News
BAVC Media Youth Partner with The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Since the beginning of the school year, four afternoons a week, the labs here at BAVC Media have been humming with the sounds of Next Gen students at work: editing together interviews recorded for their podcasts, adding green screen effects to their personal documentaries and coding interactive features for their websites. Even though graduation is quickly approaching, we’re so excited to announce that the hum we’ve all become so accustomed to won’t be quieting for the summer. Instead, students have the opportunity to put their industry-standard production skills and understanding of social justice frameworks, honed through our project-based curriculum, to [...]
QCSchool: Mean Square Error and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio Filters
Our second installment of QCSchool salutes the launch of QCTools 0.7.1 and the continued support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This post is written by former BAVC Media Presevationist Kelly Haydon If you have spent any time canoodling with QCTools playback filters, you may have noticed that the phrase “field difference” pops up a lot. The term “field” in videotape technology is something of a misnomer, but it refers simply to the odd or even number of scan lines that form a single frame of video. Imagine, if you will, a picture. Any picture will do – but [...]
Want a tech job? Stop looking!
So you’ve heard it before, when it comes to scoring a new job in tech, “It’s not what you know but who you know”. Good advice. In fact you’ve probably already come to realize that the online job-hunting routine is just not cutting it. The reality is that if you are looking at tech jobs that are posted right now, it’s already too late. Most jobs get filled by a qualified person who has benefited from the right introduction at the right time, namely before the position became vacant. Trolling job boards will never do that for you. It is [...]
The Future of Work with BAVC Media
Reviewing the requisite buzzwords of the moment in the world of work in the US, you’d think we’re at an inflection point: gig economy, portable benefits, diversity, and fissured workplace. It's easy to conclude that the pundits have something brilliant up their sleeves, and that the way we earn a living is about to be revolutionized. At BAVC Media we listen to the people who walk through our doors, a broad range of people from teen-aged, emerging media makers to septuagenarian journalists learning tech for the first time, to thirty-something hiring managers from some of the most innovative tech companies in [...]
BAVC Media Turns 40 in 2016
“It’s for video people; regardless of what your trip is. If you’re into video, do it.” In a 1976 video shared with BAVC Media by the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, a man in the San Francisco’s Castro district is being interviewed when suddenly he stops mid-interview and suggests that the man behind the video camera – the interviewer – go to a meeting at “the main library, Civic Center” to share with “all the video people in the Bay Area” what they could do if they had a center for video. He says that there is a “study [...]
Preservation Access Program Recipients Spring 2016
The Preservation Access Program, or PAP (pronounced p-a-p and not pap like the funny ladies in the Finance department like to say), is our popular, ongoing relief program for artists and small arts organizations seeking to preserve their works recorded to magnetic media. Thanks to a generous subsidy provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, BAVC Media is able to digitize and provide other preservation services at heavily discounted rates. PAP holds two application rounds per year, the latest one ending on January 14th, 2016. We’ve just told some amazing artists and organizations that they will be receiving the [...]
CLIR the Air with BAVC Media Preservation
dance magic, dance. Our 1/2" Open Reel decks have long been identified by their Bowie incarnations. Our January depression, sparked by the death of famous U-matic user, David Bowie*, was relieved only by the announcement that the Hidden Collections unit of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is accepting applications for its 2016 cycle. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CLIR has distributed millions of dollars to organizations with historical collections in the hopes of increasing access to scholars of all stripes. The mission of the grant is marvelous, offsetting the maddening expense of digitizing physical [...]
We Are SF: Pathways To Citizenship
At the Bay Area Video Coalition, much of our work is to share diverse stories through art, education, and technology. For this reason, we are especially excited about the work being done by BAVC Media Productions in collaboration with the California Arts Council and San Francisco Office of Civic Engagement & Immigrant Affairs (OCEIA). OCEIA offers a series of free citizenship workshops as part of its San Francisco Pathways to Citizenship Initiative. The initiative brings together multiple philantrophic organizations and community-based naturalization service providers to “develop new approaches, methodologies and service delivery models to promote citizenship and civic participation among San Francisco’s [...]
BAVC MediaMaker Fellows Get Some Attention
Courtesy of Michele Carlson and Art Practical. Photo: Michele Carlson. Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman first came to BAVC Media in 2012 as MediaMaker Fellows with their documentary project Living Condition, which vividly illustrates the experiences of those who have, or have had, family members on death row through an unexpected technique, animation. This unique approach provides Hibbert-Jones and Talisman with a broader palette with which to represent the descriptive and affective turns of their subjects’ testimonies while it starkly frames capital punishment in terms of what its human cost. We caught up with the duo – who are partners [...]
Next Gen Youth Deliver Report Cards on Tech
Over the past year the Next Gen team has been working on developing a Theory of Change; a living document that puts in writing our commitment to a shared vision, set of values, goals, and what we believe to be the best practices to achieve those goals. Though the full version isn’t quite ready to be shared, I want to elaborate on one of our value statements: “We recognize that in order to imagine new career possibilities, young people need opportunities to gain industry exposure, therefore we provide opportunities for young people to develop positive adult role models representing [...]
