The Remnants

Joss Whedon wasn’t the only one who kept himself busy during the WGA strike last year. Screenwriter (and sometime director) John August (Big Fish, The Nines), together with a group of friends, created the pilot episode for The Remnants, a possible web series about a group of survivors in a zombie-infested world. That pilot is now available on the web. A mixture of a classic zombie movie and The Office, The Remnants isn’t quite as brilliant or captivating as Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. But it’s worth watching. The idea of doing a zombie survival story in this fake documentary style feels fresh, and the execution is good enough to carry the pilot. Judge for yourself, it’s only 11 minutes.

Ode To Joy

We will return to our regularly scheduled programming on January 5. In the meantime, this:

Dinner For One

In Germany, everybody follows a yearly procedure before going out to celebrate New Year’s Eve: around 7pm, you watch “Dinner For One” on your local TV station. I have no idea when the tradition started, but that’s what you do. Don’t argue with me! So here it is, for you to enjoy before you celebrate the arrival of 2009. And next year, you’ll hopefully start making it “the same procedure as every year!”

Up To Speed

The latest episode of the IRL’s official Up To Speed show is using a bunch of the footage that I shot at Infineon Raceway last week.  Kinda cool, and glad to see my footage find new uses Here’s the Youtube version.

One of the things that I like about the Indy Racing League is that it’s really embracing new media to promote their series. Some of that might come out of necessity – TV coverage and promotion is lacking a bit right now and the league is looking for additional ways to bring coverage to the fans. But in general they are going in the right direction – weekly update shows, streaming qualifying and races, lots of interaction opportunities on the webpage. Other racing leagues are a bit behind this, or overly driven by corporate and outside interests (NASCAR contracts out its own webpage to Turner, for example).

Superstars

The differences between American Idol and the German counterpart? Less Ryan Seacrest, more visual effects – and the audition spaces are much more stylish than those boring American sport arenas! And of all the wannabe Simon Cowells, Dieter Bolen can certainly hold his own – not because he’s trying hard to imitate Cowell, it’s just the way he is. Quote from the video above: “If Heather Mills rolled her wooden leg down a bowling alley, the pins would fall with more rythm than your singing.”

Inside Nextel Cup

Victoria and I have made a habbit of watching “Inside Nextel Cup” on the Speed channel every week. A little bit to recap the race. But mostly to watch the panel, and more specifically to see Michael Waltrip be his usual crazy self (and to see everybody else’s reactions).

Each week the panel answers a bunch of viewer-submitted questions, most of them kind of dull. So, being my usual self, I wanted to see what it takes to get a question on the program. I submitted one, not tied to a specific race, a few weeks ago – imagine our surprise when it actually came on tonight. Victoria got a kick out of it, and I’m getting a kick out of it. I’m not exactly defining myself by having my questions featured on a TV show (having people play my games and read/watch my stuff is a bit more rewarding), but it was fun to see nonetheless

The question was “Do crew chiefs ever get in the car themselves?” To be honest, I kinda knew the answer, but that wasn’t really important. I just thought that this one would be a good conversation starter. And it was. I uploaded the clip to Youtube, see below!

Burgaltendorf

I got the idea to search Youtube for “Burgaltendorf”, the part of Essen I grew up in. And lo and behold, there’s a 5 minute TV that shows Burgaltendorf in all of its glory. You might even say that it makes it look a little bit too glorious, only focusing on the idylic and green spots of the town. Still nice to see, even if you don’t speak German. The fortress is just a few minutes from my family’s house, we used to hang out ther a lot and walk the dog through the old moat. The hotel is on the same street as our house, as well – I grew up watching those horses through the window of my old room.

Finch feeders…

Still attract finches! This is me trying out the zoom lens I bought for the camera and a few wild birds outside the house. The lens weighs over 300 gram, about as much as the HV20 itself! So the camcorder gets a bit front-heavy, and holding it steady to get a good picture is tough. A tripod will certainly help with that!

Here’s a 720p clip. The finches are somewhat blurry, the…uhm, the bigger bird looks better. Background noises courtesy of NASCAR and our five birds, which can talk up quite a storm!

25 budgies with beer on the perch, 25 budgies with beer…

I had considered buying a digital camcorder several times last year (the closest I came was a Sony HDR-SR1), but in the end I always shied away from it because the HD quality didn’t seem quite good enough yet, and a better camera is released every 2 months. The cameras could only do interlaced HD footage, HDV tapes are only MPEG-2, AVCHD doesn’t have good editing support and fills up your harddrive…etc. pp.

But in the end you can wait forever and never buy anything, and true 1080p support in a consumer camera is still a few years away. So when the Canon HV20 was announced, I decided to order one. The HV20 is using HDV tapes and is still bound by the HDV specs, so it can’t do true 1080p. But it can do anamorphic 24p as well as anamorphic 1080i@60hz, and the CMOS sensor manages the picture at true 1920×1080. That’s pretty damn neat for 1100 bucks. Now I can document whatever I want to document. It’s fun

I wanted to do some 24p tests to see how well the motion blur works and how much light I’d need to shoot this kind of footage (Hint: more than I used in that clip). So I aimed the camera at my birds and waited. Here’s a small clip of Jerry and Cloud at full resolution. That’s glorious 1920×1080, progressive scan…and then downsampled into a wmv file I didn’t have enough light in the room, so the image is kind of dark and flat. Still very neat, though. You can also download the clip here (Save As), it’s 8.5mb.

Mailaf kenn ich gar nicht, nur Olaf

Hidden in the depths of my 9000 song iPod shuffle there’s a selection of the best Deep Dance CDs. Most of these mixes date themselves quite convincingly – and the music is cheap and fluffy dancefloor techno, which will never earn anybody a spot in the music hall of fame. But in my late teen phase these CDs were my some of my most priced posessions, and when I’m in a good mood I listen to whatever mix comes on. Especially if it’s one of the yearly summery mixes, because those are a fun (and often depressing) reminder of what music was hip in Germany in the early 90s. Most of the songs are crap, but ever so often I’m reminded of a song that everybody loved back then and that became a pervasive part of German pop culture.

So yesterday the 1991 mix came on, and here’s the one song that I was pleasantly reminded of when listening:

Frighteningly bad performance, isn’t it? (Psst, I don’t think they’re really singing!) But the song was quite a phenonemon when it came out, and exactly the kind of stuff that we, as teenagers, would latch on to. Plus Diether Krebs, the late great comedian from Essen, deserves a special mention on this webpage. I can’t think of many other comics who have left their mark on German comedy as prominently as Diether Krebs. Think of him as a German Benny Hill – but with a serious acting career to go along with the slapstick. Krebs died of lung cancer (ironically enough, “Krebs” is the German word for cancer) when he was only 53 years old. He leaves many iconic characters of German TV history. And of course this, “Ne Pikfloete!”