The second episode of the very nice, HV30-shot, no-budget sci-fi, drama is out:

More info on how the Crank 2 movie was shot. They used five XH-A1 cameras as primary, and fifteen HF10 ones as crash-cams, sometimes shooting all at the same time (with several random crew members just grabbing a camera and shooting — mostly on rollerblades)! They used very high shutter speeds, between 1/1000th and 1/2000th, and with “neutral” picture settings for saturation and contrast, while they cranked up the in-camera sharpness. On the XH-A1 they also used its cine gamma settings, but on the HF10 it was not possible to use its Cinemode ability because it can’t be used independently to manual shutter speed settings (customizing the shutter speed obviously takes precedence in such an action movie). That’s yet one of the reasons why I am still rooting for that hybrid consumer-prosumer camera that doesn’t exist yet. But NAB is here, so let’s see what Canon will announce in two days time.

A few more tidbits about the movie:
- The movie is actually insane, but in a good way. Here’s a positive review.
- It seems that the movie won’t make more than $6-7 millions in the box office this week, but when you add in that count the next few weeks’ earnings, the worldwide release, and DVD sales, it will easily recuperate its $12.5 million of cost.
- If there’s going to be a Crank 3, it will be in 3D, the directors have let us to believe. These two directors really are cool.
- And good looking too.

* 50% of the OSNews readers (ok, it might be close to 80%) hate my guts thinking that I dislike open source (based on some old Linux distro reviews I wrote). Of course, this is misguided. What I hate is half-assed jobs, not open source as an idea. I am a perfectionist, not an OSS hater. In fact, my older software releases were usually under the BSD license, my current videos are under the liberal Creative Commons “Attribution” license too, I write tutorials, and I spend the best part of the day answering questions on a multitude of video forums. What’s driving me to do all that is because I occasionally think of myself in the death bed. And when that depressing thought appears in my head, the only question I seem to ask is “did I do enough for the world? did I give enough back? did I matter?“. My health doesn’t allow me to go out and work for Unicef or anything like that, so I try to help from the compounds of my office, in the fields that I also enjoy.

* I need to put a break on my iTunes purchases. I spent $90 this week. I don’t know if I give enough “to the world”, but I definitely give enough to Apple.

* I am floored by the Capital Lights. The whole album is really good, with “Mile away” being the best song in it, and “Work it out” being second best. I bought the album immediately after previewing it, it has very catchy tunes!

* Some other great releases: Music for Animals‘ “If Looks Could Kill” and Dizzy Ballooon’s “Raise a glass”. I also can’t wait for Drist’s third album in a few weeks. All local Bay Area bands.

* I am taking care of JBQ’s iPod, updating it and such (he doesn’t seem to bother). Of course, every song is legal in our players. We are also careful about the free songs that labels/bands have given away overtime as promotional material. I have updated the metadata of these downloaded songs to incorporate the information where they were downloaded from. With these new international laws about having to potentially justify your music ownership in an airport, it’s becoming important that freely downloaded indie songs have some sort of information in them about where they were acquired from.

* Adam Lambert is the real deal this year on “American Idol”. Amazing talent, a true rock star/actor. If this guy doesn’t win, then it’s the best example of democracy not working.

* My love for “Lost” has nearly eclipsed. Too many errors in it, and also it’s like the scripts don’t have enough detail in them for the actors to show emotion. The right words about the Lost situation are “I am not feeling it”.

Malbec is the best band you should get to know right away. Catchy electro-pop tunes wrapped with alternative rock style vocals. I bought their whole repertoire recently and I have fallen in love with their melodies. They are stuck in my head. Heck, I still haven’t found a single track on their albums that was below par. Amazing quality and attention to detail throughout.

Also, go to their web site and download their five new “Answering Machine” EPs for free. Or download their great videos (two of them shot with an HV20)! They look great on our HDTV via our PS3. Mark Pontius is not only a great drummer, but an amazing filmmaker too!

I made the following fan video for them. Songs and pictures are used in this video after permission from the band (thanks Mark!).

Every few days I get down all existential on me. This time, it was because of the upcoming animated movie, Terra, written & directed by fellow Greeks Evan Spiliotopoulos and Aristomenis Tsirbas. The movie is set to be released this May in the US theaters.

The story is as such: “A peaceful alien planet faces annihilation, as the homeless remainder of the human race sets its eyes on Terra.” So basically, these future humans are the bad guys, having gone through several planets already, by using their resources up. They are portrayed as a species that doesn’t learn from its mistakes, as they keep repeating them on every new beginning they do on a new planet that they find to colonize. So these last remnants of humans, find this peaceful alien race living in a planet that it’s “almost” compatible with what humans need, and with some light terraforming it can be used by them. But if they do that, the very intelligent but not very tech-savvy alien race will have to die, as they are not compatible with the changes.

So the big question posed by the movie is if the humans have the right to annihilate this peaceful alien race in order to use up that planet too, and save their species once more. Here’s what I think. The answer is two-fold:

1. Speaking as a Darwinian cheerleader, it’s the right of every species to survive, no matter the cost or the ethical questions posed.
2. Speaking as a cynical though (Diogenes being my favorite of all ancient philosophers), the humans deserve to die. They didn’t learn from their mistakes over and over again, so they should disappear from the galaxy’s face and leave it to those who do have respect for their surroundings.

Maybe the right answer is to let the humans die, but save their history, art, and DNA in a sort of a galactic museum. This way their existance will always be remembered, and their achievements will be respected, but they won’t be around to wreck havoc anymore.

Kind of like the dinosaurs. They had their time. Huh.

Big disappointment from Josh Whedon over Dollhouse. Then again, I never liked Buffy/Angel either. Too corny of TV series. But both JBQ and I loved “Firefly”. I was fooled into thinking that after Firefly, Whedon found the perfect recipe for a successful — or at least cult — TV series. Instead, we were served some pretty boring, pedestrian flat shit.

The reason why Dollhouse sucks is because there’s no mystery in it really. The story is shown so flatly from all viewpoints that I can’t associate or sympathize with anyone at the end. It doesn’t make my heart beat faster the way “Lost” does. I mean, this is just some episodic TV where the main hero is getting reset at the end of each episode, making it impossible for me to theorize or delve into the mythology. Because there is no real story there, just some shit happening every week for some unlucky people. There are just episodes of actives doing this or that as they are hired to do. Sure, there’s the FBI guy plot, and the rogue active subplot, but they are not enough to keep the mystery afloat.

Now, you are probably asking, “how it would have been the right way to develop the series”, and the right answer is “there is none”. The very idea of this being a TV series is flawed. What Dollhouse should have been is either a SciFi Channel 3-part tele-movie (like the ones they used to do every December before the economy shitted on itself), or a feature film. But not a TV series. Just like “Lost” would never work as a feature film, same way Dollhouse doesn’t work as a series.

And the reason is because most of us who like sci-fi shows absolutely _hate_ episodic TV. Dollhouse doesn’t offer us enough mystery, action, coolness, geekness, or distorted perspectives of the reality the way ‘Lost’ so masterfully does. It’s just yet another boring TV show trying to be cool just by using Whedon’s name. This ain’t enough. Whedon must try harder to create something that will last.

There were times where I got all depressed seeing some truly talented musicians never get much attention. These were the times that I felt that the “talent hunters” are just a myth. Well, it seems that they are not.

While browsing my local bands on myspace’s list, I stumbled upon “Project 13“, a teenage band a few miles away from my home. These high school kids know how to write fun music! I was floored by the commercial potential of their music. In all truth, the vocals are pretty bad, but that’s something that can be fixed to an acceptable degree with enough lessons. But, writing hook-y melodies that can be huge hits under the right circumstances, is not something that everyone can do.

So I checked their blog out, and on their latest entry they reveal that they got a “huge opportunity” that they can’t talk about. I am guessing that they got themselves a contract, possibly by a major. Very exciting for them.

Malbec’s ‘The Answering Machine’ EP’s are a series of 5 EPs being released over 5 months, the fifth one released today. They are free to download both in mp3, and WAV uncompressed high quality format.

Two of their three music videos so far were shot with an HV20. The following music video is my favorite of the three, it was the one shot with a Panasonic HVX200 instead.

My God! You have to watch the following web series!

This is the first episode of the science fiction “condition:human” series, created with zero budget, using a consumer Canon HV30 camera, and a lot of green screen. This is the most involved and most important piece of work ever created with these HV cameras!

You can also download the MP4 file to watch locally, or on your HDTV via AppleTV/XBoX360/PS3, here.

I can’t rave enough about the Longwave (that I mentioned before in my blog). This has to be the most underrated band on earth. I mean, they even scored a contract with a major early on, but somehow they never seemed to take off and they eventually lost the contract!

Anyways, have a look at the video of their second single from their new independent album — a great song, but not the best of the album (“Sirens of the deep sea” is my favorite, listen to it on the URL above):