If you’re lazing about/working/reading in front of a TV and want some music with visuals, Uniqlo’s series of LifeWear Music compilations is pretty good! I’m now watching the one set in a cafe and they’ve left mics on so you get little hints of conversation and movement in the mix.
As mentioned yesterday, I’ve been waiting for the arrival of my Backbone One controller. It was dispatched at the end of October but took ages to leave the USPS, probably because they had some important envelopes to deliver at the same time. It arrived last night after about 10 days, and I’ve gotta say, first impressions are good.
It’s a good size and feels very nice in the hands, with my only concern being that the er… spine of it cuts directly across the lowest of the camera lenses on my iPhone 12 Pro, and it looks like the lens rests against that bit of plastic. I doubt it’ll cause any damage; those lens covers are sapphire crystal, but it looks a little odd. I’m not sure that it will fit an iPhone 12 Pro Max, but their site claims that it will.
It beggars belief that I could kill 16 people in CoD Mobile without dying once, but that’s just what happened the first time I snapped this thing on. It’s also transformed GRID Autosport from a game that I bought once and regretted immediately into something that feels truly console-like, and I don’t mean a Nintendo Switch. The graphics and haptics on this thing are way ahead of any racing game I’ve seen on that system.
We went to Ferrara Homestyling to pick out some toilets and sinks. Beer and burgers were the reward.
Shot these clips in Instagram for some reason and assembled them in Quik. Also cut them up for sharing on Instagram Stories. I don’t know if I’ll make vlogging a regular habit, but I’d love to? Just can’t see portrait video being the way to go. Might switch to landscape for the next one.
Continuing a Japan holiday tradition… making videos of my daily konbini snack raids.
Recently a few colleagues found these on my YouTube and thought it’d be funny to put them up on the giant Microsoft Surface Hub we have. I don’t know why I found that a problem, when I’m uploading them onto my own public website. I suppose because probably no one sees these?
In work-related news (doesn’t happen very often here), I recently joined Fjord, a design and innovation agency that’s now part of Accenture Interactive, and one of their longstanding traditions is an annual “learning summit” that everyone travels to attend. This year, about a thousand people from 28 studios around the world made their way to Berlin for three days. I made a bunch of quick 1-minute update videos for Instagram, and this is a compilation of them.
I wanted to shoot and edit everything on mobile, without doing multiple takes or anything. Just approach it in a really rough and imperfect manner using Apple’s launched-and-now-almost-forgotten Clips app. It breaks the familiar iMovie/FCP-style workflow of assembling video on a timeline and then editing on top of it, and reimagines editing as if designed by Snapchat: you get one chance to do it right, and you have to do everything ‘live’. What that means is you can’t put the video down and then record a voice-over to go on top of it. You literally have to hold down a record button to lay down the segment of video (as if you were shooting it right then), and record your VO simultaneously. If you want to pan around the photo or video, you need to do that with your fingers on the screen too, while talking, while getting the length right. It’s most intuitive when you’re shooting a How-To video and want to narrate what’s happening.
In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the right tool for what I was doing, since I shot nearly no footage directly within Clips, but it was fun and pretty interesting to approach editing differently. I might use it again, but the fixed square format is a little annoying. I would think twice about putting any scenic holiday video through that limitation.
Today I received my new Moment Case (Dark Walnut Kickstarter edition) for iPhone 6 Plus after a long wait following the Kickstarter campaign. They hit a snag with manufacturing, and the release of the slightly thicker 6S series of phones necessitated holding back to make sure the original designs fit.
It works as advertised and is very easy to hold; slips into my jeans pocket comfortably enough too. Here’s a quick unboxing and look at the startup photo taking workflow. Note that you must use the Moment Camera app if you want to use the shutter button. It does NOT function as a regular Bluetooth remote shutter like the kind you use with a selfie stick.
sangsara.net 