Back in December I was lucky enough to be in Vienna, Austria for the 10th annual incarnation of Roboexotica, the conference for cocktail robots. I shot copious amounts of video of the various booze bots in action and Boing Boing has just published a nicely edited, whirlwind tour of the mayhem from my footage.
I’m really bummed to have missed the Blip Festival again this year. I first heard about it at SXSW last year when I saw a screening of Reformat the Plant, a documentary on the chiptunes scene and the first Blip Festival. As an 8-bit video game and computer junkie, this was what I’ve been waiting for. BBtv was there this year.
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.
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.
The past few weeks have been a treasure chest of amazing freelance video production work. Xeni at Boing Boing brought me into to shoot a few episodes of Boing Boing TV at the recent Maker Faire. Here’s some of the results.
I was also tasked with riding along in the back of kidnapper van, destination Google, to capture this collaboration between the BLF and monochrom of Vienna, Austria. This just happened to be the day of Google’s shareholder meeting and there was a bit of controversy around Google’s censorship with China. Behold the “Great Firewall!”