endurablegoods

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How'd you get here?

Chances are that you are looking for more information about one Christopher F. Smith. Good guy, from what we hear. Smart fellow. You'll probably want to learn more about him through the links below. Or I guess you could take a spin through his blog. There's some good stuff in there, too.

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Happy New Year

 

Biscoff Cookies and the amazing Biscoff Latte!

A few weeks ago I shot a promotional spot for Biscoff Cookies with my friend Tyke Jones, owner of West Coast Toast. Biscoff is one of his clients and they wanted a good 2-3 minute commercial to promote not only their cookies, but also a deliciously decadent concoction called the 'Biscoff Latte'.

Tyke and I spent half the day down at Pier 39 in Fisherman's Wharf (and scurrying around Marin Headlands trying to get the perfect Golden Gate Bridge shot) capturing the necessary footage and then a few hours editing and re-editing. The final piece will be used at The Biscoff Cookie Channel (YouTube), the Biscoff Facebook page and other locations.

At the time of this post, the only place in the country to enjoy an official Biscoff Latte is at Pier 39 in San Francisco. Get down there and try one!

Where Are They Now? From Playground to Office

When it comes to our pop culture icons, all too often the answer to the "Where Are They Now?" question ends in disappointment. From the downward spiral of Dana Plato (Diff'rent Strokes) to the drug-fueled exit by Cory Haim, it seems that all too often the dazzle and pressure that come with big-time fame are too much to handle. Our childhood stars burn out far too fast.

However, every once and awhile we hear of someone who has been strong enough to leverage the power that a short time in the spotlight provides without succumbing to the dark and deadly trappings that accompany the adulatory noteriety. Of course, you don't see these folks on TV as much as the flashy failures and sad-sack addicts. The ratings aren't as good.

But recently, as I searched for custom home products for a friend down in Georgia, I chanced upon one of these successes; a beautiful young woman you may remember from a certain playground in Atlanta back in 1990. She was the object of much affection from five young African American kids and was quite the Nintendo player.

When she broke onto the national stage, she got caught up in a whirlwind of meetings, high-pressure sponsorship deals, televised appearences and all-afternoon parties of varying legality. But, unlike many of our past young stars, she was able to pull out of it and turn her life into something more.

Powered by the momentum of near-fame and capitalizing on her new-found ability to access serious capital, the girl embarked on building a thriving business based on her love of custom-crafted window coverings. Now, with a headquaters in Atlanta, her unique take on traditional window treatments, blinds and modified curtains has expanded across much of the southern United States. She is often called on to speak at local colleges and civic organizations and is will be launching a monthly podcast titled "Look Through Any Window" in early 2012.



When asked about her time on TV and her association with one of the hottest R&B groups of the time, she said "My faith and family really kept me from sliding into the dark of side of fame. I'm lucky to have made it through that experience alive."

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Ian MacKaye and Ceiling Cat

Was Ian MacKaye the first "Ceiling Cat"? Discuss.

Listen to: Egg Hunt - We All Fall Down

Belly > Hendrix > Belly > Gummo > Verbal Assault

Stiching together divergent and distance points, references and relationships is just about my favorite thing ever. The wilder the connection and the more unlikely the sympathy, the more glee I get from making the fit. Tetris with pop culture, humanistic pieces? Psychographic, ethno-media Bento boxes?

A couple weeks ago I was at Dalva sipping drinks with a friend, a few filmmakers and a couple folks from the Roxie Theater. We were all just shootin' the shit and hanging out. Not too sure where it came from but this fellow from the Roxie (Mike Keegan) brought up the '90's alternative band, Belly. Sure - I remember them. More specifically, I remember their awesome cover of the Hendrix classic 'Are You Experienced?' on the '93 compilation Stone Free: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

Then, deftly turning on a tangential dime, he transitions to the film of the same name; BELLY.

"Filmed in New York City an urban drama, the film stars rappers DMX and Nas, alongside with Taral Hicks, Method Man dancehall artist Louie Rankin, R&B singer T-Boz. Besides starring in the film, Nas also narrates and collaborated with Hype Williams on the screenplay."
 
His interest was not so much the film BELLY itself but more the surreal inclusion of scenes from the 1997 film GUMMO. Now, GUMMO had only been recently released and was far from the well-known cult film that it is today. Why - and how - GUMMO ended up on a big screen TV in a gangster's house is a mystery. Film critic Jeff Lester weighs in:

"After a gang of toughs rob a nightclub, they come back to somebody's crib and turn on the TV and come in on the middle of Harmony Korine's Gummo. It's a great moment, as tough-eyed gangstas stare disbelievingly as two kids in cowboy hats swear and pretend to kill a young kid with bunny ears. The scene seems more a statement of comradeship than of dismissal, as if the director is promising to do the same thing for gangsta youth that Gummo did for poor white trash. He doesn't even come close."

Wanting to get this all down and shoot out the experience to my friends, I spent a good 30 minutes lining up the right YouTube clip, writing a sub-140 word description for a Blip post and making sure my Bit.ly linked worked and generally crafting a solid content-rich effort.

And then I tweeted it.
And.... Nothing.

Not a click, polite nod or high five. Certainly no RT's. It was lost in the stream of Other Important News; trampled in the fast-twitch information stampede that is Twitter. Bummer. And it's not as if I didn't know better. Hell, I even blogged about it a short time ago. So here I am - blogging about the experience and building out a better, richer account of the event for long-term reference. It's what I should have done first, anyway.

This post was good enough when I started. The connections and random happenstance of it all are fulfilling and entertaining. But when digging around for support info on Belly (the band) I learned something that took this post to a surprising new level.

The band consisted of Donelly on lead vocals and guitar, Abong on bass, Tom Gorman on guitar, and Chris Gorman on drums. Tom and Chris, who were brothers, were childhood friends of Donelly's; they had previously played in the hardcore punk band Verbal Assault.[1]

Holy shit! Verbal Assault!?! That band was amazing! TRIAL is one of my favorite punk albums of all time. Listen to the title track!

 
My god - someone please tell me that the kid from GUMMO covers 'Crosstown Traffic' with the Verbal Assault guys on guitar and drums, Donnely on acoustic guitar/back-up vocals, NAS laying supplemental rhymes and DMX sculpting sick beats while Hype Williams and Harmony Korrine fight over whether or not to shoot a classic music video or bring in faux-masturbating twins dressed in matching Terrycloth robes to glare at a velvet Virgin Mary poster and bark occassionally.

Sad Gangsta

What Is The Very Best Thrash Metal Band?

One of the most influential bands of my youth was a punk outfit from Berkeley called Operation Ivy. The band's first and only full-length release, Energy, earned near constant play around 1988 and is a big part of my musical past. I recall a hand-drawn Operation Ivy t-shirt - the album cover free-handed with a black Sharpie on a standard-issue t-shirt - I think my friends and I may have shared around. There wasn't anything like a Hot Topic in those days (and I don't think Commander Salamander carried them) so the shirt was pretty damned cool.

Operation Ivy broke up and two of the members moved onto the well-known Rancid. The lead singer, Jesse Michaels, continues to make music and work on his art in the Bay Area. And he apparently has a blog.

Currently living on YouTube (but only as audio), Jesse is blogging about Thrash Metal and lamenting about the current state of music. Honestly, it's pretty amazing. Choice quotes!

"Hi. My name is Jesse Michaels. I'm a local music asshole."
"I'm a fucking dickhead, got that?
"Let's spend $40 on a t-shirt and then fuck-load some shit into our icunt."
"...if you measure popularity in self-hatred and failure."

Oh. Right. The answer to the question; the title of this entry. You must watch to find out!

(ht, MissionMission!)

Proud To Be A Canadian!

In honor of Canada Day!

 

Color Correcting

Sure is quiet around here. Not very, uh, Colorful?

Even after $41 million and an ungodly amount of press, blog and Twitter coverage, and coverage of that coverage, and analysis of the coverage and revisits to previous coverage, there's still not a lot going on with Color. No one is quite sure what to make of their service, seemingly not even the owners themselves. That's cool, though. They've got a few more dollars to spend and plenty of smart people still punching the clock. And no one is going to forget who they are.

But that doesn't answer the big question; What the heck is Color good for? And why didn't it catch on?

I fired up the app the day it was released and had fun playing around with the basics. I'm fortunate to work in a building surrounded by the entrepreneurial energy that make San Francisco so amazing (residents include SOCAP, Square, Intersection for the Arts, Foursquare, Hub SoMa and others) so I had plenty of people within range of interaction. But a day later and I was done. I started it up occassionaly the days following just in case but I was already over it. And I wasn't the only one. No one was using the app.

But none of this is news. What I'd like to do is tell you about an idea that I think would make Color fun and useful.

I'm confident that real-time, media-driven sharing and collaborating will be a "thing". Call it PolySocial Reality (PDF) or Real-Time Co-Creation. Or The Digitally Mingled Shared-n-Magical Present™. Whatever. As our fancy devices become more powerful and we become more comfortable creating, sharing and interacting, we will naturally begin to reach out into the virtual space and explore transient, non-traditional networks.

TechCrunch writer MG Siegler seems to agree:

"Using the location element baked into all of our smartphones to automatically create implicit networks is something that we’re going to keep seeing startups working on."

The challenge with Color is that it is difficult to truly appreciate what is going on while it's going on. And it's not all that interesting after the fact, either. Meaning, the capture-and-present environment isn't gratifying enough in real time and when it's all over, all you have have is a grid of photos of people you don't know - nor do will you, most likely, have any reason to interact with them. It falls short on both sides of the event or content-creation flashpoint.

However, if all this creative juice was captured, managed/manipulated and re-presented, all these random images might morph into something far cooler. I don't pretend to know the in's-n-out's of API's or backend data spit-swapping but I would think that - while the Color app was running - there would be a way to:

- Choose friends or random people and form a temporary 'Color Cabal'
- Pull out the photos associated with said Cabal (duration, last 2hrs, every hour?)
- Batch and bump pics to a web-based video rending outfit (Animoto)
- Have Animoto smash-n-glimmer pics into a fancy 3-5min video
- Tweet out a link to that video, post to Tumblr, Facebook, etc...

There. Now you've strengthened relationships with your friends or strangers by creating with them and you (and all your friends) have something awesome to gawk at once you get home. "Look at what an awesome time we had at this party!" LOOK! See?

And you can add all sorts of bells and whistles to this thing. Real-time voting between collaborators on the music your finished video will be set to. Allow Sountracking to ID whatever you are hearing while the photos are actually being taken and use that for your video's soundtrack. Different filters, pacing and other aesthetic treatments. Export raw info to something like Pixorial for a more hands-on edit. Hell, a popular bar/nightclub could almost stream "live" coverage to monitors throughout the establishment - not just photos but really bitchin' videos. Lots of things, really.


*UPDATE: 6/29/2011: Animoto just scored a big batch of cash to bolster their position in the mobile space. Maybe they don't need someone like Color.

“It’s very easy for companies around mobile and photos to fall behind,” Jefferson said. “We want to be the [mobile] leader and accelerate development through this period of innovation.”

 

Personally, my big issue with Color is that I really had nothing fun to show for using it. But if I got something dazzling and pretty posted to my Tumblr - on the fly, without me lifting a finger or giving it a second thought-  I'd give it a whirl.

Let's Begin Again

Wow. I almost made it. I was hoping to go an entire year without blogging here at endurablegoods. But change is afoot and I've got a few things to say. If I were a tech company, I'd make fun of how badly I'd want to say 'pivot' but, alas, I am a humble creative strategist with a fondness for filmmaking and infinite games. So let's just say that 'imma do me' first and get on with it.

Last anyone checked I was still the Director of Marketing at San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking. I've been there over three years now and am still enjoying the rough and brilliant trenches of filmmaking. I've also helped my friends over at Shadow Angel Films with a couple awesome short films and hope to contribute again in the future. If for no other reason, I'd like to rock this skirt again.

And there are always a couple|few important side-projects kicking around in the background. I was chatting with this smart fellow about his cool project, took over the reins at the Bay Area Transmedia Meetup (Spoilrr), remained engaged with the Augmented Reality community and am tinkering with couple other notables. And I'm writing a fair bit when I have the time. Oh - and I finished Portal 2.

Yes! KilRoi Was Here is still in motion, too. Actually, Brian and I have fussed around with the website to make it easier to use and update. The focus of the new incarnation remains true to the core KilRoi DNA and we continue to look for the right financial arrangement to allow the film to get made. Actors, locations, crew, and budgets have all been hammer out. Getting closer!

It's not like I haven't been active in other parts of the Great Internet Culture, too. I said it back in 2009 and I'll say it again - Facebook, Twitter and other drive-by-shooting content holes have been biting at my time and focus leaving me with not much to call my own. I love my Tumblr and am still going to feed my Blip.fm account but I'm mostly done with Facebook and Twitter usage will become far more strategic. I'll still use Foursquare (as I'm convinced they will be a leader in location-based content distribution and monetization) and I'll keep an eye on Soundtracking, too (because they may be able to crack real-time, content-based community creation via music). But that's it. Most of all, I've got to get off Reddit. That place is killing me!

However, the BIG news is the Storyworld Conference. I am very excited and honored to be a part of the development, marketing and promotion of what is promised to be a critical moment in the evolution of the Transmedia movement.


        Transmedia Storytelling has the power to revolutionize the media industry.

Be part of the first major gathering of industry leaders to come together for the purpose of exploring new business models, partnering across media boundaries, and building new revenue streams by changing the way consumers experience narrative.

You’ll hear from industry leaders from such blockbuster projects as Avatar, Halo, Pandemic and more who are already increasing the value of their intellectual content through transmedia storytelling. You'll also connect with other media-industry decision makers interested in partnering to develop exciting new projects.

Join professionals from across the media spectrum to discover the creative—and financial—potential of transmedia.

I'll be working with national niche-publishing company F+W Media, the talented Alison Norrington of StoryCentral DIGITAL, and a host of global Transmedia creators, thinkers and producers to create one of the most compelling and educational content conference of the year. You are going to hear a lot about this one.

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I guess the point of all this is to announce "I'm blogging again". It's time to write. Related, I listened to this via podcast a while ago. At the 1:20 mark is really my point.

Create More - Consume Less.