Weirdest fucking video ever. mashup project

Brothers from Laxplayer3113 on Vimeo.

First Short Film

So, we had our annual uncUT Film Festival here at the University of Toledo, and as a part of the Arts Living and Learning Community dorms, I was required to form a group with some friends and make a film together. As the producer, I mostly get credit for the film, but really I couldn't have done anything nearly as well if it wasn't for my friend Caleb, who's a film major and knew about some basic composition and film techniques. Thanks to his hard work and my generally amazing self, and the help of other various friends at the dorm, I managed to not only squeeze out a film in 4 days' time, but also make a film worthy of 2nd place in the film festival. Of course, I was actually kind of bummed because I was secretly hoping to get first place. But small matters! That's just fine with me. The requirements of the film: The film had to be 3-5 minutes long, but we had some lee-way. My submitted film was 6 and a half minutes long, although my director's cut is 7 and a half. The film had to pertain to the first year on the UT campus. The film had to be awesome. The last one is a joke, because if that last one was a requirement, some of the films shown that night would have been immediately disqualified, because they sucked really hard. Seriously, I'm normally a pretty lenient and nnon-critical guy, but there were a couple films that just made you feel like you were watching the results of a 5 year old with a camera. Anyways, without further ado, I give you my director's cut short film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uL55nzQ4Q0

Video GIF

Animation GIF

Stupid Typographical Face

I hated it and my hand cramped up, so that's why it sucks.

16 grid similarity project

Don't know if we're supposed to upload this or what, but here it is.

The Brutal Truth

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high. Nothing exists because a rainbow is just a refraction of light particles in the condensed mist that forms in the ionized atmosphere of an electrical storm, and you can't go above a rainbow because technically it exists everywhere. And someday I'll wish upon a star and nothing will happen because stars are simply balls of fire and nuclear explosions billions and billions of miles away and they are not conscious and they can't grant wishes because they are simply chemical reactions that we can create in a laboratory. And that's the truth.

pixlr

AntiVirus Scan

Wonderland

Wonderland
Originally uploaded by obliqueapproach

Old photo from Tibet that I just dug up and polished up.

I Hate Fools also Life

I was just browsing around and realized that I keep finding pictures that people call "Emotive Portraits." It seems to just be a picture of themselves with heavy photoshop filters or weird patterns drawn on themselves. It really conveys no emotion, and even the few that can convey a simple one like "Anger" is done several (read:nearly twenty) times with the same make up and filters. And then, I realized that perhaps I don't know what "Emotive Portraits" are actually supposed to be. So I decided to look it up. As it turns out, THERE IS NO DEFINITION FOR IT. Somebody made up the term when they took a picture of themselves being sad about themselves or some shit stuff that's happened to them and then decided that they wanted to add superfluous meaning to it, and called it a form of art. And now people think it's perfectly fine to literally take hundred of photos of themselves making the same facial expression and call themselves an accomplished photographer. It pisses me off makes me angry. They're a bunch of goddamn gosh-darn second-hander Peter Keatings.




In other news, this next paragraph is for Mr Seder Burns. Hey Seder. You know what, I believe your Day in the Life project is cursed or something. First my media card breaks and I had to go buy a new one. Then, the night before I was going to take pictures, I went out to take photos for the Chinese Association at an event, and my camera breaks down. The clasp that opens the shutter snapped. Fantastic. So I went out and bought a new camera (so this is secretly a good thing, because I've needed a new camera for a long time anyways). And now that I've finished everything and made that goddamn gosh-darn presentation, I go and check on it and all the slides are blank aside from my text. I love this assignment.

Day in the Weekend!

Second animoto video

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

CD Quality

I don't know about anyone else, but before this assignment, I was vaguely aware of 3 audio file formats: MP3, WMA, and AAC. And as it turns out, all 3 of these formats are "lossy" compression formats, meaning that when I rip a CD into any of these file types, the song is compressed slightly, degrading the quality of said song. From this we get the cycle of people continuously ripping and burning CDs at increasingly low quality until eventually you might as well listen to radio noise.

So I looked into various audio file types, and discovered that there are many, many formats for sound. I was particularly interested in the uncompressed and "lossless" formats, where the file is compressed using a special algorithm that allows the full file to be reconstructed from the compressed format, giving the impression of 0% compression.

I took my old Linkin Park CD and ripped it into various formats at differing qualities (I chose Linkin Park because they have a wide variety of pitches, from deep bass to shrill treble).

The formats I listened to went as follows:

MP3: 16 kbps, 112kbps, and 320 kbps

WMA: 16 kbps, 112 kbps, and 320 kbps

AAC: 128 kbps, 320 kbps

Apple Lossless Encoder: Lossless

WMA Lossless: Lossless

AIFF: Uncompressed

WAV: Uncompressed

It was fun listening to the progressively increasing quality. The 16 kbps was really shitty poor quality, and I could hear static and scratching in the background. My headphones sounded like it was getting molested during the loud parts, and it was overall a pretty sub-par experience.

The other qualities sounded much better, and the scratching went away, but my headphones still shook at the loud parts and seemed to be very upset with me.

Then I decided to try the lossless and uncompressed. Fuck yeah! It was much better. In fact the 16 kbps was me riding a donkey on a muddy slope with poisonous daggers and flaming rocks falling on me from above, and the lossless and uncompressed was like me driving a Bugatti Veyron at 253 mph down the smoothest road in the world that happened to have no cars while the wind blew in the same direction I was going and a rainbow was off the distance and leprechauns are real. Maybe someone could make the distinction, but I sure as hell definitely couldn't tell the difference between lossless and uncompressed.

Urban Landscape Theme: Lifeless

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Sentinel

DSC_0043
Originally uploaded by obliqueapproach

The eerily lit Gothic tower overlooks a line of grey, empty buildings.

An Empty Show For A Missing Audience

DSC_0055
Originally uploaded by obliqueapproach

The unoccupied bench overlooking the sprawling, empty building imparts the feeling that there is nothing to look at, and no one to look at it. Very lifeless.

Alone

DSC_0051
Originally uploaded by obliqueapproach

While this tree is still clinging on to the remnants of life, the silent and somber walls close in on all four sides and seal it from the world.

The Clash

parking lot pano ii
Originally uploaded by obliqueapproach

I love this panorama of mine because of the contrast between the red sodium lights and the light blue LED lights. In this harsh, lifeless night, a war of lights rages.

Dead Swing

DSC_0010
Originally uploaded by obliqueapproach

I like this photo of mine because the swing's hard geometry accentuates the coldness and deadness of the scene.

Mini Waterfall

Mini_Waterfall

Originally uploaded by obliqueapproach

Long Exposure shot of a waterfall that I took last week.

Exposure: 0

ISO: 200

Shutter: 20 seconds

Aperture: 22/f

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Strawberry Macro

I was washing some strawberries for an upcoming party, and I was just suddenly overcome with a desire to photograph one.
I had never taken a macro picture before, so I thought I'd have a go at it.
I dumped the picture into Photoshop and added the border. Good result? y/n?

5 picnik photos

The Falcon Chronicles Page 3

Third page of The Falcon Chronicles.

The Falcon Chronicles Page 2

Second pages of The Falcon Chronicles.

The Falcon Chronicles Page 1

And here is the first page of our comic!

The Falcon Chronicles

My friend and I are working together on a comic that we've decided to call "The Falcon Chronicles." It's a story of two detectives investigating some murders and uncovering a conspiracy. So deliciously generic! Anyways, it's actually rather unique because the style is different from most comics, and it's actually a comedy. Dark comedy, that is.

Anyways, here is the cover of our comic!

Top 5 Blogs

My top 5 web logs are as follows and in no particular order:

Boing Boing: A blog full of tech, news, gaming, and misc updates.

Wired News, Tech Crunch, Gizmodo: All three of these are blogs dedicated to technology, and I love technology.

I Can Has Cheezburger: It's full of pictures of cats with funny captions. Who doesn't love that?

So there you are. A very, very simple list.

Basic Internet Etiquette

In accordance with my Digital Foundations class, I have created a blog.

Also, I hate the guy who took my username "obliqueapproach" and used it as his URL, because he has not used it in the 5 years that it has existed, and now I am forced to change my URL to a set of synonyms rather than my original name. I mean, "roundaboutroute"? That's fucking retarded incredibly lame. I guess if I was so inspired, I could make up a better name, but the point here is my ire! This entire entry is devoted to my being irked, so for the sake of blogging, I'm going to eschew reason.

Well, not really, since this is a perfect opportunity to live up to the name of my blog. So let's begin with some analysis of basic blogging manners. Not that it only applying to blogs.

There's only so many words in the English language, and only so many combinations of said words. And until we find a way to magically distinguish one username from an identical one, there is a limited number of possible unique titles to be shared by all the prospective members of a website. So if you just create a URL and then don't do anything with it, you're cutting off someone else from that certain combination of words. Of course, if you actually make use of your URL, good for you. But if you do make one and later realize that you haven't made use of your account, you should either start using it or delete it, so that you are not simply depriving someone else a URL they might want.

tl;dr: If you make an account and take up a unique URL, make something out of it instead of being a total dickhead retarded lazy and taking up perfectly good cyberspace.

Anyways, this really pushes my buttons, and that was my two cents about it. The end!