Tag: dancing

Those Crazy Dancin’ iPod Silhouettes

I’ve just learned a fascinating bit of trivia about those ubiquitous iPod commercials… apparently one guy does a lot of the dancing, even if the figures don’t necessarily look like him. All of the tall, skinny dancers with a particularly rubbery dancing style are David Elsewhere, possibly with someone else’s head superimposed on his body.

ABC News did a little story about him:

I had never actually seen the original Kollaboration video, but I highly recommend watching the full thing. My mind has been blown a full six years later. It’s kind of amazing that this guy has built a career of sorts out of a YouTube video.

money…

well, my new job starts this upcoming monday, and i think that my first paycheck will follow on friday (that’s what’s nice about working through a temp agency… _weekly paychecks!_)

i’m trying to not let the idea of having money again go to my head, but i have to admit that i’m already plotting some possible purchases.

first of all, i lost an important part of my “shitty tripod”:http://www.ambicoproducts.com, and the company that made it has apparently been bought off and folded into some huge electronics company. not surprising. unfortunately, this means that my chances of getting a “replacement foot” for my tripod (as in, the piece that screws onto a camera and then snaps into the top of the tripod) are infinitesimal.

not having a working tripod makes it basically impossible for me to make another “stop-motion movie”:http://portfolio.unsquare.com/film/donkey/, which i’ve been itching to do lately. and then i realized that if i was going to buy a tripod, why not do whatever i can to make it easier to film new stop motion video?

the most annoying limitation i had when making the donkey movie was that i could only take 24 frames of anything and then i had to unplug my camcorder and import the stills using iphoto. this meant i had very little room for error. the main reason i was so limited, however, was because of the 8mb flash memory card used to store still photos – trying to use DV tapes to store “stills” is an absurdity.

turns out, however, that you can now buy 128mb flash memory cards for $20. and a usb card reader for $10. so that’s three things that would make stop-motion a bit easier. of course, then i’d actually have to follow through and make something or it’d just be more money down a hole.

i seem to have this problem, see, where instead of making do with what i’ve got and creating something, i always tell myself that i need something newer and better to get the job done. so, first i bought a camcorder. then i bought a 120 gig firewire hard drive to store raw footage. -now i need a new computer because mine can no longer play back raw video clips without lagging desperately (except it did just fine when i edited “dancing with myself” or the lost “hepatitis pie” movie that crashed my computer.) it’s frustrating because in the meantime, instead of writing something now that i could shoot later, i spend my time on other things.- right. read the newer entry…

i have a strange relationship with writing. right now i can’t get myself to read anything i wrote in the past, even when i know it’s perfectly good. i don’t want to re-read living in concussion, or look at the fragments i’ve written for daniel, or anything else. something inside me just finds so much of that embarassing, and yet, another part of me knows that there’s nothing wrong with what i’ve written. nothing at all.

i’ve been trying to talk myself into starting something new. the attempts at convincing myself are becoming more numerous, and something has to break through soon. i swear it. i’ve _thought_ about trying to write more lately than i have in a long time, which, considering how things have been going, is quite a change. there was a long stretch there where i blithely went along not worrying about it at all.

real quick

eddy was saying that he wished there was a higher quality version of “dancing with myself” and it got me to thinking… i knew i had backed them up somewhere…

after about a minute of searching, i found the backups cd, and after messing with the files for a bit, i got the old imovie project converted into an imovie hd project. unfortunately, the original mp3 soundtrack had been corrupted somewhere along the way, so i had to redo that, which wasn’t easy considering how laggy the video was.

luckily, though, i finally managed to get them synced up, and then i exported a newer version of the movie, higher quality and all.

check it out: dancing with myself (10mb file)

*EDIT:* okay, doug, i fixed the glitch. remember, i exported the original right before going to bed. these things happen. jerk.

i haven’t been updating this

i haven’t been updating this thing as much as i would like to simply because i’m using the net on borrowed time. this computer lab is packed, and cold, and closes in half an hour. hopefully soon i might be able to get a dial-up connection in my room, but who knows how the ins and outs of british telecom will play out. it may be nigh on impossible to get a phone line and net connection set up in my room, so it may be a moot point. right now i hope to at least update a minimum of four days a week.

the most notable thing that happened to me this weekend was seeing the people across the way dance naked in front of their window. yes, that’s right. me and two of my friends watched a young (drunk… hopefully) british couple dance themselves silly in their fully lit, completely visible apartment. it seemed innocent enough at first – the guy was walking around without his shirt off. the girl looked like she was topless at first, but it turned out that she was just wearing a flesh-colored top. this became clear when she removed it. they proceeded to dance topless in front of their open window for a good ten, fifteen minutes and then they disappeared. we thought this was the end of the show, but they were just taking off their pants, apparently. after a few minutes they both returned, the man wearing boxers and the woman panties. the man insisted on dancing endlessly in front of the window. we (of course) were shamelessly watching the whole thing, which of course leads to an obvious conclusion. they saw us. yes, that’s right. they saw us staring at them through the window. they pointed, laughed… and kept dancing. now they were apparently doing it for our benefit. or something. maybe their judgement wasn’t quite right. probably it wasn’t. pretty soon they seemed to have become oblivious to the fact that they were being watched (or they enjoyed it) and they started playing a game of “steal each other’s underwear.” actually it was mostly the guy stealing the girl’s underwear and putting it on his head or waving it around in the air. they also kept spanking each other repeatedly. for a short while they disappeared out of sight, probably to their bed, but they stood up again soon enough. the woman began to walk around completely naked, which was readily obvious from our viewpoint. they guy continued wearing his boxers for some strange reason – we were all convinced that he was being a dork, since the girl was completely naked and he was still partially clothed. he began pulling his boxers up very high, much like Urkel from family ties. i’m not sure if he thought his partner would find this sexy… or what. anyways, this seemed to prove our theory. finally she must have convinced him to take them off. unfortunately, he decided this was a good time to dance suggestively in front of the window. he pointed at us to make sure we knew that he was dancing for our benefit. every once in a while the girl would leap up on him and wrap her legs around his waist. after a few minutes she would get off of him and they would talk about… something. or stand there looking at his penis, which may have been suffering from (as matt put it) “whiskey dick.” who knows. after a little more of this back-and-forth they finally retired to the bed and disappeared for a good long while. we assumed this was the end of the show and closed our windows accordingly, although i did see the final sight of two very tired looking people standing up to retrieve their clothes. all in all it was pretty strange. at least they were attractive and young. i don’t know if i could have handled an Ugly Naked Couple. i wonder if i’ll ever even see them on their balcony again. who knows what could happen the next time they get drunk.