Audition for Bruce's Shorts Crew

Be part of Bruce's shorts. We're trying to make opportunities for a young, divers group of people who are interested in Media and Technology to help explain that technology in short, entertaining videos.

The current Sars-Cov-2 pandemic means that contributors can be located anywhere in the world. Priority is given to student, early career professionals and groups who are under-represented in the media technology sector. To apply, please choose a category below and follow the instructions. All contributors are paid for their work (see rates section at the bottom). A typical episode is 3 minutes long and requires 2-3 hours work from the volunteers.

The roles available for Bruce's Shorts are:

• Guest Presenter
• Translator
• coming soon - Editor - please Contact
• coming soon - Graphics artist / VFX please Contact
• coming soon - Sound design please Contact

Audition for Guest Presenter

To audition as a guest presenter, you will need to record a short video and send it to us. The rough cut video below shows the video that we're trying to make. We want your voice and your face to be the voice that explains the technology to the audience. Bruce will introduce you as the guest presenter and then you have to respond to his questions. The script is given below.

How to send your audition:

1. Watch the video above and be sure that you understand the questions and answers
2. Record yourself on a phone, webcam, DSLR, movie camera or whatever you want
   • Please use whatever equipement you will use for the real recording
   • Please check your background for embarassing photographs, embarassing parents etc.
   • Be confident, speak clearly, but be yourself. Accents are good, you don't have to smile and you don't have to follow the script if you have better words.
   • Record only the parts of the script labelled host.
   • Leave good gaps between each answer to make it easier for the editor
   • Review your record and listen to Bruce's rough cut to check they are telling the same story.
3. Upload a private link to your video on YouTube or Vimeo
4. Fill in the Audition-Presenter form
5. Wait for us to get in touch

Script for the rough cut video

Title

Bruce VC-6 Video Compression that's different. Today's guest presenter is host

Intro

host Once upon a time in a standards committee far, far away, a group of wizards created a compression scheme called JPEG which made big pictures fit into small spaces.

They were followed by a group of video wizards from the Transform tribe who created a compression scheme called MPEG which made big movies fit into small spaces.

Over time, technology got better, computing got faster, memory got cheaper and other tribes of wizards started to get attention and so today, the time of the Transform wizards is being challenged.

Bruce Tell me host Why is VC-6 Different?

host Well Bruce, VC-6 is a type of encoding similar to those proposed by the quadtree wizards.

Bruce Wizards that live in trees?

[Graphic - basic STree]

host No, silly. A quadtree is a way of representing layered data. Each layer has four times as much data as the layer below. If you draw it correctly then it looks a bit like a tree!

Bruce Nice. But how does that help?

[Graphic - tiger 2 planes]

host Well first we split our main image into its different planes. In this case, Red, Green and Blue Planes

[Graphic - hierarchical echeleons]

host Next we split each plane into a number of different echelons. Each ecehlon is really a lower resolution set of differences (called residuals) between the different echelons

Bruce Nice. Still don't see how that helps.

host I'm glad you asked. By the time you've done all this preparation there are an awful lot of these differences that look like other bits of the image and can be predicted or encoded cheaply by spotting similar patterns in the trees.

[Graphic - bitstream optimisation]

By the time youve done this, you can then optimise the arrangement of the bitstream for your application, such as

• Lossless encoding
• Multi resolution encoding
• Massively parallel fast CPU encoding
• Low power phone encoding
• Super resolution encoding etc.

Bruce Sounds like it's a good fit for today's needs

host You're right. It's an exciting codec because its fundamental properties match beautifully the complex multi-platform, parallel OTT distribution, AI friendly world in which it finds itself.

Bruce They say the secret to a good standard is timing. It looks like ST 2117 might just have got it right. Thank you host for that excellent explaination.

[Graphic - closing slide]

Bruce's Shorts is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Find us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Get Merchandise from the mrmxf website and get rewards us via our Patreon so that the feed is forever free for you and our young contributors get paid for their work.

Translator

Translation could be one of the following:

1. Local subtitles

• Translate the script above into your local language using the same format as shown above
• Copy your translation into the Translation form

2. Local presenter

• Translate the host sections of the rough cut video into your local language.
• Now follow the instructions for guest presenter above and record yourself speaking in your local language Fill in the Audition-Presenter form.
• Finally, translate the questions asked by Bruce in the script above and copy your translation into the Translation form

The best way to add captions is to use Youtube to add captions and assign timings to your uploaded video. This allows you to check the timings and for us to check the translation.

Rates

We pay a flat rate for every published episode. We try to record 25 episodes per year, each with a different presenter. You can audition for as many roles as you want and we have a small team of preople (including our top-tier patreon supporters) who select which presenter will be offered each episode.

All episodes are less than 5 minutes long. The target length of an episode is 3 minutes. Each episode is about 2 hours of work for a Guest Presenter and about 3 hours of work for Local Presenter.