Stimulating Pixels

This is the second video I’ve ever uploaded. Much like the first one, it’s a crowd leaving an event. This time, it’s folks leaving Lollapalooza 2009 after Tool closed out the second night.

This Way To The Egress II from Stimulating Pixels on Vimeo.

Pay attention to the movement in the back by the glowing sphere to help get an idea of how many people are moving. I think the overall ticket sales were ~80,000. I’m sure they weren’t all there, but a lot of them were.

Note: if you do not like crowds, these type of music festivals are probably not for you. At least not the headliners for each night. During the early parts of the day, it’s not bad at all. For the last shows of each day, everyone gathers around one of two stages and then all leave at the same time when the set is over. I find the resulting mass of people in various stats of inebriation fun to watch.

This was shot on my recently acquired F200 point and shoot. Once again, I’m blown away with the quality little consumer cameras can capture these days.

A gentleman named Jeff Veen giving a talk at an Ignite show about the idea of “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” He focuses a little on the iPhone with points I think are valid, but that’s just an example for the underlying idea and its refinement. I love the way he describes it.

To me, the the way he talks about stealing is more about learning from someone/something and then using what you learn to create something new for the world. What a great take on things.

Skimming through my RSS news reader, I came across this video of “The Philharmonicas” playing a song called Powerhouse.

It sounded familiar at first and then at about 1:10, I figured out why. It’s the tune that is used during assembly line scenes in Looney Tunes shorts. Before the www, I used to wonder what the name was but never really had a way to look it up. Even though I’ve thought of it since then, I never looked it up. Perhaps that song was stuck in an old mindset.

Found via Laughing Squid. I would hire these guys. Created by Stink Digital.

I’m a stills guy. Not a video guy. It took me over a year with my latest point and shoot to actually think about the fact that it has video and to give it a try. Even longer to get the first real clip shot and posted. Today is the day. Here is my first video internet post.

This is the tail end of the crowd leaving Bryant-Denny after the 2008 Iron Bowl where the Tide beat the stew outta Auburn. Final score, a 36-0 shutout. Watching the fans move at roughly the same speed across caught my eye and I decided it would make a worthy video. This was after most of the fans had already filed out. Next time I’m there, I’ll see if I can get on the ramp earlier and see what it looks like with more people packed together.

While this isn’t fundamentally different from creating an audio track from a bunch of samples, the fact that it’s from youTube clips gives it extra points.

Of course, that wouldn’t matter if it didn’t groove.

There has been an increasing trend of video used for posts on the web recently. Often, this is taking the "embed" code and putting a video from youTube or a youTube clone on another site. This easy clipping of content continues to filter out as more and more people see clips they like and copy them over.

For the most part, these don’t require any work. It’s just a simple copy and paste job. Then, there’s folks who talk the source video and clip and reassemble themselves to create a new peice of content. Call it Remix, Mashup or whatever, this type of clipping can also provide some very entertaining results. Two examples are below.

In case you haven’t seen The Sopranos and don’t get the meaning of uncensored, you now have fair warning that there is a lot of dialog that’s not safe for the office. In fact, damn near all of it is considering the clip is billed as every curse word from every episode of the show.

Kudos to the folks who put these together for taking the time to do it. They have much more patients than I.

The video below has been making the rounds over the past few days. It’s a commercial for Durex condoms featuring condom/balloon animals going at it.

It was created by a company called Superfad who have done a lot of other great work. For one, they created "outtakes" of the Durex commercial that are well worth a watch.

More impressive is their reel. It’s got some beautiful images in there and stands as a great example of why we don’t have much of a chance against commercials. I mean, when stuff looks that cool, you’d have to be lacking a pulse not to be influenced.

Excellent stuff.

More and more the content I see come across my new reader contains video, and the quality of that video (both technically and content wise) continues to increase. Most of the video I consume is not from the original site. More often than not it’s a youTube video that is embedded on another site.

If you are just going for views of your video this is fine, but the real key is to make sure that views know who the hell you are. I expect to see an increasing number of people posting little banners at the start and end of their videos that contain their specific web site. This is critical if the creator wants to draw traffic to their own site and generally speaking, this is the goal since that’s where the ads served make them money.

Here’s an entertaining example I found on Laughing Squid:

Song # 10! “3 Rules of the Internet” from rockcookiebottom.com.

NOTE: For those of you who are afraid of monkeys, don’t worry about the slate in the video window. Other than that photo, I don’t think monkeys even make an appearance.

A long time ago, I saw this video for the song “Sugar Water” by Cibo Matto.

While trying to see if I could find it online, I was looking for “Backwards videos” and came across a page that had this one for the song “Typical” by Mute Math.

I’d never heard of them, but I dig the tune. They have a site mutemath.com if you want to check out more.