I spent chunks of Saturday with Glenn McMahon as part of visionOntv’s coverage of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London.

It was a good chance to practise one end of the VOTV01.5 template (it hasn't got any cartoons to illustrate it yet, but if you want a peak at how to do it, click on this). I did the interviews, Glenn did the filming.

He used an iPhone 4 plugged into an iRig mic for the sound, compressing the resulting HD files down by putting it into iMovie editing software, exporting the result to the pic directory on the phone using medium resolution.

Glenn then transferred the compressed file to a laptop PC, passed it through avidemux compression software to take it down to around 50MB. From there, I used the oneload video distribution site to send it out to multiple vide hosting sites (YouTube, blip, vimeo and the rest).

I found it inspiring to talk to different film-makers and activists who are out there doing good work. Events such as this are a great chance to hook up with them, find out what they're doing and how, then trying to do it yourself.

The following are three of the videos that came out of it, the trickiest probably being the last, my first live interview with an interpreter.

They feature Mimi Chakarova, Mark Covell and Carlo Bachschmidt.

This will be brief because what it says is all pretty simple.

The video below was shot by Tanya O'Carroll in late February as part of a training session in the visionOntv smartphone templates. It features Hamish Campbell interviewing Matt of the London Hackspace talking about his "top secret" coding project. The content wasn't really the point.

Having shot the video using the VOTV01.5 template - which is the next step up from this one - the file was bluetoothed across to my laptop for upload to oneload.com. The beauty of that approach is that you can file to several sites at once, youtube, blip.tv and so on, which can be a good thing for audience reach and also when the content might be something that other people may try to take down.

Once logged in with the visionontv username and password (ask the usual suspects for that one) it is pretty straightforward to upload the video, feed in the relevant tags to make the video searchable and to add a description of the contents.

Once done, I switiched to the visionontv google account where I checked the video, switched it to a Creative Commons licence and made it public.

The result is what you see below. If I can do it, anyone can.

Fish crowd for seats at a screening of "The End of the Line" - they weren't convinced (image from http://endoftheline.com/film/)

A weekend at the Bristol Radical Film Festival reminded me why it is so great to watch political documentaries with other human beings and then to chew over what you’ve just seen, outside the privacy of your own home.

Part of the reason we suffer such rubbish, wealth-biased government is because we’re too dumb to think of alternatives or how we might ever put them into practice. Regular, local film screenings and related debates, preferably for free, help plug the many holes in our knowledge. They come with the added, democratic benefit of exposing us to the wisdom and perspectives of strangers, which is always useful.

The last film I watched before leaving the festival – The End of the Line – was a case in point. It documents the pillaging of the world’s seas by industrialised fishing fleets over the last 50 years, and how we risk having no fish within a generation.

One of the film’s upsides is the news that we are, at last, establishing some scientific proof of collapsing fish stocks worldwide. Among several downsides was its failure to drill down into the specifics of who profits from all this plunder or how we might stop them or hold them to account.

As the credits rolled, I thought to myself the film was okay if a little unrealistic in its proposals. It urged people to eat sustainably sourced fish, to badger their politicians about limiting fishing quotas to what scientists recommend, and to back the creation of more marine protected areas around the world. Fine as far as they went but not very convincing. Having witnessed as a reporter how European politicians and civil servants always cave into vested fisheries interests, I know the chances of conventional political solutions to this problem are near zero.

Fifteen minutes of listening to fellow audience members made me realise I’d been far too easy on the film. Just one of the points made was how supermarkets and even McDonald’s were given such an easy ride. Each got some great publicity in the film on the back of a few vague promises to do better. One audience member had surfed the Internet during the screening to check those promises against the facts, finding how limited they were and how those made had been broken since the film’s release.

Other people criticised the film as just too limited and too complacent. It ignored the broader picture of global resource plunder driven by our obsession with economic growth and return on capital. The film’s perspective, which as many observed was very rich-world, failed to convey the relative scale of threat faced by the different parties it featured. While Europeans can switch to other protein sources, or rather the richer ones can, Senegalese fishing communities face far starker problems of just getting enough to eat. The film’s cosy recommendations were hardly going to help them out.

The debate was excellent, one of several I enjoyed after the weekend’s many films. It encouraged me to stick with the regular screenings I have been part of during the past five years in southwest France, where I usually live. Showing free films on the second Friday of every month, with shared food and discussions, opens up opportunities for all sorts of unimagined exchanges and locally organised initiatives. They help people understand the bogus accountability of our politicians and the failures of our conventional media to hold them to account.

I explain the idea in greater depth in my book Fraudcast News, which is now available in paperback, as an eBook or, if you contact me directly, a free PDF file. While documentaries such as The End of the Line at least highlight pressing eco-crises they usually fail to expose the root causes – our failed and corrupt governance systems and the dominance of money over everything.

We have to do better. That includes organising local screenings, volunteer-run film festivals and video activist trainings.

Paul O'Connor of Undercurrents gave an inspiring, enlightening and entertaining talk about the potential of radical video film-making at the Bristol Radical Film Festival 2012.

This animated film is a neat depiction of the why in all this. It's all about trying to break up the effects of corrupted government and their collusion with corporate sponsors (If you think that's all a bit too radical, check out today's Observer front page).

Paul gave some great tips for activists trying to get their messages out, while also trying to earn enough to keep themselves on the streets. "We want to create an alternative, vibrant media but also get our stuff into the mainstream," he said.

Don't be put off by the idea that using cheaper technology, camcorders or even smartphones, will prevent you selling your footage to fund further actions in the future.

"The whole thing about broadcast quality is bullshit really. If your images are strong and they want it, they will take it," he said. Other great films from the Undercurrents Youtube channel include the one below.

It features the amazing story from 1996 of four women as they plan and carry out smashing a BAE war plane in the UK to stop genocide in East Timor. They were found not guilty despite rendering the aircraft useless.

"Images are a very powerful way of remembering, and building stories around," says Paul.

I shot this brief smartphone film this morning using a visionOntv video-making template, warming up for a day at the Bristol Radical Film Festival in Stokes Croft.

This week-long event has a hoard of film treasures, meaning the 15 or so participants in today’s training workshop didn’t need any explanations about why our conventional media need of a root-and-branch revamp themselves.

The results were impressive, many people buddied up to produce three-shot, no-edit films explaining a where, what, why story of their choice.

The why of using a template is to cut-out the black holes of editing, processing and the rest that accompany conventional video film-making. What you lose in quality you gain in spades in productivity – the good kind – and in getting stories out there that otherwise just wouldn’t get told.

I helped out as a volunteer so as to practise using the template myself and to begin learning how to train others to be reporters – a core part of my conclusions in Fraudcast News.

Everyone here is talking about how to get funds to continue their work, meaning I will be giving away more PDF copies of the book than selling paperbacks.

That’s fine by me. Send me an email or make a comment below if you want one.

Having learned my reporting skills as a print journalist, before the internet got big, I have been trying for years to bolt on some video skills to take account of the new realities of news.

This can be an expensive and time-consuming process - which means my output of video reports has been far less than it might have been in the years since I left salaried work at Reuters.

My voluntary redundancy package included some retraining money, half of which I spent on a made-to-measure video training put together by a mate of mine. I learnt how to shoot video on a DV camera, including the basics of recording sound, framing shots, and so on, as well as editing it all together into a short video film which I put up on Youtube in September 2006. There were many steps involved getting from the story idea to the publication - all of which slowed the process and decreased the chances of it ever getting done.

I've done a few more reports in the years since though far fewer than I would have liked given the constraints of time and equipment.

So far, so straight forward

While researching Fraudcast News, my book about reframing democracy and journalism, I came across visionOntv and their radical news-making project. I met its main personnel at the 2011 Rebellious Media conference in London, when I did their mobile phone training.

It was a revelation - shooting no-edit video reports according to a set template - maximising the chances of the report getting done and getting out there and cutting out many of the resource-sapping steps of the conventional route. There are certainly compromises involved in terms of video quality and sound. Being no-edit means the reporter has to concentrate on holding the smartphone steady and doing rapid pans between shots. The one-shot template ensures some basic standards though, increasing the chances of a report being useful to an audience and getting out there super fast.

The next step up is to go for longer reports, up to three minutes, using a slightly more involved template that visionOntv are working up now. The main additions are that two people are required - one filming, the other doing the interviewing - and that the smartphone be equipped with the necessary add-ons to record decent-quality interview sound.

I was recently a guinea pig for shooting one of these, the result being what you see at the top of this post. It involves a series of the five standard shots - 1) opening to camera, 2) over interviewer shoulder to interviewee, 3) close-up interviewee, 4) close-up interviewer and, 5) two-shot interviewer/interviewee. To go between shots, the camera operator needs to "whip pan", moving smoothly but rapidly from one to the other with the minimum of overrun.

My effort was OK but nothing fantastic. There is too much LH space with the interviewee, I should have got more full-on face views of both parties, the camera was wobbling alot, and the background could have been better. Other than than, bring on the Oscars.

The beauty of smartphone reports is that if it's rubbish - you just do it again.