David Emery OnlineHouse Season Finale Filmed Entirely with Canon 5D Mark II
The season finale of the popular TV show House, which will air on May 17th, was filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II.
Very interesting – what with the occurrence of RED One video cameras being used to shoot magazine covers, these two once separate industries seem to be converging pretty quickly.
I do love the look you get shooting video with a DSLR (not that I have any interest doing it myself – it’s all about the stills for me).
Visit ➔Ambient Inspiration
I’m a heavy user of tabs in whatever browser I call home – Safari at the moment. There’s always a bunch of sites that I keep open all the time: Google Reader (using Helvetireader of course), this site, the visitor logs for this site, the server stats for this site (I may be sharing too much here…), my Flickr stats, Facebook & Last.fm. They can be split up nicely into: News, Blog+Stats & Social Networks.
In the last couple of months I’ve added another site into that last category, which slots in very nicely right next to Flickr: Dribbble.
So what is Dribbble? In short, it is to design and creativity as Twitter is to a blog post; as a member of the site, you upload little snippets of what you’re working on, limited to a 400×300 pixel canvas. That’s actually pretty much it; everything else has a vague twitter-ish feel around it so you can follow people, have followers and all that jazz. It’s simple, and all the better for it.
It’s just come out of a lengthy beta period so now non-drafted players (it uses basketball as a hook to hang all of the interface metaphors...
Read more ➔Popular Science+
In December, we showed Mag+, a digital magazine concept produced with our friends at Bonnier.
Late January, Apple announced the iPad.
So today Popular Science, published by Bonnier and the largest science+tech magazine in the world, is launching Popular Science+ — the first magazine on the Mag+ platform, and you can get it on the iPad tomorrow. It’s the April 2010 issue, it’s $4.99, and you buy more issues from inside the magazine itself.
BERG seem to be doing some incredible work of late, and this is no exception. Unlike some of the iPad magazine demo videos that have been going round in recent weeks this is grounded in reality; no crazy custom video elements, just the existing magazine content repurposed brilliantly for a touch based, animated environment.
Visit ➔It's Not the Pay, It's the Wall
...the issue I’m interested in is whether it’s possible for a news site to exist behind a wall of any sort. Anyone who runs a relatively well-trafficked website will be able to tell you that it’s typical for the majority of traffic to be fly-by visitors from search engines and organic website referrals. A relatively smaller percentage of visitors arrive at your site by purposefully navigating directly to it (keying the URL, hitting a bookmark etc).
Drew hits the nail on the head here; there is nothing wrong with paying for content online, but putting a block between you and most of your visitors is never going to work on the web.
It’s not so much that people will actively choose to go elsewhere, more that they won’t be driven there as no-one will link to it.
Contrast that with the App store (which will soon be an Apps+Magazines+Newspaper store) where links don’t matter; what matters is popularity and familiarity. Existing print offerings have both of these in spades.
Visit ➔Under Great White Northern Lights Box Set Pitchfork Review
In the final scene of the White Stripes tour documentary Under Great White Northern Lights, Jack and Meg sit on a bench in front of 88 black-and-white keys. Jack starts to play the piano and sing his ballad "White Moon". Meg starts to cry. It's a heartbreaking, out-of-nowhere surge of intimacy that briefly lifts the curtain on one of the most fascinatingly private bands to ever reach arena-rock ubiquity. It's also one of those revealing moments that raises more questions than it answers.
I don’t think this documentary has really received the fanfare it deserves; while obviously I’m a big massive White Stripes fan so slightly biased, it’s one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen. Incredibly compelling, and a stark reminder that while Jack White is still about and playing in band after band, it’s the White Stripes that made him famous and for good reason.
Also, this review is a lovely bit of writing (not that that’s out of the ordinary for Pitchfork album reviews, though).
Visit ➔Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June
The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International has announced. Users will pay £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week's subscription.
I just can’t see this working – how can you charge when more competitors then have ever existed are giving it away for free?
On the flip-side though, I can completely see £2/week working for an iPad version – the medium is important, as is the payment and distribution model.
Visit ➔LCD Soundsystem new album reviewed track by track
So what next, when you’ve nothing left to prove? Prove it again, differently. Usually when a band tells you their latest, yet-to-be-aired effort is “the best album we’ve ever made” it’s code for “we’ve lost it completely, but at that mega-volume playback in the expensive studio it felt like we’d got away with it”. This isn’t one of those records. The third, still-untitled LCD Soundsystem album contains a run of heavyweight hits that compress the best elements of their previous work, topped and tailed by some intriguing slow-burners.
Of course as soon as I post something that says we can’t hear any new LCD Soundsystem music yet, what appears on the internet? New LCD Soundsystem music:
DRUNK GIRLS!
Visit ➔A Great Year For Music
The term ‘a great year for music’ is so subjective as to render it irrelevant. One persons great year is another persons fallow period and visa versa.
That being said, 2010 is already shaping to be a great year for music.
2007 was another great year – not to say that the intervening years have been awful, of course – and this year we’re getting a bunch of those artists returning. I’m incredibly excited about the prospect of the new LCD Soundsystem album in May – Sound of Silver has to be one of the records of the decade, and if the follow up is half as good it’ll be stunning. Sadly there’s nothing out there to hear as yet, so we’ve got no idea what it’s going to sound like.
Luckily we do have something to hear from The National. Their last album Boxer was the very definition of a ‘grower’ – for me at least it took months (if not years) to fully work it’s way underneath my skin. I was actually quite worried when I first heard High Violet as it seemed instantly brilliant – have they lost the depth they’ve previously displayed? – but it turns out...
Read more ➔The Re-Designer
My name is Bryan Veloso, and I am a re-designer. I do not create, I improve. I do not envision what is new, I envision how something that already exists can be better.
I can relate to this a great deal; I think I’m best as a designer when working with pre-existing elements, illustrations and the like.
Visit ➔Blocked
There has been an surge of interest recently on the topic of ad-blocking, spurred on in part by this post on the popular tech-news site Ars Technica:
There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. […] My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love.
It makes for a very interesting read; an obviously passionate direct plea to their readership to help out, behave differently and make a difference.
As I was reading it I got a strong sense of deja vu; I’d heard this all before, somewhere else…
…replace ‘ad-blocker’ with ‘file sharing site’ and ‘content’ with ‘mp3’ and I think you might recognise it too.
I find it quite interesting that the march of ‘progress’ is of such a pace that a technology site can be threatened by the very kind...
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