Watch this video. A series of commercials by AT&T predicting the technologies we will use in the future.
I'm impressed by how correct they were with these. Of course, the way the various products or technologies are used today ended up much more elegant than predicted for the most part (Where is my gigantic touchscreen CRT!), but the ideas are very close to the same. A lot of these things are refined simply from revelations in the size of the internal elements of computing devices.
And I don't think anyone is tucking their baby in from a phone booth. What's a phone booth? (Isn't it kind of funny that the movie Phone Booth is so irrelevant after just a few years?) But I'm sure some people do use the Ustream iPhone app to stream tucking a baby in to a parent or loved one who is too far away to see it.
I think the best part about all of that is the enhanced ability to communicate. Video chat, working from anywhere in the world, even a remote beach. People say that being in front of a computer dehumanizes people, but I think the opposite is happening. People are more connected, more in touch, and know what's going on in each others' lives now more than ever.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Blast from the Past Time
So here's a fun little blast from the past. I was googling around looking for something and digging through the wayback machine and I came across one of my old websites. It used to contain links to stream all my videos at the time. Looking through, only 3 or 4 are still linked correctly (I have the originals somewhere...who knows where) so I was happy to find it! One of the videos is actually the first actual short film I ever did that contained a plot and editing conventions and all that stuff.
Do you want to see it? Ok...be warned. The quality is TERRIBLE. It's a wmv I snatched from the website where it lies peacefully. The movie is 4 minutes long, but the file is about 1.2 mb. The bitrate is 2100 BITS per second. Not kb..bits. Yikes.
By the way, I was thinking about what I used to have to go through in order to get my videos online compared to now. I had to find server space (for free since I was without a job at the time) and build a functioning website, and effectively stream media without spending all my bandwidth. THEN find a way to get it noticed by people. To get that video on youtube today, I grabbed it and tossed it in an upload and changed some info, and suddenly it's available on my channel for the world to see. When it popped up on youtube I pondered this for a long time.
Some background on the video itself...I made it in 2002. It was right after we all went to a football game actually, making it early fall and therefore I was BARELY 15 years old. CRAZY. I thought I had edited this on an old dumb editing program called MGI Videowave, but thankfully I felt the need to list the NLE in the credits - Premiere 6.0 (YEEESH). I don't really remember exactly how the idea for this video came about. We just kind of improvised it. I find it to be brilliant for a 15 year old, if I do say so myself. For a first short film, it's got some pretty decent camera angles. It has matching action, rule of thirds, nice framing, movement in the shots...really not bad at all. The pacing is a bit slow, but I like to think I was going for a slow build up of tension. This was shot on a Sony Handycam on Hi8. Ingesting analog to digital was such a blast, especially with Premiere. It definitely taught me patience and troubleshooting when it comes to digitizing. And to realize that sometimes you do everything right and the computer just doesn't feel like working for you.
I really like the last bit of action with the matching action on the soup can being raised to bludgeon the victim. The framing is awesome. I'm glad I thought of that shot. I remember trying to get it framed right....it was difficult.
So there you go, my roots are in improvised horror flicks.
Do you want to see it? Ok...be warned. The quality is TERRIBLE. It's a wmv I snatched from the website where it lies peacefully. The movie is 4 minutes long, but the file is about 1.2 mb. The bitrate is 2100 BITS per second. Not kb..bits. Yikes.
By the way, I was thinking about what I used to have to go through in order to get my videos online compared to now. I had to find server space (for free since I was without a job at the time) and build a functioning website, and effectively stream media without spending all my bandwidth. THEN find a way to get it noticed by people. To get that video on youtube today, I grabbed it and tossed it in an upload and changed some info, and suddenly it's available on my channel for the world to see. When it popped up on youtube I pondered this for a long time.
Some background on the video itself...I made it in 2002. It was right after we all went to a football game actually, making it early fall and therefore I was BARELY 15 years old. CRAZY. I thought I had edited this on an old dumb editing program called MGI Videowave, but thankfully I felt the need to list the NLE in the credits - Premiere 6.0 (YEEESH). I don't really remember exactly how the idea for this video came about. We just kind of improvised it. I find it to be brilliant for a 15 year old, if I do say so myself. For a first short film, it's got some pretty decent camera angles. It has matching action, rule of thirds, nice framing, movement in the shots...really not bad at all. The pacing is a bit slow, but I like to think I was going for a slow build up of tension. This was shot on a Sony Handycam on Hi8. Ingesting analog to digital was such a blast, especially with Premiere. It definitely taught me patience and troubleshooting when it comes to digitizing. And to realize that sometimes you do everything right and the computer just doesn't feel like working for you.
I really like the last bit of action with the matching action on the soup can being raised to bludgeon the victim. The framing is awesome. I'm glad I thought of that shot. I remember trying to get it framed right....it was difficult.
So there you go, my roots are in improvised horror flicks.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Portfolio - Digital Creations Club PSA
This was another school project, but not for a video class. I took a general multimedia class that did a lot of work in Flash to get a better handle on that, and we had to do a big overall project in any media discipline. So of course I chose video to get something else in my portfolio.
I was the Communications Officer for the DCC and I worked on this project with the VP. She ended up doing the coordinating and I did the shooting and editing, which worked just fine for me.
The project was shot on one of the school's HD Canon cameras (I can't remember the model) and honestly, I struggled to make it look like I knew what I was doing during the shoot. Our subjects were a professor and an alumni, so it wasn't bigtime pressure, but I didn't want to look like an idiot. I had spent so much time focusing on post, I had let myself not be so confident on the camera. But I managed to do just fine, luckily.
This project otherwise came together pretty easily. It was intended to be shown on the internal video system at IUPUI, which is why we went with the border. I personally still don't care for the border, but my partner insisted, so there it is.
I was the Communications Officer for the DCC and I worked on this project with the VP. She ended up doing the coordinating and I did the shooting and editing, which worked just fine for me.
The project was shot on one of the school's HD Canon cameras (I can't remember the model) and honestly, I struggled to make it look like I knew what I was doing during the shoot. Our subjects were a professor and an alumni, so it wasn't bigtime pressure, but I didn't want to look like an idiot. I had spent so much time focusing on post, I had let myself not be so confident on the camera. But I managed to do just fine, luckily.
This project otherwise came together pretty easily. It was intended to be shown on the internal video system at IUPUI, which is why we went with the border. I personally still don't care for the border, but my partner insisted, so there it is.
Portfolio - Vollrath Speakeasy Tour
This was created for NUVO and I believe it was the last video I did for them. It was a bizarre time. Katie shot it and I attempted to direct the interview, though the subject had a bit of a mind of his own which we're pretty used to. The Vollrath is a very old bar in a very bad part of Indy. We tried to capture some of the band that performed as well, but the sound quality of the bar mixed with the screaming metal quality of the band didn't really capture on tape so well. We got a tour of the basement from one of the workers (who also explained what a speakeasy is somewhat inaccurately which kind of stinks) and tried to capture the environment the best we could. It was kind of a whirlwind tour and definitely difficult to edit it cohesively.
I decided to open the video with some of the goings-on of the bar itself to show what it's like today, and a little bit of the only good audio we got from the band. I used the audio as a segue into the basement where the speakeasy was, and since the quality got bad, it was nearly unusable after that point. Rather than scrap it, I decided to EQ it so it sounded dull and as though it were coming from above, like it actually sounded when we were walking around down there. It made for a rather creepy effect.
There are a ton of cuts with the audio because our guide kept going off on tangents, both interesting and not that interesting. The raw footage I dealt with did not show any signs of life and I thought maybe after the initial review of the footage that we wouldn't find anything compelling in it. But after a little thinking, I came up with the structure you see now and I feel like if someone is interested in the Vollrath, this will serve them well.
I decided to open the video with some of the goings-on of the bar itself to show what it's like today, and a little bit of the only good audio we got from the band. I used the audio as a segue into the basement where the speakeasy was, and since the quality got bad, it was nearly unusable after that point. Rather than scrap it, I decided to EQ it so it sounded dull and as though it were coming from above, like it actually sounded when we were walking around down there. It made for a rather creepy effect.
There are a ton of cuts with the audio because our guide kept going off on tangents, both interesting and not that interesting. The raw footage I dealt with did not show any signs of life and I thought maybe after the initial review of the footage that we wouldn't find anything compelling in it. But after a little thinking, I came up with the structure you see now and I feel like if someone is interested in the Vollrath, this will serve them well.
Backlogging some entries...
I decided to do a short blog post about each video in my portfolio. I'll be linking them to my portfolio site, so after people watch the video, they can click through to read the blog to learn more personal details about the creation. I felt like I should do this because as an editor, it's our job to remain invisible and make everything look awesome. Well, not every piece of footage that crosses our path is awesome. It's hard to really show how you turned a piece around just by showing it, so hopefully I can get that across to people who care to know more about it. And if they don't, they simply won't click through the link, and all will be well!
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