I’m one of those people who likes to read things as I use them. I’ll examine the chocolate wrapper as I munch, read all the fine print on the pen I’m using as I daydream…

So every morning in the shower – whether I’m stealing Michelle’s shampoo, or just using my own (a crumbly rock-thing from Lush) – I’ll read and ponder the back of the herbal essences bottles.

I guess the packaging designers at Herbal Essences realized this, and so they included something for me to read.

There’s something comforting about reading what a product is doing for you… and usually, you’re just reading the ingredients list on the back, wondering what half of the things you’re putting into your hair are.

Whether or not herbal essences are a nice company, or if their shampoo is very good, I don’t know – but this nice narrative about how good I’m going to feel after using their shampoo is a really neat touch.

Shampoo has such a strong visceral component: how it smells, what it feels like when you put it in your hair. I feel like this story on the back helps enhance the visceral by adding a reflexive feeling too.

Just look at all the great words they’re using: dousing, silky, rich, protect, shiny, healthy, light, lustrous, happy. So awesome… I kind of want to go wash my hair now.

Of course The Matrix, Lost, and Doctor Who are EXACTLY THE SAME as Brooklyn Museum and Nottingham City Museums and Galleries! This week I’ve just given a lecture that brazenly linked ideas I’ve been thinking about for ages concerning Transmedia Storytelling with Libraries and Museums.

TV and Movies, Erik Boekesteijn from the Delft Public Library, Cats and Rabbits, Transmedia Storytelling, Natalie Tran, Henry Jenkins… just a few of my favourite topics, all smooshed into a two-hour lecture mashup.

Next week, I’ll be talking about Social Network sites specifically. It should be quite fun, especially as I’m going to use it as an excuse to play many videos of incredibly handsome men.

I’ve posted all my notes from the fantastic conference I just attended while in Melbourne – to flickr. There was a really amazing line-up of speakers, and I’m really looking forward to going back over these notes later on, and adding my thoughts and annotations. For now, though, here they are raw. Any comments and questions appreciated!

During May, I applied for a pretty amazing job at an exhibition design firm located here in Wellington, Story Inc. I took a week off work, and put together an extensive application, complete with video commentary!

Sadly, I didn’t get the “Content Developer” job I applied for – but they did like me and my application enough to invite me back for a number of conversations about other projects they were working on. Through this experience, it was really great to apply my ideas to real-world projects, to learn more about how a creative studio worked, and meet the different people that contribute to their awesome projects.

In particular, this was an important step towards finding a way to keep doing more exciting storytelling projects – like those we’ve achieved with Collective Noun – full time. I was pretty proud to list myself – for the first time – as a “Transmedia Designer” on my CV, and include Collective Noun projects as significant achievements!

LBP level design session ~ week one: Brock, Jem and Timothy spend an evening listening to the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry explaining the intricacies of Little Big Planet level design. This video is the result of several hours concentration, and too many snickers-puffs.

I love Aro Video and – as an Aro Valley resident myself – regularly borrow films from their store. However, I’m concerned that their recent campaign for censorship reform is cloaking what is primarily an economic challenge for small New Zealand businesses in social/moral rhetoric and emotive language.

Maybe that’s too harsh, I’m sure that is not their intent – but I do think it is interesting to see how economic and social issues collide (jostle for position?) around this issue.

Here’s what I understand, in simple terms:

• Films must display a New Zealand classification to be sold here.
• Films are classified in New Zealand when, before they are supplied to the public, “someone” submits it to the OFLC and pays a fee.
• Most of the time, this “someone” is a big fancy distributor to whom $1100 is not much more than a drop in the bucket. (When you’re looking at millions in Kill Bill sales, $1100 is nothing to get an R18 classification and sticker for your ultra-violent film so that sensible adults can buy it in New Zealand.)
• But big distributors only tend to import and stock what the “mainstream” watch and play. So when it comes to alternative titles – media consumed by smaller groups of the New Zealand population – noone is there to pay this fee.
• Because there are also less people to buy these alternative titles, less units are likely to be sold in New Zealand, meaning that the amount of profit to made from stocking these titles is far less, especially when you take into account that you’ll also have to foot the bill for $1100 to stock it in the first place.
• When you are a small store like Aro Video, and you have built your reputation on being able to find ‘just about anything’ for your customers, this can pose a bit of a problem. If you have to pay a classification fee on top of the cost of importing just one copy of a DVD for a keen customer, you are likely to lose money, not make it. Aro says they provide “a comprehensive choice of contemporary, classic and curious cinema including a significant selection of exclusive titles” – they trade off this reputation.

Now, here is where it starts to get interesting:

It isn’t illegal to own, and have in your own home, media that hasn’t been classified yet in New Zealand (as long as it’s not got content considered to be “objectionable” under NZ law). This means that, if you’re unable to find what you are looking for at a local retailer, you are able to go online and buy from online retailers located overseas, and have the item shipped here – direct to you.

The second interesting thing, I think, is that this is essentially what Aro Video was doing in the first place – in the past, when you asked them to find something you couldn’t find anywhere else in New Zealand, they would contact their overseas suppliers and purchase the item… but they would then sell it to you (with NZ label) over the counter.

These days, Aro Video finds itself getting “scooped” by online retailers like Amazon, because consumers can go direct to overseas suppliers, via sophisticated tools that aggregate together a great many of these different suppliers at once.

Thanks to the internet – everyone is suddenly able to see this network of suppliers, and import whatever we want to watch in our own homes!

So, this issue seems – at least to me – to be, not actually about “shortening the ‘long tail’ of consumer choice”… but rather about how free international trade is impacting on small New Zealand businesses…

It is also interesting to note that Aro Video is making money this way as well, their website states that they “also welcome international orders, so no matter where you are in the world, you can order (and even pre-order) films to buy from the website”.

It does seem to me that it might be easier for Aro Video to blame New Zealand Censorship law for being unable to obtain material, than to admit that they can’t afford to acquire and process everything that their ‘long tail’ customers ask for.

Perhaps part of the business model of an ‘alternative’ video store involves taking a financial hit on the import of rare titles in order to keep a reputation of being able to ‘find anything’. How much can you pass these expenses on to the customer? (After all, Aro Video is only $1 more expensive for a ‘general release’  than Video Ezy Wellington – would we pay more for a wider range of local rentals?)

Furthermore, it’s not quite as devastating as it sounds:

• This economic problem only applies to a very small section of films. A lot of ‘non-mainstream’ titles are traditionally brought into NZ through film festivals. Film festivals get a waiver of up to 75% of the classification fee, and this fee is fronted by the film festival organizers (this may be why film festival tickets are slightly more expensive than ordinary cinema tickets), not by retailers/rental stores.
• Much of the films brought into New Zealand may be cross-rated from Australia and the UK, meaning they don’t have to go through the OFLC, and may just ‘adopt’ our stickers. (Cross rating isn’t the be-all and end-all: if we’d followed Australia’s classification system to the letter, we’d have censored a lot more video games last year. Thankfully, our censors still look at the higher rated items, to classify them R18 so Adults can still access them even if Australia or the UK bans them).
• Many of the items Aro Video lists as unavailable actually have been previously classified in New Zealand, and are in fact available for import. Some of the list are banned due to objectionable content.

In a recent article in the Capital Times, Bill Hastings (New Zealand’s Cheif Censor) spoke about some of the issues. I was interested in his call to the video rental industry: “I would say New Zealand is missing out because the video shop industry is not being sufficiently creative in being co-operative… Why don’t these guys get together and jointly pay the waived classification fee for the title of a DVD, and then they can import as many as they want – they’d just have to pay the small amount for the classification sticker on each DVD.”

I can see, though, why this would be difficult to implement. Why would video stores, currently in competition with each other for customers, agree to collaborate? If other stores start stocking these hard-to-get items, won’t Aro Video lose its great reputation?

As a librarian, my personal view is that the onus is instead on cultural heritage institutions (particularly university libraries, where ‘works of cultural merit’ are concerned, but also public libraries) to band together and bear some of the cost of classification on the part of the public. I was quite surprised to see several Victoria University Librarians complaining, in the comments of the Lumiere blog post, that classification was “prohibitive” to their collections. (My recollection was that Victoria was considering collaborating with other university libraries to get their collections classified.)

I think that librarians (and New Zealand retailers too) have an obligation, as people who care about creative media, to promote public awareness, and support the process of classification… in order to protect access to these materials and future creative works. I think we’re fortunate to have an established system in New Zealand that looks independently and critically at what the appropriate audience is for material, as opposed to just banning it outright based on moral panic.

I believe that storytelling is one of the most important things we can do as human beings. Jonathan Harris – capturing stories told by ordinary people, making them collide and interact – is totally my hero.

I admire so much of his practice – from personally collecting ephemera and found objects to digitally harvesting public, yet profoundly intimate, tales.

One day, when I grow up, I’d love to play a similar role as a curator of everyday storytelling.

Last weekend, I made my acting debut, participating (rather unexpectedly) in the 48 hour Furious Film-making competition.

A friend of mine, Morgan Barnard, who is a lecturer, video artist and designer at VUW’s Digital Media Design school competed pretty much single-handedly, wrangling untrained actors (like myself), improvised props (such as black headbands), and technical hiccoughs – to produce a film in just every so slightly over 48 hours.

Morgan just was on time to submit when he pulled in to Te Whaea National Dance & Drama Centre in Newtown, but… (to quote Morgan himself) “as I was leaving the car with the envelope, the tape flew out of the envelope and went crashing into the some leaves in the gutter. I could have made it in time, but I was scouring through the leaves as I heard the countdown only feet away”.

I think Morgan’s effort is nothing short of superhuman, especially considering the fact that most teams have designated people for editing, writing, directing, filming and wardrobe – and Morgan did all this by himself, and also herded all of us cats into the bargain!

I am so stoked to have been a part of this little production- I think it came out rather well- and I just love that my role was “Struggling Virtual World Developer” – anyone who knows me will know that this is pretty much my dream job!

The film is called “23 Minutes Into the Future“, and I think I can safely say that I’ve had my 15 seconds (23 minutes?) of fame now, having seen it up on the giant silver screen at Readings here in Wellington this week, during the heats.