kip/bot/blog

From Guy Kawasaki’s blog, Start Cooking. Smart use of video. Rather than shoveling video over to the site, they edit stills into the video for clarity of picture. This is perfect for instructional videos where you actually need to see some detail on-screen (ie, the image and information are more important than the narrative.  Editing stills and holding them provides the additional benefit of allowing for screen grabs. The clippy energy that comes from working with stills turns out to be on-brand and in-synch with the perky voice-over.

This is a use of video and motion graphics which is not explored often enough. With higher bandwidths, it seems like many go straight to ‘internet as TV and b-roll vehicle’. Video/motion on the web is still, very often, a lean-forward, engaged experience and the viewer still has his/her hands on the input device. Building content that has hi-res moments, allows for screen grabs, pauses, and rewinds to catch a moment is a potentially big play in certain areas: instructional/DIY content, TED talks, presentations in general where rich complex slides are used, travel/sightseeing, etc.

I had a hankering for Cowboy Bebop recently So I Netflixed the remastered, remixed, occasionally reanimated and re-edited version.

I watched an earlier version
of the series, and some differences are immediately obvious from a few episodes. The graphics are sharper and the new scenes and edits are great. They’ve redone some of the voices which works really well for the main characters, but is kind of spotty on the secondary ones. (Voice-over for anime is interesting — they’re still figuring out how over the top the voices need to be in relation to the graphics.) The stupid, overanimated menus are gone which is also nice. The small and large tweaks make the whole thing fresh.
Anyone who hasn’t seen the series should check it out. The characters and friendly noir sensibility along with the unblievable music (from Yoko Kanno) put it at a much higher level than any other anime series I’ve watched. They also make it a good series to show friends who don’t understand why you like it.

One other interesting note. Because of my compulsion to multi-task while watching TV, I tend to put subtitles on, no matter what I’m watching. So I have the subtitles and the dubbing on for Cowboy Bebop, and the translations are wildly out of synch.