The AV Club Blog The AV Club Blog The AV Club Blog is filled with all of the things we, the total dorks that we are, find interesting. We also post a lot of behind the scenes info on our current and upcoming videos, so there is a whole lot to see in here. 
Articles
Old Media Lashes Out? Viralcom
2008-04-23 19:17:00 Watch this video at YouTubeI just watched the first two episodes of Viralcom“, a new web series from the evidently very well funded Joey and David (they seem to be getting the $ and access to locations from Warner Brothers’ Studio 2.0), and I have a few thoughts on it that I felt were worth ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Old Media Lashes Out? Viralcom", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/old-media- lashes-out-viralcom" }); More About: Television , Internet
Thank Thankyou For Being Awesome
2008-04-23 19:06:00 Click above to observe the motion graphics prowess of thankyou; then bow and be humbled. These guys are GOOD at what they do, which is specifically making everyone else look like a bunch of hacks. I am at a loss to choose words that adequately encompass how much I respect them right now, ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Thank Thankyou For Being Awesome ", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/thank-than kyou-for-being-awesome" }); More About: Design
The Worst Song Ever?
2008-04-22 19:00:00 BoingBoing recently linked to “The Most Unwanted Song “, a piece that was designed to contain all of the worst aspects of music, as determined by opinion polls. I listened to the song and found it to be laugh out loud funny, as did Jess, so I figured it was more than worth passing along ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "The Worst Song Ever?", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/the-worst- song-ever" });
Lost America
2008-04-22 01:56:00 I have always been a big fan of long exposure nighttime photography. It’s like entering a strangely familiar alien landscape, where the sunlit daytime world melts away to reveal a world lit by stoplights, neon signs, and the night sky. On the “Lost America ” site, you can see the work of photographer Troy Paiva. ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Lost America", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/lost-ameri ca" });
A Worthy Successor To Boring 3D:
2008-04-21 19:24:00 I think I have found a worthy successor to Boring 3D for the title of “most interesting and consistently updated 3D artwork on the web”, and its name is Zamak. I love the mixture of photorealistic rendering with their imaginative and unconventional character designs; really interesting and original work. They add new images ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "A Worthy Successor To Boring 3D:", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/a-worthy-s uccessor-to-boring-3d" }); More About: Design
Friday Mystery Video Funtime Go!
2008-04-18 22:01:00 Watch this video at YouTubeWatch this video. What do you think this is? What is that noise, what is happening here, where is this? Answer after the jump, but have some fun, try to guess first! This is an art/public works installation in Zadar, Croatia called the Sea Organ. These steps contain ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Friday Mystery Video Funtime Go!", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/friday-mys tery-video-funtime-go" });
Excuse me, does this belong to you?
2008-04-17 20:45:00 FOUND Magazine is an online publication that is updated daily with interesting finds from around the world. Here you will find everything from angry notes left on parked cars to discarded photographs and wadded up shopping lists. The submissions are sourced from many locations like garage sales, old lockers, the street, public transportation, etc. It is ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Excuse me, does this belong to you?", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/excuse-me- does-this-belong-to-you" });
Should We BuyThis? (Pt.9)
2008-04-14 19:35:00 It has been a while since I updated you all on the ongoing 6 month saga of “Jess and Andy move in to the Sweet“, so I decided it was time for a glimpse of what’s up. We have a bed, dressers, a couch, an entertainment system and a charging station, now we need ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Should We BuyThis? (Pt.9)", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/should-we- buythis-pt9" });
A Day In The Life: ?Digital Grunt?
2008-04-09 20:26:00 Watch this video at YouTube This video was made by a few friends of mine, and it so perfectly encapsulates the daily grind that is working in VFX that I have no way to expand upon it. It is a tiny bit long, but stick with it if you can, there are a bunch ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "A Day In The Life : “Digital Grunt”", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/a-day-in-t he-life-digital-grunt" }); More About: Day In The Life
?Speed Racer? Is 95% Guaranteed To Suck:
2008-04-08 02:01:00 Watch this video at YouTubeWhen I saw the first teaser trailer for “Speed Racer ” I said to myself, “Man, that looks like ass”. Then a bunch of other people said the same thing, so I decided that I didn’t really need to speak up too vocally about it. Then the newest trailer came ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "“Speed Racer” Is 95% Guaranteed To Suck :", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/speed-race r-is-95-guaranteed-to-suck" });
Hammock Bed
2008-04-04 19:11:00 It has been a while since I have posted anything for the simple sake of saying, “doesn’t this look neat!?!”, so here is just such a post. This hammock/queen sized bed/bean bag from Le Beanock is totally going in my rec room. As soon as I get a rec room that is. ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Hammock Bed", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/hammock-be d" });
Updating? Updating?. To Wordpress 2.5!
2008-04-03 06:38:00 We are in the process of updating around here to Wordpress 2.5, and this is the first post under the new admin. I would like to join the wide chorus of voices singing this major update’s praises- there are a ton of great new things under the hood. If you run a blog on ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Updating… Updating…. To Wordpress 2.5!", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/updating-u pdating-to-wordpress-25" });
Babelgum Online Film Festival
2008-03-27 08:12:00 Check out the commercial I directed for the Babelgum Online Film Festival ! Shot by Craig, starring Jeff, and post-productioned [yes I know that’s not a word, but it was fun to write] with a bunch of help from a new accomplice, Aaron. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Babelgum Online Film Festival", url: "http://mint.theavclub.tv/feeder/?FeederA ction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28rss2%2 9&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.theavclub.tv %2Fpost%2Fbabelgum-online-film-festival&# 38;seed_title=Babelgum+Online+Film+Festiv al" }); More About: Movies
Babelgum Online Film Festival
2008-03-27 08:12:00 Check out the commercial I directed for the Babelgum Online Film Festival ! Shot by Craig, starring Jeff, and post-productioned [yes I know that’s not a word, but it was fun to write] with a bunch of help from a new accomplice, Aaron. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Babelgum Online Film Festival", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/babelgum-o nline-film-festival" }); More About: Movies
Will Novels Die?
2008-03-24 18:12:00 In paper form, yes. Before I expand, read this article by novelist David Louis Edelman. For the short attention spanned, here are the most important parts: We haven?t always had novels. No, in fact, while recorded human history has been going on for five thousand years now (depending on how you define it), the novel has been around for less than five hundred (depending on how you define it)… The fact of the matter is that the novel itself is an art form that evolved to take advantage of a certain new technology, namely the printing press. Why do books tend to be no larger than around 8? x 12?? Because that?s about as large as you can make a book and still be able to hold it comfortably in your hands and transport it from place to place. Why does the print tend to be around a point size of 12? Because that?s about as small as you can make text and still have it be readable at arm?s length. Take those limitations and you?ll find that you can?t easily pack more than 200,000 wor... More About: Design , Novels
Will Novels Die?
2008-03-24 18:12:00 In paper form, yes. Before I expand, read this article by novelist David Louis Edelman. For the short attention spanned, here are the most important parts: We haven?t always had novels. No, in fact, while recorded human history has been going on for five thousand years now (depending on how you define it), the ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Will Novels Die?", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/will-novel s-die" }); More About: Technology
Things Other People Did When They Were Your Age:
2008-03-21 18:17:00 Feeling adequate today? Click this link and that situation will be cured right away. Enter your age and it will spit back a list of famous people and what they accomplished when they were your age. This is what I have not accomplished yet: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. dropped out from his job at ...SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Things Other People Did When They Were Your Age:", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/things-oth er-people-did-when-they-were-your-age" }); More About: Internet
Things Other People Did When They Were Your Age:
2008-03-21 18:17:00 Feeling adequate today? Click this link and that situation will be cured right away. Enter your age and it will spit back a list of famous people and what they accomplished when they were your age. This is what I have not accomplished yet: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. dropped out from his job at General Electric to become a full-time writer. Henry David Thoreau went off for two years to live alone in a cabin at Walden Pond. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space. Memphis millionaire Frederic W. Smith, whose father built the Greyhound bus system, founded Federal Express. Scottish botanist David Douglas discovered the Douglas fir. Ernest Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Boston dentist William Morton pioneered modern anaesthesiology after learning that inhalation of ether will cause a loss of consciousness. Jimi Hendrix choked to death on his own vomit after ingesting wine and sleeping pills. Janis Joplin died of an overdose of whiskey and hero... More About: People , Things
Magic Eye 2.0
2008-03-20 18:51:00 Click the above image to see it full rez, then relax your eyes until the message becomes clear to you. This is the first time that I have seen an autostereogram using just text, but I am sure it is not a new technique. It is, however, cool. Via MILITANTPLATYPUS. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Magic Eye 2.0", url: "http://blog.theavclub.tv/post/magic-eye- 20" }); More About: Interesting
Magic Eye 2.0
2008-03-20 18:51:00 Click the above image to see it full rez, then relax your eyes until the message becomes clear to you. This is the first time that I have seen an autostereogram using just text, but I am sure it is not a new technique. It is, however, cool. Via MILITANTPLATYPUS. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Magic Eye 2.0", url: "http://mint.theavclub.tv/feeder/?FeederA ction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28rss2%2 9&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.theavclub.tv %2Fpost%2Fmagic-eye-20&seed_title=Mag ic+Eye+2.0" });
Hack Youtube Videos To Play In Highrez!
2008-03-19 18:39:00 Watch this video at YouTubeWatch the above video for a few seconds, then watch this version. Notice a big difference? You should. The picture and sound are both better, by a wide margin, right? What you are seeing is my favorite new thing about Youtube - they encode all new uploads as 640×480 mpeg 4 Quicktimes, and there is a really simple way to get them to play that highrez version of any video. Add the following to the end of the URL, and if that video is available in highrez, it will play: &fmt=18 Anyone with an iPhone has been watching these versions when you use the Youtube app, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned that they were accessible on the web. Only newer videos are encoded like this, so it won’t work on a lot of their content, but it is worth trying. Pretty great, huh? Got any other interesting ‘hacks’ you’ve found on your journeys through the interwebs? SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Hack Youtube Videos To Play In Hi... More About: Internet
A Different Kind Of Red Camera
2008-03-18 21:30:00 This is not the Red One. This is MiniDigi AF 5.0, and it is beautiful. If you can’t guess, it is a digital remake of a classic. I have a few “olde timey” cameras I have been contemplating ways to convert into digital versions, if I ever get the time to do so. Call it an extreme back burner fascination. For now I’m content to shoot my Digitalomo shots to get my fix of flawed photography. This camera, however, would be kind of fun to use, no? Click the image to read more details. Via NOTCOT. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "A Different Kind Of Red Camera ", url: "http://mint.theavclub.tv/feeder/?FeederA ction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28rss2%2 9&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.theavclub.tv %2Fpost%2Fa-different-kind-of-red-camera& #38;seed_title=A+Different+Kind+Of+Red+Ca mera" }); More About: Design , Photography
Want To See Why I Went Overseas Last Year?
2008-03-13 20:22:00 Those of you who were reading this blog this time last year will remember that I went to Japan, Germany, and Italy for 5 weeks on a Discovery video shoot. After what has been, and certainly feels like, an eternity, they have finally started running the videos that we shot. Go see “Twist The Throttle“, directed by Dylan Weiss, shot by Andy Waruszewski and myself, in glorious HD, for free, on the web, right now, do it. What is the show about, you ask? I’ll let Dylan’s words take you through it: Shot entirely in High-Definition because of the multi-platform nature of the project, ?Twist The Throttle? is an inside and behind-the-scenes look at eight of the major and/or most storied motorcycle manufacturers in the world, including; Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Suzuki, BMW, Ducati, MV Agusta and Bimota. Segments showcase the remarkable histories of these brands, their manufacturing process, their R&D and of course their latest, greatest sportbikes. There?s also... More About: Television , Internet , Year , Overseas
2 Reasons Why I Don?t Care About The iPhone SDK:
2008-03-07 05:13:00 Those of you ‘in the know’ heard Apple’s big announcement today, which included the release of the iPhone SDK (software development kit) for anyone who wants to create applications for the device. The SDK will make it easy for developers to create applications, which will be made available to download right on the phone or in the iTunes store. This is a huge announcement, and it means that all of those jailbroken phones out there will someday be brought back into the fold and their awesome powers brought to all of the rest of us who are too lazy or too afraid (I am in both camps) to risk breaking our iPhones. “But this is great news”, you say; so why the title of this post? It is pretty simple really: I am not a software developer. All of our phones won’t be updated to accept new third party applications until the software update to 2.0 in June. That is three months from now. So basically, I don’t care what it can do- it doesn’t... More About: Iphone , Care , Reasons , Communications
?Single Serving? Sites
2008-03-04 18:31:00 A little while back, Kottke posted a great list of sites that only do one thing (and do it well). I spent a few minutes going down the list and was not disappointed once. Here are some good ones, but they are all good, so it’s better to go see the whole list. Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle showcases all the lovely things that the presidential candidate has done for you. Is It Christmas? You can do anything at ZOMBO.com. Beth Cherry keeps a single page blog with no archives. Sweet ideas, all of them. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "“Single Serving” Sites ", url: "http://mint.theavclub.tv/feeder/?FeederA ction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28rss2%2 9&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.theavclub.tv %2Fpost%2Fsingle-serving-sites&seed_t itle=%26%238220%3BSingle+Serving%26%23822 1%3B+Sites" });
I F##king Hate Mondays
2008-03-03 18:52:00 Not me, I love Mondays . But these guys effing hate them. Pretty funny stuff, compliments of Joe. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "I F##king Hate Mondays", url: "http://mint.theavclub.tv/feeder/?FeederA ction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28rss2%2 9&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.theavclub.tv %2Fpost%2Fi-fking-hate-mondays&seed_t itle=I+F%23%23king+Hate+Mondays" }); More About: King
Songs As Charts
2008-02-29 18:13:00 Dan sent me the link to this really funny Flickr gallery that breaks down songs into various types of charts, calendars, and graphs. There are way too many good ones to choose a few favorites, so here are a few random ones, you can see the rest for yourself. To see these ones better, click on them, the 400px wide resize did not do wonders for them. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Songs As Charts ", url: "http://mint.theavclub.tv/feeder/?FeederA ction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28rss2%2 9&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.theavclub.tv %2Fpost%2Fsongs-as-charts&seed_title= Songs+As+Charts" }); More About: Design
Climate Change Needs To Be Dealt With
2008-02-29 18:05:00 Watch this video at YouTubeI am posting this in case you have not seen it. It is very important that you at least acquaint yourself with the ideas discussed in this video; The basic gist, for the lazy, is: It doesn’t matter if Global Warming/Climate Change is happening, or what is causing it if it is; all that we do know is that the cost of doing nothing is too high, so our only option is to do something about it. The end. There is more info on this, and more videos on the topic, here. Greg Craven, the guy in the video, is on a one-man internet video crusade to prove not that Global Warming is real, but that fighting it is the only thing we can really afford to do. But, knowing governments, this is falling on deaf ears. Why shore up a levee when you can repair it after it breaks- that’s cheaper in the long run.. right? Isn’t it??? SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Climate Change Needs To Be Dealt With", url: "http://mint.theavclub.tv/feeder/?FeederA ction=clicked&#... More About: Science , News
Drobo Any Good?
2008-02-28 18:28:00 I have been deciding what to do about creating a better RAID situation for storing and working on AV Club videos. Currently, I back up manually to multiple drives and keep the tapes handy to recapture in case there are any problems. But this creates slow transfer times and I now have something like 8 drives that I need to mentally track the projects across. I have very recently started to look into a Drobo to solve my problems while keeping as much of the hardware that I already own as possible. My other option is manually building a RAID using my old PC (UGH!!). Here, as I see it, are the issues in play in this decision: A Drobo costs $500 and does not come with any drives, but I can use four of my existing drives easily (They vary in size from 80-300GB). If I go the homebrew RAID route, I need to buy new drives- a RAID 5 (what I would most likely build) is limited by its smallest drive, so to maximize storage I’d need matched drives and that means dropping some $$ on s... More About: Good
Starry Night
More articles from this author:2008-02-28 08:08:00 The other night Jess and I got her camera out and took some long exposure night time photos. This was the very first one I took, just to test the exposure, and it ended up being my favorite. Click on the image to see a larger but still nowhere near full rez of the photo (her camera is a 10MP DSLR, this blog doesn’t have the real estate to post the original rez). The weird dotted line of light in the top left corner is an airplane taking off from LAX, in case that wasn’t totally obvious to you already. I have wanted to mess around with long exposures for a while now- I don’t have much still photography experience overall but I definitely have wanted to get into it more, and this is the type of picture taking that has interested me the most. I want to do a lot more night time shooting, as well as try out some HDRI and macro photos, so I guess this is the first of hopefully a bunch of adventures in photography for us. Oh and I also want to do some time lapse vid... More About: Night , Starry Night 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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