Your Guide to Holiday Movies

Think is produced in Dallas and this episode features DFW film critics, Stephen Becker of KERA’s Art&Seek, Christopher Kelly of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Chris Vognar of The Dallas Morning News. I’m not familiar any of these guys, but two of them came across as much too film illiterate to have jobs as film critics. One guy fell asleep in Hugo. A couple of them consider National Lampoon’s A Christmas Vacation a great Christmas film. They suggested Home Alone and It’s a Wonderful Life are not Christmas movies. One or more of them hasn’t seen Love Actually and still criticized it!?!?! The number of films these professional film critics admitted they haven’t seen was embarrassingly astounding.

Dear Krys Boyd,

Think is the best show produced by KERA and one of the best shows on public radio. Please skip these guys next time you want to talk about film. It’s like they decided because they like going to movies they would get jobs as movie critics without understanding that they’d be no go at it until they had seen everything. The take away from this episode of Think is the guests you had on haven’t taken the time to watch enough films to know what to Think.

Love the show, though!

Neal

DO
NOT
MOVE
THE
CAMERA!

If you want the camera to move, there are tools like balancing stabilizers, jibs, tracks, and of course tripods. Without them, your shots will be better if you don’t move the camera at all ever. With the right tools, though, you can achieve shots that are down-right cinematic even with an iPhone.

Mobislyder is small little track designed for iPhone, iPod Touch and other small video cameras that gives shooters the ability to capture smooth tracking shoots like you see in film. It has a variety of mounting options including and articulated mount, mobile device mount, 1/4″ standard mount, adhesive ball mount and a 1/4″ ball mount, so really the only limitation on cameras you can use with it is weight.

Glidetrack, the company producing mobislyder has them available for preorder at a special launch price of $129.49 at the time I’m writing this.

Watch this demo to see the kinds of shots you can capture with mobislyder:

iTunes made podcasting accessible to a large audience, but it isn’t the best way to get audio podcasts anymore. The best way is an App called Stitcher. Install the free App on your phone (iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palm) and start searching for audio shows you like. Favorite a show and it’s added to a list. After you’ve built up your list, hit play and enjoy! It stitches shows together and plays them back to back. It’s a wonderful thing!

Stitcher is a great way to consume audio, especially if your taste is diverse. I hit play on a Monday morning and hear TWiT, No Agenda, The Splendid Table, WTF with Marc Maron, This Week in Start-ups, Studio 360, The Trending Show and a long, long list of NPR shows. Stitcher automatically moves down your list and plays the most recent unplayed episode. I love going from tech to comedy to a foodie show to politics without having to choose what to play next after the last podcast ends. It’s as if, I’ve been given my own talk radio station and the budget to program it with all the shows I love.

One of the best things about Stitcher is it remembers where you pause. For podcast playback that’s to be expected, but since the file streams through the App, I was pleasantly surprised to have that as a feature.

As a new media guy, I’m not a fan of the way conservative talk hosts charge for access to the podcasts of their shows, but Stitcher supports those paid accounts. It would rock my world if Stitcher did a deal with Sirius. I’d gladly pay to get Howard Stern through Stitcher.

Stitcher isn’t perfect, but it’s improving all the time. Show notes are an important part of podcasts. They feature information about guest and links to things talked about on the show. The Stitcher App only displays part of a show’s notes and there’s no way to see more. Not every podcast I love is available, and I’m pretty sure if a podcast isn’t available through Stitcher, it’s because the podcaster hasn’t signed up to make it available.

There is a browser player but it’s nowhere near as slick as the app yet. The browser player doesn’t remember playback position, and if you browse for new shows, it stops playing what you’re listening to.

If you like audio podcast, you have to get the Stitcher App! It’s free and all kinds of awesome!

Here’s the dream for any new media producer. When we’re able to shoot in 4K and get that video to anyone who wants to watch it on a mobile phone or IMAX sized screen within minutes (even better live), then we have a real revolution.

I read about a company today on Techcrunch called latakoo. The story is a group of journalists joined some tech guys to fix a problem. We’ve got gear to shoot amazing footage. Moving that footage from one part of the world to another without lots of quality loss or lots of time to wait makes what we do frustrating. Latakoo says they’re solving that problem.

The best way I can explain how cool this is is to give you a hypothetical case study. With GeekBrief.TV, we never covered CES by going there. It’s expensive to go, and I’m a cheapskate. I was only willing to go if we could get the expense sponsored, but that wasn’t possible because of our deal with Mevio. We covered CES by making several short episodes of GeekBrief.TV based on news coming out of CES.

Here’s the deal, though … there were lots of people attending CES that would have gladly served as GeekBrief.TV corespondents. There was no way to get high quality video from Vegas to Dallas in an amount of time that would have been good enough to make the kind of show I wanted to make.

Latakoo has built a system for moving great quality video from source to production quickly.

I haven’t tried latakoo, but what I read about them sounds like just what wasn’t possible when we were covering events remotely. I hope to have an opportunity to work with this company on a future product because they’re meeting a need in a really important way.

The funny thing about his show, though is that it isn’t always funny. Carol Burnett said, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” On WTF, Marc talks to famous comedians about hardship and pain … both his own and theirs. He also talks to them about the good times. WTF has a very unique hopeful feel to it. It has a sense of real humanity. Maybe the best word to describe it is kinda … deep.

I appreciate people who speak openly about hardship and pain because I just can’t relate to people who present their lives as perfect … like they’re always “winning!” Real life has ups and downs, and real people I can relate to talk about both.

If you know me personally, I’m a fan of God, but not so much a fan of the Bible. One of the things I do love about the Bible though is that it stars people who lived very flawed lives. King David (the Bible calls him a “man after God’s own heart”} lusted for another man’s wife and had the husband killed so he could be with her. If you believe the Bible, even after David did something truly bad, he maintained his friendship with God.

Every once in awhile people question me for sharing all I’m going through online. It isn’t about wanting pity. That’s usually the criticism I get. It’s about being real. I expect to get through what happened to me, but I’m not there yet. Some days it’s great. Some days it sucks. That’s life.

Marc Maron says, “Before it, I was sort of an isolated artist. I was respected within the standup community, and obviously I knew a lot of people, but I didn’t know them well. And sort of through my own attitude and my own insanity, I saw myself as a marginalized character.” That’s exactly how I feel about my place in new media and tech. I’ve been a winner. Right now I’m a loser. I’ll be a winner again.

Marc’s show is about show biz a little. Mostly though, it’s about people who make a living on stage making people laugh. It’s wonderful, and if you haven’t listened, I hope you will.

I woke up at 2AM Friday morning and started editing. When stuff renders in Final Cut, I check Facebook and Twitter. When I checked Facebook, I saw a post by Drew that he and Dawn were robbed in their home by guys with guns and machettes. Most of their valuables were taken and Dawn and Drew were left bloodied. They are now going to leave their home in Costa Rica and move back the U.S.

I’m not in a position to help them in any way that matters right now but there always seem to be angels everywhere in the form of people who can. Dawn and Drew need money to get back home. So I thought I’d share what happened just in case someone reads my blog who can help in a way I can’t. They are two of the best people I’ve ever met.

http://thedawnanddrewshow.com/support/

The film is about Josh Harris. Harris made a lot of money in the early .com days. He had a vision for Internet TV back when most of us were still on dial-up. He started a company called Pseudo.com and when his personality made investors uncomfortable, he moved on to invent lifecasting. He and his girlfriend lived in a loft with cameras and microphones everywhere until the experiment cost them his money, their relationship, and maybe some sanity.

For about a year before we launched GeekBrief.TV, I studied attention economics in an effort to understand how to share information people can get from a wide variety of sources in a way that is special enough that they would want to get it from us. As a shy, retreating, bookish couple, we had to stretch outside our comfort zone in order to accomplish our goal. It helped immensely that Luria has that special something when she’s on camera. Stretching beyond what felt comfortable enabled us to accomplish what I thought we could.

Tools of social media give us all access to the world any time we want it. It’s then up to us to choose how much we live in public. As Luria and I walk through the pain of ending our marriage, it feels improper to talk about the personal stuff and disingenuous to say nothing at all. Our goal is to make it through this gracefully. I’m inclined to share my personal pain because it has helped me to read other people’s stories. Anytime I do that though, I have to do it in a way that is respectful of Luria’s desire for privacy. It’s tricky so my default is now set to Not Share.

Everything we’re going through is new. I’m sure we’ll both make mistakes. I’m more sure I’ll make more mistakes than she will. I’m not convinced it was the right thing to announce this on our blogs. I just don’t know, but one thing she and I both believe is that the geek world is better than the cool world because geeks are concerned about perfecting our tech while accepting one another just as we are. Beyond that, living in public is a tricky proposition, so if you choose to do it, it’s probably best to proceed with caution.