eyedropper.co.uk

Amsterdam - The Borderline - 4,
originally uploaded by eyedropper.co.uk.

If Bruce Springsteen had grown up in the shadow of the Liver building and the M53 and not a New Jersey turnpike then I reckon he’d have turned out rather like Ian Prowse, front man for the ‘best band you’ve never heard of’ Amsterdam who I saw last night at The Borderline.

Prowse handles his Fender Telecaster with the same gutsy determination, but Amsterdam are proper scousers; from not doing interviews with The Sun, to keeping it in the family ala Bread as Ian’s cousin was acting guitar tech, and was constantly ribbed by him about his guitar tuning ability and lack of pay.

I got into Amsterdam after the Radio 1 John Peel tribute gig at Madia Vale, where Shelia said “This is the one he would have wanted me to play” when introducing ‘does this train stop at Merseyside?’. I remember it well as the whole room went silent to those ghostly opening notes… except Richard from Belle and Sebastian who’d just told me the punch line to the joke he was telling.

I’d forgotten how much fun seeing a band at The Boarderline can be. Bands get lights of members of the front row, friends and family all turn up – I’m sure I was stood next to the keyboard players mum; it’s much more intimate that somewhere like the Academy or Astoria.

Anyway, they’ve a new album out, the Journey, buy it. I did, and got it signed.

And if that wasn’t enough the night before in complete oppostite to them I saw Rose Royce play to The Bank’s Christmas party, also there was Samuel L Jackson, as he walked past I said hello in a manically bit pissed way, and he replied with a long slow “Hiiii….” so now I’ve met my second Jedi (Ewan McGregor being the other one).

Anyway, more shitty low res cameraphone pics on Flickr, God I’m really missing my little cybershot… New camera for Christmas me thinks…

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aperture,
originally uploaded by eyedropper.co.uk.

yeah, that’s right, he’s counting the gigs of RAM you’ll need on each finger if you want to run Aperture in any half decent way. It looked pretty good, but you’d really need a top notch desk top machine to get the benefit.

In all Mac Expo was rather good.. I was amazed at at how big an industry has sprung up providing iPod accessories. If you’ve got some white plastic and a Tandy electronics set, or a girl friend who can sew leather, you’re in business.

A lot of the store holders I spoke to said that what with it being half term, they’d been a lot of families through, one store had run out of freebies on the first day. That’s no bad thing I reckon. There did seem more retail type booths than simply trade ones this year.

Booth Babe count was extremely low, thankfully, though tosser with a radio mic speaking to two slightly interested people was high.

Link: BBC SPORT | Football | Europe | Ferguson refuses to defend Rooney.

Rooney, honestly, have a word with yourself. I think Fergurson should invest in one of these and everytime he see’s Roony stand up and about to mouth off, he should give him a little shock.

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Gavin and Cal,
originally uploaded by eyedropper.co.uk.

A very interesting day indeed.

First off, Cal Henderson very kindly came to give a talk to the BBC and very enlightening it was too. He made one really interesting point which I’ll come to later… (actually he made loads of interesting points on a great number of things). He also gave us a bit of back history to Flickr, I’ve done the odd presentation, and there’s nowt that gets a laugh as the BBC website circa 1997. Anyway, to go from Concept (Dec 03), launch (Feb04) and to have all that in the bin due to constant iteration six months later is incredible. In a year and a bit it’s managed to get 1 million users, and has 35/40 million images inside it the brute!

The second thing that’s been on my mind is this idea of ‘citizen reporting’. After the leader in the BJP that I commented about a few posts down, I decided to write a letter to Simon, the editor. Here it is in full.

Dear Sir

A Webb
Picture Editor
bbc.co.uk

So last night, Diane, the features editor called me for an interview. I’m keen to move the debate away from the London Bombings and who did or didn’t pay for what and towards ‘what happens now?’. It’s interesting because no one really knows. Here’s some other thoughts I’ve had on where we might be in 12 months…

1. The first hit is free: The public get wise very quickly and realise they can start asking for payment for exclusive submissions, especially images and video. Agencies like http://www.scoopt.com/ spring up then get bought out by Yahoogoole, trad news agencies shit it.

2. We’re Next: Maybe media institutions are next in line after the record industry and Hollywood for a shake up? We either ignore or fail to react quickly enough to the changing landscape and caught with our kecks down. Look at the structure of this piece on the Piano Man, particularly the comments. Is it any wonder the public are seeking new forms of reporting as they’ve fallen out with the media.

3. It actually works: The Live 8 scenario is a good example. One main event fully covered by professional (Getty) photographers, journalists and TV reporters, but then the web filling the ‘real experiences’ gap. There’s 9879 photos tagged Live8 on Flickr, that’s a lot of content.

The thing is that a lot of news is planned. It’s well researched by professionals who are trained and qualified in media ethics, law, keeping a log, balance, and objectivity. User generated content is none of these things, it’s spontaneous, opinionated, blurry, and subjective. More often that not user generated content only comes into play when it is the public as a whole that is affected by events. Imagine the Flickr tags for Diana’s funeral, or England beating Germany 5-1? It’s events like these that best suit UGC.

Which leads me on to some points Cal made… namely Flickr is lacking editorial. Now, they’ve been bought by Yahoo, and they’re being seen as the first Messy Media megacorp, with a news division too. So, what would happen if Flickr technology was partnered with Yahoo! news’ objective editorial? That would be a very powerful thing right? Maybe that’s option 4 in twelve months time?

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werenotafarid.com,
originally uploaded by eyedropper.co.uk.

Everyone’s doing were not afarid stuff in light of the recent bombings… Some are great and funny; absolut bottles, Enders parodies, others (mainly American) entries are a bit jingoistic for my liking… I like this one this one.

Still most of the entries fall into ‘photoshop therapy’, dealing with tragedy through comedy, and that’s a good thing.

Link: backstage.bbc.co.uk :: Prototypes :: BBC Homepage Archive.
T-dar! Rewind the homepage. Something we’ve been thinking about for a while is now here.. now, to build this function into the current homepage…

It’s really hard to gather information along the lines of ‘.Oh it was here this morning’. There’s some data that shows people search for things the morning after TX, but it’s a dark art… So will we be seeing time shifted promos? Want to relive Glasto Coverage exaclty as it happened? Easy!

In other news, cult closed today… but the final animation perhaps hints at K9’s return….?

Link: channel4.com - News. Shame on Channel4 news’ entertainment page (and their homepage!) for the lack of coverage on the death of the channel’s most famous son. Their first story is about Tom ‘I’M NOT GAY!’ Cruise who they covered in water earlier this week rather than the King of the afternoon…

Everyone loved Richard Whiteley… countdown probably taught more students basic maths and spelling than they learnt at school, it’ll never be the same.. sob

[H] [I] [E] [R] [C] [P] [I] [R] [I] - You’re 30 seconds starts now….

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DSC06131,
originally uploaded by eyedropper.co.uk.

Friday night shared a packed train to Clapham Junction (where it terminated due to a incident at Streatham Hill) with Bongo Mike and Extremely Frank Jeremy. Madly I bought one of their CDs for £4. They played such classics as ‘If you can’t have a shave in a toilet, where can you have a shave?’ and ‘It’s a crime to play music in the streets’. Oddly when I put their CD in iTunes went and got all the track names! Here’s a website about them where you can see a video.

Well, a new Pope was elected today and rather unfortunately it came as us ‘mighty homepage warriors’ were nearing the end of our working day. Good job we weren’t under work to rule conditions. It took a while for the grab of Benedict XVI on the balcony to appear on the newswires, so the Big Red Button aka pulling in the news feed, held the fort for a while immediately after the announcement. Eventually a poor contrast grab appeared, and I quickly whipped it off and went for the white text body copy option as the background was quite dark. It also went nicely with his robes and the whole ‘holy smoke’ angle of the day. I left the dark mysterious face at the bottom right of the picture in for the Da Vinci code nuts.

It’s been great being a witness to the recent papal events, often when discussing the suitability of editorial matters to do with the homepage we’d often say ’say the pope dies’, well, he did! And it was really quite weird to work through it. Just like the capture of Sadam or the resignation of Greg Dyke. It’s fantastic producing iconic images for world events on such a high profile site, and much more substantial and thought provoking that say, ‘get digital’ or the recent ‘do’t forget to buy a TV licence’ promo.

I had a trainee in today. I’ve never got over ‘explaining your job’ syndrome.

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hitchhikers,
originally uploaded by eyedropper.co.uk.

last night I saw the press screening of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, aka H2G2, and I’d like to think Douglas rests easy in his grave. On the whole a wonderful interpretation of the whole Hitchhikers story. I saw it with our own H2G2 team and BBC’s very own Mr Cult who all generally approved. And this on top of a successful Doctor Who return, they’re fit to burst.

Anyway, to the film. (contains spoilers)

Starts with dolphins saying ’so long and thanks for all the fish’ and leaving, then the Arthur’s house scene, lots of bits kept in, the trip to the pub etc. The Vogons are done magnificently, as are their giant space ships. Also the destruction of the world is done well, it implodes. How many times have we seen planets exploding, sometimes with rings flying out and bowel loosening bass sounds. If we’re lucky rocks get hurled at the camera, but this was different. Also, with 100s of Vogon ships surrounding the planet, indeed, being in the upper atmosphere, they’d have been destroyed too. No, our beautiful shining orb pops in a small fizz, and then nothing, just rose bowl style grid around an empty sphere.

Other great points, the CGI production and art direction is incredibly well thought out, and there’s a constant connection between all the elements. Everything, from the giant Vogon ships to the stamps that they use to rubber stamp documents, is big, dirty and square. This contrasts nicely with the smooth roundness of the Heart of Gold, the escape pod, Marvin’s head.

The animations on the guide are all done in friendly ‘don’t panic’ 2D pastel colours, and have their own little bits of humour. The one concerning the uses of the Babel fish for example, show’s a farmer milking a mooing cow, then once the fish goes in his ear, the cow’s moo become a speech bubble with a heart in it… freaking him out.

The beauty of the HoG’s improbability drive in action is a joy to watch… the ship suddenly pop’s into space as a sequence of seemingly random objects, and the effects last a while, so in one jump the round ship ends up as a giant ball of wool… cut to the inside and all the characters and the ship itself are all woollen, clanger/flump style, and the story rolls on, with some great animation, including Arthur being sick, his vomit all multi coloured strands of wool. Slowly as normality returns, he end up pulling the last bit of string form his mouth.. it’s a sublime scene.

Other choice lines: In a bureaucratic building on Vogonsphere seeking to get Trillian’s release, ‘Leave this to me, I’m British, I know how to queue..’ This scene includes a cameo from the original Marvin.

The approach to Magrathea contains a great answer-phone style message too. “.. you death may be recorded for training purposes, thank you”. Bill Bailey does a great job of voicing the whale who suddenly finds itself called into existence miles up in the atmosphere. Bill Nighy goes a good turn as Slartybartfast. And the journey he takes Arthur on to see the Earth Mk2 being built in breath taking. Martin Freeman pulls off the emotion in that scene brilliantly. Towards the end of the film there’s a strong ecological message that we know was very close to Douglas’ heart, and the bit calling in the question the dogma of religion is done really well too.

In all, I thought it was great. Some fans may pick and quibble over specific plot points, or even deviation from the received doctrine of the radio series. but I thought it was a great way into the whole Hitchhikers IP for newbies, it encourages you to want to explore more, to (re)read the books, even play the game, whatever. It’s out on the 28th, go and see it, and I can’t wait for the sequel, Restaurant at the end… has the real potential to a great ensemble piece, there’s so many characters, Meatloaf playing the dead Hotblack Destino? Who’d play the cow? The compere? It’d be great..

And we all got free towels!

Also, watch out for ‘the guide’ on your PDA, it’s availiable now.