Machinima Production Tool Kit – MovieStorm


This homage to Pulp Fiction was made with Moviestorm.

Moviestorm is a stand-alone (and free) application for machinima production with an impressive list of features. The company claims this is the first such dedicated tool, but you’ll remember The Movies game from a couple of years ago as well as Chrysler’s machinima contest. And while machinima production might be a fringe activity, it’s a “lunatic” fringe: The Movies Online game community website “has around 29,000 Studios with a total of 138,404 movies and all those received more than 803,000 ratings and comments.” (source).

Some of these videos are fan-made interpretations of real commercials, like this one about AllState Insurance:

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Visualizing Merged Time


Recreating Movement is a computer program for analyzing film sequences and has been developed within a diploma thesis.”

On Kottke, a great round-up of time-merge visualizations. Below, “1000 cars racing at the same time“, a video overlay of many play-throughs. Besides the obvious fun factor, it’s a great tool for averaging user interactions within an environment.

MiraWorldTV Aggregates Online TV Streams

MiraWorldTV is a plugin for windows media center. Miraworldtv consolidates various internet TV streams and lets you watch them from your media center PC. MiraWorldTV can be installed on Vista Ultimate or Vista Premium. Thousands of mainstream channels from all over the world are in-built with MiraWorldTV, and the database is updated frequently.”

Hope there’s a snooker channel somewhere in there.

Video Seeding For Professionals

I remember that whenever I had to do some ‘casual seeding’ for a promo video for an agency, I had a document with all the usernames and passwords of the sites I would dump the file to. It would take me up to a day to drill down that list, surf to the site and log in, upload the video, wait for the encoding and then bookmark the url of the clip to track the number of views afterwards. I know seeding promotonial clips has taken a downfall a bit, since not all communities are that keen on ‘being abused’ by ‘yet another agency that wants to score’ with a clip in the hopes it goes viral. So. Here is a solution that can make some people very pissed, but at the same time would come in very handy for an agency to start the seeding and save a lot of time.
In comes Hey!Spread

First thing to do the ‘undercover work’ is to have some sleeping accounts. Just go to the sites listed below and register for an account. You better start making those on beforehand, even when you don’t have a clip to seed. You can put some ‘general’ funny clips on the account and pretend to be a regular user. It’s good to have a history on a site. The longer the better. It’s good to have some activity on that account as well, it will add up to your credibility. Write down all the usernames and passwords and then head over to the Hey!Spread website.

With a simple login, you get access to their service, name your movie, tag it and start the uploading. Hey!Spread will upload your movie to:

All the links above go directly to the registration page of the sites, so in case you don’t have a username/password on that site yet, you don’t have to look for the signup page.

Hey!Spread also allows you to add a watermark to the video file, in case you want to brand it for an official release or something. As soon as you start uploading your file, all you have to do is sit back and relax. The only thing you have to wait for is the processing time of each individual video site. When everything is uploaded, you get the URL to the location of the uploaded clip. Just copy-paste that list, put it in an e-mail or a Word document, and go check the views if you need to harvest the results.

As a bonus, you can use the Hey!Spread API which allows you to propose Hey!Spread in white label as a innovative and addictive feature to your users or clients. Allow them to mass-distribute video content over the best video platforms at any time, but still be the solution provider that came up with this brilliant plan for your customer!

Have fun.

Measuring Sleep Patterns


Image: The ActiGraph

Actigraph is a device that monitors human activity and circadian cycles. It looks and is worn like a watch. The heart of the device is a very sensitive accelerometer that captures the tiniest movements of the patient.

Site Content Analyzer – CleverStat

CleverStat is a nifty tool I’ve been using recently for web site content analysis. Unlike numerous online apps, CleverStat makes a copy of the site on your hard drive and analyzes the entire thing and not only individual pages.

Color-Blind Image Simulation



Color wheel as seen by a red-insensitive protanope.

To test how your ads are seen by the color-blind, you can use Vischeck, an online tool and a set of downlodable Photoshop filters for PC and Mac.

More tools. A color-blind-friendly interface on Summize.

Earlier:
Advertising for the Color-Blind
Tool: How Color Blind People See Text
Advertising in Braille
The Robotic Shopping Assistant
Playboy in Braille


A regular color wheel (source).

Present Good-Looking Data with Chart Chooser

Chart Chooser is a tool from Juice Analytics that, as its name suggests, lets you pick the right chart for your data and download an appropriate template for Excel or PowerPoint.

On a related note, you can generate dynamic charts on the fly with the newly released Google Charts API.