Tag: video

Lords of the Dance

It’s been a very very long time since I posted a Silly Moment in Techno.

This made me laugh so hard that people around the office were concerned for my welfare.

Thank you Andy, you made my day.

Making A YouTube Band

Making A YouTube Band

If you play solo clips from YouTube on the same page at the same time it sounds oddly like a band (kinda). I’ve got a project on the go to try and make an interesting random YouTube band maker. But I need some help.

See what it sounds like here, and read more: https://www.crackunit.com/theband/

Sorry if the page looks funny in some browsers, I built it with iWeb to see how good it is – I’m sure the code is minging but just wanted to see if it could do the job – I’ve only tested it on Safari and Firefox 3 on Mac (shoddy I know). If the page doesn’t look like the image above I’d love to hear the details in the comments below.

The Girl Effect

The design of this charity site is really lovely. To my ill-trained eyes the typography is nice. And I like their promo film too. Everything about just feels like it works together.

And they made sharing so easy I’d have felt mean not doing…

The Girl Effect - Home

iPhone as VJ / DJ Controller via Midi

I know someone who is holding out on getting an iPhone because he was a bit scathing about them when they first came out. He’s scared of being shown up as a fool and a traitor when he gets one.

This video is just another example of the kind of thing that becomes possible if he just swallowed his pride. Nik, it’s time. It really is.

And if that wasn’t enough, this video showing an iPhone controlling Ableton Live nearly made me wee with excitement:

Looks Like Carphone Warehouse, Smells (and Sounds) Like Minilogue

Minilogue video by Kristopher Storm (Music by Minilogue).

Carphone Warehouse ad by Kristopher Storm (Music by Minilogue).

I’m really confused. Everything in my brain is shutting down and I’ve got no idea what to say about it. My groove has been well and truly freaked.

I saw the Carphone Warehouse ad on telly and thought this is quite a nice advertisement. Then something twitched in my brain and I thought “Fuck me, that really reminds me of that Minilogue video”, then I heard the music at the end and though “Fuck me, it even sounds like bloody Minilogue”.

Then I went and looked both of them up and realised that they’ve been done by the same guy: Kristofer Strom.

Here’s why my brain almost imploded:

  1. I’m glad that it’s not a ripoff or ‘homage’
  2. I like the fact they’ve gone to the source to get it made – I like the idea of people being ‘discovered’ on YouTube then being given decent budgets to make more of their ‘art’
  3. I think it works well as a ad, I think it’s nice
  4. It’s taking something that’s been seen by 3m people globally (on YouTube) and whacking it all over the ad breaks on UK TV where it will be seen my millions more (don’t know if I feel good or bad about that – probably just neutral)
  5. BUT CREATIVELY IT FEELS LIKE THE LAZIEST THING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD EVER, doesn’t it?
  6. Or does point 5 even matter? If it’s a good ad that tells the right story and engages the target market (and the creator is getting duly rewarded) why should I be such a stuck-up creative fuckwad about it?

I don’t know how anyone else feels about it, but it’s certainly raised a debate in my head that’s not dying down…

Is this the future? Does it even matter? Do I really care?

Powerful Tools In The Hands of Idiots – Part 1: After Effects

I’ve just started messing around with Adobe After Effects. You might wonder why. I sort of wonder why too.

Thing is I’ve been working with Keynote recently and getting a bit inspired at how it can do cool stuff with video. Then it dawned on me that by blurring the lines between video and presentation using something like After Effects maybe I could do some really cool stuff. You know, disguising a lack of substance using style.

It might just be a waste of time. But I’m sort of enjoying it.

After a couple of hours of playing around and watching a few online tutorials I realised just how powerful After Effects is. Even in the hands of a total imbecile.

This (very badly done) floating head was executed in about 30 minutes (once I’d got to grips with some basics). If you know anything about this kind of thing you’ll spot how shoddy it is. But in my defence I’ve got bad lighting, a severe case of impatience and very little skill:

Once I’d done that I realised that I had to do the thing that everyone does when they get a shot at After Effects. MAKE A LIGHT SABER!!! Star Wars kid here we come…

But I decided I’d try sticking it up my nose instead:

Obviously it needs sound effects and it’s very short because my impatience kicked in again…

I wasn’t going to share these videos because they’re not very good.

But then I figured that perhaps it’s good to share the fact that it’s easy to have a go at this kind of thing. And actually it is possible to teach yourself new, seemingly very complicated things, quite quickly – albeit to a fairly rudimentary standard.

I’m thinking that modern software is really rather excellent.

A $5 Laser Show – OMG OMG OMG!

I love lasers and music. I just do. So I almost wet myself when I saw this great video of a $5 laser show:

Full instructions on how to make your own are here.

Or Dr Altman will take you through all the necessary steps right here:

Perhaps the best thing is the discovery (in the comments here) is that all you really need to do is mount a tiny mirror on your speaker cone and point the laser at it to get a sound activated laser working like a dream.

Guess who’s heading to eBay to buy lasers…

It’s a Kind Of Bally Foamy Thing

Further proof that all ads are rapidly tending towards a point of absolute singularity…

By Publicis for Orange Slovakia as far as I can make out. Via Space Invaders.

What Advertising Can Learn From Radiohead

I wasn’t going to blog about the House of Cards video and it’s brilliant integration with Google and the geekosphere. I wasn’t going to blog it because everyone else has. It is bloody brilliant though. Yet another example of how Radiohead really understand the importance of context.

So I wasn’t going to post it, then I realised it’s a golden opportunity for me to share a presentation I did at the Online Marketing and Media Show last month. I got invited by NMA to talk on a Creative Directors Showcase thingy. Me, Flo from Dare, Sam from Lean Mean Fighting Machine and Dom from Glue all got to chat about things we’ve seen recently that we like. The other guys all did a great job and showed us lots of cool online / mobile advertising things.

Instead of doing it on something that I liked, I chose to do 5 minutes on Radiohead ;-)

Basically it’s all about how I don’t like Radiohead, but how, through being interesting and innovative, they’ve made me like the ‘idea’ of Radiohead. Imagine if normal brands could do that. Make you care about products you don’t even like that much. I reckon there’s stuff we can learn from the ‘head.

I tried to format it for online video as best as I could (I added some extra words so it can be followed without me speaking, and I put some music in it to stop it feeling too silent) – but I’m not good enough at that kind of thing to make all the timings quite right, so please forgive any bits that feel too slow or too fast.

I hope no-one minds that I used their footage in there. I specifically use the examples of:

I’ve just noticed that Radiohead are a bit shit at search engine optimisiation though. With page titles like this:

RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS – Google Code

How is anyone supposed to find them. Like anyone will look for all those spaces and underscores ;-)

Admission: I really posted this because I had an odd experience in the pub on Tuesday night, a bloke approached me and asked if I’d done a presentation on Radiohead. He’d seem me do it. Live. I felt almost famous. For a second.