Workshop on Small-File Ecomedia
Monday, March 17, 2025 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1Lecture Hall
The environmental impact of streaming media is now calculated to contribute 1% of greenhouse gas emissions and rising fast. Streaming comprises a significant proportion of the carbon footprint of information and communication technologies (ICT), which is calculated to contribute about 4% of global greenhouse gases, about the same as the airline industry. ICT is composed of data centers, networks, and devices that store, transmit, and display all our social media, videos, photos, and other large files, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence applications, etc. All these uses require huge amounts of electricity, and about 79% of global electricity comes from fossil fuels: hence the large carbon footprint.
Conceived at the Small File Media Festival in 2020, Small-File Ecomedia can offer a solution to the rising carbon footprint of streaming through the creation of low- bandwidth movies of an average of one megabyte per minute. This is only a tiny fraction of high-definition video, which is between 60 and 350 megabytes per minute. The dissemination of small file media requires minimum energy and bandwidth, causing no damage to the planet. Drawing new modes of thinking otherwise in media theory, small-file films raise awareness for environmentally friendly media creation and consumption. While mainstream media is becoming increasingly high-definition, with proportionally higher electricity demands for streaming and storing, small-file films embrace glitchy images and abstract compositions. This lo-fi intervention draws from both do-it-yourself (DiY) movements and computer-based artistic practices. Practitioners can utilize free, cross platform apps including Handbrake, Any Video Converter, and AVIDMUX to compress moving-image content to a fraction of its original size. Some artists use these aesthetic tools to manipulate the granular materiality of digital media objects.
The workshop will cover the motivations and techniques behind small-file filmmaking as well as the basic steps of small-file filmmaking (pre-production, shooting, editing). No need to be intimidated by expensive equipment and fancy software! If you are interested in small-file filmmaking,
you will only need to have a smartphone with a working camera (new, old, recycled, anything really!) and a computer capable of downloading simple video-editing software.
Great cinema doesn’t have to mean great big files!
Please register here.
Mohammad Zaki Rezwan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Humanities at BRAC University. He has over eight years of experience in teaching a diverse range of courses, including visual art and culture, film, media, communication, cultural studies, critical theory, postcolonial theory, and literature in English. He has previously worked as a Research Assistant for research projects at the University of Oxford and Simon Fraser University. He holds an MA in Comparative Media Arts from Simon Fraser University and an MA in Literatures in English and Cultural Studies from Jahangirnagar University. He curated the exhibition Unveiling in 2019 at Centre A, the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. He previously worked as the Assistant Editor of Crossings: A Journal of English Studies and the Editor of the Comparative Media Arts (CMA) Journal. In 2020, he founded Rickshaw Art Archive (rickshawartarchive.org), a non-commercial, crowdsourced digital archive of rickshaw art in Bangladesh. He has published and presented his research at a wide range of peer-reviewed journals and international conferences around the world. His research interests lie in the areas of South Asian arts, aesthetics, film, media, and visual culture.
Email: [email protected]