Yearly Archives: 2009

Christmas Shoot

the mindlab, videos, ,

mike

Mike brought a 16 mm Bolex camera home from school over Christmas break, and we shot a short entitled Turkey Breasts. Like many other shorts, we’ve shot over Christmas break1, it was shot on The Dirt Road2. Unlike other ones we’ve shot, this is the first Christmas break film actually shot on film. I think Mike sent the film off for development and it should be back soon…

Pictures from the shoot are here. (Not all pictures are uploaded yet…)

  1. The Search for the Chupacabra, Spontaneous Combustion, Ant Farm, and Risks were all shot over the holidays. The first two used The Dirt Road extensively as a location. ↩
  2. The Bridge was also shot on the dirt road (on 8mm). ↩

Lady Sovereign in X-ED

the mindlab,

Breaking one of my tenants that I never post Youtube junk on Protozoic — *whatever*. I’m really intrigued by the following movie, *X-ED*, directed by Theirry Lawson. The film features Lady Sovereign, who is perhaps best known as the British female musician who signed to Def Jam (she is now off that label and on her own) and as the TRL sensation behind “Love Me Or Hate Me.” *X-ED* was made before Sovereign, credited as Louize Harman (actually Louise Amanda Harman), was a pop sensation. For a film not too far off the production values of a *Protozoic* straight to WEB-backyard-film, the piece is surprisingly coherent and even well acted. I can only assume Ms. Harman has no acting training so to speak, but she’s pretty much a natural.

Happy New Year.

site news, the mindlab

house

Happy New Year. Protozoic has been going for more than 4 years. Seems like a long time, doesn’t it? The Chook website was run, in one manner or another, for a lot of years too. The earliest hit I get for that at Archive.org is August 17th, 2000. Wow. And I know we had an even earlier version than that one for a year or so, but I’m not sure we had the domain name back then.

We also did RSS feeds back then, YEARS before it was mainstream. And (essentially) a RSS-feed enabled blog, in the original Mindlab. I had written a rudimentary RSS feed parser in PHP and a rudimentary blog posting system so Mike could log in and write a post. The post were automatically inserted into the appropriate page and an RSS feed file was written. The main page then read the RSS feed and added the headlines of the new posts to the front page. That was the extent of living on the cutting edge of WWW design. Now we just (happily) use WordPress.