Posterous theme by Cory Watilo as adapted by Jamie Graham

Making the geeky cool

written on Wednesday 1 June 2011 and filed under [dave jeffery] [geeky stuff] [transdiffusion]

This is the showreel of my friend Dave, who has done wonderful work for Transdiffusion and Kaleidoscope amongst many others. The stuff he produces is wonderful in a geek-heaven kind of way, but then he comes along and puts a layer of übercool on top of that. Who can ask for anything more?

Their glory shall not be blotted out

written on Tuesday 31 May 2011 and filed under [cemeteries] [what i did on my holidays]

(download)
As I've previously mentioned, my weird hobby when in Belgium is to visit and photograph Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries.

If you've never seen one, this must seem very odd indeed, so here's a short video of Railway Dugouts (Transport Farm) cemetery, just outside Ieper/Ypres, so you can see what they generally look like and why they hold such fascination.

It's been around 18 years since I last handled professional video cameras, so it's no surprise that the videoed parts of the film are rubbish: inexperienced operator using a stills camera to take video pictures without a tripod == crappy film. Still, it's no worse than most YouTube videos, especially as I shoved in lots of stills with too much Ken Burns effect on them. The camera mostly caught the sound of me breathing like some old pervert (say nothing) so I've dubbed a Public Domain rendering of Jerusalem over it, which leads to some accidentally hilarity (the choir sings "dark satanic mills", the camera pans on to the grave of one S W Mills; each time they sing "England", the camera comes to rest on a Canadian or Australian grave and so forth).

[plug type="shameless"] If you like the Ken Burns-style stills, you can see more of them by buying my wonderfully produced, if ambitiously priced, book from here. [/plug]

Let the train take the strain

written on Tuesday 31 May 2011 and filed under [trains] [what i did on my holidays]

(download)
So I discovered the video camera function on my phone, pointed it out of the window and now take you on a journey from Menin to Wervik (edited for sanity reasons) so you too can pretend you've been to Belgium too! See what I do for my readers?

As a bonus, I've included the return working of the train passing near Zillibeke at the end.