Not the nine o’clock news

It’s not the 9 o’clock news but then that’s probably a good thing.

Below you can watch three no-edit videos I produced as part of a mobile phone training run by visionOntv for citizen journalists. It was part of a whole series of events being run at the Bank of Ideas, a building that used to house the Swiss bank UBS before being opened to the public by Occupy London.

I helped teach and learned at the same time, meaning I had some homework to do along with handful of others on the course. We were aiming for one-minute, one-shot video reports, using visionOntv’s standard template for mobile phones.

The idea is to produce short films that say where they’re located, that are shot without camera wobble and that feature a voiceover script and sign-off. The more people that get used to the technique – shooting and uploading video quickly to the internet – the more we will all get to see alternative narratives about what is happening around us. That means not having to rely on conventional media outlets, with all their shortcomings and blinkers, the core point I make in Fraudcast News.

I shot mine on November 23 at Occupy London Finsbury Square using a borrowed Samsung Galaxy Europa GT-15500, an android mobile phone. I bluetoothed the files to my laptop, from where I uploaded them to YouTube account we created for all the participants. Had I had 3G on the phone, I could have uploaded the videos directly to YouTube from there.