Sunday Morning Coffee

Another Flickr video upload and Canon PowerShot G9 test.

If Flickr had launched its video upload service back in January 2008 might really have been the year of video after all (apologies to Semanal, by the way).

[Video] Belmont

Click on the image above or one of these: Quicktime | Flash

Here I go again attempting to make something out of material gathered with no particular purpose in mind. Under other circumstances I’d have used a tripod and locked the shot, but the 9 still images which make up this presentation were taken hand-held. The presentation itself was created in minutes, completely in iPhoto.

The location is Norfolk Street in Belmont, a district of Port of Spain, Trinidad, where I was last night taking photos and video of the La Fantasie art project. I selected the building mainly because it was directly across the street and because of the glow from the two fluorescent light fixtures which highlighted the texture of the metal door, but it also happens to be the constituency office of the People’s National Movement, the ruling political party of Trinidad & Tobago.

See a larger version of the video at Caribbean Free Video, where I’ve begun archiving all the stuff that moves.

This also happens to be my submission for Semanal - Week 4!

[Video] So Many Elephants

More video from my 2006 India trip. This one’s really just a slice of life, and a slice of tourist life at that. Nikipedia and I had every intention of riding an elephant up to Amber Palace. But on actually arriving at Amber and seeing that the walk up the hill takes all of five minutes, plus learning that getting to the elephant terminus involved walking some distance away from the Palace, we decided to hoof it instead. Viewed up close, it also seemed just too much of a touristy thing to do.

Which didn’t stop me from filming tourists riding elephants. The faintly audible voice pointing out that most of the elephants are female is Nikipedia’s. View a larger version of the video here.

We did end up getting a chance to interact with elephants, however, as Tabu, our Jaipur driver, took us to visit an elephant compound in the middle of a village off the Amber Fort Road.

[Video] “A Feather in his Cap”

I recently signed on as a member of an initiative called Semanal, where the goal is to produce 52 videos for the year (ie one per week), so it seems like I’m now sort of committed to this video thing. Which gave me the impetus to turn the footage I shot on that achingly gorgeous day at Mount St. Benedict into something.

I beg you, therefore, to view this one more as an exercise in creating a narrative of sorts out of material shot without any particular purpose in mind, and in playing with mood and atmosphere, rather than trying to discern any meaning (there isn’t any). It was also the first real test of the Aiptek GO-HD camcorder, which, like most cameras of its ilk, yields the best shots in good light and when the camera is held still. And next time I promise I’ll take along a tripod.

Thanks to Nikipedia, Jonty, André, Alison Allyson and the waitress at the Pax Guest House for participating (albeit involuntarily). The soundtrack was borrowed from here.

Click here see a slightly larger version of the video. And here to join Semanal.

(”A Feather in his Cap” was previously uploaded elsewhere under the title “A Murder on the Mount”).

Technorati Tags: trinidad, caribbean, mount st benedict, video, semanal08, semanal08week2

2008, year of video, plus my India Road Movie

I’ve never been one for new year’s resolutions, but if there’s one goal I have for 2008 it’s to make peace with online video. Having spent a good part of my professional life working in television, I’ve got plenty of prejudices about quality etc. to rid myself of. In fact, I strongly believe that one of the reasons I was able to embrace audio so freely is that I’ve never worked in radio.

So brace yourself for a season of bad CFR videos as I teach myself to shoot (as opposed to telling somebody else to shoot) moving pictures, edit (as opposed to sitting with my hotshot editor brother and watching him push the buttons) and play with various methods of compression and presentation while savouring the limitations imposed on me by bandwidth and my reluctance to impose too much on the patience and goodwill of my viewers.

I recently invested in a small, cheap Aiptek GO-HD camcorder, but the video below was filmed on the Panasonic still camera I took with me to India last year. The footage sat there for a year, until, inspired by some of the things the Egypt group were doing with their little camcorders, I decided to sit down a few weeks ago and hack it into something. It’s a little over six minutes, which is a long time to be looking at footage shot from the side of an auto-rickshaw, but it’s got a nice soundtrack and a few interesting images here and there. So why not pop a Dramamine and take a look?

Technorati Tags: semanal08, semanal08week1, india, jaipur, autorickshaw

Bracing for Dean

Click To Play

These were the scenes this morning in Diego Martin, Trinidad, around 930am. Hurricane Dean isn’t even within spitting distance of us, so imagine what it must feel like in the islands further north, some of which - Dominica and Martinique, for instance - have already taken a beating, and where hurricane warnings and watches are in effect.

Over at Global Voices, Janine Mendes-Franco has posted a report on the reactions from the Caribbean blogosphere as the region braces for Dean.

Sobers’s record six sixes on YouTube

Posting this one for the benefit of the young ‘uns out there who may never have seen Sir Gary make his record-breaking six sixes in Cardiff, Wales in 1968.

Hat tip to Skye and to the Guardian Unlimited sport blog, who features the clip today among their “favourite clips from YouTube this week“.

Ralph Thamar - “Fe Van”

I touched upon my Martinique experiences some time ago at the dormant-but-not-in-fact-dead Caribbean Free Photo. In that post I mentioned the group Malavoi, whose music, I said, “features prominently on the soundtrack to my Martinique days.”

Yesterday I happened to come across the MySpace page of Ralph Thamar, Malavoi’s former lead singer. Around the time I arrived in Martinique Thamar was just starting his solo career, and I recall once having somehow gotten seated at a table (probably due to some screw-up in the seating plan) with him and Edith Léfel and Marijosé Alie at a bizarre event called “La Nuit des Stars” that was being televised by RFO Martinique. Those were some strange times, indeed.

I no longer keep up with French Caribbean music like I used to, and this video for the song “Fe Van” reminded me of what I might be missing. Accompanying Thamar on piano is Mario Canonge, another fine Martiniquan musician whom I had the good fortune of meeting briefly last year, when he played with the band Sakésho at a jazz festival here in Trinidad.

“Fe Van”, incidentally, is from Thamar’s 2005 album Alma y Corazon.

“Running with the Dogs” - Orange Sky (video)

My talented amigo Walt Lovelace sent me this video he directed for Trinidadian rock band Orange Sky’s “Running with the Dogs” a couple of weeks ago, and insisted I post it on CFR. (”Don’t I need permission?” I asked. “You have my permission,” he replied.)

So here it is. The snake is real, and so is the lightbulb.

Upstairs, Orange Sky’s latest album, is available at Amazon.com.

“A Happy Song” - 3canal

Digging around in my Libsyn archives today, I came across this 2005 video for 3canal’s “A Happy Song”, which I’d compressed and uploaded ages ago but never did anything with. I figure now’s as good a time as any to unveil it. The video was directed by Walt Lovelace and Wendell Manwarren.

“Happy Song” is from the CD Jab Jab Say — grab yourself a copy at CD Baby.

In other 3canal news, according to the reports out of Washington DC, preparations for the show “Caribeana” are going swimmingly.