I can’t believe this was ever on television.

Posted on December 19, 2007

Straight from the LLR video vault are two weird, little videos I made a few years back with my partner-in-crime, Melinda. Back in the day, photographers at KPTV were occasionally charged with creating a two minute video that the credits would play over at the end of teach Sunday newscast. I gotta tell you: I made some weird credits pieces, man. I had dancing action figures, creepy Halloween costume skits, and one segment where Hasser just drank a Diet Coke in front of the camera for two whole minutes to “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Of course, none of segments these were ever questioned, especially since another photog was allowed to show raw hamburger meat being cooked or (and I’m not making this up) a shaved cat licking someone’s nipple ring for two solid minutes. Ahh, the golden days of TV news!

Anyway, here’s two of my favorite credits pieces I did - both involving a full cast of Star Trek: Voyager collector’s dolls, that I’m now ashamed to admit I actually owned. Melinda and I were inspired to shoot this after the station lobby was “toy bombed” just before the annual Toys For Tots toy drive, and later we shot a sequel when Voyager was cancelled. We were a UPN affiliate at the time, so it made more sense back then. The credits pieces eventually ended, for they were completely erratic and probably didn’t really help our Nielsen meter strategy. At least I have these little holiday gems to fondly look back upon.

I’d also like to point out this that was years before Robot Chicken.

Have you been “terminated” yet?

Posted on December 13, 2007

There’s so many weird, viral promotional website out there right now, but this one kinda got my attention. You upload a photo of yourself to see what you look like as one of those nasty Terminator robots with perfectly sculpted abs. [The “subject in action” button on the bottom-right shows a little video clip.] Read more

Completely out of juice.

Posted on December 5, 2007

I can’t find the battery charger to my digital camera that permanently lives in my left pocket. It sucks because I’ve had so many funny things to take shots of and blog about - which sorta irks me that I only feel compelled to blog when I have a graphic to go with it. Anyway, until the pwershot is up-and-running again, here’s some random thoughts about television I have to share with y’all.

I spend entirely too much time on Hulu watching Kitchen Nightmares.

My station broke into programming with a breaking news update during the Heroes season finale on Monday. Just before the show went to commercial break, a vial containing a deadly virus was tumbling towards the floor, a mere second from shattering. When we came back to the show (from the breaking news alert) all the heroes were standing around congratulating each other. It sucked to miss part of the show, but hearing about the angry calls and emails from the “Heroes community” the next morning was priceless.

I was looking at the list of all the crappy reality shows taking over the networks (American Gladiators not included) due to the WGA strike and part of me wishes that somehow the CBS studio executives decided to just extend Kid Nation and force those kids to stay in Bonanza City for another few months. It’d end up being a Battle Royale blood sport just in time for February ratings. If that happened my money would be on the creepy, little Jared kid.

The WGA strike makes more sense to me now…

Posted on December 2, 2007

…especially after recently spending hours on the video site Hulu. The site’s a joint venture between NBC and FOX, in which the networks (and their respective sister networks; FX, SciFi, Bravo) have dumped a ton of original high-quality video on there for folks to watch. It’s in private beta right now, but when the site opens up to the public you’ll be able to watch clips and episodes from dozens current shows (and classic ones like Buck Rogers, A-Team, and Battlestar Galactica). Like YouTube, you can email the shows to your friends or embed them on your blogs- even edit it down to show-off your favorite scene, like I did with this week’s episode of 30 Rock.

Hulu is just awesome, and it’s another example of how people are consuming their media, especially on platforms other than the traditional TV. Naturally, there’s a small amount of advertising within the shows on Hulu, but it’s handled rather well. And after watching one program after another, it’s become apparent to me just how much revenue the members of the WGA would be missing out from once the site actually goes public and people can catch up with the entire series of Friday Night Lights without having to turn on the TV or buy a DVD.

Also, I’ve come to realize that the word Hulu most likely means “crack” in some foreign language.

Two random things I’m obsessed with this week:

Posted on October 21, 2007

Portal - It was packaged as an added value to The Orange Box for Xbox 360, but ends up stealing the show. You play the game as a human lab rat, making your way through deadly mazes armed with a gun that shoots only teleportation portals. Thanks to YouTube, some of the more difficult (and insane) levels now have visual strategy guides. Folks who don’t have a game system can play a really sweet, side scrolling flash version of the game. Can’t get enough portal.

Dexter - I finished reading the third Dexter book last week. It was good, but it definitely wasn’t as strong as the other two novels - maybe it was too different. The cable show is still going strong, but I can’t bear to watch it in anything other than HD.

I rock the dice now, so watch out.

Posted on August 28, 2007

These are things that have happened, or that I’ve been thinking about this week - none are long enough for their own blog entry, or too long for a Twitter post.

1. I just got a copy of Advantage Yahtzee from Amazon. Is it cheating to read a book on how to kick ass at Yahtzee? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m obsessed with the game lately. And if there were performance enhancing drugs for the game, then I would be juicing up every day and paying a co-worker to pee in a cup, so I could fool the Yahtzee Gaming Commission.

2. The season premier for my favorite show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is up on the gang’s MySpace page. But, it’s way better if you’ve seen the past two seasons (which come out on DVD next week - buy it!). And now I have a favorite new character: “PepperJack” the street pimp. And I have a favorite new catchphrase: “Pepperjack love Fraggle Rock”

3. I was kinda horrified yesterday when I randomly heard Carrie Underwood’s stalker chick song on the radio and realized that I knew all the lyrics (but I apparently don’t know the name of the song). I was equally astonished today when I was driving along with my photog boss, John Hendon and he sang Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” along with the radio perfectly. You gotta see it to believe it.

4. I’m totally gonna start tearing up my blog template soon and getting a new look. Something with a slightly wider sidebar.

I need my favorite shows to come back on.

Posted on August 12, 2007

Just watched the season finale (or what I’m sure is to be series finale) of HBO’s John From Cincinnati. For those of you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll offer this simple advise: don’t. It’s not that it’s not good in its own special way, it’s just that it never really goes anywhere. If you’re one of those people that complains how Lost never goes anywhere, this show will have you slitting your wrists. It’s all my fault though, I could’ve stopped watching at any time, but I didn’t want to give up. You know it’s a bad sign when episodes end with lines like “Well, this was a complete waste of time.”

It nicely rounded out my trilogy of terrible shows, consisting of: Grudge 2 (you can’t escape those Japanese grudge curses), and SciFi channel’s Flash Gordon.

season finales: analog vs. digital

Posted on May 23, 2007

Tonight we were faced with a conundrum, as both the American Idol and Lost season finales overlapped, and for several reasons (both personal preference and technical) we didn’t want to flip between them or wait until the other show was over.

So my solution was to put a little analog set alongside the HDTV, so we can monitor Idol as we watched Lost. I knew the show (Idol) would be an overblown, bloated mess - only the last 10 minutes actually worth watching - but since I watched the whole season, I felt compelled to “keep an eye on it”. (Also the wife needed to watch her news, which followed Idol and also overlapped with Lost. Luckily, we could pause Lost, in case we needed to focus on the other TV…which came in handy when Fox went over eight minutes and screwed all their local affiliates on the last (and biggest) night of ratings.

I suspect “The Others” had something to do with that.

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