right now. If the venue doesn't have room for posters then..... well, close it down. What's the point of being a venue if you don't have space to advertise the shows that are coming up?

The cards are much smaller so use a lot less resources to produce which is good for mother earth. You could also go easy on the number you actually have made which helps on both the cost and environmental fronts. A lot of this advertising stuff just gets thrown out. Yes, maybe some of it gets recycled but it's far better not to make it in the first place if you don't need it.

QR codes make it easier for people to share information about the show. There is a learning curve to overcome but good design on the poster or promo card can help that along by illustrating what you actually do with the QR code.

21st Century

Doing all of this might take a bit of effort, especially when we're talking about theaters and their incumbent personnel, but change needs to come to make things a bit more user friendly for the paying customer and a bit easier and cheaper for the visiting company.

This is just one idea, what have you got?

[ QR Code Generator ]

So, here in TheLab™, we thought what better way to spend a Sunday off work than to read through more than 1000 "tweets" from our beloved National Dance Network to see how much time they spend talking about themselves and others.

For the purposes of this piece we looked at the Twitter accounts of Dancebase, DanceXchange, Dance City, Dance 4, Yorkshire Dance, The Place, South East Dance and Dance East.

To help us out there are, mercifully, a few toys around the web that can help analyse how individual Twitter accounts are interacting with the world.

We were able to tell how often an organisation replies to another Twitter user directly (by means of the @account responses) and how many times they "re-tweeted" somebody else's information. These numbers are measured as a percentage of their total number of tweets.

Additionally we looked at the last 100 messages they posted (as of Sunday May 8th) to determine how many of those messages were marketing orientated (specifically used to sell tickets or promote a particular service) and how many had no connection whatsoever to the organisation or a performance or activity they may be staging. These are hard numbers, not a percentage.

The numbers tell us that Dancebase, the only NDA in Scotland, and South East Dance are far more likely than any of the others to actually reply to people using their Twitter account.

As for the rest? They all fall into single digits with the more tweets an organisation has published making the @reply numbers more damning as an illustration of their relative engagement or lack thereof with the public at large.

Although South East Dance has only tweeted a grand total of 104 times they have still managed to accumulate a response rate of almost 40%.

So called "re-tweeting" can be a good and a bad thing. If you only ever re-post information from other people then you might be perceived as being a bit "click happy" and not really paying too much attention to your followers.

Dance East comes of best/worst in this scenario with 38% of all their Tweets being rehashed from somebody else and South East Dance falling into second place with 28%. All the others seem to have their clicking fingers under control with single digit percentages across the board.

Marketing is where most of them all fall down, cartoon style, into the floor of the canyon. Both Dance4 and ThePlace hitting 89 and 87 respectively from their last one hundred Tweets on the "buy something from us" scale.

More often than not both of these dance organisations try and hit you with the same marketing message for the same thing with multiple tweets in a short space of time. We feel sure that goes down well with the followers.

Only South East Dance, again, and Dance East keep their numbers below half, although only just in the case of Dance East.

The final column shows us how many times an NDA sent out a piece of information which had nothing to with the organisation in any way.

As you can see, it's a pretty poor state of affairs. Four of them sent out nothing and the rest should probably have a meeting to discuss their "social networking strategy". South East Dance, based on only 104 tweets, once again comes out on top with an approximate 7% rate of unrelated information sharing.

Perhaps the final number is easier to explain when you check how many of the NDA's actually follow dance companies on Twitter to keep up to date with what they're doing.

Article19 follows most dance company Twitter accounts (as many of the active ones we can find). Comparing our list to those of the NDA's tested we see that Yorkshire Dance doesn't follow any dance companies at all. DanceXchange follows one, ThePlace follows five, Dance City follows six, Dance 4 follows one, and Dance East follows three.

Once again, South East Dance wins the day because they follow eleven dance companies.

We've included numbers at the end for Article19 and Dance UK for you to use by way of a comparison. If you're wondering about the pathetically low reply and re-tweet numbers for DanceUK then wonder no more. More than 98% of their 2448 tweets were done automatically via their Facebook account, a common problem and a common source of irritation among Twitter users.

Of course Twitter is only one metric for measuring the level of interaction but the internet is, if you haven't noticed, a pretty big deal and thus far a lot of well funded organisations, based on this evidence, are not too good with the communications.

We feel sure somebody will get right on this.

Time for something dry here on Article19 because we, here in TheLab™, want to talk to you about listings, the bread and butter of online information when it comes to the performing arts.

When you work on this side of the business you start to realise very quickly that simply finding out when a where a dance company is performing is, for the most part, no simple task.

Websites for dance companies vary in quality from excellent to "good lord, what the hell is that?" and the same goes for venue websites.

Finding simple, clear, to the point information is often such a struggle we have to resort to making phone calls. That's a pain if you're a working journalist but you're not going to care if you're a member of the public. Those folks will just go see something else.

Sketch

Third party websites are not much better. Take "The List" website for example, the sister site to the ubiquitous print publication that covers many of the UK's major cities.

If you take a look at our screen capture of one of their listings pages (see below) you will notice that less than 10% of the information they actually put on the screen in front of you concerns the show you actually want to see.

All of the key information is highlighted in the boxes, everything else is mostly superfluous to requirements.

The show in question is Jasmin Vardimon's '7734'. Apparently The List doesn't consider it important that you know the company's name. The rest of the screen is taken up with annoying advertising, an overly complex search box, a comments box and still more annoying ads.

A word to the wise for website operators. If your operation is so expensive that your core information and purpose for existing is being ruined by an excessive number of ads then your defeating your own reasons for existing.

Venues

As mentioned, some venues are better than others but they all tend to suffer from the same problem, they focus all of their efforts on delivering information you don't need.

Again, if you look at the captioned screen shot taken from the website for The Lowry Theatre in Manchester we have many of the same problems. Key information plays second fiddle to images, simple things like the box office phone number are stuck at the bottom of the page, hidden away in tiny grey text.

You can view the notation full size by clicking on the image.

Ultimately both of these examples illustrate just how difficult some websites make it to actually get at the information you really want.

Keep It Simple

Now, because we work in TheLab™ we can experiment and build things to try to illustrate better ways of doing things for the wide and wacky world of dance.

So what we did was build listings.article19.co.uk, the world's most simplistic listings website, probably!

The thinking is fairly straightforward. At any one time there are fewer than 20 dance companies touring the UK with perhaps 10-15 dates per company. Because the company's themselves are the key element that people are interested in the homepage of the site offers you a simple list of the companies that are currently on tour along with the name of their work or works.

If you click on a company link you are given a simple show description and a chronological list of their tour dates. This list includes the bare minimum amount of information a potential attendee should need; the time, date and location of the performance with a direct link to the venue website. If a user needs a bit more detail then a click on the arrow delivers the "show card" page.

Again this is very paired down. The information is essentially the same but includes a venue address and a company website link along with some clickable "tags" so you can find information about shows at the same venue or the general geographic location.

The whole site has only two main links; "who's on tour" and "map". The map link presents you with, again, a simple, clear map with pins denoting the location of a particular performance.

Clicking on the pins reveals the name and date of the show with a clickable link to the "show card" mentioned above. If there is more than one show at the particular venue then we don't use multiple pins, we simply list each show, again in chronological order, inside the information bubble.

Maps are particularly useful for people who want to find shows close to where they live or close to where they might be going.

Stripped

Throughout the entire design there is no superfluous information. We don't include any images, pull quotes, videos (unusual for us), or pointless machine generated "things you may also like" recommendations that are always, always wrong.

The website has very few graphics, (the website title, the map pins and the map itself and that comes from Google). Every piece of information for each company and each show is included only because somebody might actually need it.

Our listings site is trying to solve a very simple problem as simply as possible

With more work we could almost certainly strip it down even further by eliminating the "show cards" and creating a customised pop-up or overlay on the main tour screen for each company, but that's for another day.

Our Point

Perhaps the main point we are trying to illustrate with the demo website and this piece in general is that keeping things simple and stripped down makes life a lot easier for the public and for you. The less clutter and mess you have to distribute the fewer mistakes that get made and the fewer shows that will get overlooked and you can spend less time telling people things they don't want to know.

[ Article19's Listings Demo ]

Arts Council England has announced the first of its seminars for "Building Digital Capacity". This particular gathering will take place in London, of course, on May 23.

To save you the bother of going and listening to people yap for 3 hours and 30 minutes, the total length of time this seminar lasts, we, here in TheLab™, explain everything they will probably tell you and why you probably don't need to hear it.

The big push is something called IPTV an unassuming little acronym that means internet protocol television or to put it another way, video delivered to a television screen using internet like technology.

If you have have ever stayed in a hotel then the chances are you have used IPTV. It's what they use to sell you pay per view porn. It's nothing more than video delivered via a clunky graphic interface from computer servers stored in the hotel.

Now imagine this; You buy a new TV set but instead of plugging it into an aerial or a cable box (from Sky for example) you just connect it to your home internet connection. When you turn the set on, instead of being presented with a television channel you get the image below (a concept image from Samsung). Instead of using your TV like....... a TV you use it like a phone or a tablet, or a desktop computer.

To watch a program you open an application from a particular provider, like Netflix or the BBC iPlayer, and watch your chosen program through the television via those applications that are in turn connected to the internet. Hey presto, so far, who cares?

As well as paid for providers, like Netflix or Sky Television, you also get applications allowing you to watch public video sites like YouTube or Vimeo. These types of applications basically provide a TV orientated user interface to let you watch content from those sites.

The applications or "channels" you are able to watch very much depend on the TV manufacturers. If they don't have a Vimeo app then you can't watch Vimeo content. If all your content is on Vimeo then too bad.

What's in it for you?

The simple answer to that question is, not much! From the point of view of a mid-scale dance company or theatre company for that matter all of this is irrelevant. Most of the content on these internet enabled TV's is still controlled by television companies. If you want your content on a Sky Arts application or channel then that's up to Sky Arts to make it happen.

Content on public video sites like Vimeo or YouTube suffers from the same issues as all the content you might currently have online. The fundamental issues of being discovered and getting watched.

From a popularity point of view that very much depends on the number of people who actually buy these types of TV sets or a set top box equivalent (like Apple TV or Boxee). No accurate numbers are currently available for the UK.

There also doesn't appear to be anything on the agenda about how you actually create compelling content that people might find useful or actually want to watch or who is going to pay for that material to get made.

Apps

Next on the agenda are "apps". The apps (applications) they are referring to in the publicity materials are small software programs that run on either, so called, smart cell phones, tablets (iPad, Blackberry Playbook, Samsung Galaxy et-al) or the aforementioned TVs.

They usually serve a very specific purpose such as locating restaurants, making photos look like polaroids, or some other task that was hitherto impossible sans a small battery powered walkie talkie.

Ironically at the time of writing Apple's iTunes store, the most high profile hawkers of these things, is currently working intermittently so we couldn't conduct a comprehensive search for theatre/arts based applications.

The one application we are aware of that was released by a prominent theater is the Sadler's Wells video application (SW Screen). Essentially all the "app" does is hook into the videos that are available via the Sadler's Wells website. Currently, more than a month after release, there are still only 22 videos available. That fact alone makes a complete mockery of the apps "search" facility and it won't work without an internet connection.

"The Wells" could have achieved the same thing with a free podcast channel and saved themselves the cost of developing this turkey in the first place, but we digress.

Once again cost is the determining factor here. Software applications don't come cheap even if you can come up with a genuinely useful reason to commission the thing in the first place. If you want to sell it for money it better have more utility than can be achieved through simply visiting your own website.

Applications are also not a one cost deal. If the app has any kind of long term use then it will need to be developed, updated and distributed for years.

For the most part, unless you are a large scale organisation, you won't have the money to spend getting these things made and if you do have the money, you should probably spend it on something else.

The People

As for the people presenting all of this trivia to an unwitting populace? Mark Dobson and Andy Hudson will be making the case for IPTV. Apparently they are representatives of something called the "Newcastle Gateshead Cultural Venues" (NGCV) where they have developed a "beta" test version of an IPTV channel.

All we could find about these guys is a closed Ning platform (think Facebook but on a smaller scale), but no phone numbers, no profiles, no nothing. We couldn't find any information about the channel itself or where it can be accessed. The NGCV is made up of 10 venues based in the North East of England.

The other two are Mark Bamber and Justin Spooner who are listed as BBC Academy Trainers. No information on these two either but the BBC Academy website does gives you lots of help about how to set up a tripod and other mysteries. No, we're not making that up.

Conclusion

If you're looking to get out of the office for a few hours, or even a whole day for non London folk, then we can think of about 200 - 300 more interesting ways to spend your time.

Before arts organisations look at possible distribution platforms for content ACE, the BBC and whomever else is involved in this push for digital expansion needs to seriously discuss the resourcing and creation of the content.

Dance companies and other arts organisations are content creators, distribution platforms are the purview of large tech companies and broadcasters.

Over the last 10 years I have filmed thousands of hours of dance in all kinds of situations. Hundreds of live performances, rehearsals, events, indoors and outdoors, from the most experienced professional companies to the greenest of beginners.

I've used all kinds of equipment, been squeezed into the smallest of spaces to get a good shot and felt the intense pain most cameras operators know only to well from a long day of hand held filming. I've pulled a rabbit out of a hat more than once to make something with minimal material with no time to do it.

Over the last 12 months, via Article19's various, for want of a better word, channels our dear readers have watched more than 50,000 hours worth of dance material.

I tell you this only to let you know that I speak from a position of experience and because
I have a request, I want the people getting in my way to get out of my way.

Now, I don't mean you're blocking my shot or I want to film everything, no.

What I mean is this. As someone who wants to watch dance both in the the theatre and, more importantly for this piece, on screen I need whomever is responsible to stop making it really difficult for me to do that.

I don't want your jump cut, whip panned, dutch tilted, craned, hyper edited, close up, blackout, pull quoted, one minute, meaningless "trailer". I want to see the work, I want to see the movement, that thing we call dance.

From my personal point of view I think the filming of a dance performance should be approached with the same diligence a journalist uses when telling the truth in a piece of writing. Your work is what it is, stop trying to make us think it's something that it's not.

I bring this up because a lot of the older videos on Article19 are being upgraded to a better quality format. Just yesterday we published the upgraded version of 'Riff' by Matthias Sperling, a work from three years ago (you can watch it above).

From a filming perspective it's the dream shoot because it's a solo, it's doesn't get any simpler than that.

Mr Sperling is an accomplished dance maker and an experienced, highly skilled professional dancer. He doesn't need my help or any camera trickery to make the work look good. He just needs me to get out of his way and film the movement. Do you think your ability to watch and enjoy (or not) this piece of dance would be enhanced by unnecessary cutting, close ups or on screen pull quotes?

Padding

Look at it from another perspective. Do you think the iPad would be the commercial success it is today if the thing was complicated to use and kept getting in your way every time you tried to do something with it? Of course not, it's successful because it's simple. The iPad is the KISS principle writ large.

What about movies? One of the best cinematographers in the world is a guy called Tom Stern, you've probably never heard of him but he's the guy that shot 'Million Dollar Baby' (among many other movies), Clint Eastwood's Oscar winning boxing film. Every shot is designed to let the actors and the writing, the real strengths of any film, shine through. It's understated, simple and staggeringly effective because we don't want to see the camera work, we want to watch the movie.

Sharing

There's a worrying trend right now in dance that seems to be restricting more and more of what we can watch online. Dance seems to be following the model, perhaps unwittingly, of the music, television and film industries. That model is "Sharing is bad, control is good".

With the possible exception of Siobhan Davies Dance Company you would be hard pressed to find substantive examples of any dance companies work anywhere online, not even on their own websites.

I get that dance companies want people to come to the theatre and see their work, of course they do, but dance is, and always has been, struggling to get people through the door. The answer does not lie in control and meaningless trailers, the answers lie in sharing and substance. The more material that's put out there the more chances people have to get to know the companies, the work and the art-form in general.

Dance is a complex and thoughtful art form. It requires you to pay attention to fully grasp what's going on. As Tero Saarinen said, it's not "fast food", and as I say, it's not So You Think You Can Dance, it's better than that, so how about we start showing it to people as often as we can?

[ Riff on Article19 ]
[ Trailer Park ]

The recent announcement by Sky Television for their "Ignition" arts funding program has the PR flacks salivating and the press release stenographers running out updates on their websites at record speed.

£1.3Million over three years, £200,000 per project, chance to be featured on a national broadcaster, albeit one with a very small viewership compared to terrestrial broadcast channels. It's all good, especially when the arts are being cut by central and local government.

In fact the official announcement for this project came just one week after the NPO results were released by ACE, so good timing huh? Suspiciously good timing, if you're a cynical press hack that is.

Problem Partners

Several years ago Article19 discovered that the, now defunct, White Oak Dance Project was being sponsored, in part, by a big tobacco company. After we asked them some questions the logo was swiftly removed from their website and some frantic protestations were delivered that the money came from the tobacco company's charitable foundation, so that was ok, right?

At the time it raised some questions about just how far arts organisations would go to secure funding for their projects and day to day operations. Was any major corporation off limits no matter the products they made and sold or their ethical practices whilst plying their trade?

How Far Would You Go?

There is nothing wrong or unethical about drilling for oil, refining that oil and turning it into thousands of products that we all use everyday. But, many would argue, there is something fundamentally wrong if, in order to increase profits, you bypass safety controls, get a lot of people killed and spill 200 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. So would you take money from BP? (the Royal Opera House already does)

What about being caught up in bribery and corruption scandals in North West Africa as Royal Dutch Shell (Shell) has been for many years now. Wide spread pollution across Nigeria for almost 40 years has gone un-punished with Shell being exonerated by a UN investigation paid for by Shell.

You buy fuel from their petrol stations, but would you want their logo on your promotional material? Would you want to spend their money?

British Aerospace (BAE), they seem seem like a nice bunch. Lot's of smiley faces on their website, talk of engineering brilliance, apprentice schemes and corporate responsibility. Ultimately though they are a weapons manufacturer, they sell sophisticated weapons technology to countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others that actively and brutally suppress the rights of their own civilians.

If you think the arts are living it large on government money then you'll love BAE because they receive billions from the government to build things we don't really need, like nuclear submarines (at £1Billion each) that get stuck on sandbanks. If you want to know why there is no money for anything, ask BAE.

As for Sky? Well they are of course owned by Rupert Murdoch the American/Australian who owns News International, Newscorp, Fox and a whole lot more in the media world. One of Mr Murdoch's newspapers in the UK (The News of the World) has just admitted to wide spread phone hacking in order to illegally obtain personal information about the rich and famous. Two of their employees are currently under arrest facing criminal charges and possible jail sentences.

Others have already been sent to jail.

Fox News in the United States, also owned by Murdoch, is well know for fabricating information, fear mongering, racism and being little more than a right wing shill for the Republican party.

Do you really want to associate yourselves with these people?

The Ethics of Money

Arts funding is facing more of a squeeze than usual in these, so-called, "difficult times" so the next couple of years may well throw up some serious ethical dilemmas for arts administrators looking to pay the bills.

Finding clean money might be totally impossible so will it come down to degrees of morality when a mid-scale dance company is faced with accepting or rejecting a donation from a particular donor or corporation?

Are the arts facing the slightly ridiculous situation of meetings being held with the board where an Executive Director is arguing that "Company A has caused massive pollution but at least they're not as bad as Company B because Company B killed a whole bunch of people!" Pollution versus corporate manslaughter, the new debate for the arts in the 21st century.

And what of the work being created and sponsored?

Sky's "Ignition" project promises to "invest in the creation of new groundbreaking art works, projects, events and performances". Doesn't that sound exciting!

How much would you like to wager that none of those works will be a stinging portrayal of corporate greed, media ownership regulations, phone hacking, right wing news commentators or tabloid excess?

If you're in any doubt they say as much at the end of the application form;

"Sky Arts may refuse to consider an application if the applicant acts in a way towards the Sky staff which Sky Arts reasonably considers to be inappropriate, unlawful or offensive."

Big Bad Government

Say what you want about government funding of the arts but at least the money is relatively clean. You're not being funded by the Conservative Party or the Labour Party, you're being funded by the public via their taxes.

Governments are also accountable (if we don't like them we can get rid of them), we can mount arguments to defend arts funding and we can slap their wrists if they try to interfere in the work being made.

If you want government funding to make work criticising the government then no problem! Well, you can apply for it, getting it is another matter.

It's difficult for detractors to make "guilt by association" arguments when your core funding comes from public money.

When money is coming from corporate benefactors you can mount no such defence. They can give it and take it away as they please with no accountability and no discussion, it is their money after all.

Arts Council England and their brethren in Scotland, Wales and Ireland are, often times, intractable organisations pushing ridiculous policies onto an unwilling arts world. Compared to the opportunistic sharks swimming in the corporate ocean however they are little clown-fish nibbling at your toes.

ACE can be fixed, Sky, not so much.

[ Art at Any Cost ]
[ Dirty money at the ROH ]

The last time we wrote a piece about filming dance and doing it well was nearly four years ago. In 'Shooting Straight' we outlined the basic tricks and techniques you need to deploy to film a live dance performance.

Now, those techniques still hold true today but there is another way, a way you can film any dance performance no matter how many dancers are in it with just two cameras and, possibly, one operator.

Get in Parallel

For the most part a dance performance in a theater is created to be seen from the front or as near to the front as makes no difference. Unless you're English National Ballet and your'e producing a crazy version of Swan Lake in the round then it's the proscenium arch for you and your dancers.

With that in mind let us turn to the parallel camera set-up

As the name would suggest what you need to do, or what your rented camera operator needs to do, is set up two identical cameras, on their tripods, side by side. We shall call these cameras; A and B (I think you should call them Bert and Ernie! Ed!)

Before you start setting up the cameras on their tripods make sure that each cameras settings are the same so the final images match from each camera. Because there are so many different cameras we can't go through specifics so either ask the rental shop or read the manual.

Ernie............ Camera B is mounted to the right of camera A (as you face the stage) and is set to record the wide angle or "master shot" for the work. Now, when we say wide angle we don't mean the entire theater, the lights and half the audience. No, what we mean is the boundary of the stage with a little shaved off for good effect since dancers rarely occupy the extreme left or right of the performance space in any show.

For top and bottom framing take your cue from the position of the camera. In the example shown above (Candoco Dance Company 'In Translation') we've framed the wide angle showing a lot of overhead space. If you're shooting from a flatter angle frame the dancers towards the middle of the frame with less overhead space (see the MK Raw video at the bottom of the page for an example)

If you frame the wide angle and you get audience heads in the shot, but not obscuring the dancers, then you can just mask them out in post production (we'll cover that another day).

Focusing this camera is easy. Get somebody to stand on the stage and then zoom your camera all the way in, as far as it will go, so you can see the persons face. Switch the camera to manual focus, and then adjust said focus until the image in the viewfinder or on the pop out screen is razor sharp.

Then zoom out, re-frame your shot as described above and leave the focus alone on that camera for the rest of the show. Lock out the cameras pan/tilt head on the tripod and camera B is good to go.

Where is Bert?

Bert, I mean camera A is positioned closest to you or your operator. This camera is the one that will track your dancers around the stage and pick up all the nice details in your wonderful choreography.

Make sure you have a good tripod so you can make smooth camera movements. If you don't have one then rent one. They aren't expensive and if you rent a camera they usually provide a fluid head tripod in the kit.

The image below illustrates how the framing differs between camera A and camera B

The techniques explained in 'Shooting Straight' still apply here in terms of framing your dancers, how tight your framing should be and controlling the exposure of your shot.

You can also set the focus for this camera the same way you did for camera B and you should be fine. Just keep an eye on the image and make sure everything stays nice and sharp. The ability of the operator to manually focus a video camera varies wildly from camera to camera. Some are easy, some are a nightmare, so choose your weapons carefully.

As we have explained before, make sure you monitor the exposure (how much light gets into the camera) as the show progresses. Unless you have some pretty ridiculous and very fast changes in light levels then handling two cameras solo shouldn't be a huge problem. Just stay calm and adjust the exposure on camera A before adjusting the exposure on camera B.

Make sure the exposure numbers (shown as F1.8 etc) on the displays for each camera match when you adjust the settings as you film. This will ensure your footage from each camera matches.

When Article19 deploys this particular technique we use EX1(R) cameras from Sony. Not only are they very good cameras they also have an on-lens ring for adjusting the exposure (or the camera's aperture). This makes adjusting exposure very quick, smooth and easy.

You can watch a short section from 'In Translation' from Candoco Dance Company below. This work was filmed using the parallel camera set up.

The wide angle shot may appear to be very far away, especially on a small computer screen, but what we're doing here is creating an immaculate, watchable recording of the show. We're not trying to show off how clever we are with cameras, it's not about us, it's about the work.

Cut the Cadence

Finally, a word to the wise about editing. When you shoot with multiple cameras you end up with multiple, perfectly synchronized angles of your work. Because of this you, or some hack editor, can go overboard and start chopping and changing shots for no other reason than "just because".

Every time you make an edit, no matter what subject you are filming, the viewers eyes have to adjust their focus on the screen toward whatever you're pointing the camera at. The more you cut, the more the viewer has to flick their eyes around the screen in a vain attempt to pay attention to your work.

For dance, this flicking, can be disastrous. We've seen many promotional videos that are completely unwatchable because the edits occur, with irritating regularity, every 3 to 5 seconds. Don't think cross-dissolving helps either, because it doesn't!

Just imagine sitting in a theatre, watching a dance performance whilst blinking in a really exaggerated manner and you will get some idea of how completely stupid and annoying this type of editing is for your viewers.

The video below, featuring MK Raw but not shot in parallel, gives you some idea of how a calm approach to editing helps enormously when trying to maintain the viewers interest on the work.

Go forth and shoot and try and make it very easy for people to watch your work online and on video.

[ Shooting Straight ]