Pete Hindle
Pictures and stuff from a guy who likes coffee.
Tag: video
July 13, 2010
Psychosith
Part of an emerging trend of CGI mashup – as computer graphics become good enough that home users can do incredible things, genres become squished together. Click through for the artists blog or videos.
May 15, 2010
A Break from Our Usual Presentation
I don’t often sling Youtube videos up here, but this band – solo violinist Owen Pallett – has not only covered this song and made it his own, but also written an album called “He Poos Clouds”, which is about the magic system in Dungeons and Dragons.
April 14, 2010
Quantum Leap’s Samuel Beckett
Famous Irish playwright Samuel Beckett has a science-fiction namesake: Doctor Sam Beckett, who leaps through time to set right what went wrong.
The above video is a joke about these two Samuel Becketts. In his later career, the playwright Beckett made some awesomely post-modern offbeat works, including a play that lasts for three seconds, and consists of a giant mouth sighing.
Every episode of Quantum Leap starts with Sam Beckett “leaping” into a new dramatic scene, where he says “oh boy” (such is the non-offensive nature of the show, even when faced with near-certain death Sam does not drop an f-bomb).
The video is a mere few seconds of a Samuel Beckett, wearily saying “oh boy”, and then roll credits. The humour comes from knowing that there are two Samuel Beckett’s being referred to in this video, leaving me with the problem that it’s a very obscure joke… I believe that it’s so obscure, I can depict the people who will find this funny using a venn diagram:
February 7, 2010
Instructional Videos are Bullshit
(SuperAmazingDoesItForYou video link)
After a morning spent tussling with installing, then uninstalling Zotero, I’ve finally had it with those instructional videos that software designers create. I think that nothing beats the written word for communication of information, but I’m consistently finding that complex software is being explained by the use of an instructional video.
And usually, that video sucks. Seriously, what’s up with programmers making videos? Are they bored of typing all day?
So, in the spirit of the age, here’s a video for my new, forthcoming product, SuperAmazingDoesItForYou. I haven’t actually got round to writing any of it yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.
October 7, 2009
Meditations (after Aurelius)
RSS readers might need to click through for the video.
EDIT: I recorded this video using Photobooth and uploaded it to Vimeo, but it seems that – like every video I record with Photobooth – something went wrong with it. In fact, I have a whole litany of hate just for Photobooth, as every occasion I’ve tried to use the useless, idiotically bad, prone to failure, must-have-been-drunk-at-the-time-they-wrote-it application, it truncates the video file. But! It doesn’t do it until you decide to shut down the program, leaving you with the stench of failure just when you thought you’d managed to get something done.
Nevermind. Back to eating chocolate in my pyjamas.
May 25, 2009
Old Video, New Post
I’m putting this up because my mum told me she liked it. Thanks! It’s a video made with the programming language Processing, inspired by the work of Douglas Coupland.
March 9, 2009
Let a Thousand James Hugonin Paintings Bloom
James Hugonin is an artist who lives in Northumbria, and makes paintings that reflect his surroundings by taking the predominant colour for each day and painting a square in that colour. This is very procedural art, and therefore it lends itself very well to make a computer program that does the same thing.
This would probably annoy the bejesus out of Hugonin. Sadly, this is not my concern, as this is another exercise set my Jamie Allan, my tutor. Obviously, if you’ve seen my last piece of work for him, you might be getting concerned that Jamie is actually running some form of art world Project Mayhem, and that all graduates of the DM course will be changing their name to Bob soon. This is probably not the case.
I am Pete’s complete lack of surprise.
If you’re going to procedurally fake something, why just fake one? Therefore I set the program to stop cranking out fakes at a thousand. The colour’s a bit off, as if Hugonin had suddenly found his Northumbrian idle surrounded by flesh tones, but it holds together. The video ends up being 8.20 long, with two “paintings” every second.
December 20, 2008
Lucky Three, the mid-90′s mediascape, and the Long Now
Now that we’ve shaken off the annoyances of changing themes, let’s talk fun stuff.
The video above is such a classic piece of mid-1990′s footage. The style of it is pretty eye-catching, washed in original sentiment grunge, but gear-heads like me will notice the reel-to-reel tape recorder in some of the session footage. Do you know how expensive recording things used to be? It was crazy! Now everybody has got a laptop that can do multitracking, so the cost of making a single has dropped.
And bear in mind that the footage you are seeing is from 1996. There wasn’t really an internet in the same way that we have one now; search was still getting started in a lab at Stanford University. There was still a media hierarchy that meant it could take months for some media to come out – ‘sleeper hits’, etc, that would permeate through a system of media.
I don’t really know much about Jem Cohen, who according to wikipedia has also designed the album covers for Fugazi. Apparently he shot this video for a fanzine, which seems like a very ambitious fanzine. At first I was confused, and thought that he was the same Jem that used to be in the Pogues, and later went on to make music inspired by the philosophies of the Clock of the Long Now. This is not so; apparently Cohen is his own Jem, working in different areas.
I’d stick with the video up until the last song, ‘Angeles’, comes on. That’s my recommendation, anyway.
