lines of flight

I love Lego. I love The Wire (except season 2). This is great.

that’s pretty cool, right?

The video is a basic home aquaponics how-to. Aquaponics is increasingly popular as people learn about the benefits of locally grown produce, food sovereignty, all that good stuff.

I researched, wrote and voiced the script and interviewed Clyde (in an unfortunately poor audio situation). It really needs some images and illustrations in the beginning to explain the basic concept of an aquaponics system. Something like this neat :40 animation maybe?

We got over 104,000 youtube views and another 2,200 on vimeo, but who’s counting? :~j

We knocked out a few more “web extras” for Mālamalama magazine this summer.

My main job is to shape the features through the interviews. Then I suggest (kindly dictate?) the edits and give feedback on how it fits together with the visuals. Still not sure what that job is called, but it’s kind of like writing except with pictures and sounds. lol.

We hosted these all on YouTube but have since switched to Vimeo (much better!!).

Three videos and some brief commentary after the jump.

Got to do a fun story for Mālamalama about University of Hawaiʻi locations featured on the TV show LOST, as the show heads into the series finale. The story was a photo-driven feature in the print issue and a narrated slide show online.

Here is the slide show:

Art Director Rowen Tabusa did both the slide show and the print layout. I especially love the print version for looking Lost-y with the bamboo grove background and for being smack in the center of the magazine. heh. It’s quite the popular story online, too, with two thirds of our total visitors taking a look at it.

Tho it doesn’t seem like it would be, this was actually a challenging piece. I was dealing with lots of different people—from ABC and each of the locations; trolling LOST fan sites for information; and trying to verify everything I was getting. Which isn’t so different from what I always do, but was a lot for such a short story. Unfortunately one major mistake crept into the print version, but it was corrected in the slide show (quite cleverly, I thought).

Modest as it is, the story feels like another deliberate baby step forward in the integration of print and online storytelling for Mālamalama magazine.

Short video feature we did for the January issue of Mālamalama magazine, below. I did the interview with Paxton, oversaw the editing of that portion (i.e. chose the quotes—what is that job called?), wrote the narration and am the narrator.

Is that really my voice? It sounds so deep and sluggish. Can that be adjusted to sound perkier? yeesh.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! I just noticed that YouTube now has an automatic captioning based on Google voice recognition! How long has that been there?? that’s AWESOME!! Tho it looks like you need to view the video on the YouTube site to get that option (look for the CC button in the control bar).

That is the answer to many an accessibility prayer… Never mind that “University of Hawaiʻi” is alternately transcribed as “university of havana” and “university of why,” those both sound like great schools, too. LoL.

[Mālamalama]

Honolulu is under a smoggy, gray haze again. Only it is not smog, or haze. It’s vog. This picture was taken today around noon.

Whether arriving via airplane or cruise ship (both pictured above) or living la vida local, these noxious natural fumes fill the lungs. There is no daily vog index popularly reported. Who is studying vog? Is enough being done to warn people of potential dangers?

Here is what our view towards Diamond Head looked like at noon today:

How is it possible that the Air Quality Index for Honolulu today is “good” when it looks like this?!

In comparison, see how clear the horizon is in this sunset video from the same vantage? Even as night falls, you can see a striking difference.

=_=

Hmm… so I see another month is about to slip by without me clocking in on this blog. Can’t have that. Without any ado, here are a few things I been up to:

• Handed in my MA project to the committee that will decide if I am good to grad—or not! *cross fingers*
• Accepted my first freelance assignment in a year-and-a-half. Now that the bulk of the MA work is done, I can do this again!
• Published a story on Second Life, with web extra.
• Got a killer URL and am building a site which I hope to monetize. Will it (soft) launch next week? No promises…
• BONUS: July 2009 Atelier Hawai’i web extra production about a summer painting course. Helped conceptualize the video, conduct and edit the interviews (content) and write the script. This came together well.

Two days after the public Michael Jackson public memorial, we visited the former home of the Jackson family in Gary, Indiana. It was slightly surreal. We left a card and took a picture of ourselves in front of the house, even tho it felt strange to do so. We didn’t smile.

This video slideshow accompanies a travel feature in The Atlantic called Saunas and Silence: The Finnish idea of a perfect vacation. It’s writer/photographer Trevor Corson’s take on Finland where, he claims, solitude is a national pastime.

The pictures are lovely and he’s done a good job capturing that back-to-nature instinct that Finns cherish, myself included. Admittedly, a good portion of the rest of the world probably considers going to a rustic cottage on a mosquito-infested lake to be a difficult and boring sort of vacation. But hey, that’s where the beer comes in, and it’s really, really good for your soul. The nature stuff, not the beer.

Finnish food was not really featured in the story like I wanted it to be, it’s as simple and boring sublime as getting away to the cottage. I suppose it’s possible that the author doesn’t find pickled herring on hard rye bread a mouthwateringly irresistible breakfast food and was trying to be nice by not mentioning it, but, I really wanted a few more mentions of tasty Finnish eats.

Overall though I’m digging this self-produced video slideshow. Good inspiration for the ones we’ve been working on for Mālamalama, as mentioned here and here.

Am I the only one that missed this Sesame Street Captain Vegetable clip as a kid? This is too funny.

As if the crazed and kooky haired muppets weren’t enough, the dialog has extra snark (“what are you, some kind of weirdo?”) and the silly song gets stuck in my head when I least expect it.

Taking the cake (er, salad?) are those sad looking vegetables! Poor Andy gets his black licorice candy swapped for a plate full of dry, raggedy celery. I dare a cracked-out puppet to try and take my licorice and replace it with celery. NO.

But that’s of course beside the point. The point is to promote good nutrition and not nightmares, so the trippy hippies at Sesame Street reprised the sketch with John Leguizamo as Captain Vegetable.

Leguizamo’s Captain Vegetable comes off awkward in places and to be honest, Elmo was never my main muppet. But it’s still a funny skit and the costume reaches new heights of ridiculousness. Is that corn silk coming out of his head? At least he’s armed with more than two vegetables. Thanks, playa!

The old link was passed on by friend, web designer, music lover, LA denizen Tim Ganter, back when he was still blogging… poke, poke… Thanks for introducing me to Captain Vegetable, Tim!

Two Beer Queers is a podcast about beer, from Hawaii. These guys have a great balance of raunch and refinement–they take their beer very seriously, but get in plenty of off-color silliness as they pour, observe, sniff and drink(chug!) each brew.

TWO BEER QUEERS EPISODE 09 – OLD RASPUTIN & PARADOX.

Hosts Bully O’Sullivan and Russel Kealoha taste test all the oddball beers that I would like to try, if I weren’t reaching for familiar brands. Even tho I consider myself a discriminating beer-drinker, the beers featured on this show make me want to challenge my palate.

I really love how the Two Beer Queers keep in mind the masses of BudLight and Heinekin drinkers, constantly encouraging everyone to try something new. At the same time, they let us live vicariously through them, since my wallet already knows that a $13 bottle of stout is not gonna happen anytime soon! I can’t imagine what a 20-something(??) oz beer would have to have in it for it to be worth so much. Breastmilk? Miracle anti-oxidants? sheeeeeit. But watching you drink it is fine with me, 10% ABV would put me down too quick anyway.

Cheers, fellas! I am officially a fan. Keep up the good work!

This three minute, 50 second video was featured as a web extra to accompany a story about seahorses in the January 2009 issue of Mālamalama online.

My job was to coordinate the production, do the interviews, edit the spoken audio and when we didn’t have all of what we needed, to do some narrative voice-over. The decision to add the voice-over was last-minute and it ended up being recorded in an empty office with leftover fake Xmas snow used as sound insulation(?!).

This web extra has had over 400 views on Vimeo so far; that’s the version embedded into the story, but you have to go to Vimeo to see the glorious HD version. We used Vimeo because we were having some problems uploading to our Mālamalama YouTube channel. Now YouTube is cooperating, so I’ve embedded the HD version here.

Splitting our views between different video hosts is obviously not ideal. YouTube is less elegant than Vimeo, but it has a *much* larger community. Vimeo looks awesome, and for a small fee, we’d be allowed to embed HD video on our site, but no decision has been made yet.

I welcome any feedback and opinions on the issue of video hosting and playback.

lately, workwise

Malamalama, the magazine where I have been a writer and online editor (content manager) for the past several years, is being cut back from three to two print issues per year.

However, they’re adding 4 web-only issues to the production schedule–in addition to weekly updates–which means more online content is needed, especially audio and video. As a feature journalist and content producer the chance to work with an enthusiastic team on new media projects is super fun, even with the increased workload(!).

So far we’ve taken a collaborative approach to the producer’s role of these web extras and are improvising and learning with every assignment. I’ve mostly been the one to collect and edit the interviews (with sound help as needed) while magazine art director Rowen Tabusa and photographer R. David Beales handle the visual content and editing. Then I write the meta data or descriptions, upload the content and often do some online promotion.

Links to our web extras with a few notes on productions are below.

Feedback is very welcome!

Web Extras

• Bamboo Ridge: Celebrating 30 years of local writing and writers written by me, picture by Cory Lum, audio and video work by Rowen Tabusa. The Bamboo Ridge package was for the first online issue in the new magazine layout–why yes, it *is* built on WordPress heh–a whole other accomplishment of which I am proud and enjoyed working on.
• From Page to Stage, a behind-the-scenes look at The Little Snow Fox and Other Tales of the North Pacific. This was put together in lightening speed with almost no advance planning — whew!
• Homecoming 2008 cute slideshow put together by David and Rowen.
• Our best work came next, the Writing with Thread feature about a world-class textile show in the art gallery. This one hit a minor chord with YouTube commenters.
• Most recently, Newcomer Butterfly has a Light Footprint is one I wrote and did an audio extra recorded over the telephone (photographs by lepidopterist Jim Snyder). This is my most self-contained web extra and even includes my voice sounding goofy as usual. I do like that Yahoo audio player that comes out.