Let Me Smoke My Pipe!
Dan’s not the only one that can post videos. Here’s one I really enjoyed. I heard about this guy in a podcast that covered a steam punk gathering in London.
Who do I need to slap upside the head?
Every once in a while, while reading Wikipedia to try and figure out why some show from my childhood isn’t available on DVD, I read that music rights are holding back the DVD. I understand that these shows were created back before DVDs and, therefore, some kind of weird legal loophole is keeping the tv show rights holders from using the music. But I think that whoever owns the music should just let it be used! Why? Because it can end up leading to music sales for the music rights holder. This wasn’t the case in the bad old days of records and CDs. But now that the viewer can just buy any song he/she wants, the music rights holder is just losing money for no reason. Recent example: Danielle is currently working her way through the Nip/Tuck DVDs. After watching the season four finale, she searched around the Internet to find the song and then bought it off Amazon.
Creative Commons
First my amaturish Creative Commons video:
The Creative Commons from djotaku on Vimeo.
Now, this awesome one I saw on Lawrence Lessig’s Blog:
drop the bomb productions gets a facelift
After having tried drupal for a couple of years on an unrelated site, I came to see that it would be a great way to develop a new site for drop the bomb productions. After about two days of converting the site over, you can now see the results. I think it results in a cleaner, easier to navigate site and I think it’ll be easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
ZeroPunctuation - Awesome video game reviews!
The word irreverent is tossed around way too flippantly these days, however, if there’s one site that deserves it, it’s ZeroPunctuation. ZeroPunctuation is a site where a British guy living in Australia reviews video games within a video format weekly. He often makes fun of games and the genres they belong in. The animation is extremely simple, yet remarkably effective. It’s slightly more than xkcd, but not much more than stick figures. The way he does this is brilliant and it must be seen in order to explain it correctly. Just one warning, if you get queasy over profanity, do NOT visit his site.
Incongruitastic
When I first began to study about Salvador Dali, I looked up surrealism in Wikipedia. The article mentioned that surrealism was not limited to the art of painting. It also extended to video work. I always wondered what a surreal movie might be like. Well, I have found one that, for some reason, has really stuck to me. It’s called Incongruitastic. This project originated with the animator wanting to combine all of his ideas into one short film. The result is episode 0, which is extremely surreal.
Crank That is the new Mashup Sensation
This annoyingly catchy rap song with crazy dance moves (there’s even a video online by the rapper to show you how to do the dance) is being put into all kinds of mashups. For some reason, these all seem to involve kiddie movies and Tv shows. Anyway, this gave me a pretty good laugh for a while. So, even though I hate linking to youtube videos (since they have an annoying tendency to be taken off), check these out while they last. First, check out the original, so you know what they’re parodying.
Vimeo Introduces Channels
One long standing request on the Vimeo forums was for Vimeo to adopt some features from flickr; namely sets and groups. Well, Vimeo decided to mix it up and create a hybrid all their own. Dubbed Channels, they are an interesting mechanism. A user creates a channel and then the user can add his own videos to that channel as well as the videos of anyone else he thinks matches the channel criteria. So it’s like a set, but you can add others so it’s like a group, but only you are allowed to add in videos. I think it’s annoying that only the channel moderator can add new videos. However, I do like a lot of the extra features they added such as blogs and RSS feeds. I’ve wanted a way to blog within vimeo about vimeo-specific things that were just way too specific to mention in this blog.
mytoons.com is pretty awesome!
What makes mytoons.com so awesome is the fact that they truly do care about their users. Due to what I wrote about my experiences with my “Shrodinger’s Cat” video on their site, I’ve had their lead web support guy email me and we’re actively working on the problem right now. That and getting the comment on my blog from the President is pretty sweet. I’m very happy with this experience as it shows they truly care and are truly working towards having the best animation site on the net. It’s like being in involved in an open source project where they accept your constructive criticism as input towards improving the product instead of something that needs to be swept under the rug.
mytoons.com annoyances
It does not seem to support HD aspect ratio (widescreen) videos while Vimeo does.
“Shrodinger’s Cat” is not any higher quality than on Vimeo.
So far there aren’t too many views, but there hasn’t been a lot of time for people to see my videos just yet.
