OK, so it has been 3 years since I posted anything on my site. That’s shameful. I’ll try to do better. For what it’s worth, I’ve been busy. Perhaps I’ll post some videos and pics of what I’ve been doing.
Meanwhile, please enjoy this video taken during a period of very low water of the Mississippi River at Memphis.
We got back from a week-long trip to the Dominican Republic recently, and while the photos I got from my phone turned out well, I particularly liked the video from the DJI Mavic Pro. See if you agree…
Just a short video on a warm fall evening, flying over the Mississippi River and gazing toward Memphis, Tennessee.
Salina is a beautiful island in the middle of the Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily. Katherine, her parents, and I spent a pleasant few days there, visiting different towns on the island, and visiting with friends.
While in Sicily last month, I flew the Mavic Pro quite a bit. This video covers much of the footage from the time spent near Mount Etna.
In March 2017, I got a DJI Mavic Pro, which is commonly called a “drone” but is really just a fancy flying camera. The Mavic has four foldable arms that allow the entire aircraft to fold up to something about the size of a water bottle, but it uses a camera with a gimble and can shoot 4K video. All in all, a very impressive machine.
I’ve shot a few sequences with it, and these are two of the best I’ve edited together. If I don’t crash it, I hope to add more soon!
Since 2013, I’ve been recording one second every day using the 1 Second Everyday app and saving them to 3-month and year-long movies. I continued doing this through 2016 but stopped after New Years Eve, so these are the last movies from that effort.
I’ve enjoyed saving these seconds and preserving snippets of time with family and friends, and I think these seconds will be more valuable to me in the future, as way to go back and relive, if just for a moment, a small part of my day from over a 3.5 year period.
In this video, we continue to trip in Italy, going from Tuscany to Venice, into the Dolomites, then back to Milan before heading home to Memphis and into a very warm fall.
Some folks know that I’ve been doing the One Second Everyday thing since last year, as I bother them with recording my short films at different times. Anyway, here is my compilation of seconds for January, February, and March 2014, which includes two trips to New Orleans, a conference in St. Louis, some motorcycle riding, and a lot of cold, cold winter.
If you haven’t heard about One Second Everyday, it is a app you can load on your smartphone of choice that allows you to grab a second of video everyday and easily construct a movie of it. It is a great way to track where you’ve gone and what you’ve experienced over period of time.
I’ve been playing around with a project called 1 Second Everyday, and this is a movie all all of my seconds from August to December 2013. (I started when the Android version of the app came out that shoots the video and continued through the end of year.)
I’ve been posting a few videos on YouTube from our time in Australia in 2001 and 2002, and I thought I would share a few of them here. This movie features the La Perouse Panthers in an exciting city championship game against Moore Park, one of their biggest rivals.
I still haven’t mastered getting the best quality video up on YouTube. I’ve tried several different methods to improve the resulting video after YouTube encodes my video after upload, but nothing has worked.
If anyone has a killer method of how to move a finished iMovie 2006 video to YouTube, please leave a comment. Thanks.
A few days ago, our friend Jesse Morrison, an employee at our local Malco theater, was suspended for writing a negative (and likely very correct) review of the new Fantastic Four movie, Rise of the Silver Surfer.
Today’s Commercial Appeal is carrying the story.
Please visit Jesse’s site, Memflix and Beyond, for more details about the circumstances of Jesse’s situation. The story, essentially, is that Jesse worked as a projectionist when Rise of the Silver Surfer was shown at a trade screening. As he has done many other times, Jesse watched the film he was screening and then, later on his own time, wrote a review of it and posted it online. 20th Century Fox found out about the review when it received coverage on Ain’t It Cool, a popular news site, and contacted a Vice-President at Malco to complain. The VP at Malco called Jesse and suspended him, even though Malco knew that Jesse wrote these reviews. Jesse’s excellent free newsletter, Memflix, which contains his reviews and other info about Memphis cinema, is distributed at Malco locations.
If, like me, you feel that Malco should, at least, tell their employees not to write reviews or have them sign a non-disclosure agreement before they basically fire them for writing a review of a movie, especially when they have been doing that same thing for years, please visit their Contact page and let them know.
UPDATE: The Commercial Appeal is reporting that Jesse has been allowed to come back to work by Malco, but Jesse will be moving on in 2 weeks. Thanks to everyone that contacted Malco on Jesse’s behalf!
I was fortunate enough to get an email yesterday that alerted me to a one-time movie showing, which happened to only be a few blocks away at the Brooks Museum. I hadn’t even heard of the film, called Nobody, before that, and I’m really glad I got to see it.
Nobody is about a man named Jerry Bell that floated from Indiana to Memphis on an inflatable raft, earned by smoking 20,000 cigarettes. After barely making it to Memphis, he hangs around the city for several years, occasionally earning money to continue the journey down to New Orleans. The documentary recreates his trip from Indiana to Memphis, but the best parts of the movie cover Jerry’s time in Memphis, much of which was shot in pure observational style. The film allows a rare look at American society’s “untouchables,” all within the framework of one man’s struggle to survive.
Nobody is playing at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, NC, on Sunday, and while the movie hasn’t been picked up for distribution yet, it seems like only a matter of time. While much of the photographic symbolism was over the top and there were some sound issues, the movie was beautifully shot and the story is haunting. Hats off to the filmmakers, Lance Murphey and Alan Spearman, for taking the time to craft this story into such a compelling narrative.
If Nobody isn’t coming to show at your town, consider ordering the DVD from the website, particularly if you are familiar with Memphis. The Commercial Appeal also covered the premiere in this article.
A couple of days ago, I heard about the “I Dig Incubus” contest, and in the span of 12 hours, with a lot of help from Kath, I threw together an entry. Check it out here:
truk’s “I Dig Incubus” Video Contest Entry for the song “Dig” from the album Light Grenades
Given the talent of the competition and, mostly, my severe lack of decent video editing software, I don’t have a very good chance to win, but it was fun to see what I could do with iMovie and a (very) rainy Sunday afternoon.
Enjoy!