Every year the Volunteer Center hosts their Hats Off event celebrating local heroes in volunteering and community service. As in past years I produced video and graphics for the event.
After the success of last year’s “The Volunteer Experience” video featuring Volunteer Center staff we decided to make a similar video featuring Bay Area volunteers. The participants all tell a great story about how volunteering can change lives (including their own!) and benefits the community. For the full effect be sure to watch the HD version at youtube.
A video response to the iPad release from Adobe. It’s a video that shows the wealth of flash content available on a myriad of devices, including new smart phones like the Palm Pre and Google Nexus 1. Check it out here:
I served as creative director, editor and as the lead of the motion graphics team. The video was shot on a Sony F23 and thanks to the hard work of Thomas Tucker and Jim Rolin of VideoFax, it looks pretty sweet. Almost all of the screens are live – only a couple were composited and only because of licensing issues.
While I agree that Flash will soon be replaced as the dominant media player for video on the internet, I think it’s shortsighted of Apple to completely ignore it on the iPhone OS. Flash was the technology that stretched the boundaries of what was possible for the internet in the past and I think it’s the leading contender for that role in the future as well. As an example – how else would someone create something like Chat Roulette?
Personally I would like to have the choice – a well tended, walled garden or the unknown wilderness. There is beauty and wonder to be found in each.
Fascinating! Powerful smart phones have become so ubiquitous so quickly that I think many people forget that they have made the über-geek vision of wearable computing a humble reality. But the big barrier for wearable computing was always the interface – how did you make input? Where was the screen?
While we are still some years away from the screens of tomorrow that I imagine (low powered lasers in your glasses that would paint virtual screens directly on to your retina), I think this is a big step forward in the input problem. The soft-key interface of the iPhone proves that people can get by just fine without physical buttons. Personally it took a long while to get used to, but in time I’ve discovered that I can type far more rapidly and accurately than I ever did on my Palm Treo with its Blackberry style keyboard.
So to take this concept a step furthere, why waste valuable screen real estate with keyboards, buttons and other interface elements? If you can turn the body itself into an interface device, perhaps by making our fingertips into sensors, than any surface could be used for soft-keys.
Incredible! Apparently this will be an automagical implementation of Google Voice technologies.
Not only is this an incredible boon to the hearing impaired (or anyone that wants to watch videos with the sound turned off), this is one way to start automatically adding searchable metadata to video content.
I had always heard it was that gnarly section of 22nd Street in Noe Valley between Church and Vicksburg but is it really? Read this post for a fascinating look at one blogger’s attempt to find out for sure.
Surely I’m not the only one who finds that a turkey dinner is far more tasty as leftovers than it ever was when originally served.
We had the standard turkey for Christmas dinner at my in-laws house this year and even though it was great, it was when I made the leftovers into San Francisco style* holiday-burritos that it really shone.
* All of the ingredients jammed inside the tortilla.
Yeesh – many is the day I wish I had actually gotten some schooling in coding web pages. However, progress has been made, things have been learned and some modicum of success was achieved.
Here’s me racing in the third race of the Bay Area Super Prestige Cyclo-cross Series. Judging by the look of determination and lack of pain this is probably early in the race and before I ended up crashing twice on the hill of lamentation.*
* The site of many a fellow rider’s troubles that day.
A great post here about someone who tried to make a last go of shooting 35mm film. It didn’t work out too well. Oh well. Film is dead – long live film?
I have long ignored the technological battles and ideological warfare between film purists and digital zealots. Use what you’ve got and use it to get a little better each time. Accept that digital photography is supplanting film the same way that ball point pens trumped fountain pens and move on with life.
If you like film so much – keep shooting it! There will always be a place for film and it will never (never!) go away entirely. People still do calligraphy with fountain pens (or even quills!). To me the technology is secondary anyway – the only thing that really matters is where you point your camera and when you trip the shutter. A great story is a great story whether typed on an old Smith Corona, scratched out in pencil or carved into runes.
The film vs. digital smackdown reminds me a lot of the sturm und drang in motion picture editing over the arrival of computer based non-linear editors. There was lot of moaning about weird visceral connections to the medium and the need to “feel” the film. Ok – so the process is different now – what you’ve lost in feeling you’ve gained in speed of iteration in never misplacing trimmed frames. Is one process better than the other? I think not – they’re two different processes, and so it is with film versus digital photography. Film is great and digital is great, and they’re both great for different reasons.
But to me, the thing that is really great is photography itself – to capture and record light in a precise enough matter that another person who wasn’t there can experience it too is nothing short of miraculous.
You may have seen a grey bio-diesel bus chugging around the Bay Area filled with people having a great time dancing to great music and wondered “what the hell is that, and how do I get on?”
Wonder no longer – Transported SF is hands down the most fun dance party San Francisco has to offer. With an open floor plan, seating for 40 and a sound system that can blast beats inside or out the party rolls with you as the crew takes you on three hour journey to places in and around the city.
So get on the trolley… er bus!
P.S. You can also rent out the buses for private parties.
