Posts Tagged ‘technology’

Downloaders of the world, unite for good!

Sunday, July 25th, 2010 by Andrew

You may have heard of The Yes Men. If you haven’t, think of them as super­hero media hoax­ers, trot­ting the globe and deceiv­ing the media in an unend­ing cru­sade for justice.

Back in 2009 The Yes Men made a doc­u­men­tary called The Yes Men Fix the World. They are now being sued by the United States Chamber of Commerce—an anti-environmental, anti-regulatory, anti-government, anti-people cor­po­rate lob­by­ing concern—who are seek­ing to have every copy of the movie impounded and destroyed.

Here’s where you come in.

As a coun­ter­mea­sure, The Yes Men, in coop­er­a­tion with the fas­ci­nat­ing new film dis­tri­b­u­tion out­let Vodo, have released the film for free as a BitTorrent down­load. Get it here. Download it, watch it, and seed that baby like there’s no tomor­row. If you’ve got some spare cash to chuck their way (I don’t), swing by their store to make a dona­tion.

The Yes Men Fix the World is a deadly-serious film dis­guised as a fun-loving romp. Watch the movie if you want to see the remark­able story of how The Yes Men fooled the BBC into believ­ing that they were rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Dow Chemical, and what that meant for res­i­dents of Bhopal, India. Or if you pre­fer, hold on until the bit­ter end to see how they tricked mayor Ray Nagin and the gov­er­nor of Louisiana into wel­com­ing them as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Somewhere in there is a cameo from Reggie Watts (Google him), and of course their Chamber of Commerce shenanigans.

BitTorrent is not just a way to watch leaked workprints of X-Men, it is an instru­ment of jus­tice. By seed­ing this file as much as pos­si­ble to as many peers as pos­si­ble, you are help­ing to ensure that these sur­real media cru­saders will not be silenced. Won’t you please help?

[if you need a good (free) BitTorrent client, I rec­om­mend Transmission (Mac) or µTorrent (Windows)]

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Posted in Rants & Raves, Reviews | No Comments »

Analog curiosities

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 by Andrew

Last sum­mer, after wrap­ping prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy on Discouraging Words, Vvinni and I (with the help of Evan) shot a bunch of footage on VHS tape about a supremely anti­so­cial übermen­sch named Plastix Ultimate. Back in August I shared an ad for Skin Removal Cream that Vvinni had cut from the footage. Now, here’s some­thing else:

This ultra-condensed ver­sion of the nar­ra­tive we shot was cre­ated for the “Foot in the Door 4″ show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and leaves out a few key plot points, but I think it cap­tures the over­all fla­vor of the piece.

Second, here’s this:

What I really love about this cam­era (a Panasonic Color TV Camera WV-3320) is the ana­log smearing—ghost trails and lin­ger­ing burn-in left by bright high­lights trav­el­ing across the frame. I real­ize that I prob­a­bly only have a lim­ited num­ber of usage hours on this thing before one of the tubes burns out (these are frag­ile com­po­nents that have been work­ing for over 30 years, after all), so I have to fig­ure out some­thing really good to do with it. I think maybe I’d like to use it to make a music video.

So if you’re an extra­or­di­nar­ily tal­ented musi­cian and you want me to make a music video for you using this cam­era, drop me a line.

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Posted in Filmmaking, News, Personal Projects | 1 Comment »

The cost of a terabyte

Thursday, June 11th, 2009 by Andrew

Today I got my brand-new 1-terabyte (1,000 giga­byte) exter­nal hard drive in the mail—bought in order to store and edit the Political Justice footage. I paid about $110 for it, includ­ing ship­ping. I remem­ber a few years ago when I was intern­ing at Channel 10 and they got their first ter­abyte drive, my boss looked up how much a ter­abyte would have cost in years gone by. I couldn’t remem­ber those num­bers, so out of curios­ity, I did a lit­tle research and cal­cu­lated the cost of a ter­abyte in years past (via Cost of Hard Drive Space):

2004: $1,000
1999: $27,400
1989: $12 mil­lion
1984: $80 mil­lion
1956: $10 billion

Granted, the very idea of a ter­abyte would have been ludi­crous in 1956, when only one mag­netic hard disk existed, with a stor­age capac­ity of 5 megabytes and a pro­duc­tion cost of $10,000 (in 1956 dol­lars). Still, hypo­thet­i­cally, a ter­abyte would have cost $10 bil­lion 53 years ago. Inflation-adjusted, that’s $78.4 trillion—enough to pay for the fed­eral bailout more than six times over.

And now I’ve got two of ‘em in my liv­ing room.

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Posted in Rants & Raves, You Explode Filmmaking | 2 Comments »