Smart Energy

I directed and photographed this new video featuring a couple friends of mine who just graduated from WSU and started an organic farm just outside of Pullman. My colleague Phil Cable did the wonderful editing.

Here’s a cool rap video urging you to stop using all that plastic. This is in keeping with Plastic Planet, a documentary I reviewed here a while back. This video also puts me in mind of another film I reviewed, Gas Hole — which so totally missed the point about fossil fuels that I didn’t bother posting it here on Smart Energy (but you can read the review on Curled Up with a Good DVD).

So I’ve turned into a time lapse junkie and KJ seems to think it’s pretty cool, too, so here we go again. Just what we need: another project.

I’ve always loved t/l, especially of plants growing, but until recently it’s been expensive to produce decent footage. I mean, you have to leave a camera in a field or the woods for some period of time, taking it out of production and risking it being stolen. Recently, though, I was lucky enough to meet Roger P. Hangarter, a botanist at Indiana University, and an expert and artist of the time-lapse medium. He’s a scientist… and an artist!

He told me to give PlantCam a try. It’s cheap and produces an HD-ish image. It’s early days yet and I’m still learning how to best deploy the cameras, but here is an early effort that isn’t too dumb. This is about 5 days worth of images compressed into 50 seconds. Warts and all.

Holy crap, Eric Skye cooks. I’ve been listening to him for a few months now after getting on to him via a guitar mag article. Today I just got his solo acoustic album, “For Lulu.” Tis amazing.

His String Trio is hot stuff, too. Check out this 6+-minute version of Skye’s composition, “Happy Cake.” Skye bakes the cake, and the mando solo is the shit!

A snip from a marketing profs email; they’ll charge you to learn more about this. I won’t: call or email me for more information.

Video is a fresh, dynamic, and increasingly essential way for you to reach your customers.

* Visitors who view online product videos are 95% likelier to buy than visitors who do not view the videos. (Internet Retailer, April 2010)

* Video increases the likelihood of a front-page Google search result by 53x with proper page optimization. (Forrester, January 2010)

* A minute of video is worth 1.8 million words according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research. (Forrester, January 2009)

Loving Lampposts, a documentary by Todd Drezner: highly recommended.

Loving Lampposts: Living Autistic

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4.5 stars (out of 5 possible)
Directed by Todd Drezner
Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Todd Drezner’s beautiful investigation of autism is motivated by the personal. His son is autistic and loves to look at lampposts. They walk every day they can in Central Park and the young boy gazes up at the lampposts, recognizing them as individuals in ways us mere normals simply cannot.

There is a lot of bad information about autism out there and, with grace and compassion, Drezner gives even the lamest and most discredited notions their moment in the sun. The film is divided into sections and a recurring one is called “Autism is…” The reality is, no one knows for sure. But it is certainly not caused by vaccines or mercury, and it very likely isn’t genetic, either. Read the rest of this entry »

The title of this post comes from Nietzsche, while the video below comes from YouTube. This one-man band uses a looping pedal (if someone can tell me which pedal, that would be great) and is amazing. As one person commented on the video:

it’s so sad that rebecca blacks bullshit has 30 million something views, and this which is amazing only has 65,000 someone needs to fix popular culture

Yeah, well, as Nietzsche said, “Success has always been a great liar.”

In Hong Kong, because of the space, apartments are small and expensive. Gary Chang, an architect, decided to design a 344 sq. ft. apartment to be able to change into 24 different designs, all by just sliding panels and walls. He calls this the “Domestic Transformer.”

I’ve been a fan of Diego Stocco’s since I saw his Experibass video a couple years ago. He’s up to new tricks with the Bassoforte:

I started thinking about how I could re-purpose the keyboard of the dismantled piano I keep in the garden, so I thought to build a new instrument by combining it with some other parts I had laying around. I ended up with this mechanical hybrid thing I thought to call “Bassoforte” (bass + pianoforte).

The neck is from a broken electric bass, as a bridge I used a cabinet handle, the pickups are from a guitar, and the part at the top where the strings are attached is a chimney cap, which works as resonator as well as percussive sound.