October 24th, 2008, 13 Comments »
At BarCamp last month, Julie and I shot video of a bunch of people answering that question for DreamBank. If you’re in and around the Vancouver tech scene, you’ll probably recognize a few people in this video:
That X-Wing fighter was pretty frustrating.
August 1st, 2008, 4 Comments »
Get Your War On is a series of red-ink comic strips about post-9/11 America, and an important voice of satire and reason in an unreasonable world. And now they’ve gone all stop-motion on us. Here’s the first episode (er, rated M for language):
Is there a name for this style of animation, where an artist draws (or uses some clever video editing tricks to appear to draw) over live video to achieve a very realistic style of character movement?
July 30th, 2008, 5 Comments »
Lee and Sachi have a new video explaining something much more baffling than RSS or wikis: the American electoral process.
Lee does an excellent job of explaining the US’s somewhat baroque (and if you ask me, highly peculiar) means of electing a president. He gets through the whole video without once saying “electoral college”.
The title of this post refers to an asterisked disclaimer in the video that indicates that Lee’s explanation doesn’t apply to two states: Nebraska and Maine. What’s with them? From Wikipedia:
Two other states, Maine and Nebraska, use a tiered system where a single elector is chosen within each Congressional district and two electors are chosen by statewide popular vote.
So, Maine and Nebraska have a more complicated system?
June 30th, 2008, No Comments »
Via email, I got a link to this remarkable (if academic) video demonstrating a series of Photoshop-esque effects as applied to video. It’s from a group at the University of Washington–here’s a blurb from the accompanying paper:
We present a framework for automatically enhancing videos of a static scene using a few photographs of the same scene. For example, our system can transfer photographic qualities such as high resolution, high dynamic range and better lighting from the photographs to the video. Additionally, the user can quickly modify the video by editing only a few still images of the scene.
If you watch to the end, you’ll see how they remove an irksome No Parking sign by cutting it out of a single video frame. It’s pretty cool.
June 25th, 2008, 6 Comments »
Seeking some mediocre television that wouldn’t interest my wife (we tend to watch the good shows together), I downloaded a couple seasons of “How I Met Your Mother”. It’s an ordinary, post-Friends sitcom, whose redeeming features are the hotness of Vancouverite Cobie Smulders and the awesomeness of Neil Patrick Harris. I didn’t actually know that Harris had such an extensive theatre career./p>
That’s probably why Joss Whedon has cast him in his new, web-only musical entitled Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Here’s a teaser trailer:
Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.
Here’s the empty but official page, and the most prominent fan site. It also stars the excellent Nathan Fillion and the charming Felicia Day.
June 22nd, 2008, 4 Comments »
About a year ago (as I wrote here), Capulet helped produce and promote a series of videos for Elastic Path, an eCommerce company in Vancouver. They were called “The Crazy Messed Up World of eCommerce”, and asked the question “What if offline shopping were as cruel and difficult as buying online?”. Here’s one of the videos:
Last week, I received an email discussing a series of three videos that another eCommerce company, 7 Billion People, had released and showed at an industry tradeshow. You can see them on the front page of their website, or in their YouTube channel. They claim to ask the question “What if all shopping was like shopping on the web?”. Here’s one of their videos:
Does that seem oddly familiar to anybody else? Let’s see–same format, same setup, same comedic premise, similar dialogue. Their videos are obviously a lot slicker–they have professional actors and, you know, lighting, but I think the similarities are pretty striking. Too striking to be a mere coincidence.
I’m obviously not an objective observer. But it sure looks like they saw the Elastic Path videos and, without acknowledgement, blatantly ripped off the idea. What do you think?
June 19th, 2008, 3 Comments »
I’ve been in Chicago this week, speaking at Web Content 2008 (notes from my talks) and hacking up a lung. In one of my talks, I referenced the notion of micro-celebrity, and how many webby folks are famous to a couple thousand people.
Coincidentally, on Wednesday we visited the great, labyrinthine Art Institute of Chicago. While wandering through it, I spotted Britney Barber, the star of the amusing video podcast The Midwest Teen Sex Show. Not surprising, I suppose, given that we’re in the heart of the Midwest (or so somebody told me).
Ms. Barber is famous to me, so the feeling was pretty similar to past celebrity spottings. I didn’t, you know, bother her for an autograph or anything, but there was that sense of ‘hey, I usually only see you on a screen”.
June 10th, 2008, 1 Comment »
I’ve been reading, er, viewing Sam Javanrouh’s terrific photoblog forever. This might be the first video he’s posted. At least, it’s the first video I remember. The caption reads “Chess players at Dundas Square, Toronto. Shot on Canon 5D with 5 seconds intervals. Exposure of 1 second for each frame. Music from Philip Glass’s ‘The Photographer’”.
I’ll include it below, but it’s worth checking out the bigger version on Vimeo.
Players from Sam Javanrouh on Vimeo.
June 9th, 2008, 6 Comments »
I’m a casual soccer/football fan (I struggle with which term to use). I’m a long-suffering supporter of Canada’s national side, and enjoy watching European matches whenever I get the chance. I look forward to the big tournaments–the World Cup and European Championships–every two years.
The second most popular sporting event on the planet, Euro 2008, is on right now. As I’ve mentioned, we’re a TV-free family. I really only miss the thing for watching sports. I’ll go to my parents’ house or the pub to watch a game, but I like to watch the video highlights of each match on a daily basis.
Unlike North American sports, it’s ridiculously difficult to watch Euro 2008 (and World Cup, if I recall correctly) highlights on the web. No domestic network website–CBC, TSN, Sportsnet–shows them, and I’m denied by my IP address from accessing the BBC’s video. As far as I can tell, my only options are:
The Euro 2008 doesn’t offer a cheaper price if I don’t want to see full matches. Plus, they don’t give me any kind of preview of the video for which I’m paying. Am I going to pay $30 for YouTube quality streaming video (”hey, that pixelated blob scored on that other pixelated blog!”).
If I wasn’t going to Chicago next week, I might actually pony up the $30. Instead, I’ll rely on the less legitimate but free options.
I will say that it was a joy to watch Italy get their azure butts kicked today. Sneijder’s goal might stand as the best of the tournament.
June 5th, 2008, 7 Comments »
Today I happened to see the video for the catchy Sara Bareilles tune “Love Song”. I first heard this song about a year ago, but apparently it just went huge on the Tube o’ You.
I was struck by how much of the video was shot in the style of the average YouTube video. Ms. Bareilles is centered in the frame, looking directly into the camera, and the shot is basically just her head and shoulders.
Compare that with another singer-songwriter-at-the-piano video from 2002: Vanessa Carlton’s “1000 Miles” (could she look more underwhelmed in her photo on Wikipedia?). I’ve put a few screenshots together to illustrate:
Obviously this is only a single data point, but I’m reminded of an earlier post I wrote about musicians co-opting the style and conventions of YouTube.
Music video directors must recognize that a huge part of their viewership has shifted mediums. I wonder how much (and how else) the move to YouTube is impacting videos? Do they use more saturated colours? Simpler set ups? Any thoughts?
On a related note, it’s interesting that I’m not allowed to ‘embed’ (that is, include in a blog post or elsewhere) either of these videos. It’s been disabled on YouTube. What are record companies and managers afraid of?