Here’s an excerpt with my sit down interview with Spike Lee yesterday. Myself and a handful of other bloggers & vloggers got 20 minutes with Spike to ask him about the influence of the Internet, social networks, mobile devices and cheap tools on film making. Oh, and also his view on UFOs!! This is part of the Nokia Productions film project.
A few questions with Spike Lee from ekai on Vimeo.
This user submitted cell phone film project that I’ve been helping out with for Nokia and that Spike Lee is directing is set to premiere in LA next week. I’ve haven’t seen the finished piece or have any idea how long the thing is, but I’m sure with Spike’s hand, it’ll be interesting to say the least. Nokia is doing it up big time and giving myself and the four other assistant directors 30 minutes sit down time with Spike. That’s pretty damn dope and I do have some of my own questions for ol’ Spike. What I think would be more interesting though is if you give me some questions to ask. Yes YOU, unwashed Internet masses. Now’s your chance. Anything at all. Ask him about his email habits. What are the challenges working with a million random people with cell phones? Does he like pumpkin pie? Would he ever collaborate with Clint Eastwood on a movie? Is he planning on doing an epic film on Obama? Coffee or tea? Leave your question in the comments. The whole Q&A will be live streamed and archived I’m told. Will post those deets when I know ’em.
Also, congrats to five lucky people who contributed death scenes for the film. Miss Bekah Havens for her Spaghetti Western piece, Heather Schlegel for her takes Of Mice and Men and Rebel Without a Cause, Eric Liu for his stop motion Lego version of Jurassic Park, Andrew Bennett for his Quick and the Dead inspired submission and Carlton Brightly for his interpretation of the Blair Witch Project. You’ll be going to LA and chillaxing with us and Spike.
A few weeks ago, this solar powered, GPS-enabled, picture taking purple cruiser bike showed up at my door. It’s one of 20 bikes that Yahoo! commissioned as an experiment by the fine folks at Uncommon Projects and are being sprinkled around the world. There are three here in San Francisco and I have one of them. Some others are in New York, Vermont, Sydney Australia, Copenhagen Denmark and Singapore. You can see the whole list on Yahoo’s Start Wearing Purple site.
The bike is an 8-speed Electra Townie equipped with a Nokia N95 cellphone that takes a photo every minute while the bike is moving. It geotags the photo and uploads to a dedicated Flickr account immediately over the cell network. The solar panels on the back sit on top of a control panel connected to a long life battery that charges while out and about in the sun. I could ride the bike across the country nonstop, though I admit I haven’t tried that yet. If for some reason the bike runs out of juice, there’s an AC plug in the control panel that will charge the whole thing up overnight.
It comes with the nicely designed cat friendly owner’s manual.
If you dig into Start Wearing Purple, you can follow my bike on these sweet maps that plot the photos posted to Flickr. Unfortunately, the site is all in Flash and I can’t link directly to maps section. You can also see maps directly through the bike’s Flickr account.
Here’s a set of photos and slideshow my bike took while riding on Chris Carlsson’s SF Bicycle History Tour which I highly recommend!
So the verdict? It’s fun to ride, is a great conversation piece and proves that you can voluntarily surveil yourself very easily. The plus side of that is if the bike is stolen I can easily track it down. So far, I haven’t had to do that. The battery does last a long time (several days) so charging is an afterthought. The initial rev of the custom software running on the N95 was a little buggy and the phone would just stop taking photos sometimes as well as not geotag some photos. I had to open up the camera housing and force a reboot to get it going again until Tarikh from Uncommon Projects stopped by and upgraded it. It’s been smooth sailing ever since.
UPDATE: The Associated Press did a little video news segment on the ybike featuring Amit Gupta, who also has one of the three bikes in SF. Note the Unamerican sticker on the side of his solar panel box, a little gift from me. 🙂
Sam Rockwell: Bronstein at Large from ekai on Vimeo.
One of the coolest things about what I do for living is being able to work with a wide variety of people. Last week, my friend Eve who works at San Francisco Chronicle, asked if I could shoot a video interview with Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large at the Chron and Sam Rockwell, actor who stars in Choke. Choke is the latest film based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, famous for writing Fight Club. It opens this Friday.
After a year of legal wrangling, 19-year old Star Simpson finally tells her story to BoingBoingTV. Star was the MIT student who was arrested at Boston’s Logan airport last year for wearing LED art on a hoodie when she went to go pick her friend Tim up. She was immediately surrounded by 40 cops, shackled and charged with “possessing a hoax device.” When it became apparent to Boston’s overreactive authorities that Star was not a threat and the media frenzy was in overdrive, they persisted in charging her with a crime. A year later, the case is settled and Star gives her first interview recounting the events.
I shot the video from Star’s perspective, so I got a chance to meet her and understand her a bit. She’s a super sweet, curious and creative college student, the complete opposite of what Boston’s authorities made her out to be. Boston has a history of overreacting to things they don’t understand, which is quite unfortunate. The climate of fear that many of us live under, leads to this kind of egregious reaction. At the end of the day, Star simply wants to build cool stuff that we can all appreciate.
What do you get when you throw 30+ bloggers, video creators, gadget freaks and forum moderators from all around the world in a room together in Helsinki, Finland? I’d like to think we’re here to stop the world from assploding, but even we may not be able to do that. I don’t know the answer, but I’ll find out soon. I’m heading to the airport bound for Helsinki, the motherland for Nokia whom is behind all this. You can follow along on the Nokia Open Lab site.
We are now in the final act, Act III: Death, of the Spike Lee Nokia video project I am helping out with. I posted previously about it here. To encourage greater participation we are challenging people to remake or swede (as in Be Kind, Rewind) death scenes from their favorite movies using their cell phones.
I am one of five “assistant directors” who are working to cull through the bullshit and try to highlight some of the good stuff as well as guide people through the submission process. The stuff submitted so far has been mixed, so this is where you come in. The five ADs each get to pick someone from the pool of submissions to fly out to the movie’s premiere in LA in October. Hotels and flights all covered by Nokia, anywhere within the continental US that is. You’ll get the satisfaction of seeing your remake possibly making it into the final cut, hang out in LA and shmooze it up with Spike Lee. The catch is you need to have your sweded scene done and uploaded to the Nokia Productions site by August 20th, which is in like 10 days. Any cell phone is fair game, doesn’t have to be Nokia.
I encourage anyone to give it a shot and shoot me an email or leave a comment if you need help getting going. Also point me to your stuff when it’s up so I can take a look. I’d love to be able to give away the LA trip to a reader of this blog. More details and how to upload your content is on the Nokia Productions site, which uses Jumpcut for video hosting/remixing. Make sure to tag your submission ‘famousdeathscenes’ so it’ll be considered for the free trip.
Scott has opened up the emerald doors of Laughing Squid to a few friends to guest blog. My first post went up today, a wrap up of my experience at Comic-Con.
I had the spectacular pleasure of bouncing around with Mr. Telstar Logistics himself, Todd Lappin, to capture for Boing Boing TV interesting stops along the way of The Long Now Foundation‘s Mechanicrawl event. First stop was the Long Now’s own museum of prototypes for its 10,000 year clock. Long Now’s Executive Director Alexander Rose breaks down all the awesomeness in this video. Lots of shiny rotating machinery and geneva mechanisms to ooh and ahh at.
Pals and Webzine alums Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders asked me to come to Comic-Con this year and shoot video for io9, the Gawker sci-fi blog they edit. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. Turns out it was a lot of bouncing around from panels to halls to press roundtables to celeb filled red carpets. Lots of A, B and Z list celebrities in need of pimping their latest action packed movies and TV shows. Yeah, not a bad alternative to sleep for a few days.
Here’s links to the video coverage I did for io9. I’ll add more as they publish.
J.J. Abrams: Creator of Lost & Alias, Producer of Cloverfield
Jamie Chung: Samurai Girl & Chi Chi in Dragonball
Dave Filoni: Director of Clone Wars