Metropolis Coffee
Here’s a new video we recently finished for Metropolis Coffee
See what people are saying about this Edgewater gem – also a favorite of Loyola students and alums. I can thank Metropolis for getting me through more term papers than I would care to count 
A weekend at the studio? This is life itself
One of the benefits of working from home in a creative industry is the home studio. Maybe we don’t get free sodas or coffee, but we can record a new song or produce a short video on a whim. That’s pretty much living the life, isn’t it?
Our new video, Portrait, is one example: (warning – it’s a little bizarre, though completely safe for work)
Based on the very short story “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe, this video is a loose adaptation we shot just for fun. It was filmed in and around our studio building, and completely produced over last weekend. Also, it features none other than Rami Atassi and Curt Rochon, our Lead Producer and Head Audio Engineer.
Look out for more videos from our studio, particularly the new music series we are working on… more details soon to come!
-Remsy
BeeBillion.com launch video
We’re just finishing up a handful of videos, and we’ll be posting them to our blog throughout the remainder of the month.
Here’s a web spot we wrote and produced for BeeBillion.com, a new social commerce site launching this month.
You can also view this video in the newly updated portfolio section of our website.
Boxer Full-length Stream
Greetings,
I hope everyone’s having a fun and productive start to 2011. We’ve got some new videos coming up soon, but until then:
You can now stream Boxer, our most recent short, thanks to IMDb. Click here to watch it.
Many thanks to everyone who has already downloaded the film!
“It’s supposed to be great living”
“If I ran my set with fear, I would get 1 percent, not 100 percent, of what I get. And there would be no fun in going down the road together. And it should be fun. In work and in life, we’re all supposed to get along. We’re supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. It’s supposed to be great living; it’s supposed to be fantastic.”
- David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish
h.264 Controversy: Don’t Be Evil?
On Tuesday Google announced that they will discontinue support for the h.264 codec on Chrome. For many professionals in the video community this is more than just a bit disconcerting. In order to give you a sense of the effect, it may help to do some explaining.
First: Google. On Google’s “Our Philosophy” page the company lists 10 core principles that guide their actions. Before going on, at least take a minute to read through headlines of each point. Pretty great, huh?
Lists like this are why I love Google. Most multi-billion dollar corporations aren’t exactly interested in living out a philosophy. Google, of course, is a different kind of company and their business models rely on different kinds of consumer interaction. In fairness though, they have maintained these principles pretty well and this definitely has factored into my decisions to switch to their products. Our business uses Google apps, I personally use the Chrome browser and Gmail, and most of the world gets their data from Google’s Search Engine and Analytics. When deciding who to give the majority of your personal information to, a company that cites “Don’t be evil” as a core philosophy is a compelling choice.
...But Anakin Wasn't Evil Either
And that’s what makes their recent move regarding h.264 support so confusing. For those of you who don’t have to deal with video codecs as often as we do, here’s a brief rundown. h.264 is the standard for professional compression on the internet right now. It’s very efficient, allows for a range of output settings, and is overall just very easy to encode for.
Here’s the issue for Google: h.264 licensing and use is owned by the developer, MPEG LA. h.264 is not open source and the purpose of the Chrome project is to promote open source software. And I get that, really I do – especially with net neutrality becoming such a contested topic and the FCC attempting to permanently hover over our shoulders. However, it does seem a little convenient that Google owns the codec they are supporting – a codec otherwise pretty irrelevant. More convenient when you consider that they are trying to directly compete with HTML 5, which supports h.264 and requires a licensing fee. Maybe if they can help us avoid paying for it they feel that they’ve completed their job.
My Work Here is Done
There’s just one problem – this hugely conflicts with the interests of most web content providers. Not that it’s a big deal to download a Chrome Plug-In for viewing, my concern is more about how this affects popular perceptions. Am I supposed to tell my regular viewers and clients to download the Plug-In? Most people would sooner browse someone else’s content, though hopefully they will stick around for ours 
. Or maybe we will just have to recommend viewing on another browser – which is a bummer because I love Chrome’s usability!
It makes even less sense given that h.264 is GOOD – it works incredibly well across a wide array of machines and is easy to encode and upload with. I respect Google’s desire to press onward in the evolution of technology, but sometimes we just need to catch our breath. And it’s not like a change in support, they’re simply dropping support entirely.
Full details are still unclear, so I could be missing something here. And I’m not going to turn my back on Google just yet… actually I don’t even think I could. Maybe that’s the point.
-Remsy
*for another perspective, this article explains the situation very well
Let’s Stay Together
Mondays can be a drag… so why not start your week off right? Here’s an acoustic cover of “Let’s Stay Together,” the Al Green classic, performed by Bassel Al-Madani. We shot this last week in our home studio:
Bassel and the Supernaturals are performing at Chicago’s Subterranean this Saturday, January 15th. We’ll be doing a live concert video and I’ll join them for a few tunes, including a full band version of this song. Hope you enjoy the video, and we’ll see you at the show!
-Rami
Reel 2011
Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a great holiday season.
We just finished a new demo reel showing some of our work from 2010, in four major content areas: live event, web-based video, documentary, and narrative. It will be up on our website soon. Thanks for checking it out, hope you enjoy!
Are you Reddi for the holidays? And more
Everyone loves to load up on sweets during the holidays. But this year, please enjoy ReddiWip responsibly:
Art Direction/Copy: Ryan Gast | Shooting/Editing: Remsy Atassi | Original Music: Rami Atassi
We’re not affiliated with ReddiWip in any way. We just love the stuff and wanted to have some fun with it. And clearly Ryan was very hungry (that’s him in the video).
–
In other news, we’re about to do some shooting for our project, “Empire’s Sky: A Chicago Documentary.” Empire’s Sky is our exploration of how current economic conditions are affecting people’s lives in the diverse city of Chicago. If that sounds a bit general, or you’d like to learn more, download our 2-page brief. And if you’re a Chicagoan interested in getting involved, reach out to us – we’d love to hear from you.
One group of Chicagoans we’ll be profiling is small businesses and their owners. This Friday, we’ll be shooting at Metropolis Coffee in the Rogers Park/Edgewater neighborhood. If you live in Chicago, you probably know that Metropolis makes some of the best coffee around, and they’re also a prominent local business.
We’ll keep you posted, and while the completed documentary is about a year away, we’re putting together a short profile video of Metropolis. It will be up here and on our website in early 2011.
Finally, for anyone interested in the progress of Boxer, I’m making a post tomorrow (or maybe Thursday) about the festivals we’re submitting to in Jan-March 2011. For filmmakers with a limited festival budget (like us), this will also include a discussion of how to get the most out of Withoutabox by using some simple tools to collect and sort data on film festivals.
- Rami
