kottke.org posts about video
I wasn’t expecting too much of this video about how to eat sushi, but it’s actually pretty good. It features Naomichi Yasuda of the highly regard Sushi Yasuda in Manhattan making sushi for a newbie and telling him how it should be eaten.
This Old House + Jiro Dreams of Sushi = this video.
Update: Another perspective on how sushi should be eaten comes from Tom Downey, who shares the 10 commandments of the owner of Tokyo’s Yajima Sushi.
There were open spots at the counter. But the chef, Susumu Yajima, instructed me to take a seat nearby and wait. Eventually I was summoned to a place directly in front of him, and the attack began: Piece after piece in rapid succession, as Yajima barked orders at me.
“Eat now!” he said, milliseconds after passing me a glistening slice of buri (amberjack) atop shari (the finger of rice that forms the base of nigiri sushi). “Use your hand!” he upbraided me, as I reached for my chopsticks. He even instructed me to half-chew one piece before washing it down with sake.
Anthony Richardson (previously, previouslyer, previouslyest) describes a NASCAR race from the British perspective.
Now for the bumper view! Wow, the easiest way to work out what on Earth is going on. Oh, the car’s giving the one in front a little sniff. Ah, they’re a bit like dogs, aren’t they? Petrol dogs.
That’s the somewhat unusual name of a feature-length documentary about world-class stone skippers. Here’s the trailer:
I love skipping stones. When I see flat water and flat rocks, I can’t not do it. They have to change that name though. They were likely going for “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” but really missed the mark. Oh, and they’re raising funds on Kickstarter to finish the film.
The zen art of stone skipping meets the competitive nature of mankind in this feature-length documentary. Set in the world of professional stone skipping, this film will examine the competitive nature of mankind. World Records will be tested, rivalries will fester, and a sport will rise from the ashes of obscurity.
Update: The full-length movie is now available for rent or purchase on Vimeo.
A short appreciation of the Steadicam and its inventor, Garrett Brown. (Brown also invented the football SkyCam.) Features footage from Rocky, Return of the Jedi, and The Shining.
From Wikipedia:
The Steadicam was first used in the Best Picture-nominated Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976), debuting with a shot that compounded the Steadicam’s innovation: cinematographer Haskell Wexler had Brown start the shot on a fully elevated platform crane which jibbed down, and when it reached the ground, Brown stepped off and walked the camera through the set. This technically audacious and previously impossible shot created considerable interest in how it had been accomplished, and impressed the Academy enough for Wexler to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography that year. It was then used in extensive running and chase scenes on the streets of New York City in Marathon Man (1976), which was actually released two months before Bound for Glory. It landed a notable third credit in Avildsen’s Best Picture-winning Rocky (1976), where it was an integral part of the film’s Philadelphia street jogging/training sequences and the run up the Art Museum’s flight of stairs, as well as the fight scenes (where it can even be plainly seen in operation at the ringside during some wide shots of the final fight). Garrett Brown was the Steadicam operator on all of these.
The Shining (1980) pushed Brown’s innovations even further, when director Stanley Kubrick requested that the camera shoot from barely above the floor. This prompted the innovation of a “low mode” bracket to mount the top of a camera to the bottom of an inverted post, which substantially increased the creative angles of the system, which previously could not go much lower than the operator’s waist height. This low-mode concept remains the most important extension to the system since its inception.
(via @robinsloan)
Update: Here’s Brown talking about the Steadicam and his career. And here’s Stanley Kubrick’s introduction to the Steadicam, via a letter from a colleague. (via @poritsky & @LettersOfNote)
Automata is a film directed by Gabe Ibáñez in which robots become sentient and…do something. Not sure what…I hope it’s not revolt and try to take over the world because zzzz… But this movie looks good so here’s hoping.
Jacq Vaucan, an insurance agent of ROC robotics corporation, routinely investigates the case of manipulating a robot. What he discovers will have profound consequences for the future of humanity.
Automata will be available in theaters and VOD on Oct 10. (via devour)
As far as these things go, this video of the Muppets singing So What’cha Want by the Beastie Boys is pretty near perfect.
See also The Muppets singing Kanye West’s Monster and the Sesame Street gang doing the Beastie Boys’ Sure Shot. Oh, and the classic Bert & Ernie Ante Up rap video:
(via subtraction)
From Mallory Ortberg at The Toast, an appreciation of Ralph Wiggum.
Ralph is not a rule-follower like Lisa, nor a rule-breaker like Bart; Ralph does not observe the rules because he is almost completely unaware of them. More than any of the other students at Springfield Elementary, Ralph is a child. Bart and Lisa and Milhouse and Nelson and Janey are kids, and therein lies the difference. Ralph sees things that aren’t there (“Ralph, remember the time you said Snagglepuss was outside?” “He was going to the bathroom!”), eats paste, picks his nose, volunteers unprompted, nonsensical declarations (“My cat’s breath smells like cat food”) disguised as Zen koans. His character is sometimes written as dim-but-profound, sometimes borderline-psychotic, and occasionally developmentally disabled, but more than anything else, Ralph like what he is: a child who hasn’t yet aged into a kid, which is one of the most embarrassing things a child can be.
Goes nicely with this video of some of Ralph’s finest moments:
Take a closer look at how half-a-dozen ceramics masters practice their craft.
From Tony Zhou, A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film.
Michele Tepper wrote about Sherlock’s display of texts in 2011.
The rise of instant messaging, and even more, the SMS, has added another layer of difficulty; I’m convinced that the reason so many TV characters have iPhones is not just that Hollywood thinks they’re cool, but also because the big crisp screen is so darn easy to read. Still, the cut to that little black metal rectangle is a narrative momentum killer. What’s a director trying to make a ripping good adventure yarn to do?
The solution is deceptively simple: instead of cutting to the character’s screen, Sherlock takes over the viewer’s screen.
And just today, a trailer for Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children, which movie seems to consist entirely of texting and social media interaction:
(via @tcarmody)
A remastered copy of the original 1977 Han-shoots-first version of Star Wars is out there and you can watch it but it’s probably illegal. But Disney is never going to show it to you, so maybe it’s ok to find it on Bittorrent?
The Despecialized Edition is the years-long work of a diverse group of people who have taken elements from many different sources and created the ultimate version of the first Star Wars film. It has also been upgraded to display properly on high definition screens, with high-quality sounds and a near perfect image.
The latest Blu-Ray release of the film serves as the skeleton for this edition, but elements of the 2006 bonus DVD that included the unaltered version of the film was also used to remove special effects and edits that were added by Lucas.
Here’s a short feature on the video sources used:
And here’s how to get the full film.
Update: Here’s an extensive side-by-side look at how dozens of shots were modified to make The Despecialized Edition.
The Art of the Title has a look at the Emmy nominees for best title design for 2014: Black Sails, Cosmos, Masters of Sex, Silicon Valley, and True Detective. As noted, the excellent titles for Halt and Catch Fire missed the eligibility period by a day. Spoilers: True Detective’s titles won.
This video combines two thoughts to reach an alarming conclusion: “Technology gets better, cheaper, and faster at a rate biology can’t match” + “Economics always wins” = “Automation is inevitable.”
That’s why it’s important to emphasize again this stuff isn’t science fiction. The robots are here right now. There is a terrifying amount of working automation in labs and warehouses that is proof of concept.
We have been through economic revolutions before, but the robot revolution is different.
Horses aren’t unemployed now because they got lazy as a species, they’re unemployable. There’s little work a horse can do that pays for its housing and hay.
And many bright, perfectly capable humans will find themselves the new horse: unemployable through no fault of their own.
(via waxy)
Watch Peanuts creator Charles Schulz draw Charlie Brown. It only takes him around 35 seconds.
(via @fchimero)
In order to reproduce, salmon swim from the ocean up rivers until they find the spot they were born. But sometimes people build dams or other “artificial water constructions” that can disrupt salmon travel. A company called Whooshh Innovations has developed a tool to help with this problem: a pneumatic salmon cannon.
According to the folks at Whooshh, their transport system can handle 40-60 fish per minute, move the fish at 5-10 m/sec (11-22 mph), and transport fish 1000 feet into the air along a tube 2000 feet long.
From YouTube, a playlist of 12- and 24-hour-long videos of ambient space noise, mostly of the sounds of spaceships like the Tardis, the USS Enterprise, and the Nostromo (from Alien). I think the Death Star is my favorite:
Or the completely unrelaxing 12 hours of Star Trek red alert sound:
Sadly, the list is missing my favorite spaceship sound, Sebulba’s podracer from Phantom Menace. See also Super Mario Bros Sound Loops and Extended Star Wars Sounds. (via @finn)
Here’s the trailer for the third and final movie in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy:
The Hobbit was initially supposed to be just two films but Jackson decided to split the second film into two. From Wikipedia:
According to Jackson, the third film would contain the Battle of the Five Armies and make extensive use of the appendices that Tolkien wrote to expand the story of Middle-Earth (published in the back of The Return of the King).
The second movie was better than the first so I’m looking forward to this one. But then again, I’m totally in the tank for Jackson’s take on Middle Earth (I did the Weta Digital tour when I was in New Zealand) so I would see it even if the first two movies sucked.
Actor Robin Williams was found dead in his home today of an apparent suicide. He was 63. I have been thinking a lot about this scene from Dead Poets Society lately:
Microsoft has developed software to transform shaky time lapse videos into impressively smooth hyperlapse movies. Take a look at a couple of examples.
Read more about the project on the Microsoft Research site.
According to testing by the folks at America’s Test Kitchen, you should not be thawing out your frozen steaks before you cook them. Mind. Blown. Into. Tiny. Pieces. Sweep. Me. Up. Pls.
Conventional wisdom holds that frozen steaks should be thawed before cooking, but we wondered if steaks could be cooked straight from the freezer. Cook’s Illustrated Senior Editor Dan Souza explains our cooking experiments.
They also apparently more-or-less deep fry their steak? Is that a thing that we should be doing? (via digg)
Many videos and photo projects promise a glimpse of life inside North Korea “as you’ve never seen it”, but I believe this video by JT Singh and Rob Whitworth actually delivers the goods. It’s one of those 3-minute time lapse portraits of a city that are in vogue, with the North Korean capital Pyongyang as its subject.
Time lapse videos are interesting because they show movement over long periods of time. The Western conception of North Korea is of a place frozen in time, so the time lapse view is highly instructive. (thx, jeff)
Update: Sam Potts, who travelled to Pyongyang and North Korea in 2012 and took these photos, finds this “deeply fake as filmmaking”. From his Twitter acct:
Re the time lapse of Pyongyang video, it feels deeply fake as filmmaking, to me. Thus I mistrust it as a document of what real PY is like. You don’t see any of the details to that reveal, even in PY, how very poor a country it is. Some of those buses didn’t have tail lights. They had blocks of wood painted red to look like tail lights. And the library computers are incredibly poor quality.
Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker also noted the propaganda-ish nature of the video. At the very least, the video is a dual reminder of the limitations of time lapse video in showing the whole story and of how manipulative attractively packaged media can be.
From James Marsh, the director of the excellent Man on Wire, a biopic of physicist Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane. Here’s the first trailer:
The film is based on a book by Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen.
In this compelling memoir, his first wife, Jane Hawking, relates the inside story of their extraordinary marriage. As Stephen’s academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of motor neurone disease. Jane’s candid account of trying to balance his 24-hour care with the needs of their growing family reveals the inner-strength of the author, while the self-evident character and achievements of her husband make for an incredible tale presented with unflinching honesty.
As promising as this looks, the Kanye in me needs to remind you that Errol Morris’ A Brief History of Time is the best film about Stephen Hawking of all time. OF ALL TIME.
Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant played against each other in only eight NBA games, but none of the games took place with both players in their prime. Their first few meetings, dominated by Jordan, happened during Kobe’s first and second NBA seasons, when he was an impulsive and unpolished teen. Their final meetings, dominated by Bryant, found an out-of-retirement Jordan on the hapless Washington Wizards, pushing 40 years old.
But more than any other two marquee players in NBA, Jordan and Kobe have played with very similar styles. Like almost identically similar, as this video clearly shows:
The first 15 seconds of the video is a fantastic piece of editing, stitching together similar moves made by each player into seamless single plays. And dang…even the tongue wagging thing is the same. How many hours of Jordan highlight reels did Kobe watch growing up? And practicing moves in the gym?
As an aside, and I can’t believe I’m saying such a ridiculous thing in public, but I can do a pretty good MJ turnaround fadeaway. I mean, for a 6-foot-tall 40-year-old white guy who doesn’t get a lot of exercise and has never had much of a vertical leap. I learned it from watching Jordan highlights on SportsCenter and practicing it for hundreds of hours in my driveway against my taller next-door neighbor. I played basketball twice in the past month for the first time in years. Any skills I may have once had are almost completely gone…so many airballs and I couldn’t even make a free throw for crying out loud. Except for that turnaround. That muscle memory is still intact; the shots were falling and the whole thing felt really smooth and natural. I think I’ll still be shooting that shot effectively into my 70s. (via devour)
These sculptures by Gerry Judah for the Goodwood Festival of Speed are amazing. Here’s how they made the Mercedes arch for this year’s festival. (via ministry of type)
Sight and Sound polled 340 critics and filmmakers in search of the world’s best documentary films. Here are their top 50. From the list, the top five:
A Man with a Movie Camera
Shoah
Sans soleil
Night and Fog
The Thin Blue Line
Unless you went to film school or are a big film nerd, you probably haven’t seen (or even heard of) the top choice, A Man with a Movie Camera. Roger Ebert reviewed the film several years ago as part of his Great Movies Collection.
Born in 1896 and coming of age during the Russian Revolution, Vertov considered himself a radical artist in a decade where modernism and surrealism were gaining stature in all the arts. He began by editing official newsreels, which he assembled into montages that must have appeared rather surprising to some audiences, and then started making his own films. He would invent an entirely new style. Perhaps he did. “It stands as a stinging indictment of almost every film made between its release in 1929 and the appearance of Godard’s ‘Breathless’ 30 years later,” the critic Neil Young wrote, “and Vertov’s dazzling picture seems, today, arguably the fresher of the two.” Godard is said to have introduced the “jump cut,” but Vertov’s film is entirely jump cuts.
If you’re curious, the film is available on YouTube in its entirety:
(via open culture)
Christopher Nolan + Matthew McConaughey + space + doomed Earth. Oh man, this is looking like it might actually be great. Or completely suck.
Please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t s (via @aaroncoleman0)
Erik Malinowski takes a baseball commercial that used to air late nights on ESPN in the ’90s and ’00s, and uses it to trace the effect of technology on sports.
“He was the first guy I ever knew who used video as a training device in baseball,” says Shawn Pender, a former minor-league player who would appear in several of Emanski’s instructional videos. “There just wasn’t anyone else who was doing what he did.”
It’s also something of a detective story, since its subject Tom Emanski has virtually fallen off the face of the earth:
Fred McGriff is surely correct that nearly two decades of video sales — first through TV and radio and now solely through the internet — made Emanski a very wealthy man, but this perception has led to some rather outlandish internet rumors.
According to one, the Internal Revenue Service investigated Emanski in 2003 for unpaid taxes and, in doing so, somehow disclosed his estimated net worth at around $75 million. There’s no public record of such an investigation ever having taken place or been disclosed, and an IRS spokesman for the Florida office would say only that the agency is “not permitted to discuss a particular or specific taxpayer’s tax matter or their taxes based on federal disclosure regulations and federal law.”
From This Must Be the Place, a lovely short profile of Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo, California. Old Town shows silent films with live musical accompaniment. Includes a brief tour of the inner workings of the theater’s wind-powered pipe organ from 1925.
For the latest installment of Grantland’s 30 for 30 short documentary series, a story on the genesis of the high five and what happened to one of its inventors. This video is chock full of amazing vintage footage of awkward high fives. [Weird aside: The sound on this video is only coming out of the left channel. Is that a subtle homage to the one-handed gesture or a sound mixing boner?]
The Silva Field Guide to Birds of a Parallel Future, featuring several videos of how futuristic birds might move. For instance, here’s a deconstructed bird in the shape of a Borg cube:
The crew at The Atlantic Video takes a trip to The National Wildlife Property Repository, which stores confiscated illegal wildlife items.
The National Wildlife Property Repository, a government facility outside of Denver, stores more than a million products of the illegal wildlife trade, from tigers and bears to elephant ivory. These items are confiscated at points of entry around the United States, and sent to the Repository to be destroyed or used for educational purposes.
The bit about the National Eagle Repository is especially interesting. Under federal law, every dead eagle (and eagle parts, including feathers) must be sent to the repository, where they are made available for distribution to native tribes.
The primary objective of The National Eagle Repository (Repository) is to receive, evaluate, store and distribute bald and golden eagle carcasses, parts, and feathers to tribally enrolled Native Americans of Federally recognized tribes throughout the United States for religious purposes. The Repository serves as the collection and distribution point for bald and golden eagle salvages each year by State and Federal wildlife officials.
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