We're an amateur organization, and proud of it!

We are not a corporation, or a charitable foundation or a non-governmental organization, and certainly not a Las Vegas show. We're just some people goofing off together. 

So what am I doing sitting tightly throughout our events trying to take professional-quality photographs? Who needs them? And I'm missing half the poetry in the process. And then when I get home, why do I struggle hour after hour picking just the right shots from an assortment of ten or fifteen from each poet, then cropping them perfectly and trying to get the exposure and colour just right? For heaven's sake, I'm not a professional photographer. I'm not a professional anything! Give it up!

It's not like there's no alternative. There is. You guys in the audience are all carrying cameras. So I'm going to start relying on you to take the photos, then email them in to me. And the videos as well. (We no longer have a videographer.) So please snap away, and take any videos you want, and don't worry about how amateur they are. That's what we want. That's our look. Send them in along with your name and I'll post them and credit you. 

Stan:  burfield@live.com

We need someone to do videos of our poets while they’re reading at the London Open Mic events. Would you like to volunteer?

You wouldn’t need a Hollywood-quality camera. Although something better than a cell phone would be nice. The main thing is it should have reasonably good sound quality. The viewers will be listening as much as watching, if not more. You would also need a small, cheap tripod, one you can set on a table. Point the camera at the poet, push the button and let it go. After the event, the video would go to YouTube. 

Easy stuff, and fun to do. And if you take this on, you don’t have to feel trapped into doing it every single month. If we miss one here and there, so be it. Videos are just an add-on feature to the open mic. 

But a good one. Videos can make up for a lot of the problems caused when poems are presented orally at a reading. They allow people to go over a poem more than once to help them appreciate it, which they could do if reading it in a book. And they give people the opportunity to watch once again a particular poem that they loved when they heard it at the reading. 

This would be a volunteer position, but of course it wouldn’t hurt a resume. There are side benefits as well, like possibly meeting some interesting people, getting more involved in the local poetry scene, and, if you would like, joining our organizing committee (not a very difficult job), and having your own blog on our well-read website. 

Anyone interested in doing this can contact Stan at burfield@live.com

Kevin Austin, through his Hawkeye Video Productions, is donating time and expertise as a videographer to London Open Mic Poetry Night.

In the past, Austin has made promotional videos for companies and charities, as well as commercials for broadcast. And he has still found time to feed his voracious appetite for reading and his love of modern art. 

He found his way into the video world at Fanshawe College where he studied fine art, and at N.S.C.A.D. University in Halifax where he made a slew of short films and also work in other mediums.

Hawkeye is hungry for work. Anyone with any kind of need for high definition video production, or for any related technology would do well to contact Kevin. 

For businesses, Hawkeye produces videos for corporate events and promotional material, training videos, web streaming, trade show multimedia, and commercials. 

The company can capture the excitement of live events, and preserve the emotion of weddings, for wwhich it offers three different packages of professional videography.

In the world of movies, Hawkeye is happy to collaborate with larger production firms and film crews on independent films and large video contracts, or to just fill the need for an extra camera man, “just in case”.

For audio performances, Hawkeye uses the very best microphones, as well as booms where required. 

Hawkeye can also replicate DVDs in large quantities.  And it can convert old-format videos to digital form on DVDs, and any number of them, as few as one.

For more info: www.hawkeyevp.com 
Kevin Austin at: 
videoinfo@hawkeyevp.com
office: 519-290-1491    
mobile: 519-532-2242

Our videographer, Erik Martinez Richards, has found that preparing the videos of the poets at our first event, like any first attempt at anything, is much more time-consuming and difficult than expected. 

Erik had to install and learn how to use new editing software, just for starters, and then discovered that all the videos had to be put in a different format for YouTube, which takes forever, and then there`s all the detailed hassle of creating website pages, posting everything on them, writing blurbs and on and on it goes. 

It makes me smile. 

Now at least one other person is beginning to get a small taste of what it takes to keep this boat sailing. 

Anyway, have patience. The videos are well worth waiting for. And in future events, Erik will have it all down and be as quick as...as....as Erik.

This will be a wonderful addition to the open mic. In future anyone who liked a poem someone read, but maybe it was read too fast for them or they got distracted and missed a couple lines, will get to see it all over again, assuming the poet allowed it to be taped.

 (We are planning on videotaping two poems from each featured reader and one from each open mic reader, and posting them in our website for those who want to experience them again, or for who missed them, and also as an archive, which is necessary because it’s a given that all London poets will become famous one day, but which is even more necessary because descend...ants of our poets may grow up and want to watch them read one day.)

Our problem-solving so far:

On whether or not reading a poem on a YouTube video makes it illegible for publication in many journals, this is how we see it so far, but which we will try to get authoritative proof of: In practice, what makes a poem on the internet unpublishable in some journals is whether the editors can Google it and it comes up in the search. If it does, then that poem already has a copyright on it in the sense that it can be found and read, and is indelibly stamped with the date on which it was first saved in the computer server. However, you can’t Google a poem that only consists of sounds on a video, unless it has its written title associated with it, which we wouldn’t do. So a journal that Googled the poem wouldn’t find it if it was only in a video. And thus it would say the poem is publishable. Well, this is only my backwards way of looking at the problem. What I will try to do between now and September is get this verified by journals themselves. If anyone knows the answer right now, please make a comment here or email me.

The other possible problem which has been brought up in terms of publishing is whether or not we would have to get permission to have a poem read which has already been published. Not if the poem is from a book: the author owns the copyright. If it was in a journal, or an anthology, what then? Not sure yet. Some of you published poets must know. 
 
The other problem concerns those who object to having a video camera pointed at them, for any reason. We simply won’t videotape that person. We’ve discussed it. No problem.

We're adding a little excitement to the 2nd season of London Open Mic Poetry Night. We will be videotaping samples from each reader, including both the featured readers and the open mic readers.

Two poems from each featured reader and one from each open mic reader will be displayed on a special video page on our website, where they will be available for all to see indefinitely. They will act as a more immediate record of each event than did last season’s picture gallery, and will also serve as an archive for interested parties years down the road.

Those who were excited by a particular poem at the event but didn't catch all the words will be able to watch it any number of times if it was one of those videotaped.

If anyone does not want their video open to the public, they only need to speak up and we will keep it as a non-viewable archive only. If they don't want to be videotaped at all, we won't. 

A reader, Deb Hill of The Ontario Poetry Society,  has brought up questions that we must deal with before September 4th.  For instance, "how this might cause concerns for copyrighted material or even material that is not published yet! If a poet reads new work would the video posting be labeled as published work and no longer be available for submitting elsewhere. Also, if someone reads from a book and that work is recorded, does permission need to be granted from the publisher?" So there will definitely be another posting on this subject.

Master photographer Erik Martinez Richards will be the videographer. His former job as the photographer will be taken over by Kevin Heslop, who will also write the summary of each event. It should be an interesting season.