Category Archives: Video

| TV, Video

Watch an hour of iCaught for five minutes of YouTube videos

ABC premiered its new show iCaught tonight (hope iCaught Data Management Services doesn’t sue). It’s their YouTube clip show, in a sea of upcoming YouTube clip shows that seek to cheaply license popular clips owned by people who have no idea of their actual worth. The show’s reason for watching it instead of, say, just checking out YouTube’s most popular videos directly? They give “the story behind the videos,” which apparently means having a couple of talking heads say how cool it is and the creators say how they didn’t expect it to become this popular.

And isn’t that worth sitting through all those commercials?

Here’s a roundup of the videos they showed for their premiere:

  1. Battle at Kruger (Wikipedia entry). OMG. Animals get into fight! Film at 11! Don’t we see this stuff all the time on the National Geographic Channel? Oh wait, we do! It’s already been licensed to them.
  2. A bunch of videos about dancing at weddings. Clips from 13 going on 30, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Footloose and So You Think You Can Dance. This is an ABC News story about dancing at weddings, with the same level of silliness. Congratulations ABC, you went a whole 10 minutes before figuring out this show’s concept is stupid and abandoning it in favour of a newsmagazine-style format. The one (non-professional) video that gets more than a couple of seconds is the Wedding Thriller video, which has already been talked about to death.
  3. Venetian Princess … wait, no. She’s just thrown in as a completely unrelated intro to…
  4. The Obama crush video, which was created by an advertising executive, which is about as counter-culture as you can get, right? Sigh.
  5. Lee Paige, the DEA agent who shot himself in the foot while teaching kids about gun safety. Does agreeing to appear on this program mean he’ll be dropping his lawsuit against the government for allowing the tape to be disseminated? (The lawsuit, of course, was not mentioned on the show)
  6. The Merry Miller / Holly Hunter interview disaster. Kudos for ABC for pointing out its own failures, but it still seems fake and silly. No mention of what actually went on (she’s horribly unqualified, but Joel Siegel thought she was hot, I guess), and just some footage of her giggling about how she couldn’t interview someone without a prompter running.
  7. The Women in Art morphing video. No interview with its creator or anything silly like that.
  8. A bunch of uninteresting crime-related/surveillance camera/MySpace video news segments that sound a lot more like World News Tonight than a new primetime TV show.
  9. David Elsewhere at Kollaboration. Shots of his dad. That’s about all I remember.

In case it’s not clear enough how little money they put into this show, it’s hosted by a nobody standing in front of a white screen. It has no sets, and its stories are setup like back-to-back two-minute TV news reports, which just serves to remind us that the networks aren’t spending their budgets reporting on, you know, news.

To recap:

  • The show seems to be about running YouTube videos, but only shows clips from those videos. Not once did it show the entire thing in one sitting.
  • The show claims to tell the stories behind the videos, but there’s plenty of important facts that are left out, as you can see above. A quick check on Wikipedia will, for the most part, find you more information than you’ll find on this show. (The fact that Wikipedia considers many of these videos to have insufficient notability says something.)
  • The show tries to think of itself as cool, with its green-screen usage and “click” sounds matched to the host’s hand jabs, but the interviews are setup old-school, complete with blur filters to make everyone look younger.
  • The show tries to be new and current, but the videos are months or even years old.
  • The show tries to plug its website (well, actually, it plugs ABCNews.com), but the website provides no easy way to, you know, look at the videos featured in the show which you couldn’t actually watch because of all the fuzzy interviews going on.

In other words, it’s a complete and utter joke. Any guesses on how long it’ll keep going?

| Montreal, Video

The camera adds 10 pounds, and 6 civil rights violations

Montreal Police (“Montreal Police Service”? I guess it’s technically correct, but it sounds really weird) is upset at YouTube videos that show their officers at work.

Their beef specifically seems to be about two videos (shot by the same person) which identifies the officers by name giving him tickets. This one refers to the officer as “conne-stable” (very original). The SPVM’s beef with this one (a five-minute argument over a parking meter) is more curious perhaps, since the officer gives his consent for the video to be posted online.

They’re just two in a small sea of videos of encounters with police. It’s perhaps telling that some people are reaching for the camera the moment they’re pulled over, assuming that the officer might pull something illegal.

| Humour, Media, TV, Video

Rock and … pretty ears?

I’m sad to say I’m a bad Quebecer (or, should I say, a bad québécois). I don’t watch Tout le monde en parle, I rarely flick by the local French-language TV stations unless there’s big local news, and I don’t read La Presse or the Journal de Montréal regularly. As a result, I’m missing out on an entire culture going on around me. I have only vague ideas of these shows, these personalities.

So, as I sit here watching 110% (I know, I know, but hockey’s my thing), I’m discovering, for the first time, the group Rock et Belles Oreilles. For those like me who hadn’t heard of them, they’re a 25-year-old sketch-comedy group whose members include the strangely-bearded Guy A. Lepage.

Their videos, most of which are from their 25th anniversary last year, are all over YouTube. Since I’m a media buff, I’ll highlight some that deal with the local French-language media:

| Humour, Movies, TV, Video

The worst of Québécois film and television for your viewing pleasure

A friend pointed out to me today that he was planning to pop his Fantasia cherry by going to an interesting showing this evening. One mention of the words “Total Crap” and I knew exactly what he was talking about.

For those who don’t know, Total Crap is the brainchild of Simon Lacroix, who has for some reason taken it upon himself to collect the worst of Quebec television, from dancing lessons for overweight baby-boomers, to local wrestling previews, cheesy commercials and, every now and then, an appearance by Celine Dion. This is a pretty good example, but there’s much better.

Now, you might think “wow, that’s a really weird hobby”, and you would be wrong. You see, there’s someone else in town who’s doing the same thing. DJ XL5 (Myspace link, sorry) is also a local practitioner of what they call “zapping” and showing awful clips to eager audiences.

Last fall, someone had the brilliant idea to have them square off against each other. On Halloween at Club Soda, they did battle. The audience couldn’t decide between them, and there was no winner declared, but they did agree they wanted more.

So today at 7 p.m. at Concordia’s DB Clarke Theatre (Hall Building, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., corner Mackay), comes DJ XL5 versus Total Crap: La revanche. Here’s the teaser.

Next Friday afternoon, DJ XL5 returns solo with a showing of some pretty insane shorts with DJ XL5’s Kaleidoscopic Zappin’ Party (Teaser).

Tickets to both are $7.50, which you can get at Admission or on-site. (Bell Mobility is running a promotion with $5 tickets if you want to play their cellphone games)

| Media, Video

It’s just cruel to not provide the video (UPDATED)

Local news is abuzz (well, kinda, when they’re not blowing Harry Potter) about Global Action Network volunteers infiltrating a Quebec foie gras producer and gathering some awful footage of what they call animal cruelty.

Today they supposedly released video of their findings. So you’d think that the news websites would at least provide a link.

So once again Fagstein steps in where others have failed. Check out the four-minute video on YouTube.

UPDATE: The above video was for some reason taken down. Here’s another link to another video with the same scenes.

| Montreal, Public transit, Video, West Island

Da train! Da train!

The Gazette’s Linda Gyulai has an article about some railway buffs criticizing Montreal’s plan for commuter rail service, specifically the route of the Train de l’Est (stupidly running from Terrebonne east to Repentigny instead of running west through Laval, using existing tracks, to the de la Concorde metro station) and the apparent abandoning of the plan to use the Doney Spur, which splits from the Deux-Montagnes train line near Highway 13 and runs between Hymus and the 40 west to Stillview.

One important correction to the story: It mentions the building of a Home Depot west of St. John’s Blvd on top of old Doney Spur right-of-way. In fact, it’s east of St. John’s, which mean any rail link to Fairview (which would still have to cross Highway 40 somehow) would have to run through, under or around this new hardware store.

Here’s a bonus for you: A YouTube video of rail buff Avrom Shtern asking Pierrefonds/Roxboro mayor Monique Worth about the Doney Spur in March, and having her give the kind of non-answer that you’d expect to find in a first-chapter exercise of Politics For Dummies.

| Blogosphere, Media, TV, Video

DOA

Dominic Arpin has made it official: he’s no longer a journalist. He’s leaving TVA’s newsroom to start a new show called Vlog where they show videos they got (and hopefully licensed) online. His co-host is Geneviève Borne, so you know which one is the eye candy. (His blog, meanwhile, will continue as is.)

I’ve got to give the Domster some credit: At least he doesn’t call what he’s going to do journalism. It’s entertainment, produced on the cheap since they just have to find other people’s original ideas instead of coming up with their own.

I’m not sure how successful this show is going to be. It’s hard to say especially knowing so little about it. But I’m not holding my breath. I hope Arpin surprises me.

His post about the new show is interesting, because he talks about leaving the comfort zone of a unionized job for a high-paying, high-profile but incredibly risky gig that he can be fired from at any time.

Dominic: If you find yourself out of a job after a few episodes, you can always come work for Fagstein WorldMedia Ltd., provided you don’t mind being paid in Froot Loops.

| Blogosphere, Video, West Island

How to drive like an idiot

Adrian points us to a video on YouTube (among other places) called “Late for Work” of a young driver zigzagging through light traffic on the West Island. There’s a second video out there (I won’t link to it because it’s on a porn site) called “Late for School” of a similarly dangerous trip down Highway 40 in St-Laurent. Both videos are sped up, but it’s clear from the rest of the traffic that this guy is going fast.

What gets me about the video is not so much that some idiot is filming himself doing this, but the route he takes in it:

Late for Work route

Google Maps says the logical route above would take 11 minutes, which sounds about right. The video is about 3 minutes long. Assuming it’s sped up at about 5 times normal, that means not only did he act like an idiot speeding, but he also lost time.

Idiot.

| Montreal, On the Net, Technology, Video

The parking meter myth rears its ugly head

A CNet blog post about a new website mentions an old YouTube video (how it’s related to classifieds is beyond me) about how easy Montreal parking meters can be “scammed”. Because putting money in an already-paid-for spot doesn’t add to its time but instead replaces it, the video alleges that you can add a nickel to a paid-for spot and cause the hapless soul parked there to get a ticket.

Missing in this vast conspiracy theory is any evidence that this actually has happened. Nobody seems to have come forward to complain that these mysterious party poopers who want to screw drivers for no reason have targetted them.

Besides, drivers are issued receipts when they pay for their parking. If these nefarious evil-doers do execute their brilliant plan, it would be a simple matter of showing up with the receipt to have the ticket dismissed.

This of course assumes that parking spots can be cancelled in this way, and that meter maids will be told that the spot is not paid for. As I understand the case (can’t find a link to the article that talked about it), this is not what happens.

So you can rest easy parking in Montreal. But, just to be safe, keep your receipts.