iMovie Obsession 2.0

I am nothing short of honored, after over 20.000 people watched my YouTube "Skyscrapers" video. Making it, almost exactly one year ago, was as fun as playing a computer game for me, and I never planned for anyone, except for a few friends, to see it. I enjoy the comments, and I thank anyone who watched it. It got me motivated to produce more content, and in past few days I indeed half finished the new video. Like the original one, it's going to be a collection of enhanced YouTube clips, but with a cool twist. All of them will be either amateur or pro footage from airplanes, helicopters & other vertical moving vehicles/objects, and will be covering the official ten greatest skylines in the World. It is planned to be released within the next few weeks.

Cities will be listed as follows (and here is the official ranking on emporis.com):

10. Dubai

9. Bangkok

8. Tokyo

7. Shanghai

6. Seoul

5. Sao Paulo

4. Chicago

3. Singapore

2. New York City

1. Hong Kong

This listing ranks cities by the visual impact of their skylines. Each building with 12 or more floors in the city proper is assigned points based on its floor count (see the table on emporis.com). The point total for each city is calculated automatically. Calculation does not include TV towers, masts, bridges, or other structures. The listing actually puts Guangzhou on the tenth position, and Dubai on eleventh, but this will change shortly, after Burj Dubai's official completion.

I set much higher standards for this project, because I want it to look professional. Here are a few highlights:

• It is going to be in HD, but obviously not all required footage was available in such extremely high resolution. Sections about Dubai, Tokyo, Chicago, and New York City will be mostly, if not all in HD.
• Video will be exported in a widescreen format 16:9.
• No titles or watermarks whatsoever are allowed to be visible in the final version of the video.
• Not a single frame should be shoot from a static viewpoint.
• Not a single frame should be shoot from the ground level. It is all about looking down on the skyscrapers.
• All footage must have been recorded during daylight.
• A vast majority of clips will be enhanced with the iMovie technology called "video stabilization", which smoothens the camera motion, and stills the picture shaking. When needed, functions like "playback speed control", "reverse video" and picture enhancement will be used.
• There will be an animated world maps, as a smooth introductions to the individual city sections.
• There is a small chance that two versions of video will be released. The compact one, fitting within YouTube's 10 minute time cap, and an uncut one, divided in the half on two episodes.

Here is a brief preview of what it's going to be, focusing on using new technologies in iMovie 09:

If anyone knows where to get more footage of Bangkok, Shanghai, Seoul, and mostly Singapore (!), please share. It's almost as all flights around those cities were banned.

This will be a dynamite for every skyscraper lover.

Why rock music has become more boring with time.

Haha, no comment, except to say ... YEAH!

Click picture to enlarge

EXCITING! Video released for a song I LOVE for over a year.

I was talking about it a long time ago, and if you check out this post from one year ago, you can hear the track. On june 8th, 2009 - a few weeks ago the band (wisely) released the video for it, with the single release following soon. It already got a lot of buzz, and it's only right because I think the song is amazing beyond words. I described it as "Very Intense" a year ago, and I have all the faith in the single, which is currently #1 on Billboard "Bubbling Under Hot 100" Chart. Not to mention how hot one of the two band members is. Get Your iPods ready!

Do you want a tattooed barcode, only better and without knowing about it?

This is scary. Did you know, that there are actual, operating "dust" sized chips, that can store 38-digit numbers using 128-bit Read Only Memory (ROM). The "invisible" thing is 0.05mm x 0.05mm in size, and it's using Radio-frequency identification technology, the same as for instance electronic toll collection systems (ABC in Slovenia). Not a big conspiracy theory fan, but imagine how easy it's gonna be to tag us in the future, when this hits massive production. I'm gonna be so old fashioned when I'm old, kids are gonna go - "he doesn't even have any chips in his body!", but I don't think I'll ever do it on my free will.

Noisettes Live

It was surprisingly amazing a few days ago in Koko, Camden. This is a picture one of my friends I was with took, we were in the second row, and the singer was soooo beautiful. Very dynamic and entertaining gig. Click here to see more photos.

Bizarre facts about future of our civilization

Are you up for some heavy stuff? Like You all know I'm a huge geek by heart, and that includes hours and hours of wiki-reading late at night every few days when I feel like it. Last night I was all into futurism and was reading about these wicked ideas about not so distant future. The pace that we live in is unbelievable, and was never nearly as fast.

Dramatic changes in the rate of economic growth have occurred in the past because of some technological advancement. Based on population growth, the economy doubled every 250,000 years from the Paleolithic era until the Neolithic Revolution. The new agricultural economy began to double every 900 years, a remarkable increase. In the current era, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the world’s economic output doubles every fifteen years, sixty times faster than in the agricultural era. If the rise of superhuman intelligences causes a similar revolution, one would expect the economy to double at least quarterly and possibly on a weekly basis.

Most theoretics think a so called "Technological singularity" will take place in a few decades. What is it?

... if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.

Mmmmm. Even better, this is going to happen in our lifetime, futurists agree, most of them setting the date somewhere between 2030 and 2045. Read the whole article if You find this even slightly interesting, there is much more unbelievable ideas and concepts, like for example post scarcity, which is an inevitable future of our civilization and economy, where everything will be practically free, and there will be no human labor necessary at all.

I don't know how very weird is the fact that I honestly find stuff like that interesting, but I do, and considering that idea of technological singularity is often used in popular culture (Matrix, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica ...), I'm not the only one.

I am excited about the future, I just hope we all live to see it, and not nuke ourselves before our society can progress to higher levels.

Song Of The Week \ 20

This must be the best dub I've ever heard, I am in love with the elegance of this track, I mean it's so cleverly made, that i can't call it anything else except elegant! It is based around bass and the very subtle sound of a woman breathing, and singing "ooh" is so cleverly incorporated in the track. Very minimalistic, with every sound exactly at its place to make the song as beautiful as it can be. Not to even mention the sound game starting about four minutes in. Turn on the bass, and dive in!

Battant - Kevin (1989) (Andrew Weatherall Stadium Dub)
London, UK \ Kill The DJ \ No Wiki This Time

Dub at it's best, minimalistic with every sound in the right place.

Sideways

I finally found another amazing movie, that matches the awesomeness of the holy American Beauty, Brokeback Mountain, Juno and the likes. I mentioned it's soundtrack in a quick recap post when bringing this blog back to life. The movie itself is just very mature and entertaining, simple, without any stupid Hollywood crap. The story is developing slowly, with lots of beautiful cinematography, and delicate dialogues, that you can slowly absorb. Anyone generally agreeing with my movie taste - see it.

Not into comedy really, but ...

Me and my housemate watched TV in the kitchen, when a show called Chatty Man came up on Channel 4. It was the first ever episode of Alan Carr's new show, and it was FUNNY! I don't wanna sound like a snob, but I find a big majority of comedy to be just just plain stupid and not funny at all, so I was so much more surprised to enjoy Chatty Man that much. Alan is such a sweet, flamboyant character, and for the first time in my life I am a fan of a comedian. He is 33, openly gay, and known for his deliberately camp demeanour and self-deprecating humor. Here are a few cute taster clips, but unfortunately BBC and Channel 4 disabled the embedding functionality, so I'm linking ....

Follow these links, I think it's worth it:

Chatty Man, Kitchen Promo (0:31)

Tooth Fairy Live: Why Not To Go To Drama School (1:12)

Sport Relief: Alan Carr Vs Arsenal Ladies Football Team (2:42)

Surprise for our housemate

Song Of The Week \ 19

Crystal Castles are the freshest thing I've heard in a very very long time, and I fell in love with them completely. The whole album is something else. It can be quite violent and sometimes without any melodic form, and the sounds are so innovative, that it sounds like it's from 2030. It's like a nintendo on steroids mixed with screaming lesbians and cheerleader chants, and the overall feeling of the album is amazing. You can't have it as background music, it is way to intense and intrusive. This is my favorite song, but it is a hard call, because I love about half of the album and I like the other half. It screams YOUTH! ENERGY! FUTURISM!

Crystal Castles - Courtship Dating
Toronto, Canada \ Last Gang Records \ Wiki

8 bit syths, in a way you heaven't heard before.

Catching Up

I don't have a better explanation for my long absence, except that I didn't feel like blogging, and for some reason distanced myself from my creative internet activities, and rather resort to consuming web activities. I have more home-time lately, and consequently spend considerably more time online, and I really started to miss blogging.

So to quickly catch up with what I've been impressed with during this time of absence, let me present you with some (mostly very geeky) photos:

Boston Big Dig is a gorgeous example of what difference a thought-out city planning and urbanism can do:

Black Eyed Peas and their "Boom Boom Pow" is a huge hit, and I got infected with the video and sound. Getting over it by now though.

Fool's Day prank, which I fell for and thought it's amazing. World's first flying hotel! (shamed)

Very enjoyable movie, I love it, but even more so it's soundtrack, which is very different to what I usually listen to - it might become my gateway album to modern jazz and such.

How can I post anything after such long time, without including some skyscraper. Well I can't! The spectacular, unbelievably tall Burj Dubai is about to be overshadowed by another mammoth project in the same city. It's called Nakheel Harbour Tower, and it's gonna be !!1400!! meters tall - almost 4x WTC or 2x Burj Dubai.

The Stanford torus is a proposed design for a space habitat capable of housing up to 140,000 permanent residents. Build it in my lifetime please.

Apparently the next big thing in home design - Office Pod, home office-cubicle for the garden. SO cute I want one.

I joined Star Trek Mania, the movie is a very cool, fresh and a successful reset of the franchise. Don't even get me started on Chris Pine ...

Okay, this is weird, but I have a thing for elegant traffic solutions like this. It's the most elegant highway junction I've ever seen. Situated in Bergen, Norway.

Saint Etienne don't have one song, that I could particularly expose, but their greatest hits album as a whole is as nice as a road trip across Spain at summer with friends, in a convertible.

Speaking of Spain - this is one of only handful real IMAX cinemas in the world, and the architecture is stunning! Located in Valencia, Spain, the Hemispheric is a part of the "City of the Arts and the Sciences".

The new model of Boeing's biggest airliner 747 "Jumbo Jet" is the biggest yet. I just love its design, it looks much prettier than "fatter" european Airbus A380.

So much for now, more to come soon. Thank you for visiting again.

The best video I've seen in a long time

Behold, everyone! It's the great Joan As Police Woman with "Start Of My Heart".

How to become a lesser geek

I could probably write a book about that. Back in my old days I would be spending my whole days on the computer, starting with morning coffee, then using it at work, and after that surfing and watching movies and tv shows at home. My lifestyle changed dramatically in the last five months, and as I just recently realized, my computer habits changed as well. It doesn't mean that I'm not spending almost every moment in virtual world whenever I'm at home, the thing is that this really is not that often. And when I am, I just wanna surf a little and watch something, or maybe not even that, because it's already too late.
I guess I'm trying to explain why I'm not taking such great care of this blog as I used to. Here are the reasons, and recipee on how to become a lesser geek:

- Get a very low-tech job, where u can't use your computer, but rather actual papers and stuff.
- Buy a mobile broadband usb dongle from the suckiest provider, and don't have broadband internet.
- Don't have a proper table and chair in your room.
- Don't have any time to relax and chill with your laptop.
- Don't have any money to keep upgrading your hardware.

Song Of The Week \ 18

Song of the week just became a grown up theme with the 18th fabulous post. This time we're going to the past, which is highly unusual, but don't worry, we are not leaving the 2000's. We are going to talk about a dead man though. Arthur Russel was a New York musician, who died of AIDS in 1992, aged 40. I found out about him on Friendly Fires celebrity playlist on iTunes, and had to buy it imediately after listening to the 30 second sample. It has this brilliant, laid back stereo sound effects, which combined with his melancholic vocals, and sweet lyrics makes one hella good song. Record was released on the 2004 album "Calling Out of Context", compiled by Steve Knutson, and I'm not sure if I like anything else on it.
This ambiental masterpiece has been playing in my earbuds for the past couple of weeks, and even though I bought a lot of great music lately, this is so far creme de la creme of my music library in 2009. Let's start a year with a dead man!

Arthur Russel - Get Around To It
New York City, US \ Audika Records \ Wiki

Sexy, erotic song, which I cannot wait to play at the "right occasion".

Skins

I found my new favorite TV Show!
I've heard it's great from three different people, so I just went and bought series 1 and 2 on DVD, and really enjoyed them. I watched them over the new year's, which included a whole lot of partying, and it felt good to watch the show on all those "day's after", and further accelerate the party mood.
Programme is very hardcore, made differently, therefore fresh, and astoundingly aesthetic to watch. It includes a lot of drugs, and sex. Would recommend to anyone, who likes to watch beautiful young people doing fierce stuff :) Trailer for series one is below.

Another Anniversary, Another Apology

This is 201st post on this blog. I'm sorry I haven't kept busier lately, but I think I have a few good reasons. First one is Christmas and new year's crazy partying, which lasted for more than a week, and it was a real hell-raising, as one of my London friends would say. After that I went back to my routine, except I was constantly tired, and I think that could be psychological, since I was again feeling a bit lonely, after my friends, who were visiting during the holidays, left in early January. I just now came back from visiting my home country for the first time since I moved to London, and that was surreal, intense, and a lot of fun, so posting had to wait until now.
I just want to let you know, that the blog did not die, and I am still very much looking forward to post things that I came up with in time of absence.

My House, originally uploaded by NN84.

A very very cool project

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KEO

Fabulousness is starting!