Just in case anyone missed Ben Stewart’s gig at Ric’s on the weekend. He uploaded a video of himself playing Paranoid Android, on Ukulele, on The Toilet.
The Awesomeness is strong with this one. Lovely fast intimate production. The shower scene is particularly excellent.
This is one of those videos which should be watched first, then explained:
This was one of the most fun videos I’ve ever been involved in. Well and truly nestled in the “fast, cheap, effective” philosophy, we went from concept to completed shoot in under 24 hours.
Ben Stewart approached me with a small budget and a catchy song. On Saturday night, while waiting for Rachgirl to get off the phone with her mum, I did a little experiment with party poppers and the 200FPS slow motion mode on my camera.
I called Rowley Cowper up on Sunday morning with “bring your tools over, you need to make me a device to set off 200 party poppers at once”. Ben and I bought the local shopping centres out of poppers, Billy Hyde’s out of ukuleles, and we made it to The Edge in time for nightfall.
As it took almost two hours to load the launcher, and as we were shooting in The Edge auditorium after closing, we only had one chance to get the shot, so we did about a dozen rehearsals before the “live fire” exercise.
Letterbox Lullabies is a series of intimate house gigs put on by stalwarts of The Troubadour, Brisbane’s most beloved music venue. This was my second Letterbox Lullabies shoot: Surface Paradise, featuring Matt Redlich, Rowley Cowper and Timothy Carroll.
For these shows I aim to be as unobtrusive as possible, so these videos were shot on a single handheld Digital SLR, with audio recorded by Anto Pink and mixed by Matt Redlich.
The performance of Look At Miss Ohio was one of my favourite live music moments from 2010.
For The Gulf Stream, I wanted to experiment with stabilization (and a little motion tracking of guitar) on the DSLR footage. I was able to get the hand-held footage pretty smooth, but the rolling shutter of my Pentax K7 makes it a bit hard for video geeks to watch.
The entire set is available for download from http://surfaceparadise.bandcamp.com/
Cowper played at The Edge‘s first Show Pony showcase event. As a Catalyst at The Edge, I was responsible for tech setup and mixing live video, as well as VJing other artists on the night, alongside my weapon of choice: Cowper.
With a couple of capable camera assistants, I was able to put together edits of two songs from the Cowper set:
Audio from this set is available for (free) download.
With Sampology set to take over the audiovisual world with his Super Visual Smackdown, he needed a design refresh to show people what was coming.
Sam is pretty new to the video world, so he asked for some post-production services to give his set intro that extra bit of polish.
I animated titles, stabilized hand-shot footage, tightened the edit, and colour-corrected the clips Sam had brought together from throughout film history.
I’ve just released Fail With Me, the latest of many works I’ll be producing for Edward Guglielmino‘s album Late At Night.
This joins several other videos I’ve produced recently for Ed:
Lion In Your Bed (Live)
Fail With Me (Live)
No Body Is Perfect (Live)
Caught In A Landslide (Live, Bridge Sessions)
Late At Night (Live, Bridge Sessions)
I’ve also posted on Create Digital Motion about the philosophy and techniques behind the production of this video.
Now I’m off to have lunch with Ed and plan for our next escapade.
Long-time collaborator Edward Guglielmino. Failing over and over. A beautiful desaturated mandala of fail.
For a while now I’ve been keeping an eye on the web censorship antics various Australian governments have been getting up to. The previous, coalition government decided that spending AU$3000 per copy on some web filtering software was a fantastic idea: Dan of Dansdata has a summary of the maths behind that particular exercise in pointlessness.
So the new, Labour government looked into that failure, dubbed it so, and then decided that the reason it failed was that the coalition just hadn’t wasted enough money. That they’d aimed too low. So instead of some kind of pointless, wasteful, opt-in filtering software that kiddies can bypass, now they want to implement country-wide, mandatory internet filtering of “illegal” and “inappropriate” material.
This is wrong and pointless on so many levels, it’s quite difficult to even know where to start if I was to explain to someone why this is a bad idea. Once again, Dan has a summary, and he doesn’t think it’s actually going to happen, which is nice.
But I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen.
Similar threats have been made here in the past, and they’ve always petered out into nothing. There are no votes to be won in actually filtering the Internet, after all. The people who vote based on Net filtering promises are unable to tell whether it’s actually happening or not. And there are plenty of votes to be lost when everyone who doesn’t call their browser “the Internet” discovers that they can’t get to YouPorn or Mininova any more.
(link)
Just in case they actually think they’re going to go through with it, there are some people starting to activate and campaign against this pointless stupidity. So here’s some resources:
No Clean Feed – The Website, The Mission.
No Clean Feed on Twitter.
No Clean Feed petition
No Clean Feed Facebook group.
How a “Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy” can think this would be feasible, or that it would be a good idea even if it was technically possible, is completely beyond me. Why is Australia repeatedly lumped with luddites for our IT ministers?
Spring’s first super cheap produce hit the grocers last week, so over the weekend I went on a small cooking rampage, making roasted italian tomatos and chilli & onion jam.
Yes, we’ve almost gone through a jar of it in 2 days.
It’s based off this recipe, but the quantities have been changed drastically for my tastes:
8 red onions, sliced thinly
8 chillis, seeds removed if you don’t want it super spicy
8 garlic cloves
No pureeing either, and loads of extra olive oil added during the cooking process. This spicy goodness was strained off and used to start various other recipes over the weekend.
My birthday present from the Rachgirl finally arrived from Russia. It’s a Zenitar 16mm fisheye. Loads of fun.
Review on CDMotion, more pics on Flickr.