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From YouTube to cinema: Camp Takota review

February 15, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Elise ends up in Camp Takota after her life crumbles. The social media manager gets fired after a social media mix up and discovers her fiancé is cheating on her.

Life in Camp Takota does offer something of a restart. She has friends there, time and space to reassess her life and goals. When the future of the camp is thrown into doubt all that healing is put at risk. In order to save the camp Elise and her friends must change the lives in ways none of them had expected.

I enjoyed Camp Takota and this is despite the synopsis falling safely into the type of movie I would normally try to avoid.

I enjoyed the film for all the right reasons. The main actors; Grace Helbig, Hannah Hart and Mamrie Hart put on strong performances. The plot twists are tight, believable and engaging. The film is well shot, easy to watch and engaging.

I actually cared about the fate of Camp Takota. Sure, yeah, the mobile app developing villain is dangerously close to a parody too far… close, but not over the line. I watched the villain flop about and was all too aware that I knew Shoreditch hipsters cut from the same archetypical cloth.

I watched Camp Takota on my big Philips screen in the living room. The movie was streamed via the PC in the spare room which had legally downloaded Camp Tatoka from the web.

In fact, if you want to watch Camp Takota then this is the route you’ll likely take. That’s one of two reasons I was watching the movie in the first place.

I had two reasons to watch Camp Takota. Firstly, I had no choice. My partner is a loyal fan of the YouTube channels of the three main actresses; Grace Helbig runs It’s Grace, Mamrie Hart runs You Deserve a Drink and Hannah Hart runs My Harto with over 1 million subscribers and famous for My Drunk Kitchen. The three are YouTubers and vloggers. We had pre-ordered the movie and behind the scenes documentary when it was first announced.

The other reason I was going to watch an American camp movie (not a natural choice for a gamer geek in Scotland) was because I had faith in the team. The YouTube antics of the three actresses are great. We watched the live stream of the trio celebrating as Hannah hit the 1 million mark. It was 3am in the morning when that happened, here in Scotland, but they’d kept us entertained.

Sure enough, Camp Takota proves to me that YouTubers with real personality, wit and acting skills can front a film. It also proves to me that YouTube celebrities can successfully promote a film.

I enjoyed the film more than I thought I would. The surprise for me was how well these three YouTube stars acted. I wasn’t surprised at how well the movie was put together or promoted.

I expect – and hope – we’ll see more of this. The costs of making good quality content are coming down. The skill sets are out there. We should all benefit from the extra diversity and competition.

Court battles giving reviewers a hard time

January 20, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

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Two links in this post; one about Yelp being ordered by a US court to name the person behind an anonymous review and another about a legal battle to force TripAdvisor to do the same.

It strikes me that the rules for content and platforms are known. Important decisions like safe harbour and the DMCA cover what happens to a piece of content that belongs to someone else. What about people?

From the BBC; Anonymous online critics must be identified, says court

Users who have posted negative comments on the online review site Yelp must be identified, a US court has ordered.

The case involved the owner of a carpet-cleaning business who told the court bad reviews written about his company were not from real customers.

From STV news; B&B owners in court in bid to sue writers of bad TripAdvisor review

The owners of a Highland guest house have gone to court to seek details from an internet travel website of the writers of two bad reviews in a bid to sue the authors.

Martin and Jacqui Clark said that one report was false and that another set out events that were fictional.

There is some overlap in the cases. Each time the complaint is that the review is fictional. Will this mean that review platforms ask for a photograph or two?

Amazon’s Goodreads has doubled in size again

January 3, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

It’s probably appropriate to think of Goodreads.com as Amazon’s social network. It doubled in size in 2012 and it did so again in 2013 according to a a blog post on the site.

Goodreads is now up to 25m members from a base of 6.5m in 2011. The infographic shows that every second 4 books were found on Goodreads and that the site now has 29 million book reviews. The most popular book of 2013 was Dan Brown’s Inferno and that matches with Amazon’s best seller list.

The most popular quote from the site comes from Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare;

Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read.

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