Pigs

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Futuristic Shopping

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noon: trip to the park for seasonal stress relief

More fun than a SAD lamp

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All right - enough my yakkin' - back to business: let's eat some dog poo

Just a little moment - shot, cut and sent from my phone in the park just now.

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End of the Black Dog

Finally, I think I've pushed through my period of panic and uncertainty and unhappiness with my work.  

I wanted to find a way to balance money earning work and creativity better - and to make good money from my skills and talents without having to do the same thing week in, week out.  I'm easily bored and love nothing better than working on new ideas and completing projects quickly. 

Less simple cheap websites for people, more online video for slightly larger companies doing good things who need video to tell their stories better.

Short, well-paid, achievable projects, and no guilt for spending time working on personal video projects (self-development). 

It seems obvious, but JESUS it's taken me a long time to work it out.

Thank you Katie for putting up with me through these recent Black Dog days and helping me see the light.

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Rider Spoke - Interactive Mobile Technology Bike Theatre Game at the Barbican!

My friend Lucy was reviewing this.  She's a theatre critic.  She invited me along for the ride.

Not often you get something that presses Geek, Art and Theatre buttons all at the same time.

You'll see what it is by watching the video.

It's inspired use of new technology - Blast Theory, the artists behind it, have created something really Of The Moment, that couldn't have happened until right now - or at least not in such an effective way.  The key ingredients are:
the Nokia N800 (released in January, the sister device to my N93) a wide screen portable computer with Wifi wireless internet access and GPS satellite positioning; and The Cloud, the new City-wide wifi network.

For the benefit of both non-geeks reading this, these are the things that allow us, the riders, to roam around London, for it to know exactly where we are, to connect with the home server and allow us to hear other people - even those recording their messages Right Now - and for it to tell us whether the messages they left are near or far from where we are.

If Blast Theory want to, they'll be able to make a little map of all the hiding places, with people's recordings on them (either as an installation, or online).  They could even feed the GPS co-ordinates into something like Google Earth, so you could do a virtual walkthrough of the City and you could hear people's messages, exactly where they left them.

So I thought it was all very cool and inspirational.

If only it'd been longer... ;)

I got back in the end, and they didn't seem at all bothered - but I *was* half an hour late for dinner on the other side of town.

I totally recommend it.  Especially if you stick reasonably close to the Barbican instead of cycling for miles through the City's labyrinthine streets like me.
It's on from 11th October to 21st October at the Barbican in London.
http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=6071
£10 if you rent a bike, £5 if you bring your own.  How cheap is that? Given the average price of an average theatre show, I reckon they should be charging a lot more.

(PS - I saw yesterday that Google Earth have just started using the Geotag location information entered in Youtube videos so that you can see videos exactly where they were filmed.  I'm geeky enough to always enter the Geotag info when uploading on YT, but I doubt most people do.)

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normal service will resume imminently

another video about being blocked. don't watch unless you're really bored. i do these every so often. as i sit in bed sending this, it occurs to me that past blockage videos have been immediately followed by periods of great inspiration. yes! that's what's happening here. this is the bowels of my mind making burbling noises after a long period of constipation. tomorrow, i'm going to wake up and poo everywhere. what a fantastic thought. goodnight xx

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20 second snapshot - Friday night at St Elmo's (Fish) Bar

Friday night is fish and chip night - this is the chippie at the end of the road.

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40 second snapshot - We Live In The Future

At Liverpool Street Station on my way home.

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*that* was supposed to be *this*

Well, that's cheered me up.  I attached the wrong file when I uploaded, and I didn't even check.  That's what happens when you shoot, cut and post on your phone on a bit of a downer.  This one is quite different to the one I posted before.  Or is it? I don't know. This one is half the length and has music, anyway.  It was the revised cut - the one I posted before was my first assembly.  Then I really stripped all the shots down to their essences.  So there you go - you get to see some of my process. Lucky you.

The only thing missing is naked Jay and his pussy ;) 

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my blue wave

i am out of the office this afternoon. i thought going to a café to make a To Do list might make a difference. huh.

i tried to snap my immediate environment in terms of how i feel - and when i mostly failed, i just cut it together here and now anyway.  why not?  got me out of my head for a moment.  it's nothing serious - just bullshit that i'm sure will pass when i get on top of my work - which isn't that hard.  tomorrow. tomorrow. i love ya, tomorrow.

-----
And the best is yet to come / You may think you are the only one / To never get it right / Just stick around on this lovely lovely night / And we may be amazed /
By my blue wave

To conclude this interview / Many facts and fictions you construe / The dog gives you the paw / You pat his head and you wipe his jaw / He's the only one who knew /
About my blue wave

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Moving Snapshot: Family

My brother-in-law Jan, my sister Amanda, my nephew Vijay and their dog Finnigan. And Amy.  On Long Beach in Tofino, on the wild Pacific coast of Vancouver Island.  This is just what I need to watch at the moment - takes me right back there.  Amazing place, amazing holiday.

They didn't know I was filming.  Something I've found is that  when you quietly set up the frame and turn on for a minute or two, it's amazing how often your frame fills with beautiful movement, purely by chance.

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Fat loser

"Andrew you've got to be number one! I won't tolerate any losers in this family. Win. Win! WIN!!!"

Yeah, I know.  It's a day late. 

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Franti à la Lumière

Although I'm on holiday in Canada, I've been doing some videoblogging this weekend for The Big Time Out festival in Cumberland, BC, the village on Vancouver Island where I'm staying with my sister.  I've uploaded a bunch of videos to http://thebigtimeout.tv - it was all suggested and executed in the last couple of days before the festival.<br><br>Anyway, Saturday night's headline gig was Michael Franti & Spearhead.  They're amazing, and Franti gets the crowd going crazy - but I'd been told I couldn't film them, and certainly couldn't post images or music to the internet.  As it happened, I cheekily took a couple of minutes from the side of the stage and posted it anyway - I knew he wouldn't mind.  But in the spirit of not breaking his copyright, here's a silent fixed camera Lumière of his shadow on the screen at the back of the stage.<br><br>When I filmed it, it didn't even occur to me that it'd be a way around the copyright thing.  I just thought it'd make a cool Lumière. 

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this was supposed to be a nice peaceful reflective Tea With Rupert

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Rupert's Vlog Deathmatch Entry: James Bond iPod Karaoke #2

Yesterday evening, on the way home over London Bridge in Rush Hour, listening to James Bond themes on my iPod, I was overwhelmed by the urge to flip open my phone and record this for the VlogDeathmath.com Drunk Underwear Karaoke Challenge.  It's not Anarchy in the UK, but it was fun to do anyway.  Next week, you'll be able to cast your votes at Vlogdeathmatch.com.

The rules of the latest Deathmatch are to use any or all of the words Drunk Underwear Karaoke as a basis for your video.  

I wasn't drunk or in my underwear (it was tempting) but yesterday was my last day of work before a month-long holiday in Canada, so I *was* totally lightheaded with joy. Or maybe it was that I'd lost my wallet and so hadn't eaten anything all day.

Turns out that the challenge was designed to have enough appeal to attract non-videobloggers to the Pioneer Two Boots movie theater in New York where these entries will be screened on 11 August. If I'd known it was going to be shown to an audience on a big screen when I recorded it, i would have done it at twice the resolution.  And I would have done it in my underwear.  And I would definitely have done it drunk.

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Seeing Prince's opening night at the 02 Millennium Dome!

I was quite excited. Can you tell?  The whole thing - before, during and after - was pretty intense.

I'd almost forgotten how incredible he is, what an amazing performer and musician... and how many hits he's had.

"I GOT MORE HITS THAN MADONNA'S GOT KIDS" 

Check out his Singles at Wikipedia

Oh, and then scroll down to see all the songs he's written for other people.

He plays guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, drums, percussion, saxaphone. And composes, arranges, produces, performs everything at high levels of perfectionism.

AND HE ROCKS

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Meeting Up With Tim D from Reality Sandwich

For you map freaks out there, the locations in this video are: 

Turnham Green Station (Map)

Leon, Ludgate Circus (Map - Website)   

 

 

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"Who will he bang?" Gritty Street Poetry Reading

Thanks to Gogen for reminding me about this song. Lyrical gold.

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Signs Of The Times - Rotating Portrait Of A High Street In Britain, 2007

More pseudoarty nonsense, no ranting or babies today. Just stood on a spot in posh & leafy Chiswick and pretended I was a CCTV camera.  Kind of like the way that Coppola used the camera in my favourite movie, The Conversation. But with a cellphone.

It's interesting what you notice, if you stop in one place and zoom in and out with your camera or with your brain.  My phone is helping me to see things in the world around me that I take for granted and blank out.

Today has been a day for noticing how much things have changed since I've been alive.  Not just non-smoking pubs, coffee bars and CCTV - I was flicking through Microserfs and thinking about how futuristic the email and geek lifestyle seemed in 1995, and how real it is now.  And then I came downstairs and found this post from Gogen, about his memories of the 1980s.  I said everything else I've got to say about that in my comment there.

 

In other weird news, the last film I did like this one, Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime, might be screened in San Francisco tonight in the NewTeeVee Metacafe Pier Screenings after some of you were nice enough to give it a handful of 5 star ratings.  I find this idea almost erotically exciting. Partly because I always associate San Francisco with The Conversation, and so I've always secretly wished I could live there.

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