AMA Superbike 2008 Video

I have posted my music video from the AMA Superbike event at Infineon Raceway this May. Enjoy your daily dose of Tainted Love!  

Toyota/Savemart 350 Promo

This is a promo video I created for the official Infineon Raceway website. This was fun because I’d never made a fast-paced, high-energy commercial video before. And even though the final result is pretty damn crude and basic I learned a ton.

40 Years on the Red Line

My latest video is now online! This year Infineon Raceway is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and I made a “short history” of the racetrack for the official webpage. I’m really happy with the final result, and have grown a lot as a “filmmaker” (I don’t know if this term applies yet). Filtering through several hours of material encompassing 40 years, wriggling that material down to 8 minutes, and then have everything line up with the interview portions that I shot for the documentary was a nice challenge.

Watch the video on Youtube or go to the Infineon Raceway webpage!

AMA Superbike Riders

I’m doing some housekeeping on my raceway footage, and I realized that I never uploaded the AMA Superbike panel that I recorded at the raceway earlier this month. Miguel Duhamel, Neil Hogson, Matt Lynn, Jake Holden and, in a separate video, Mat Mladin. Some fun stuff, Miguel Duhamel is funny as always.

Danica Patrick Wins

IndyCar is picking up some steam these days! Some early momentum was built last season, with a closely contested 2007 championship, Dario’s flips, and tempers flaring at Watkins Glen, but then the whole thing seemed to fizzle a bit with two former champions (Hornish and Franchitti) leaving for NASCAR. Well, look at where we are after just three races in 2008: Champ Car and the IRL have reunited to form one league, drivers from both sides of the old fence have already won races (19 year old Graham Rahal became the youngest driver ever to score a victory in St Petersburg), and now – finally – Danica Patrick has become the first woman to win a major automotive competition in the United States! I don’t really have a strong preference when it comes to racing – Victoria and I pay attention to both NASCAR and the IRL equally these days. But it’s great to see OWR slowly return to its former glory. Congrats Scott Dixon, congrats Graham Rahal, congrats Danica Patrick! Looking forward to the rest of the season, especially the stop at Infineon Raceway this August. And of course I’ll be there to document it all, up close and personal

David Reutimann

David Reutimann testing at Infineon Raceway (with help from Chris Cook). Nice guy on a crazy schedule. I hope he learned something for the race in June.

Daytona

And thus endeth the 50th running of the Daytona 500. I had to watch the race by myself because Vicky is in SoCal visiting her sister and friends right now. Which sucked, but I still had a great time. More importantly, a couple of things were reconfirmed to me today:

• Screw the nay-sayers, screw the snobs. Screw anybody who is trying to make fun of people who watch NASCAR races. This is great entertainment, just as good as any Superbowl or Oscars telecast. 43 cars going 190mph, 2-3 wide, often with less space between them than a deck of cards. Yeah, they’re going around in circles. Yes, it takes a long time and there’s quite a few commercials – but you don’t have to give the race your undivided attention for the entire time. And most importantly, there’s always something going on: cars bumping. Cars spinning out. Big crashes. Big crashes in which the cars slide across the finish line. On their roof.

  On fire.

  I don’t have a problem with the low-tech approach of it all. The cars might not be aerodynamic technological marvels, but compared to your average Formula 1 race, this is pure entertainment – uninterrupted racing action that stays unpredictable until the very end instead of two lead changes during the entire race (which usually happen during pit stops, no less). Who cares if it’s very “All-American” and somewhat Rednecky. It’s FUN.

• I’ve grown way too accustomed to our DVR. Record the race, watch it with time delay, skip through the commercials. Yeah, that’s a great comfort feature, skipping through all those commercials, theoretically gaining some time – but it turns yu into a babysitter for the TV. Way too much attention required, you never feel like you can just walk away from the broadcast for a while. “Oh no, it went to commercials! Quick, gotta skip forward!”
  Well, today I just watched the live broadcast while working on a 3D model on the comptrer. There were a lot of commercials I couldn’t skip. I just didn’t worry about it It’s kinda sad, but figuring out this stupid little fact was liberating.

Looking forward to the rest of the season, and especially the Sears Point race in June. Not only will it be in our backyard, the cars will even turn right from time to time. Take that, nay-sayers!

IndyCar Test at Infineon Raceway

My latest video is now available for public view on the official Infineon Raceway website. IndyCar drivers Scott Dixon and Ryan Hunter-Reay visited the racetrack on December 6 and 7 to test for the new season, and I was there to document those two days.

Expect more of these kind of videos in the 2008 season. The Infineon Raceway staff are giving me great behind-the-scenes access, so the videos should turn out even nicer than the ones I already made this year. Go to my Youtube page to get your additional fix of IndyCar, NASCAR, Karting etc. at Sears Point

One of the necessary but unfortunate side effects of creating video for the web is the resolution. The movie is usually tiny and heavily compressed to account for bandwidth and dial-up users. So I thought it would be fun to post a few fullsize frames from the IRL Testing video posted recently.

As a sidenote, I’m still working fulltime on new game projects for our company. But you shouldn’t expect any announcements for quite a while, it’s still too early.

NCK Road Racing at Infineon Raceway

This is a music video that I created for Victoria’s dad and the Northern California Karters. Gokart racing around the big track at Infineon Raceway!

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!