Evan's blog

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  • Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker

    Nice little doco about a Brooklyn guy who makes professional kitchen knives by hand. Not sure about the choice of framing for the interview, makes it a bit hard to get into sympathy with the subject.
    [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/31455885[/vimeo]

  • Disable Perian for best YouTube HTML5 playback

    Just discovered that YouTube HTML5 video playback can be improved dramatically if the Perian QuickTime plugin is uninstalled — it seems that Google is trying to be smart and deliver a WebM format to the browser rather than h264 in an MP4 container. Bit of a pain, I was wondering why the player was dropping frames all over the place, and being generally unresponsive to scrubbing/play/pause interactions.

  • Boston University: BU Abroad & You at BU

    Interesting content aggregator site for BU Admissions – You at BU. Not sure if people would bother with fiddling around with all the options — perhaps for those who are visually minded it’s good.

    Also discovered some older BU Abroad clips on YouTube that are excellent — short and really give a flavour of the country where the student is on exchange.

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOc4LXUNdko[/youtube]

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiSd72_rSm0[/youtube]

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni1z3pJKpdc[/youtube]

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkoEKfPMDDM[/youtube]

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hynwteprZ_0[/youtube]

  • Zeega: tool for online documentary creation

    Just noticed a reference to Zeega, an open source tool for creating online documentaries. Could be interesting.
    http://zeega.org/

  • Holstee Manifesto film

    The “Just Do It.” for 2012? Maybe. Nicely produced, but I’m not really sure what the message is — the script needs a little more work?

    [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/34414313[/vimeo]

  • For women in science clip – Heather Whitney

    Nice short clip, similar to what we’ve been producing for the Curtin Commercial Innovation Awards. Might be some ideas we can steal! I agree with some comments about the interview audio edit — it’s a little too sound-bitey and choppy for my taste.
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey3KdzcE-K4[/youtube]

  • RMIT’s How does… work? YouTube clips

    Interesting play by RMIT, presenting their lecturers with “kinetic text” animations explaining questions in their area of expertise. Good YouTube search fodder. However, they didn’t quite close the loop with a strong call to action at the end of each clip — how about a link back to the faculty or school? Why is the “watch the rest of the videos in this series” a text link in the description and not an interactive annotation?

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_E4DrPRLPI[/youtube]
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Gnm7B69UU[/youtube]
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoIafzc0k74[/youtube]

  • Bootstrap: Twitter’s fast site building collection

    Interesting collection of JS and CSS presented by Twitter for rapid building of sites.
    http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

  • Lighting for “green screen”

    Eve Hazelton does a nice tutorial on how to light and post produce a green screen shoot. Really good demo of After Effects in the second half which explains all the controls needed to quickly get a good result.

    [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/34365256[/vimeo]

  • Bournemouth Uni video production

    Interesting collection of clips on YouTube, probably at about the same level of production as the Curtin team.

    However, here’s something different from their current campaign, reacting to the changes to government funding in the UK — a character animation — interesting! Breaks through, although possibly a little long?
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv1Whlvf7U8[/youtube]

    This clip about the international student experience is ok, but when the student support person is talking to the viewer they really should be talking to-camera to increase the personal feel, also; how come the “German” student seems to have a very strong local accent? 😉
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNRvjhSEcmw[/youtube]

    Forensic science course promo video, nice work, good cutaways. Should draw in the CSI crowd?
    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWkFYM7VXfM[/youtube]