little lost robot

Today’s shooting assignment took me to the sleepy, little town of Jonesville to shoot video of a controversial church sign. The pastor wanted to call attention to the fact that Barack Obama has a similar last name to Osama Bin Laden’s first name - a similarity that perhaps makes him a Muslim, despite the fact he’s a practicing Christian and has denounced the Muslim claim about a trillion times.

To my surprise, many of the church’s neighbors found the sign offensive, and one lady even asserted, “No, I don’t think that they are brothers.” Personally, I find the sign offensive on several levels, and many for reasons of bad grammar and punctuation. Perhaps the pastor doesn’t have a question mark tablet. I’ll let that one pass. But, “Humm?” Pretty weak. [All that said, the pastor was a really nice guy and we were thankful he granted us an interview.]

This weekend the wife and went down to Myrtle Beach for the South Carolina AP Awards. Hours before the ceremony we found ourselves feeding the disgusting catfish in the pond at Broadway at the Beach. For only a quarter you get to see hundreds of fish and water fowl battle over cheap food pellets, dropped from the grubby hands of somewhat loving tourists.

I used the nifty, new video service on Flickr to embed the following video clip. It’s a perfect way to share the occasional, short videos shot with digital cameras along with your sets of still photos.

Later, in a different spot we fed the fish again. This time baby ducks joined the fray, fighting for food [video clip]. I can only describe it as: sad-awesome-disgusting-rad.

Okay, maybe it’s lazy blogging to occasionally embed Onion News Network videos, but this one totally made my day. I would watch CSPAN all day long if it went something like this:

It’ would be totally pronk if this word soon skyrocketed to popularity on the internet - or at the very least, Virginia’s 11th District.

Had a pretty busy day at work, shooting stories about truckers that may (or may not) be on strike. However the real highlight of my day was when I was sent to video a county council meeting, where the sheriff talked about all the prostitution and violence in the area. At one point they shifted gears and gave a fascinating powerpoint demonstration about gang violence, which took a morbid turn when they showed all these gory photos of slain gang members. I’m talking blood and brains. Also, the presenter showed a video called “the blood dance”, showing gang members dancing around and throwing signs. I made a mental note to look up that video later on Youtube and then change out the music the gangsters were dancing to with something more riduclous - someone already (brilliantly) beat me to it.

I’ve done a pretty good job avoiding covering the Leatherheads movie (aka “Clooneymania”) that was shot in the Greenville area last year. I put together my paparazzi story, but that was sort of a mocking thing, so it don’t think it counted. Well, today my streak came to an end when I was sent to video George Clooney and Renee Zellwegger receiving their honorary keys to the city this morning.

The actors were rather charming, but the thing I was really impressed with was having a key tripod position right in front of the stage. I’ve been to crappy local government stories where we don’t even get to set up so close, so this was a nice change. [To all the other videographers: I was hoping to get a bunch of good nat sound for my pieces today, but all I had when I got back to the station was this endless audio channel of women screaming. One long, endless scream.]

Another brilliant video from The Onion. I have the videos downloaded to my Tivo now, so I always have an awesome present when I scroll through the “Now Playing Menu”.

You may look at this video and think it’s completely ridiculous, and you’d be correct - I made it in 25 minutes. It’s targeted at my five year-old nephew, who turns five this weekend. It is now evident to me that I’ll never have a career as a singer-songwriter. I sorta ignored small signs over the years, like glasses shattering and people throwing up in the karaoke bar. But now I’ve made peace with it.

But it’s not the only birthday this weekend, as my brother and his wife are having a babychild today at the hostpital! So Cody and Baby Nathan will have their birthdays within a day of each other. (Update: baby Nathan photo.)

I saw this video on the YouTube, and decided to post it here, on my oft-neglected blog. It’s called, “Puppy Vs. Robot! Epic Battle For Territorial Domination!”

It was a toss up between posting this video or the one with the three year-old girl recounting Star Wars.

Today’s video assignment found me bouncing around in a fishing speedboat as female “Bassmaster” Janet Parker ripped across Lake Hartwell at the nautical equivalent of 120mph. Along the way, we hit some rough patches and got blasted with freezing water, but her makeup help-up remarkably well.

She’s in town as part of the media circus surrounding ESPN’s Bassmaster tournament thing [video]. I’ve been told repeatedly today that it’s the “Superbowl of the fishing world” - but without all the semi-entertaining television advertisements. I left work at the end of the day with two thoughts running through my mind: 1)”I find myself oddly interested in the world of professional sport fishing; 2) I’m so thankful that I didn’t drop my XDCam in the lake today. Read more