Alright, I've been talking this thing up for some time now. Now, with no further Apu, here is the debut of "Chinese Takeout", the latest music video from the Boardlord's new album, "Wax Museum". Directed and edited by Scott Frosch.
I want to take this time to thank the guys in the band for giving me creative control on this one. Working in the video production industry, quite often I'm stifled by clients & agencies who want to play everything straight and narrow. But the Boardlords give me the opportunity to go all out with my ideas. So again, thanks. And thanks to all the people who helped out behind the scenes, namely PDA and Rob Koch. Alright, enough with the sentimental crap, let's get ready to watch the video.
I'm giving you a few options for your viewing pleasure:
1. The hi-res version straight from my website. (takes some time to load up, but it looks the best.)
2. Vimeo (Good, not great)
3. The YouTube version (A last resort for the computer illiterate)
So leave me some feedback on whether or not you liked the video. And BTW, if the first fifteen seconds of the video makes any sense to you, consider yourself "totally cool". Thanks for watching.
WARNING: Extreme "Who Gives a Sh*t?" Content:
Anyone who hung out with me last summer will remember my brief fascination with the "Elvis" Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Combining the goodness of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with banana flavoring, in no doubt, an homage to the King's love of fried peanut butter & banana sandwiches.
Well, the other day my wife and I were in the $5 Store* on Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk and found a box of them. (photo courtesty of my cell phone)
Keep in mind these things were in a limited run last summer and haven't been available since. We bought a few of them on Tuesday. Do you think they're still good? I'm willing to bet they are fine. In fact, if I don't get sick, I'm also willing to bet that I'll go back and buy what's left. I went thru two boxes of them last summer.
Wait a minute, closer inspection of the photo above...Cinnabon makes a snack available in the grocery store? I wonder if it's any good?
*What's up with the $5 store anyways? (I can't remember the official name, it's next to Rio Mexican Restaurant. Let's call it "$5 and a Dream") Is the $5 Store the flagship of the dollar stores?
BTW, they've got an actual grocery store in there. With a frozen isle and everything. You can get economy bacon & TV dinners. Why go to Hallmark for $3 greeting cards when you can pay fifty cents? They also have EVERY jumbo size candy that you would pay four bucks for at the movie theatre. Go there & stock up before you get gouged at The Dark Knight.
So much whining and moaning on StamfordSkatepark.com Enough already. Just shred!
New skate video up on my Vimeo site. Peep it here. Plenty of boarding this July 4th weekend, including a visit from the great one, Murph. (As seen in the above photo, courtesy of PDA)
The video was literally slapped together so that my fellow Scalzi brethren could have a look, ASAP. Shot with the Canon XH-A1 and edited quickly in Final Cut Pro. Hey, check out the cool "glass bug" title feature that I just learned.
Excellent holiday weekend. I don't want to go back to work.
Enough with the weekend festivals, parades, marathons and such and such. Alright, I'm not against raising money for charity, but someone has to formulate a better game plan. Traffic this morning (6/29) was a complete cluster f*ck in the areas of Summer, Washington and God knows where else due to some kind of 10K or fun run or whatever. There were more cops and traffic cones downtown than Lindsey Lohan has Page Six mentions.
With our stagnant economy and outrageous gas prices, shouldn't we be making area restaurants and businesses readily available to the consumer? Or is the answer, 'block off every available road and create unnecessary traffic jams?' If you're going to have these events, there has to be a more logical way to accommodate traffic. You can't just block off streets North, South, East and West, forcing people to drive all over creation to get to a simple destination.
And BTW, who are these kooks that are running around in 90 degree weather? What are you, insane??? "Hello, I have dehydration on line one, shall I tell them you're in a meeting with heat stroke?"
Well, we all know the only reason I care about Stamford traffic on a Sunday morning is that I'm trying to make my way to Scalzi Park from Norwalk. So let's take a look at some pictures from this morning's session. Due to this whole traffic conundrum, I abandoned my car at the corner of Bridge and Summer and skated to the park. Which kind of sucked, but it's no big whoop. As you can see, the theme for today was "shirtless". It was REALLY hot out.
First up: Adam is really taking those frontside ollies out of the park.
Here I am having some fun in the shallow end of things.
Oh no he didn't! Ben "The French Assassin" Plomion, absolutely killing it with a clean kickflip over the barrel.
Skate photos by PDA.
On a different note, check out these Jeff Grosso Vans that are coming out real soon. (I'm told in a couple of weeks by Old School Skaters Online.) I'll believe it when I see it.
Time for another barbeque at Scalzi Skatepark, this one taking place on Saturday, June 21st, which is (believe it or not) National Go Skate Day. While I'm sure groms descended en masse on the streets of Manhattan, we kept it local.
I forgot my camera, so there's not a lot of documentation of the actual barbeque. But PDA got the shot below: Myself queued up in line for Billy Bonebrake's famous hamburgers hot off the grille.
I kept the local groms hopped up on sugar with a seemingly endless supply of Cherry Pepsi. Parents, you're welcome.
Shades of the great Chris Miller. Gene busting out a tuck-knee frontside in the deep end.
Billy Bonebrake, the man can carve it up and make a mean potato salad.
PDA, full coping contact in the deep end. By his account, he got pretty worked by the end of the day. Sometimes those knee & elbow pads slip off, rendering them 100% useless.
Jim Murphy stopped up from Queens. (Wounded Knee Skateboards) He pretty much killed it with Madonnas, big frontside airs and tweaked inverts. Did anybody get that guy a hot dog?
I think I was at the park from about 10:30 till 4. A full day of skating, and I even went back for some more the next morning.
Good barbeque. See you at the next one.
OK, back to business. No more posts about sub-par beer dispensing devices. In today's installment we will look at the hotness that is After Effect's Keylight 1.2.
Now of course, I don't want to give too much away of the new Boardlord's video, "Chinese Takeout", but here's a taste with a few production stills. Believe me, the best is under lock and key until the video is done.
Exhibit A kinda has a "Blade Runner" feel, doesn't it? But I assure you, it's the skyline of Shanghai, not Los Angeles circa 2019. Maybe I need to add more random explosions and spinner cars in the background.
Exhibit B shows you how nicely Keylight works.
Look how wrinkly my green screen was. (Not to mention the Pug) I gotta steam that thing or something. But with just a few tweaks in After Effects, I managed to produce a nice key. And I'm sure someone more competent could rock this way better.
Hi, I'm a Mac.
I'm a PC.
I'm a dog in a Chinese takeout container.
Yup, you gotta love the white infinity screen.
So the biggest stumbling block I've run into lately is the transition to High Def. (If you consider HDV High Def) I mean, it looks great, but it brings post production to a crashing halt. Trying to render sixty seconds worth of motion graphics on my old G5. (I've got one of the last PowerPCs before they made the Intel transition) Forget it, I had to tweak the settings big time, and even then, it takes a looongggg time. It's worth it though. I want to get as far away from SD as allowable. Well, like I said, thank God the song is only sixty seconds long. That's it: From here on out, no music videos longer than a minute.
Alright, break is over. Time to keep working on this project. When the video is done you'll hear about it (and see it!) here first.
