All posts by Tim

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). ↩

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.

brian and owl pellets

the mindlab

brian

I find this strange. I know what owl pellets are, but if you are not familiar with the term, here’s a quick definition:

…the mass of undigested parts of a bird’s food that some bird species occasionally regurgitate. The contents of a bird’s pellet depend on its diet, but can include the exoskeletons of insects, indigestible plant matter, bones, fur, feathers, bills, claws, and teeth. In falconry, the pellet is called a casting.

Yummy. Anyway, owl pellets are often used in biology classes so students can get some hands on experience with this kind of thing. I guess it’s kind of fun to pick apart the bird version of a hair ball and find little mouse bones in there.

So, if there is a need for owl pellets, there must be a supplier. I understand this too. What I don’t understand is the marketing tactics of these suppliers. Discount Owl Pellets is one of these suppliers. If you navigate to their Products page, you’ll find such varieties as ‘standard owl pellets,’ ‘basic owl pellets,’ and even ‘jumbo owl pellets.’ You haven’t lost me yet Patty. You lose me on the ‘individual bargain bags’ and the ‘premium owl pellets.’

Anyway, thought you guys might enjoy this. Just be happy I didn’t order any grab bags for Christmas presents.

max

the mindlab,

max

It has been mentioned that video is the future of photography. One only has too look at the rise of YouTube and the death of newspapers to see this. We want video. We want moving pictures. At the very least we want still cameras that shoot 10 frames per second.

One thing that video will never trump still photography on is capturing the essence of something, in one slice of time, in a manner that is immediately evident to any onlooker. Sure, video can capture the essence of many situations in ways that photography can’t. It can capture the motion and movement and the progression of events. But to absorb that essence requires one to sit down and watch. It requires effort on the part of the viewer. Photography can relate all you need to know in a single glance, even if the viewer has no intention of actually studying the photograph.

This photo does that for me. It might not have meaning to those who don’t know Max, the dog pictured. But to see this picture is to know this dog.

40

the mindlab

bottle

I finally got around to watching the Netflix movie that has been sitting on the top of my DVD player since 9/15. The previous movie had made a multi-week stay as well. I decided to watch this movie and then cancel my membership.

So I put the movie in. My DVD player couldn’t read the disc because it was “dirty.” Right. It was badly scratched. Oh well.

So I cancelled it anyway. With my last movie being a $30 rental that I never even watched.