Ghosts

Shot late at night on Nov 1st, Day of the Dead, in my father in law’s rambling old country house.

As I mentioned yesterday, I and a bunch of other people are playing a big game of video consequences this month. Each day, someone different makes a 90 second video, inspired in some way by the previous day’s piece.

Adrian Miles kicked it off yesterday with Like A Match, a love poem in audio, looping over a video of a match being struck, which changes when you move your mouse over the video.

The rules are that your video has to be 90 seconds or less, and inspired in any way (you don’t have to explain how) by the previous day’s video.

While I was pondering my response late last night, and filming the log fire we were gathered around, I caught this moment, which I decided to share as it is.

Then I went up to bed, in the haunted room. At 3am, Kate and I lay wide awake in the pitch black. Old country houses are dark. Every few minutes there was a loud and unexplained bang of wood on wood from somewhere within the room. Turning on the light would have woken the baby, so we spent a rigid hour with Kate asking me to whisper reassurances in her ear about the lack of scientific evidence for ghosts. Neither of us wanted to admit to the other how freaked out we were – Kate had already been in bed when I shot this video, and I didn’t want to frighten her by telling her what I’d just heard. Eventually, she quietly got up, turned on the light in the hallway, left the door open a little, and the noises stopped.

Turns out that Kate had had the same conversation with her stepmother yesterday evening about ‘the flamingo room’ – only she had the details, which for obvious reasons aren’t widely available, but which do add an eerie extra level of synchronicity to this video. If you want to know, the code is here, you’ll just have to View the Fire again, and think “Fox” and “Source”


(Update: Dennis’s response to my video is here)


iPhone Video / Podcast mp4 file

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What People Do With Their Hands

It’s November again. Which means NaVloPoMo. Which means posting one video a day every day.

With all the things I’ve got going on, there’s not much chance of me being able to do that this year, but it’s a good prompt to post some videos when I can.

I’ve also devised a game of consequences to run alongside NaVloPoMo, with 30 videobloggers in a chain, each posting on a different day, each inspired in some way by the previous day’s video. More tomorrow, which is my day.

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Live from the Dinard Festival of British Film

This weekend, I’m off on another jolly – to Dinard in France, where they’re holding their 20th annual Festival of British Film.

As with previous festivals and events that I’ve videoblogged, I want to post a fair amount while I’m there, and I don’t want to drown you in a sudden flood of little photos and videos, so I’ve set up a special Posterous Blog for the event:

http://dinard.posterous.com

> and the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/dinard

I have also set up a dedicated Blip.tv account – so I’ll embed the whole Show Player below, and you can see any and all videos all as I post them, from within this one blog post.  Without flooding the RSS feed or your email inboxes.

A bientot!

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Spies, Free Hugs and Helsinki Twestival – Day 1 Nokia N86 Tour 2009

It’s taken me a week to find the time to sort through the footage and cut it down to a watchable size – but here are 8 minutes of highlights from the 18 or so hours of non-stop filming we did on Day 1. We had some technical hitches with uploading, so I didn’t post from the road as much as I’d wanted.

@philcampbell, @vikkichowney and I were sent by Nokia & Womworld on an 18,000 mile tour of Twestivals last weekend, with instructions to document the trip on the new Nokia N86 8MP – we started in Helsinki, and then headed off in different directions – me to Bucharest, Phil to Dubai, Vikki to, um, Birmingham – where we handed our N86s over to @bvlad and @freshplastic who continued the tour – all of us reconvening in Oxford on Sunday night.

Twestivals are essentially meetups of Twitter users in scores of cities around the world, to raise money for local causes. Each city’s cause was chosen by an online vote.

Nokia sponsored our trip (as well as carbon offsetting our miles) by giving a Euro for every 5 miles we travelled. So in the end, we raised around €3600 for local causes. Plus we carried with us a free Nokia N86 for each Twestival we visited to raffle or auction.

More to come – and I’ll post some links to all the media that I and the others generated.

Formats available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4), Flash Video (.flv)

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Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent

A little something from earlier.

I’m not going to be posting everything here – just a few bits and pieces. You can follow the whole tour on Twitter here: @ruperthowe – and by following the #n86tour hashtag that the three of us are using (just put n86tour into the search box) – and most of my video will be on my Flickr stream – when my phone is actually posting things properly. Bloody technology.

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Inglorious bastard reviews Inglourious Basterds

i’m only doing this because i promised myself i’d start writing reviews again. for the discipline. or something. kate’s away, and i’m working on a script. so i suppose it counts as creative procrastination.

but Inglourious Basterds is a perfect example of why i hate reviews: you come out of a Tarantino movie that’s not as good as some other Tarantino movies, and you have to list the reasons why. and so you make it sound shit. when actually you know it’s 54 times better than any of the movies you just watched trailers for. Case 39 with Renee Zellwegger and a demon foster child? fuck off.

apples and oranges, innit?

so. to be clear right from the top:

this is an A Grade Movie.
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