February 17th, 2010, Comments Off
The subtitled Hitler trope is a gift that keeps on giving. I don’t know why I find them so entertaining, but whether it’s the Sundin trade or problems with Windows Vista, they always amuse me. Maybe it’s because I saw the original film, and each send-up reminds me of the original’s super-serious tone?
In any case, Graeme McRanor has produced this latest example, on the Winter Olympics. Rated PG for frequent cursing:
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January 3rd, 2010, 2 Comments »
Two years ago, almost to the day, we moved from Malta and Morocco. We lived in Essaouira on the Atlantic coast. We rented a lovely riad (according to Wikipedia, “a traditional Moroccan house or palace with an interior garden”) called Dar Zahira (caution, autoplaying Berber music ahead).
The owners of Dar Zahira recently produced a great-looking four-minute video on the city. It really captures the mood of the place. Here’s the video, but it’s worth watching it in HD:
Somebody recently pointed out to me that ‘Essaouira’ has all the vowels except for sometimes-y.
December 15th, 2009, 2 Comments »
As regular readers know, I’m working on the TckTckTck campaign, fighting for a fair, ambitious and binding deal on climate change in Copenhagen. We’re in the second, final week of negotiations and things are heating up. This past weekend, the campaign organized a third global day of action. It featured over 3000 events–candlelight vigils, marches, protests and so forth–in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The previous two days, by Avaaz on September 21 and 350.org on October 24, were similar in scale.
In each case, there’s been a video hastily produced that seeks to document the day and further inspire the climate change movement. Together, they tell the story of global climate action over the past six months, and look pretty slick doing it.
October 15th, 2009, 2 Comments »
As I recently mentioned, today is Blog Action Day. Ironically, because it’s Blog Action Day and I’m involved in the TckTckTck campaign, I don’t have a lot of free time to write a long, heart-rending blog post about the dangers of climate change.
Instead, I want to share this great video that the local video-meisters at Giant Ant Media created for TckTckTck. It speaks for itself:
I usually wouldn’t be a big fan of a video full of cute kids, but this one jibes with our philosophy and theory of change for TckTckTck. It’s reportedly brought the occasional person to tears, which is a pretty good result for 80 seconds.
July 6th, 2009, Comments Off
As I mentioned, I’m revising the video chapter of our book, and so I was happy to discover this recent Slate article. For a month, Chris Wilson monitored the performance of 10, 000 newly uploaded videos. Here are the results:
After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 viewsâ€â€that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That’s the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.
An site called, uh, Rubber Republic ran a similar study (PDF), and found that 10% exceeded 1000 views, and 1% received 500,000 views.
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July 5th, 2009, 2 Comments »
I was doing some rewrites on the video chapter in our book, and discovered that this unremarkable clip was the first ever video posted to YouTube. It features YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim making a bad joke:
It’s interesting how much this video predicts the vast majority of YouTube videos: a young person speaking in direct address to the camera. He’s not in his bedroom, but otherwise it’s utterly typical.
June 14th, 2009, 8 Comments »
I’m not sure how I stumbled upon it, but I quite like this explanatory video about The Book of Mormon. The creators are liberally borrowing from (or, less charitably, ripping off) Lee and Sachi’s excellent approach, but at least they’re executing well.
I’ve never really know much about this particularly unorthodox branch of Christianity–now I know a little more.
May 25th, 2009, 9 Comments »
I’m working on a new project that has some particular requirements. They’re not that unusual, though, and surely others have already solved this set of problems:
No, we haven’t branched out into pornography.
I checked out some courseware systems, but they’re really about delivering structured multi-part classes. I’m also aware of E-Junkie, which is what Common Craft (among many others) use to distribute their videos. They’re a good option for downloadables, but don’t offer flash-based video for viewing only.
I’m happy to pay for a turn-key solution, assuming it doesn’t cost a ridiculous amount of money. That’s preferable, actually, to messing around with Drupal or whatever. All suggestions welcome.
As a thanks-in-advance, here’s an awesome German pop song.