A thoroughly pleasant weekend; drinks with Steve on Friday night at The Globe kicked it off, and after recovering on Saturday morning I did a quick jog around the Level before Mark came round; he's retaking his shodan exam soon so we're getting together now and then to run through some basic exercises (the muesli of aikido). Round to Soph's for an abortive attempt at chipping up a load of wood, and then... NaVloPoMo!

I'd been looking forward to this, firstly because it sounded quite fun (and a cross-section of local Brighton geek types was obviously to be found there), but mainly because it was a chance to catch up with Rupert, who I've not seen much of since we were at boarding school together. It was good to see he's still the same bundle of nervous energy which he was 20 years ago (a period of time which seems to dull most of us), and that he's out there shouting about videoblogging, something I know next-to-zero about.

The films were interesting, and seemed to divide roughly 50/50 into "neat little films that would probably have been made pre-Internet" (and are now enjoying better distribution) and "films which would never have been made at all were it not for cheap recording kit and the WWW". The former were fun, but didn't press as many buttons for me as the latter, where lurked captured moments of the hilarious, the mundane, and the touching. And I can't help but look forward to what happens when the economics of cameraphones and the web really kick in and we start seeing *different* stuff, not the same sort of films we used to have but done by a wider group of folks or distributed better.

So, cameraphones make cameras cheap; who's making films on the cheap with 3 or 4 cameraphones, the kind of films that just can't be made from a single viewpoint? And many of the films I saw seemed like one-(wo)man efforts - who's doing fantastic collaborative stuff online?

I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this stuff, and I'll be keeping an eye on the Semanal site...