Dumbworld: A Sacramento Based Blog on Entertainment, Media and Art

Detox (Dr Dre’s long long long awaited album is really coming out- supposedly).  Snoop has been in the studio working on it.  From urban music.

from Vator.tv, a tech company social network

• ‘The agencies, such as United Talent Agency and William Morris, are becoming more like venture capitalists as they move toward an ownership model and further away from the representation model, said Chris Pappas, head of digital media practice for United Talent Agency. “We find the right artist (and) we create a company around his/her intellectual property,” he said. As for the artist, “they’ll have a substantial ownership position,” he added. “The idea is that they’ll be the owner of that content and not just workers for hire.”‘

video here
 

I don’t go to the movies a lot, although I do watch a lot of movies.  When I heard somebody else say that they walked out of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull , and then proceeded to dump on the quality of the products coming out of Hollywood, the first thing that I thought was ‘snob.’  

This was the only review I had heard for the movie.  I decided I would check it out for myself and boy was I sorry.  I would have walked out too, if it wasn’t for the hope that it was going to get better and less implausible (after all I was raised on Indiana Jones and Steven Spielberg movies– Does Steven Spielberg even make bad movies?). 

So what’s the verdict?  Buzzwatch’s Jargon Tracker tracks the popularity of phrases on the interweb.  One of the more popular phrases this week was “Nuke the Fridge.” 

“Nuke the Fridge” references  the implausible scene from the movie, where to survive a nuclear bomb test, Indy hunkers up in an old refrigerator (and is thrown along with the fridge miles through the air– and survives of course!).  Nuke the Fridge is meant to signify anything that has left the realm of reality (sort of like “Jump the Shark”).

I’m sure there are a number of scenes that are equally as out there as the Nuke the Fridge scene, but the one that comes to mind is a CGI heavy scene where the dude from Transformers (his name escapes me) gets caught up in some vines during a high speed chase.  Transformer dude gets lifted out of the jeep, and as the jeeps speed off, he proceeds to swing through the jungle with a bunch of monkeys and somehow cuts off the racing jeeps at a pass. 

 I try to learn something from every movie I watch, and from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I learned, just because you can do something with CGI doesn’t mean that you should.   

is from Napoleon Dynamite because it made me realize the importance of a good title sequence.  The art of the title takes a look at, well, the art of the title.

A commercial we did for Capitol Proformance (a sports training company) in Sacramento.  It features professional baseball players Derrek Lee and Nick Johnson (among others).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec0ROda5fbo]

I definitely need to work on improving the quality of my uploads for the web.  It looks great on the HD closed circuit TV’s for Metro Hub Network– where it shows on a loop in bars, restaurants, taxis, etc.– but not so hot on Youtube (I’ve heard that videos don’t look as good on Youtube anyways).  I have seen some “recipes” to make your Youtube videos look better– but I still am not happy with them.  Let me know if you have a recipe for Compressor that you are happy with.