Honorable Mention in the Greyscale Gorilla 5 Second Project.

FAIL from Dave Koss on Vimeo.

Making of video here (7 & 1/2 hours into 1 minute)

Making of "FAIL" from Dave Koss on Vimeo.

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
Google Fiber Launch
Google Buzz
Iran blocks Gmail

UPDATE: Not even 30 minutes after I posted this article, the band cola-cola posted the new song on their myspace page. You heard it first here!

The leaked Apple Ad for the iPad is an obvious fake. Here are the reasons...

1) The product in the video is obviously a 3D rendering. Apple usually uses the real thing in their commercials. Notice the ports on the back. They're flat. Not three dimensional. Plus the falloff shadow on the first shot is nice and even like a spot light in any 3D animation program.

2) These ports are flawed. Note the magsafe adapter on the back. How would you charge this or use any of these ports for that matter if they were on the back?

3) Apple stopped putting Firewire 400 on their products to conserve precious space. Why would they bring it back on an even more compact device?

4) The song playing is not recognized by Shazam, so it's probably not a mainstream band.

5) The music is not mastered well. It sounds a little like it was an amateur recording.

6) This is obviously an online marketing campaign for the band Cola-Cola out of LA.

As someone who is surrounded with video technology on a regular basis, it really makes me laugh to look at a DVD and see a label that says, "Filmed in HD." This is what I see on many DVD's in the stores now days because it's a buzz word. The looping fireplace DVD I got for Christmas last year had this written on it, and it's just funny to see from a videographer's perspective because it just doesn't matter. No matter what camera you shoot it with, it still has to be down-converted to standard definition in order to be saved on a DVD. No matter what you do, a DVD is still a DVD.

Keep that in mind while I describe the new series on The History Channel. Everything about this commercial and website makes the documentary look like it's in HD, but it isn't. The name of the show itself is "WWII in HD," but nothing about it is actually HD. The show originally aired on The History Channel in HD, but that is all. Again, as a videographer and editor this really bugs me. They're using HD as a buzzword to trick people into buying.

It's advertised at $7.95 and there are no disclaimers on the commercial or the website that it isn't in HD. The website says, "...full, immersive HD color." "...as well as HD color..." "...converted to HD with meticulous technique..." That is wrong. These techniques were used to create the original, but that is not what they are selling.

If you follow my articles or follow me on any social media site, you probably heard all the excitement about the American Airlines Orange Juice incident. This article is not about the incident itself, but about what happens online when something you do goes viral. When the story first broke on The Consumerist, my site got a bunch of hits, but not more than it could handle. Only a handful of people that read the article were clicking on the link to my site. I can only imagine how many hits they got on that story. The kicker was when someone posted a direct link to the article on Fark.com. I knew Fark was a bigger site, but had no idea it would generate that kind of traffic. My site could hardly take it. I had a pretty large bandwidth package from Godaddy.com and I figured it would be fine if anything went viral. But I was wrong.

The other day I wrote a blog about American Airlines that made the front page of the consumerist. It caused quite an uproar. I'll write more about the experience from a social media / technical aspect later.

Update: American Airlines has declined my request for a refund of any points used for this flight. I was hoping just to talk to someone at least about this man's experience to make sure he didn't get in any further trouble, but they called me from a blocked number, so I didn't answer. The woman just sent me a generic email and left no return phone number on my voice mail.

I travel with a group of about 130 individuals that fly with us for work on a regular basis. Many of them fly American often and have many frequent flyer miles and upgrade points. We've all spent many hours traveling in crappy airplanes and sitting in middle seats to earn these points. Sunday, December 6th, I was flying from Sacramento (SMF) to Dallas (DFW) on flight #614 and spent 6 upgrade points so my pregnant wife and I could get some sleep. We were up late and the flight was early, so we really wanted the sleep. There were 60 of us traveling between the 6:00am and 6:15am flight to Dallas alone. About 25 were on flight #614. I wasn't hungry, so I decided to sleep through the flight by putting my headphones on and dosing off as soon as the plane took off. 6 of us in our group had upgraded and were happy to have a comfortable seat for once. We played some musical chairs so my wife and I could sit together. I was is seat 6A, she was in 6B. The rest of our friends in first class were in seats 6E, 6F, 5A and 5F, all surrounding a man about to have a very bad day. About 45 minutes into the flight I was awakened by a flight attendant named Helen, screaming at the man sitting in front of my wife. It was so loud, I could hear it over my headphones and the music playing. She was going off about how she didn't care if he was Platinum or Executive Platinum. I found this to be very odd. When she was done screaming, she came over to where my wife was sitting to ask what she wanted to eat. Then she said, "Sorry about that, he was just bitching." First of all, such language shouldn't be used by a flight attendant. Second of all, what business is it of hers to discuss the situation with other passengers?

I love the Dave Hill effect, and I've come up with a similar technique. I'm not quite on his level yet, but hopefully this is something everyone can use to have fun with their photos.

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSTHBIOg8sM
Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGsgud2NnEM
Part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1B2gIOzOw0