Durham Skate Park
This past weekend I took my daughter to the Durham Skate Park in downtown. She loves skateboarding, so she was pretty up for it. The funny thing is that she doesn’t really know how to ride. She knows the names of all the tricks, but can’t even really ride on a flat surface. I figured taking her to the Skate Park would provide some inspiration and she would get some practice riding along the edge of the park. She really didn’t ride at all, but she was very interested in shooting some video. The above video was completely shot by my 9-year old daughter on a Kodak ZI-8, handheld HD camera. I cut it together using iMovie, but with some simple direction regarding cutting on action and creating a narrative thread, she organized the shots, and even discarded a few that didn’t work. This kid is not your normal 4th grader. She really gets this stuff. We will definitely be shooting more video, and soon she will be managing the editing software too. Oh, and we scored it in Garage Band and she made the choices in that too.
They are just a band
This music video from Dan Le Sac VS Scroobius Pip for the song “Thou Shalt always Kill” struck me as being catchy and thoughtful. It is a guide to life in modern day England for the music hipster. I love the litany of bands at the 1:30 mark.
Movies with No Signal
This video is a compilation of movies, mostly from the horror genre, where people find themselves is perilous situations, only to discover they have not cell phone signal.
The Beatles 3000
Sometimes history adds perspective, and sometimes it adds Scottie Pippen.
We Got That B-Roll!
If you have ever edited a video and wanted to drop in some footage while the main speaker or narrator continues, that’s called b-roll. The name comes from film editing where your main footage is the A roll and you need to cut in some footage from a secondary roll, or the B roll. This shows that any business function can be pitched as an informercial, especially with tongue firmly placed in cheek.
(Thanks for Greg for tweeting this)
FullSteam Backyard Beer Fest
Recently, the under-construction FullSteam Brewery in Durham, NC hosted a Backyard Beer Festival featuring local homebrewers. Read more
Weird Al Helps Explain Auto-Tune
Rocketboom continues their series of Know Your Meme with special guest Weird Al, explaining the tired musical trend using a software treatment called auto-tune, which corrects a singer’s pitch and makes them sound like a robot. From Wired.
The Soccer Project
Four filmmakers, three of them former top level college soccer players, set off on a journey to connect with the world through pickup soccer. Read more
Need Permission for Social Media Monitoring?
Depending on how traditional your organization is and their reluctance to adopt social media practices, it can’t be worse than this video. Here’s an extreme example from the pharmaceutical industry where the legal adviser cannot even authorize listening in the social media space. Show it to your boss next time they tell you that you can’t do something.
How to Make a Baby
Even though this video has a provocative title, it is a great example of animating still photos into a video. It’s also really sweet.
Here are some notes about how they made the video from www.otherthings.com. Follow the link for more information:
We made this video using a technique called “pixilation”, which is a fancy term for stop-motion animation done with real people instead of puppets. We shot it, frame by frame, with Raquel’s Canon DSLR over a period of nine months. Those of you who stopped by our house might have noticed some mysterious tape marks on the floor in the living room. Those were for the camera tripod and our feet.
Animating over such a long period of time, using an increasingly pregnant woman as one of your puppets, means basically throwing out everything you might normally do in an animated film. For example, early on, we had this idea that we should wear the same clothes every time, for continuity’s sake. But as Raquel’s pregnancy developed, we soon discovered that the extra effort required to change in and out of our uniforms was going to interfere with the goal of shooting as many frames as possible, and might even prevent us from finishing the project at all. We dialed down the perfectionism, and in the process ended up having a lot more fun with it.
Hat tip to Bit Rebels