This is my blog for now. A place where I post links, tell stories, give reviews, talk about my day, or just B.S. to fill some space. Hope you enjoy this work in progress.
Ok this wasn’t a total original idea but it is a cool one. Saw this post on Veronica Belmont’s blog and had to give it a shot. The rules of the Sixth Photo Meme are these:
“It works like this: if you use Flickr, go to the sixth page of your photostream and pick the sixth picture there, then post it to your blog.”
My Sixth Photo is one of my wife, Sarah outside of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth,TX. I know its not obscure and jarring like Veronica’s Shrunken Heads but its a good one.
Now for the second part of the meme. I get to tag 6 lucky friends to carry on the meme on their blogs! This was actually harder than it looks. It took me a while to find 6 friends who have a blog and use flickr. Tough crowd. So…. John Bandy, Tamara Farley, Kathleen Ratliff, Marc Weintraub, Mike Hedge, and Ben Dyer its all up to you to pass the torch!
A friend of mine had a booth at this expo called CAPE! which stands for Comic and Pop-Culture Expo here in the Dallas area. It’s the 4th annual event and its the worlds largest free comic book event! It’s sponsored by Zeus Comics, one of the bigger comic book stores in the Dallas area. (more…)
Animoto is a brand new video slideshow creation website created by techies and tv/film producers. The technology behind the site is based on “Cinematic Artificial Intelligence” that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film. The end result has the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.
Animoto is still in beta so you have to signup to use the site. You basically select between a 30 second video or full length video. The 30 second videos are free. Full length videos cost $3 per video or you can pay $30/year unlimited videos. I chose the 30 second video.The site tells you that you need 12-15 pictures for a 30 second video. I chose a mixture of pictures from friends and family.
You then pick the music that plays with the slideshow and you have to the choice of their collection of Creative Commons license music or from your own collection. It does make you verify that you have permission from the artist to use the audio. I just chose from their library to make it easy.
The last step is to give your video a name and description. You then click create video and wait. It takes a few minutes to create so they give you want they call “distractions” which are basically trailers while you wait. It took about 5-10 minutes to complete the process. Once it is done processing, you are left with a slick video you can embed in your own website, email to friends and also post to YouTube all on the same screen. Here is a link to my finished product on YouTube. Here are some screenshots showing you the process I went through on the site:
This is one of the best movies I've seen all year. The director is clearly a visionary. It is genius the way the director mixed in real apartheid footage mixed in with CG to give the movie a "documentary" feel. The movie's breakneck pace kept your interest throughout the whole movie.
This is Jennifer Jason Leigh's first feature film. This movie is filled with horror movie cliques but it has enough campy horror violence to keep most horror movie buffs entertained.
I was shocked that I liked this horror/suspense/thriller. I'm not sure what to call it. Its not your conventional horror film but it was tastefully done and started and ended right. It started slow then when ballistic towards the end. Its the type of movie that will leave you on the edge of your seat. It does have its fair share of "torture porn" scenes ala Hostel but its not every scene in the movie. The torque scenes are placed there to evoke a reaction to the audience and it does that in spades.
