Our first official "super" activity took place last night as part of Super Clematis Live - a football-themed version of the weekly nightlife activity in West Palm Beach. Now for all of you fame watchers waiting to be regaled with tales of shoulder rubbing with the Jonas Brothers, you may want to skip this post.
Clematis by Night an outdoor street fair with food, drinks and some live music acts who work tirelessly to cover every cheesy pop song ever written. They nailed it by going from "Don't Stop Believin'" right into "I Gotta Feelin'" - The dynamic duo of overplayed karaoke fare. Now what made this particular night "super" were the few non-descript former NFL players signing autographs and a couple of inflatable games with football logos. Oh, and we think we saw Freddie Falcon and Bobby Bronco running around the place too.
The Evening's headliners were none other than soft-rock legends Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas, not to be confused with Jefferson Starship. Mickey and a group of musicians half his age trotted out all the classics you know and love (and Elise REALLY loved a little too much for comfort).
For your viewing and listening pleasure here are a few of them captured with our new Kodak zx1 camera.
We Built This City - Encore style (listen closely, at one point it sounds like "live goes to tape)
Just when you thought you had been soft-rocked to the fullest, they encored with the classic "We Built This City." For one brief moment West Palm Beach was indeed built on (soft) rock & roll.
A series of blogs from our experience winning two tickets to the 2010 Superbowl in Miami
West Palm Beach, FL - I'm pretty sure there's a football game taking place on Sunday, and a pretty big one. As a matter of fact it's arguably the biggest sporting event on the American calendar. Yet it seems that all anyone wants to talk about is what celebrities will be on hand (Saints & Colts & Kardashians, oh my) and what party can you get in to, and not who has the better o-line, but who's o-line can sing better at Media Day's none-too subtle tie-in with "American Idol."
So rather than provide another insider report on whether Peyton Manning will root for the team he plays for or the one he rooted for as a child, we've decided to provide the complete outsider's perspective to Super Bowl madness. Throughout our week in Florida we'll make our way to a few of the coveted activities, but overall, let us be your eyes and ears at Society Ground Zero.
Notes from the Almost Front lines...
As noted above, we are not the media elite, we don't have a reality show on E! (yet) and have no discernible ties to the cash-heavy Mafia, so rather than a shimmering ocean view from a South Beach hotel, we're staying in nearby West Palm Beach. I say this not as a complaint, but as statement of fact. The takeaway from this is that we were fortunate to win two tickets to the hottest event and plan on taking full advantage of that - which means spending a week in intermittently sunny Florida during the worst weather month of the year in Chicago. If that wasn't good enough we were handed the keys to a shiny new silver Mustang as our official wheels of the Gregg & Elise adventure. A Super Bowl miracle.
Other things:
- Perhaps the two most coveted parties to attend before the Superbowl are put on by Playboy and Maxim magazines. Remember magazines? Those were the paper things that have all but been replaced by the Internet. If I were a more suspicious person I might surmise that these publications have stayed in business past their relevancy just to host the yearly bout of bacchanalia.
- The stories not involving the parties and celebrities are all about the advertisements during the game. Are these not the very same 30- and 60-second bits of cleverness that we go out of our way to DVR right past the other 364 days a year? The Superbowl spot seems to be the Betamax in a Blu Ray world. Do these ads bring a return anywhere near what it costs to air them?
- Why does politics ruin EVERYTHING? The Superbowl and its sideshow are beloved for the unnecessary excess, over the top half time and anything else that amounts to no actual substance. Now we have to tread out the abortion debate in between quarters of the Bud Bowl? What a downer!
Stay with us as the game approaches and we take you to all the places that you want to be.... when you couldn't afford the places you actually wanted to be.
Posted by Gregg Jaffe on February 03, 2010 at 11:32 AM
Through the magic of a Netflix subscription, my laptop and an HDMI to Mini-display port converter, I watched an entire British series (The IT Crowd) - from start to finish, every episode - in about 4 days time. Now before you accuse me of being a potato of the couch variety, keep in mind a few determining factors of this amazing feat.
1. My wife was out of town and left to my own devices very little happens.
2. British sitcoms tend to be only six episode seasons, and last about 3 seasons total. That's 18 episodes. In the early years, "The Simpsons" would knock that out before Thanksgiving.
So, right here on this very blog I am advocating the British Sitcom Model for the advent of the Web TV Age. As the medium matures and the inevitable mixing of regular TV with web TV takes place, this seems to make the most sense. What has made Web TV so intriguing so far is the experimental nature of it. The fact that you can produce a program by yourself, with little to no money, and distribute it as far as your Facebook friends will take you, truly lends itself to the short and unsentimental style of our former masters (oh I hate that King George III).
By developing an idea that you can play around with, get a feel for what the characters are like, but remain experimental, this could free up people to constantly come up with new material and challenge the network structure that would rather try out an unfunny, large chinned hack in prime-time over an interesting scripted show.
This is just a theory I'm playing with, and in trying to develop a few series of my own I decided to throw it out there and see how the rest of you feel. So, let me know what you would like to see from the shows coming out on the Internet.
Should we go with 6 episodes a season, 3 seasons max; or should we keep going and going and going until we get to the "Facts of Life Down Under" episode in Season 10?
Posted by Gregg Jaffe on January 28, 2010 at 01:11 AM
I get asked all the time how to do certain tasks pertaining to video by people who dabble but haven't dedicated their lives to the dizzying world of video production like I have.
So, in our continuing series of helpful tips on video for the web, today I'll introduce you to a free piece of software that does some pretty heavy lifting in terms of converting, compressing and even simple editing of video files. Ladies and gentlemen, please say hello to MPEG Streamclip.
MPEG Streamclip is put out by an Italian company called Squared 5 (http://www.squared5.com) and thats as much as I know about them. According to their site, "MPEG Streamclip is a powerful free video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files ... encode movies to many formats, [and] can cut, trim and join movies. MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL."
Thats a useful little gadget there. Let's look a little deeper.
CONVERT AND COMPRESS
Sometimes you're given a Windows Media file (.wmv) and need it to be a Quicktime (.mov), just drag and drop it into MPEG Streamclip's simple interface and export away.
Maybe, you have a video recording with a great song that you want to put on your ipod - you can export just the audio and be in earbud heaven.
You've got your wedding video on a DVD and want to put it on the web for your Aunt and Uncle to watch online - take that giant file and bring it down to a web-friendly size.
You need a frame grab of a video to put on a website or send to the press. You can scrub frame by frame and find the one you need, export and you've got your picture.
EDIT, JOIN AND TRIM VIDEO
Sometimes you want to do a little editing and don't have the time or money to hire a professional, such as yours truly - you guessed it MPEG Streamclip is the answer. You can set an in and out point of your video and delete the bit you no longer want.
Or, say you've got two clips that you want to bring together - drag them both in and export out. Voila!
CAN'T BEAT FREE AND USEFUL
This just scratches the surface and I'm sure there are tons of other uses that I don't partake in since I have my fancy editing software, but I just wanted to share this little gem with those in need.
There are many programs that can do similar things but at a much greater price than free. The happy price tag comes with a few drawbacks - an ugly interface with a bunch of extra drop down menus you don't need; a terrible name (nobody uses MPEGs anymore); the accompanying help document is nearly impossible to read.
All in all, MPEG Streamclip is a valuable tool to add to your box. Any questions on the above or to delve further into what it can do, feel free to drop me a line.
Posted by Gregg Jaffe on December 01, 2009 at 11:04 PM
"Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this blog, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, is prohibited."
Why are professional sports so slow to adapt to modern technology and social media? First the NFL employs a draconian Twitter policy that the Don Quijote of unnecessary PR, Chad Ochocinco, vows to stab with his sword of justice. Next comes a story via SM superstore Mashable about a missed opportunity by Major League Baseball to launch a viral video from a genuine moment by a Philadelphia Phillies fan, that amazingly did not involve throwing batteries at the opposing team.
America's professional sports leagues are extremely blessed with the ability to have essentially 30 (give or take) brands under their umbrella with which to market. Think about all the Cubs, or Cowboys, or Redwings merch that gets sold every year, and imagine the Don Fannuci-like commissioner of each league wetting their beaks from every sale. Isn't that enough for them to be happy - and moreso, shouldn't they embrace the fact that the millions of fans are essentially marketing their product for FREE!
Its not bad enough that the average hard-working fan has to fork over a small fortune to take his family to a game and fill them up with nachos the price of an SUV; but they are treated to a bunch of athletic savants complaining about how underpaid they are (If I hear about one more "hometown discount" contract that involves $200 million I may lose it altogether).
What's so irritating about this is, what are they trying to protect? I get it when the military has to ban tweeting, or when a politician's wife needs to keep some details to herself, but come on, this is a GAME we're talking about. Unless @CC_Sabathia is tweeting signs to @davidortiz I think we can feel safe with Twitter on the sidelines and in the dugouts. For all the commissioners know they might make a few extra bucks - and we KNOW they like that.
Posted by Gregg Jaffe on September 16, 2009 at 05:20 PM
Posted by Gregg Jaffe on February 05, 2010 at 10:44 AM
Should we go with 6 episodes a season, 3 seasons max; or should we keep going and going and going until we get to the "Facts of Life Down Under" episode in Season 10?
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America's professional sports leagues are extremely blessed with the ability to have essentially 30 (give or take) brands under their umbrella with which to market. Think about all the Cubs, or Cowboys, or Redwings merch that gets sold every year, and imagine the Don Fannuci-like commissioner of each league wetting their beaks from every sale. Isn't that enough for them to be happy - and moreso, shouldn't they embrace the fact that the millions of fans are essentially marketing their product for FREE!