Archie McPhee’s wristbands, made from recycled paper?

Thursday, July 30th, 2009
I love my gray “ENNUI” wristband, Seattle awesomeness store Archie McPhee’s answer to the ubiquitous Livestrong and Wriststrong bracelets, but somehow I don’t think the gray rubber ring is actually “Made with recycled paper” as is stated on the packaging. It’s the thought that counts?

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Music: Soko, “I’ll Kill Her”. Awesomeness.

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
Since I don’t live in Europe, I often miss out on the better music that hits the charts over there. I’m not saying they listen to better crap than USians in general because that generalization doesn’t1 ring true (case in point: Crazy Frog didn’t go nuclear over here, thank god).

But every once in a while I hear something awesome from across the pond, and am surprised it got a massive amount of airtime elsewhere and is completely unknown here. The songs of Soko, a French singer/actress, fall into that category. Here’s her demented folk-rock hit “I’ll Kill Her”:

I ran into the song because it was the inspiration and soundtrack of this great motion graphics piece:

http://motionographer.com/2009/07/08/joerg-barton-ill-kill-her/

Worth a listen and a look IMO. Broaden your horizons, listen to songs about murderous impulses from across the pond2.

  1. I nearly wrote “…that generalization doesn’t always ring true…”, meaning to imply that sometimes the generalization is true. But since a generalization that is sometimes true is by definition not a generalization at all, I left the original statement unqualified. To be clear, I think there’s plenty of great music all over the world, and plenty of crap. [↩]
  2. After all my larger-world talk and attempts at drawing sweeping conclusions, I should point out that Soko has apparently moved to Los Angeles. So I guess that makes her yet another singer who lives in the US but is for now only well known and popular as a recording artist and performer in Europe, like David Hasselhoff or Steven Seagall. [↩]

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SmoothCam test #1: AJ developing a musical idea on a piano

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

A SmoothCam Test – AJ testing an idea on the piano from ZachFine on Vimeo. Available in larger size for playback and/or download here.
This is a test of Final Cut Pro’s “SmoothCam” motion stabilization filter. I’ve set two videos side-by-side. On the left, the original clip. On the right, the SmoothCam version with the following settings:

Auto Scale: 1
Actual Scale: 138%
Translation Smooth: 1.5
Rotation Smooth: 2
Scale Smooth: 0
Mix: 100

The original clip was shot with a Canon HV20 mounted on a Steadicam Merlin, so it was fairly smooth to begin with. I was pleased with how well the SmoothCam filter ironed out the rotational skewing of the camera without being noticeable about it. I do wish the filter didn’t autoscale the entire clip to match the worst of the movement, and instead the adjusted clip could start with the wide and then smoothly scale in to cover the adjustments, then smoothly scale out for segments that were more stable. Had I shot with a higher shutter speed, the motion blur on the subject wouldn’t be as bad.

I’m sure I’ll end up using this SmoothCam filter on some footage one of these days. It’s a nice effect. I’ve already had FCP batch analyze all my footage from the SXSW festival. The fact that the filter works very quickly on clips whose motion has already been batch analyzed is a deal-maker.

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