MICHAEL VERDI

Flash QuickTime Embed by: vPIP Embed (copy t load, you probably just need the latest version of the Flash plugin - It s here if you need it.

Flash QuickTime Embed by: vPIP Embed (copy ll be as good as these girls. videobloggingweek2008

Flash QuickTime Embed by: vPIP Embed (copy & paste): close Dylan got a goldfish. videobloggingweek2008

Flash QuickTime Embed by: vPIP Embed (copy s here if you need it. It s an Escalade pulling a taco trailer. Call now - 210-883-5097.

Flash QuickTime Embed by: vPIP Embed (copy s here if you need it. Jay, Ryanne and their kitties (!) stopped in town for a few days as they make their way across country to their new home in Virginia. And since Jen is just up the road in Austin for a few more weeks she came over too. We ve been hanging out for two days working on Show In A Box and updating all kinds of stuff. I ve been working on rearranging my videos and websites and here s what I ve come up with: This site will be my personal stuff; graymattergravy.com will be a collection of artworks and reportsfromthefuture.com will be my blog about virtual worlds, videoblogging, machinima and the tech behind it all.

Flash | iPod | QuickTime HD QuickTime This is a tiny piece of a project that I ve been working on for months now. It was a lot of fun to do and I m pretty happy with the way it turned out. It a six-part machinima series based on Scion City. The website is done in flash (I built that too) and as the videos play, extra content becomes available. Part of the idea is that people can add on this story or create tangental stories so we kept all of our sets, props and avatars and put them in a backlot that is open to anyone via Second Life. You can check the whole thing out over here -> What Is Scion City? And because I ve been working like crazy on this for weeks, I m counting this as my first video for Semanal

Flash | iPod | QuickTime HD QuickTime My daughters are over this videoblogging fad.

QuickTime | iPod | Flash Hello videoblog. I ve missed you.

Flash Word!

QuickTime | iPod | Flash It s been almost a month since I posted anything - as usual, I ve just been working long hours. Recently I had to put together a reel. Normally, I m not crazy about doing that kind of thing but I had fun with this one and got some help from my alter ego.

QuickTime | iPod | Flash This is another Lumiere style video so it doesn t have any sound. Not that it had some great sound on it to begin with - just distorted airplane rumble. The camera is a fixed as I could get it by holding it against the window. All the tilting is just the airplane making a big turn before landing at the Phoenix airport. It s also about 15 seconds longer than the 60 sec rule because I wanted to include the entire turn. lumierevideo

QuickTime | iPod | Flash Like the name says, this is just a test video for an upcoming project. There s no plan for Dylan to be in it (though she could) and you probably won t ever see this scene. I was just testing out my PhotoJPEG capture settings and playing with the look. I ll be posting more about this project as it gets closer to launching (early August?) but I will say that all the source video will be distributed under Creative Commons - Attribution and everyone will be invited to join in. Technical notes: This was shot in DV using my Canon HV20. The sound was captured with the Rode Video Mic. I captured everything in Final Cut Pro using a custom setup that brought the video in as PhotoJPEG at 640 X 360, 30fps. All told, I captured a little more than 4 minutes of source video that took up about 228MB of disc space instead of nearly 1GB.

QuickTime | Flash | iPod Lately it s become kind of hip to be green. Rockstars are singing about it, celebrities are driving hybrids and Hollywood is giving out Oscars. This is all good stuff, don t get me wrong. But one thing that doesn t seem to get talked much about is vegetarianism. Becoming a vegetarian may just be the one thing an individual can do that has the most positive impact on the environment. Here s an article about the U.N. report and here s the full report.

iPod | Flash Basically this is just me testing out my new Canon HV20 camera while Dylan is acting silly. Jay wants me to remind you all that this is supposed to be silent and that there is nothing wrong with your computer. Check out this video in HD! lumierevideo

QuickTime | Flash | iPod I hate it.

QuickTime | iPod | Flash Here s another Lumiere video. This one was shot from my bathroom window last night. lumierevideo

QuickTime | iPod | Flash Everybody s doing it. lumierevideo

QuickTime | iPod | Flash Much of what I shot at Pixelodeon was unusable uninteresting and poorly lit but I did get this bit on Sunday morning when we went to IHOP with Rupert. Some of this video came from Rupert s version of the same event. The music at the end is from an old radio show called, Jerry Of The Circus. pixelodeon2007

QuickTime | iPod | Flash Boy it s been a long time between videos. I d say I ve been busy (and I have) but there s more to it than that. Anyway, here s one. I ve got 5 more in the can. Let s see if I can t get them done before their time expires. By the way, I m still messing with the site after installing Show In A Box. Not really sure what size image works in the post - the Flash and iPod versions are 320 X 240 and the QuickTime file is 640 X 480 - so I sorta split the difference.

iPod | Flash 8 This is another SpinXpress related post (though it applies to more things than just SpinXpress). Last weekend we had a hack-a-thon at the Digital Dojo (Markus house) and shot a conversation about distributed production. This is an idea that I ve been really interested in and working on since I started videoblogging. The idea, basically, is that you can put together a great team to work on something if you can work via the internet and are not limited to those that live in close proximity. Of course you can still work with people face to face, it s just that you don t have to let geography stop you. In fact there might even be projects that require people to be distributed around the world and couldn t be done any other way. Anyway, I just thought I d share this conversation. I think it s the longest video I ve ever posted here but I think it s worth it. Some technical notes about the video: At the last minute I realized that we had 4 Xacti cameras on hand so we did an impromptu 4-camera shoot. I then put it together using the mulit-cam feature in Final Cut Pro. I think the result really captures the actual event really well.

Full Size | iPod | Flash 8 I m tagging this one videobloggingweek2007 even though it s officially over. I made and uploaded it yesterday afternoon but didn t like it so I re-edited it a little this morning. Anyway, about 6 weeks ago I posted about working with nothing to show for it yet and now I do. Most of the time I was working on integrating spinxpress.com with the desktop application. It s pretty cool - changes in the software show up on the website and vice-versa. We also added a place to search for media by license. This means that if you are working on a project and need a photo from Flickr or a video for the Internet Archive you can find stuff with the particular Creative Commons license that you need to use it your project. It actually offers more granularity than the searches on the individual sites. Of course making something like this - it s never finished but check it out - SpinXpress.com SpinXpress.com/GetMedia. videobloggingweek2007

Full Size | iPod | Flash 8 I can t get Dylan to make videoblogs anymore but I can occasionally get her to talk to me on video. A little more than two year ago she got Internet famous talking about getting braces. Now they re off and she s grown up a bunch. I think she looks like a model. videobloggingweek2007

Full Size | iPod | Flash 8 This is some video from this year s SXSW. I don t have the names of the people who did the video thing or the people who did the Tesla coils. Maybe Bre knows since I think he put that particular party together. videobloggingweek2007

| Download QuickTime | HD/AppleTV Finally. Here s a second video for Videoblogging Week. I m not sure it was worth the wait. I m really just working out some machinima ideas. It feels like it s going to take a few more to see if it s really going anywhere. Tags: videobloggingweek2007, machinima, secondlife.

| Download QuickTime | HD/AppleTV I went back and forth a bunch of times about making and posting this - mostly because I doubt I have the time to make this good. I ve wanted to do something else with machinima and the characters I started to create previously, for months now. Of course there s always something that gets in the way. So I figured I d use videoblogging week to work out my ideas. I have no idea what happens in tomorrow s video (really today s video since this first one is late - 2am). So we ll see how it goes. nscape.tv is in the credits but not active yet. These videos may or may not end up there but I didn t want to have to change the ending if they do. Tags: videobloggingweek2007, machinima.

Full Size | iPod | Flash 8

Full Size | iPod | Flash 8 Rebecca and the girls came out to San Francisco for a few days (they just went back this morning) and we took advantage of the great weather. This is a short video from Muir Woods that I thought Jay would enjoy. Check out all of my photos from the last few days.

Full Size | iPod | Flash 8 People always ask me why we never see my wife Rebecca on my videoblog. I always say that she shows up here briefly on occasion but that she not really into being on video - especially when it s on the Internet. Well just for you, I got her on video the other day when we were driving up to Austin to see The Shins.

Full Size | iPod | Flash 8 Advertisements suck. Sure there are exceptions but for the most part, they suck. One of the things I’m enjoying about San Francisco is the relative lack of billboards and fast food signs along the road. In San Antonio there are places on the highway where all you can see is cars and signs. Here they actually have trees and hills to look at sometimes. But I don’t have to tell you how crazy advertising is - you see it, hear it and trip over it all day every day like everyone else. Advertisements are beginning to get all over videoblogs too. I guess I don’t really mind so much when the video is fictional or informational and the ad is super short - like a flash at the end. That’s easy to ignore - Ze Frank is always selling something at the end but I can’t tell you what. But when ads show up on a someone’s personal videoblog it’s just weird and I swear to god the thing that we talked about happening around this just did. Yesterday I watched a beautiful, emotional, personal video. But at some point my eye wandered for just a second and I saw a little ad in the sidebar for a site where you could download smilies - hmmm. Then I looked up and saw that the video was ending but the playhead wasn’t at the end of the video. And sure enough AN AD FOR A FUCKING VIDEO CAR CHASE GAME CAME ON. This person had just poured their soul out relating a very serious thing that they’d experienced - and made beautiful video out of it - and then an obnoxious ad took a big giant shit all over it. So now that I’ve painted myself into a corner I thought I’d make an advertisement (I’m all about the irony) for some videoblogs which are trying sponsorships - like NPR or PBS - instead of going crazy with ads all over the place. I think it’s kind of cool that the people who watch and care about these projects can contribute a little to help make them happen. To me it’s more like buying a book or seeing a concert. So check these guys out, subscribe to them and send them a few bucks. Wreck Salvage Wreck Salvage Ebay Auction Lives in Focus Donate to Lives in Focus at Have Money Will Vlog Galacticast Galacticast Sponsorships

Full Size | iPod | Flash 8 That about sums up 2007 so far. I ve been working hard on SpinXpress - designing a whole new website that let s you interact with the desktop application. I did a tiny machinima experiment. Ryanne and I have started to work on a major update to Freevlog and I m working on an idea that may make use of all these - SpinXpress, Machinima Freevlog - but it s still a ways off. In the meantime I ve been enjoying the new Shins cd. Rebecca and I are going to see them in Austin a couple of days before SXSW which I ll be speaking at by the way. I ve also been really disappointed by the new David Lynch film, Inland Empire. Obviously I think it s great that someone like Lynch can just grab a consumer DV camera, make a film and distribute it himself. That s what we ve all been going on about for the last two and half years. But what just infuriated me about Inland Empire was not that it was hard to follow or that there wasn t much of a plot (I m expecting that much) but that it was just plain boring. Boring boring boring. 3 hours of vague creepiness and Laura Dern with a what-the-fuck look on her face punctuated by 15 minutes of mildly interesting variations on Lynch themes done much better in Lost Highway and Mullholand Drive. Anyway, both The Shins and Inland Empire are inspiring me (for opposite reasons) along with a bunch of projects that I ve been catching up with - Frank and Dale, Wreck Salvage, Noodlescar Daily, Next to Heaven, and the delicate museum.