Jane Lui @ Cafe Henrici

Here is Jane Lui performing her original song "Long Ago" from her show at the best cafe in Zürich back in May

This song will be on her new album Goodnight Company coming later this year.

 

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The First Music Video Shot Entirely on a Camera Phone -- The True Story

With all the buzz about the iPhone4's video capabilities, I thought it would be appropriate to tell a story from the archive. This is a story of the harsh mistress that is internet fame and of pushing technologies beyond the cutting edge. It is also a story of self-congratulatory exaggeration. It is the true story of the first music video shot entirely on a camera phone:

iPhone/iPad Friendly Video

 

Set your judgement aside and come with me way back to 2004.

(Ripple dissolve - Chimes sound effect )

Random Nokia 3650 PhotoCamera phones were first becoming popular in the US, and I had recently picked up a Nokia 3650. This shining piece of technology had a 0.31 megapixel camera that also recorded 176x144 video, though limited to 12 second or 96kb clips (whichever came first). In addition, I was equipped with an unlimited GPRS plan from T-Mobile and an account with the now defunct proto-twitter service Textamerica. I was posting photos and short messages regularly from my phone way back in the early mid-2000s. I was a true member of the avant garde. Little did I know that my penchant for pushing the envelope would catapult me quite nearly to internet celebrity.

The night was February 30th, 2004. I was visiting San Diego for the weekend. It was late, so a group of friends and I were at the only place to go in track-home-laden North County San Diego -- Denny's. As it got later, we all became slightly punchy. My friend Haber (known only by his last name) was punchier than most and I began to film him with my camera phone. I discovered that you could stop and start within a clip, which allowed for basic in-camera effects like making things disappear. At one point in a video clip, my other friend Dave told Haber to get down from something he had climbed on to. That line was born to be a sound sample.

Later that night I returned to Haber's place, where I was couch surfing. I got the idea to throw together some loops in Garage Band and edit the grainy clips into a "music video". Haber, who is one hell of a guitar player, added the pièce de résistance -- a kick ass guitar solo. I inserted an MTV-style music video title and named the "band" XFYA, since everyone at Denny's that night had been in my high-school band, FYA (like ex-FYA, get it?). I hastily uploaded the video to Textamerica (Archive.org Link), giving it the title "the first music video shot entirely on a nokia 3650", and promptly went to sleep. The next morning, Haber Get Down had been seen nearly 10,000 times. It spread like a small brush fire through the nascent Web2.0 and went on to be viewed nearly 200,000 times (which was a lot for back then). It was even written about by several prominent bloggers including BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin who wrote "It's kind of lame, but it's still a first."

Filming "Cornelius Swarthout"To continue riding this wave of internet celebrity, we made an attempt to shoot a planned music video on my camera phone. We recorded a few songs the next night and filmed the second music video shot entirely on a camera phone: Homage to Cornelius Swarthout.

Alas, I was too far ahead of my time. Youtube didn't exist yet and web videos didn't have as much ability to go viral. Some TV shows appeared interested, but the video had too little resolution and television didn't really "get" internet video yet. (I actually sent a a mini-DV of this to a cable channel! Imagine 176x144 badly encoded video blown up to 720x480. Yuck!) Haber Get Down was forgotten. Over a year later, the Presidents of the United States of America claimed that they were the first to film a music video with cell phones on their song Some Postman. XFYA, being essentially a fake band, had no chance at refuting this. I still stand by my acheivement though. Granted, their video may have been better -- but we were first.

Ok, setting this silliness aside, something did strike me during that time. It was something people are only starting to talk about now. When we were filming Homage to Cornelius Swarthout, I thought about how liberating it was to be able to make a film with a pocketable device. I thought to myself that some years in the future we would have HD video camera phones, and the boundries of where and when cinematic stories could be created would be broken down.

We are seeing this now. When the iPhone 3GS came out, I made another music video, which was the first ever to be to be shot on that device -- Technologic Overkill. It was sort of an inside joke to myself about Haber Get Down (Technologic Overkill was the name of my moblog on Textamerica). Other videos came shortly after (1, 2, 3). Now with the iPhone 4, people are creating and even editing HD videos from a device that fits in their pocket. The results are pretty good (1, 2, 3).

Back in 2004 again. I had another thought that day while filming my second camera phone project. More important than where and when videos could be created with a pocketable device was who would do it. In the future, any kid with a camera phone could create the next masterpiece of cinema. I know Haber Get Down is far from a masterpiece, but I think it was an interesting step towards the future -- or it could just be a blurry camera phone video.

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From The Archive: Homage to Cornelius Swarthout

This entry is quite old and quite silly. I created the first music video shot entirely on a camera phone.  Homage to Cornelius Swarthout is the second music video shot entirely on a camera phone.  I still enjoy the strangeness of the song and video. Before you judge the quality of this video, remember that this is 2002 camera phone technology.

P.S. Cornelius Swarthout was the true inventor of the waffle iron -- a truly great man.

Shout outs to Dave, Haber, Sean and Justin.

Illusionist Boy by Jane Lui

Last Month Jane Lui perfomed at Cafe Henrici. Before her set, when went to a beautiful rooftop in the Niederdorf and filmed this:
 
iPhone/iPad friendly Youtube Version

Check out more awesome videos of Jane on her Youtube channel

Special thanks to George, Tito and Olivia. 

New Music Video In Progress


I have known Jane Lui for a long time and it has been my pleasure to collaborate with her on two music videos: Freddie Goodtime from her first album, Teargirl and Libra Armor from her second album, Barkentine. A few weeks ago Jane came through Zürich for a visit. While she was her we shot a new music video for a song called Goodnight Company which is also the title for her upcoming third album. I am now in the process of editing the video and it is looking great! Stay tuned for the video's release soon!

Canon 550d Movie Crop Mode

The Canon 550d is an excellent photo camera with its 18MP(5176x3456 pixels) sensor, but the main reason that I purchased one was for its HD video modes. It is capable of shooting 1920x1080p at 24, 25 & 30fps as well as 1280x720p at 60 & 50 fps. In order to produce these frame sizes/rates while still using the full sensor area the camera "cheats" by skipping lines. When shooting 1080p for example, i believe that the camera is skipping every third line. The 550d has another video mode which doesn't use this cheat. It is called Movie Crop Mode which is interesting but in most cases not very useful. Check out this diagram:
The part of the image outline in red represents the entire usable pixel area of the 550d. Outlined in green is the 16x9 part of the sensor used in the HD modes with gray lines in half the frame to illustrate showing the line skipping occurs. The little blue box in the middle is the part of the sensor used in Movie Crop mode. The camera is cropping out the standard definition-sized center of the sensor to make videos of 640x480 resolution. This is essentially the same as taking a photo from the camera and cropping it to 640x480, except that it is 30fps video. What does this mean? The most apparent thing you notice when using this mode is whatever lens you have on is effectively 7 times longer. A 50mm lens becomes a 350mm lens. A 200mm becomes a 1400mm. It also means you have some incredible macro capabilities because the minimum focus distance of the lens doesn't change. Finally, it actually has less aliasing artifacts than the HD modes in the camera. As interesting as all of this is, it is not HD so it's actual applications are very limited. Here are some real examples:
 
iPhone/iPad compatible Youtube Link 

A few notes about this video: The camera has a normal 640x480 mode which is not included in the diagram at the top of the article. It works essentially the same as the HD modes by line-skipping. I included two HD clips at 100% to show that the Movie Crop really does resolve more information than the HD mode. The footage of the green bug was taken with an 80mm lens, which really shows off the macro abilities of Movie Crop. The baby foxes were shot at 3200 ISO, it is amazing that one can film in such lighting conditions even if it is grainy.

Movie Crop is a fun feature to have, but the lack of HD makes it mostly useless. It would have been nice for Canon to include a 1080p Movie Crop function which would give non-line-skipped footage with a crop factor. Maybe this is something that will be included in professional Canon HDSLRs in the future.

Questions? Comments? Contact me.

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Plastic Bullet Review

Plastic Bullet is a new photo-manipulation app for iPhone developed by Red Giant Software (the app's name is a reference to their popular video color correction software Magic Bullet). Plastic bullet is intended to simulate the effects of cheap, plastic-lensed film cameras like the Holga, Diana, etc. intro screenWhen you open the app it prompts you to either select a photo from your camera roll, or take a photo in the app. After the photo is chosen or taken, you are presented with four randomly generated variations of the image.  variationsThe variations are based on a combination of color toning, contrast, saturation, simulated film burn, vignetting, blur, etc. If you tap on a variation you are giving the option to save it or go back. If you do not like any of the four choices you can simply press the refresh button to make 4 entirely new variations of your image.    I really like this app. The quality of the results are great. I also like the fact the it is selectionrandom, but you still have the choice of which random variation you choose. It's all the fun of shooting with a crappy plastic camera with none of the commitment. The one big downside to the app is it will only save images at 800x600 resolution. However Red Giant has said they will allow full resolution saves soon. I look forward to this update. Plastic Bullet costs 1.99 in the app store. Here are a few more images.

 

 

 

 

Questions? Comments? Contact me.

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Three New Lenses


I recently picked up three new lenses for my Canon 550d. They are all actually old lenses, but they're new to me. All of them are manual focus lenses from the 70's and 80's and they are all from different manufacturers. This means they require lens-mount adapters so they will fit on my Canon.

The first lens is the only one that I truly sought out. I wanted a nice normal prime lens for the 1.6 crop factor chip on the 550d. I settled on a Nikon 28mm f2.8 Series E lens. It was quite inexpensive and is very sharp. Its 35mm equivalent focal length is ~45mm. This is my new standard lens.
Franz Liszt 28mmThe second lens I picked up when I was in LA earlier this month. My sister has possesion of my grandfather's Olympus OM-1 and attached to it was an F.Zuiko 50mm f1.8 OM lens. I already own the Canon 50mm f1.8, but since the Olympus is manual focus it is going to be much nicer for video work. I will post comparisons of the two lenses eventually. I am curious to see how they compare.
Franz Liszt 50mmThe third I picked up on a whim at a camera shop here in Zürich. It was in a bargain bin for CHF 30 and I thought I'd take a chance. It is a Minolta MD TELE ROKKOR 135mm f3.5. I was taking a chance on this lens because I was not sure if it was adaptable to Canon or not. Luckily it was. Unluckily I picked the wrong adapter. There are two different adapters for Minolta to Canon -- one has an optical element and the other doesn't. I went for the one without hoping it would be ok. Unfortunately the lens won't focus to infinity. It still makes a great macro lens though. May someday I will get the optical adapter. Does anyone know which minolta lenses focus properly with out an optical adapter?

Franz Liszt 135mmExpect to see these lenses used in my video work in the near future.
Thank you to my model Franz Liszt.