Video
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Saturday, March 17th, 2007Early this afternoon I went with Brien to the Cinerama to go see 300. It’s another Frank Miller graphic novel brought to life. The topic is the Battle of Thermopolae, and while the movie is light on substance it’s a beautiful flick with great art direction. Having 300 hot, dirty, sweaty men running around covered in their ex-enemies never hurt either!
In other news I still love my car. I wish the weather would start cooperating so I can give him a bath and do a proper photoshoot with my DSLR. For now the following shot from last Wednesday will simply have to do:
“A6 front grill” by sparktography
A lazy sunday morning
Sunday, March 11th, 2007Laying on the couch with Skype while drinking coffee, watching History of the World Part I, and wading through the river RSS. Just what the doctor ordered for a cold rainy Sunday morning!
Project Re:M1xed
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007My friend Mike and I had an idea of creating a movie mashup entirely from other movies. Fair use gives us the right to use up to 8 seconds of another work without violating their copyright, so why not make a short film (5-10 minutes) made entirely from 8 second or less clips of other movies.
So far we are thinking doing a homage to cult Sci-Fi movies by making our own from the leavings of others. We have a library of 750+ DVD’s to pull samples from, and access to decent video editing tools to make our job easier. We may interleave audio and video from different sources simultaneously to allow for more dialog and action options, but only 8 seconds per sample will be allowed.
We are looking for help in everything from envisioning to helping polish the final project. Obviously this is not for money, but it should prove to be a blast. If you have creative ideas that might make this better we want to hear them - join us in our creative endeavor - just leave a comment or drop me an email!
Dog hiccups and other fun things
Sunday, February 18th, 2007I lay here on my couch exhausted from the goings on of yesterday. Skype is equally exhausted and is passed out in a little ball next to me. He’s hiccuping in the cutest possible way - there really is very little on this earth as a sleeping dog that’s convulsing uncontrollably in the throes of hiccups.
Someone recently commented to me that my blog was very beige. They didn’t mean the color scheme, but more the fact that my life is rather boring. I actually appreciated that more than the person intended: I like the boring quiet life! Luckily I still do have the occasional splash of color in my life as yesterday exhibited:
The afternoon movie showing was quite exciting! I had 8 people show up for drinks, movies, and other sorts of orgastic excess. Skype of course had a blast - it’s almost more than he can bear to have that many drunk people show up and play with him. For an idea of the happenings check out the (dark and long) Quicktime timelapse I made.
Take that beige! Now back to our regularly scheduled beige.
Oh yeah - and I’ve developed a love affair with Tilda Swinton! She’s just so good at being bad!
More time lapse wackiness
Saturday, January 20th, 2007Today I spent much of the day finally cleaning up my place after CES hit it like a tornado. Halfway through it suddenly occurred to me I could try using EvoCam on my Macbook in the living room. I’m also Right-click here to download the 2.8MB Quicktime 7 .mp4 file or check out after the jump for an embedded version.
I’m using Quicktime because it’s higher quality than flash and since with this one I’m experimenting with high frame-rates and larger video sizes it just made more sense. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!
New media stuff
Friday, January 19th, 2007It’s been a busy week at work, but I’ve still found the time to put together a couple of cool projects. I finally took the time to wade through all my Lensbaby shots and collect the gems into a Flickr set entitled ‘Best of Lensbaby‘. Check it out for some of my favorites, and to see it grow over time.
In addition I also picked up a copy of EvoCam for my iMac. Bre suggested it as a Photobooth replacement when I was looking to remove the “screen flash” and I ended up falling in love with it for some of it’s more advanced features. At first I was a little hesitant to throw $25 at webcam software, but even after just a few hours I was in love with EvoCam.
It has a really neat way to set up motion activated time lapse movies using the iSight. Basically my iSight is on all the time now. Whenever movement is detected (i.e. I am sitting at the computer) it takes a photo every 15 seconds, and adds the photo as a frame in a time lapse movie. At 24 frames per second playback speed and 15 seconds of real time per frame of video it makes it easy to watch my life go by at a 6 minutes per second. Even cooler is that since it’s motion activated there are no long gaps of nothingness while I’m at work or sleeping.
I’ve got it set to cut the movie and start a new one each day at midnight so I’ll end up with a detailed log of my computer usage, and something that’s actually pretty cool as an art project by itself. Below I’ve posted a quick one that only takes up an hour or so of “real time” and was more of an experiment than anything else - be expecting cooler versions at some point in the near future.
The Quicktime version is very large, but has a keyframe for every single shot in the time lapse so it’s very high quality. I’ve compressed it down to a flash video to show here, but might be making DVD’s to mail out if any of the coming days produce anything particularly interesting or thought provoking. Without further ado:
Tower Records: the end of an era
Friday, January 19th, 2007
If you like media you are well familiar with the iconic Tower Records. Sadly they have filed for bankruptcy and are having their final going out of sale-sale. Check it out for 25% or more off CD’s, DVD’s, and games + free shipping - I just bought a bundle and so should you!
Making a fool of myself Intel style
Thursday, January 11th, 2007I’m officially all Vegas’ed out, but luckily I get to leave today. We had a lot of fun, and there are a ton of great videos up on gearlive.com - check them out! I’m already looking forward to CES next year, and getting home tonight to see Skype!
A quick video to leave you with from the Intel booth at CES:
Wii!!
Friday, December 22nd, 2006It’s been almost a week since I’ve had a chance to sit down and post to my blog. I’ve been super busy and exhausted at work, and when I’m not at work I’ve been feeding my video game habit. Things have been kind of crazy at work trying to get things ready for the holidays, and managing a project that got handed to me that’s mid cycle. Luckily the project ships in a few months and hopefully I’ll be able to go back to working on a project start to finish.
Earlier in the week I got Civilization IV for the mac and found myself hopelessly addicted to it. It’s a well thought out turn based strategy game. As proven by my recent Gears of War experience I’m not much for twitch based games, but on a game that’s 100% turn based and entirely self paced is awesome. It’s very strategic and makes you think about how you want to grow your civilization from being a hunter-gather based society to the stars.
As excited as I am about CIV4 I won’t actually be playing it much over my 4 day weekend I suspect: I finally got my Wii! I haven’t had that much time with it, but I got it set up and spent a little time this afternoon playing with Wii Sports and Twighlight Princess.
I have to say for the record that I’m impressed. The Wii’s graphics are decent (not good), but their gameplay is fantastic. Having a controller that is so motion based is highly intuitive and makes even simple games fun.
More on the Wii soon I promise - gotta go play it now!
“Wii!!” by sparktography
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