Scene 1: Street in Dalston

Opening shot: Busy street in Dalston with normal people.
Gradual transition: One hipster appears, then two, then a few more, until the street is filled with hipsters.
Focus: Establishing the hipster vibe of the neighborhood.

Scene 2: Café (Otto)

Camera tracks: A line of hipsters waiting to be served by the owner.
Owner: Middle-aged, charismatic, slightly mysterious.
Menu board: Shows organic, vegetarian, and vegan burgers. “Vegan” is crossed out with “sold out” written beside it.

Scene 3: Montage of Happy Hipsters

Various tables: Hipsters enjoying their burgers, laughing, and chatting.
Background: The owner moves around with a questionnaire, engaging customers.

Scene 4: Owner’s Interaction with Couple

Focus: Young, pretty hipster couple.
Dialogue:
Owner: “So, what can I get you? Something hipster? Vegetarian or vegan?”
Hipster girl: “Vegan.”
Owner’s reaction: Interested, almost too enthusiastic. Invites them to the kitchen to show how the burgers are made.

Scene 5: The Kitchen

Mysterious atmosphere: Dim lighting, industrial feel.
Owner’s demonstration: Prepares burgers with care and precision.
Subtle unease: Slightly eerie details (e.g., odd tools, nervous glances between the couple).

Scene 6: Sinister Revelation

Owner by rubbish bin: In the bin, partially hidden, are the clothes of the hipster couple.
Horror detail: The owner washes his hands in the sink, water runs red with blood.
Expression: He smiles sinisterly as he leaves the kitchen.
Transition: Fade out to the next day.

Scene 7: Morning Clean-Up

Café scene: Staff cleaning, washing glasses.
Noticeboard: “Fresh in vegan burgers” written up in neat handwriting.

Scene 8: Kitchen Activities

Graphic details: Chopping up the bodies, though not explicitly gory (suggestive shots).
Cut to: Patrons happily eating their “vegan” burgers.

Scene 9: Reverse Opening Shot

Street scene: Filled with hipsters, then slowly transitioning to fewer hipsters.
Ending shot: Street returns to being filled with normal people, as if the hipsters have disappeared.

Closing Scene

Final shot: The café sign with the word “Otto” prominently displayed.
Subtle hint: The door closes with the sound of a bell, hinting at the café’s ongoing sinister activities.

Notes on Tone and Style

Visuals: Quirky, vibrant colors with a gradual shift to darker, more sinister tones.
Music: Light, hipster-friendly music in the beginning, transitioning to eerie, suspenseful music as the story unfolds.
Pacing: Start with a slow, leisurely pace, building up to a faster, more intense rhythm during the reveal and climax.
Humor: Dark humor interspersed throughout to maintain a balance between horror and satire.

Additional Elements to Consider

Character Development: Brief but impactful interactions to establish the personalities of the owner and the hipster couple.
Symbolism: Use subtle symbols (e.g., the menu board, questionnaire) to hint at the underlying horror.
Cinematography: Close-ups and lingering shots to build tension and highlight key details.

This outline to create a compelling short film that combines dark satire with horror, offering a critique of hipster culture and extremes of trend-following.

A short film OUTLINE Hipster Burgers

Published Date 1/14/12 4:52 PM

Scenes

* street in Dalston, filled with normal people, one hipster, 2 hipsters, half hipsters, then all hipsters

* Café (Otto) camera tracks, line of hipsters to the owner of the café serving Coffey – behind him a board with organic, vegetarian, and Vegan (crossed out/sold out) burgers in stock.

* Montage different tables of happy hipsters eating burgers, the owner in the background with a questioner.

* Cut to owner asks questions to young pretty hipster couple “Q. Something hipster, @ vegetarian or vegan”, hipster girl answers vegan. The owner is interested and asks them to the kitchen to see how the burgers are made.

* kitchen – have to write this bit?

* the owner standing by a rubbish bin, if you look closely in the bin are the cloths of the hipster boy and girl, CUT he washes his handing in a sink and they run red. He walks out of the kitchen smiling. FADE – Next day.

* SHOT morning clean up, glasses washing, righting up on the noticeboard “fresh in vegan burgers”

* CUT Kitchen chopping up the body, CUT to everybody eating

* Reverse opening shot, street full of hipsters, half full, 2 hipsters, one hipster, only normal people.

* Café closed sign, owners shuts door, takes off his hipster glasses and crushes them under foot, walks off – the street is empty.

Published Date 1/2/12 9:34 PM

2001 – The G8 Summit in Genoa

I arrived in Genoa a few days before the anti G8 demonstrations were due to start, to help set up the Indymedia centre. We travelled in a tiny camper van with my frend Marion from Munich. The border caused no problem – the border guard asked us why we were going to Italia and we said we were holidaying on the coast, with a knowing look on both sides. Arriving in Genoa the police presence was heavy. The convergence centre was being set up down at the beach. Just a hundred yards away there was a huge police build up at the stadium. After wandering around for a while, we camped the night parked out of sight beside one of the big marquees of the half finished convergence centre. In the morning, meeting up with other groups, we made our way to the GSF and IMC organising building: the Diaz school. 

The IMC (independent Media center)

We found a place to stay at the IMC at the head of the stairs, on the roof, which was out of the way, and looked around. The video room was full of techy gear but none of it seemed to be available for public use. The centre was well equipped with computers supplied by the city, all networked together. The techy crew had obviously put a lot of work into the set up. There was Linux on all the computers but with no applications and no system of support to help people make the transition to this “non-standard” operating system – a powerful gesture of what is possible but practically useless. A re-occurring theme in the tec-journo divide.

The video room was a bit of a fiasco –  a lot of non-configured private computing kit – most of it password protected, taking up the majority of the space. There were no shared resources and it seemed none of the kit worked in a familiar standard way. An ego wank space with little organised IMC ethos.

Two PCs were “requisitioned” from other rooms and MS Windows was installed (as there was no functioning Linux video editing software). At one of the first meetings money was put aside to upgrade one of these computers to be a DV editing system with a new hardrive and Firewire card. On the other we installed an analogue video cpature card –  brought along from CanalB  – so we had two shared editing systems. The second of these created the bulk of the video that was uploaded from the IMC centre during the summit – the DV computer broke down on the second day and didn’t work again.

Marion and I headed down to the street to make the first report at the convergence centre. It wasn’t long before we were stopped and detained by a group of undercover policemen while doing a piece to camera outside the main police accommodation stadium – which happened to be right next to the convergence centre. We were held for a few hours while more and more undercover policemen arrived, until there were 10 or 12 police and two cars around us. They asked me for the tape in the camera – I refused – took down all our details and checked our passports – it become a bit nervewracking. I secretly filmed some of the secret policeman. Interestingly we were to see one of them two more times undercover at the counter-summit, and outside the IMC centre before the raid.

Driving round the streets trying to film the red zone barrier going up, we were stopped and detained twice. For an hour the first time and 3-4 hours the second. Arguing with the police and attempting to exercise normal civil rights proved fruitless. This was the first nagging Orwellian feeling that was reinforced over the week of demonstrating. The police were a state in themselves and there was obviously no respect for the role of law in their actions. Fear was starting to stalk the streets, encircling the meeting of the cabal of world power.

THE RAID ON THE IMC

After the shooting of one demonstrator the tension was rising, paranoia about police repression spreading. People began to leave the indymedia center, people began to leave Genoa. There was much discussion of what to do and no firm consensus. Many people made the decision to leave independently until the numbers had halved as the night wore on.

At midnight there were shouts of “the police are coming”. I looked out of the window but couldn’t see anything. People started to run around, grabbing stuff and barricading doors. I ran to find Marion and told her about the hiding place on the roof I had checked out when we arrived. She grabbed the tapes and equipment and headed off.

Looking out of the side window I could not see any police around the front door so I shouted back to the people blockading the door, trying to calm the situation.

I went up to the roof to film the carabinieri breaking into the building next door – a van smashing through the front gate; police breaking the windows with chairs, smashing down the doors with tables they found in the courtyard. Worried for my safety and the video I was recording, after a few minutes I decided to head back downstairs to see if the police were coming into the IMC as well.

After two flights, turning a corner, I came face to face with a carabinieri policeman dressed in full body armour with his truncheon drawn panting his way up the stairwell. At this I turned and flew up two flights shouting, “they are in the building”; past the barricaded door to the IMC and up to the roof. Dodging the spotlight from the circling helicopter I headed over to the window of the water tower and lowered myself in whispering “Marion it’s me”. No answer. Creeping through the darkness with the only light being from the IR beam of my camera, I made my way down through the corridor of water tanks whispering “Marion are you there?” and starting to panic that she was not. A small and frightened voice came back: “turn the light off”. She was hiding in the space behind the last water tank.

We waited. She had brought a bottle of water and supplies. We talked about what we would do if and when the police came. Would they come in and search… would they throw tear gas… would they smash our equipment and break our bones.. these all seemed very real.

The helicopter circled, its spotlight lighting up the window of the water tower. There were noises of movement outside: the police searching the roof. We kept very quiet and still.

We were there for 3-4 hours. There was screaming from the street below and cries of “assassina”. We only came out after the helicopter had left.

There were survivors wandering around the roof top, numbed and in shock. I interviewed two English girls who had been in the IMC during the raid, then went downstairs to survey the damage. Doors were smashed open. Computers were dismembered: their hard drives ripped out, monitors smashed. Across the street there was much worse waiting. Blood had covered the floor, congealing into puddles, and sprayed up the walls. Trails led into huddled corners; clothes lay around in disarray, personal belongings were strewn across the floor, speckled here and there by blood stains. Desolate, dazed people were searching through the piles. Reporters stood in small, silent groups. The trail of blood led up the stairs. Bits of skin and clumps of hair stuck to the walls. Following the broken doors and hasty barricades, looking in cupboards and under desks, everywhere someone could have hidden there was blood and broken skin, the bashing of heads against walls, the smearing of blood stained hands. There was a smell in the building. The Carabinieri had left their mark.

Published Date 1/2/12 7:04 PM

Thinking were we come from… mainstream bohemianism, hippy drop-out culture, Greenham, CND, vagabond, Labour Party, student, squatting culture, protest camp culture, DIY community group organising, undercurrents, internet utopian’s, Anti-GM direct action, corporatewatch, risingtide, indymedia, summit hoping, anti-war direct action, mainstream alt-tv, rescuing/ running a community centre, European social forum/SWP, visionontv, climatecamp, Rebelus Media Conference, occupation movement…

Published Date 1/2/12 5:32 PM

Hamish’s history of The European Newsreel

The has been much talk about doing a European wide video newsreel for the last 10 years or so. Undercurrents, which grew out of the UK anti-roads movement, was in its latter additions an attempt at covering geographic wider story’s. However, it wasn’t till the digital camcorder revolution and the communication revolution of the internet made video documentary work at a grassroots level sustainable.

I was working with undercurrent in Oxford covering demo’s and teaching the acational video activist course at Ruskin collage. The European Newsreel came out of 6 months of funding I wangled, which left me free to …. I had been thinking of doing a European video production/screening network for some time, had raised the issue at a number of European manifestations and Alt-gatherings. Had meet many good and committed video makers, B- of CannalB (Berlin) in Genoa had impressed me with her work ethic, Marion from Munich had translated the 9.11 film I had brought back from NY IMC. I visited croater where I meet Iva and Oliver who were making original videos and organising screenings. With such good committed and driven people something should be possible if they could all be connected together and a common spark ignited.

At the time I was supplying short edited news stories for World in Crises, a weekly 30-minute report for Freespeach TV in the states. While chatting to Eric by e-mail one day the subject of a European news program came up, FSTV had been running the Indymedia Newsreel for the 6 months at this point. Eric had some development funding which had to be spent before the summer so the European wide news project was pushed into fast gear with the help of Anna Bragga (who was planning a new alt-media magazine) and Paulo we organised the Islip gathering by inviting all the nice people I had meet that summer to Oxford.

The idea was to produce a “Europeanised” version of the American project. Keep it very simple with the minimal of rules and constraints, build it up slow from the core (and committed) group, bring in new people as the project grows. The project was to be firstly very simple with no aimless politicking (the pain of progressive IMC type projects) to consist of a page of structure and a paragraph mission statement. The dynamics of the group and regular face to face meetings would keep the project on the productive path. With this in mind, it was decided to make the project affiliated of the IMC rather than a direct IMC project, making it out look much more open to non-activist ghetto ideas and techniques. For me, it was very important that these simple processes need to be agreed from the very beginning, then changed by experiences of producing the half hour video. Being very aware of the problem of all talk and no action from the endless activist dream world of East Oxford.

One of the core ideas for me was that we would use blagabel video CD’s for screening and distribution rather than VHS as this would allow a non-centralised and most importantly robust distribution network. VHS being analogue doesn’t work at all well as a non-hierarchical distribution medium. It is difficult and time-consuming to copy VHS on a small scale. With latter practical but (blind) decision to use VHS we were committed to uncontrolled DV masters being distributed, unrestrained exploitation of others work being a re-accruing problem and is one of the main sources of paranoia in the activist ghetto that I felt we need to avoid (or at least mediate it) from the beginning. But with most of the innovations I had in mind, they only surfaced later as people directly experienced the issues. This agen is a damming theme from the ghetto that experiences and innovation is seen as threats rather than encouraged. In the ghetto the is little respect for the hierarchy of knowledge involved in knowledge and craft production, this childish attitude is both a blessing when it challenges the existing power structures and a damnation when it undermines real solid alternatives.

We set up the Islip list as a means of achieving this early consensus so that the gathering itself could be the place where we got to know each other and actually share the practical skills of producing a pilot issue of the project. Very few Alt-projects are sustainable, the ones that are sustainable tend to be focused on small and closed claques, almost all the IMC networks embody this. In such projects it is generally a small tightly nit core who do most of the work, surrounded by a shifting periphery.

Islip was a failer at creating such a functional core… it instead institutionalised a fundamentalist and paranoid muddle which the project is now struggling with. The project does exist, but it suffers from a lack of clarity, dignity and warmth that very much questions its long term sustainability. Perhaps after the meeting in May this might be opened up as the paranoia and megalomania of activism may have died down enough for a solid, practical and interesting project to grow from the current weed racked ground.

Myself, I am getting on with a more defined project from the start – European wide video activism training caravan. Funded and role defined from the beginning.

Hamish Campbell, Oxford 2003

Published Date 1/2/12 5:07 PM

Report on Islip Gathering

June 14^th to 17^th 2002

Introduction

The gathering in Islip attracted an impressive attendance of representatives from a variety of alternative media organisations and independent video activists. Some had travelled from as far afield as Croatia and Germany. Eric Galatas, from the US-based FreespeechTV network, the event’s sponsor, had travelled from Colorado.

The days were organised around a series of meetings and workshops, the agendas of which were decided and agreed by the attendees themselves.

Goal-setting

The first item was to establish the goal of the project. Everyone present contributed their thoughts and the outcome was a distillation summed up thus:

Create a video structure (network)

• Enable production and screenings of a regular monthly Newsreal: CDs, video tapes, cable, satellite

• Online co-operative network resource

• Decentralised

• Cafes or local nodes

• Resource sharing

• Global distribution

• Use multiple formats and approaches

• Establish European satellite and cable channel, screening programs 24/7

Which,

• Connects and empowers local and global (virtual) communities and groups

• Distributes existing programs

• Facilitates the creation of new groups and programs

• Enables information (skills, clips, events) exchange

Connected to existing movements, shall bring about positive social change.

Workshops

The group then split up into sub-groups to discuss strategies and problem-solving for three crucial areas:

• Production of a monthly Newsreal (a complilation of segments from around European)

• Distribution systems and publicity

• Organising and fundraising

1. Production of monthly Newsreal

The workshop proposed the production of a monthly Newsreal defined as a compilation of segments of 5 minutes or less each totalling a maximum of half an hour (). Segments should be gathered and edited by a different group in different European countries each month so that workload and ownership of the project is shared. Countries outside the UK to provide English translated versions and all raw versions to go to non-UK countries for translation.

It was proposed that the Newsreal be made available in two formats: moultymedia(VCD) and VHS to accommodate different needs and facilitate wider distribution.

2. Distribution systems and publicity

The workshop proposed a three-stage plan to test and build an effective distribution system.

Stage 1: Test pilot the Newsreal using existing 5 minit segment to creat a news reel to be distributed to the current group. And locally screened. Usfull for fundraseing and explaning what the project is about.

Stage 2: Start posting out info on IMC video lists, Make a second “proper” news reel to be screened to sympathetic local groups. Assess feedback. Build a database of contacts of sympathetic groups and other interested parties who may be new to the concept of alternative media and conduct a second round of pilot screenings. Assess feedback and make any recommended changes to Newsreal. Assess and deal with any issues arising from production system. Make the project part of the IMC network – ie. Get it on the video IMC page.

Stage 3: the big lornch has to come after lydon as the main contacts will come from lydon…International launch of Newsreal. Proposed to coincide with the PGA (People’s Global Action) conference in Leiden, Netherlands and the World Summit??? at the end of August screenings to take place in Leiden, other key European cities and possibly the US. Big publicity drive incorporating stunts and liaison with sympathetic journalists, aiming for national (as well as local) coverage in the mainstream media of all participating countries. Produce flyers and posters to advertise screenings locally. Post up info on Indymedia website.

3. Organisation and fundraising

The workshop proposed that participating organisations co-ordinate the production of Newsreal with independents sending their segments to the relevant group for that month. Each group should work on it for two or 3 months so they can get up to speed. Undercurrents can do the produces the first two pilots then I would sergest Cannal B produces the lornch issues and possebaly then the corations… its important that groups doing the production have a history of producing and segments (would argue that they should have produced 2 or 3 Newsreel segments before they take on responsabilerty for producing the news reel.

It was recognised that a large amount of translations would be required and that money should be sought for this.

Money to be raised by:

• applying for grants (not-for-profit status of the project to be established beforehand)

• profits from sale of Newsreal at screenings, through universities (People and Planet to distribute), festivals and other outlets

• income from sale of Newsreal to FreespeechTV for monthly screenings and sales to mainstream media in European countries

• we need to think about – sponsorship from ethical companies

Who are we and what is our purpose?

Participants agreed that we need to be able to define who we are and what our purpose is for those who may wish to get involved and for fundraising purposes. A number of definitions were proposed and this is still an area to be agreed on.

What happens next

• Pilot Newsreal to be produced ASAP and copies sent to all participants to arrange small scale local screenings

• Separate working group e-groups to be set up to facilitate ongoing discussions and organization – this is tempery – we need a new working websight.

• Definition of project and purpose to be discussed online (Islip list) and agreed on

• Grant-making bodies to be approached for ’emergency’ funds ie small amounts, to cover production and administrative costs of pilot screenings