in case you haven’t seen, or if you only get these videos via email or RSS, the last few days’ videos have been posted on 12seconds.tv rather than as individual posts on Twittervlog.

you can see them in the little player at the top right of the Twittervlog site, or by clicking here to see them on my channel at 12seconds.tv

no doubt more vlomo videos will be posted on 12seconds this month – it’s a manageable way to meet the challenge of posting every day, although I don’t just post any old clips there. Even a 12 second moment can tell some kind of story – and I try to get two or three different elements in each one.

-
Formats available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4)
-

The slowest series ever. In November 2007, I posted Part 1, arriving in San Francisco; in November 2008, I posted Videoblogging The Conversation; this year it’s Vertigo. And they were all shot in November 2006. Holy shitsticks, I’ve aged more in the last three years than this movie location has in the last 50!

–
Formats available: MPEG4 Podcast File (.mp4)

—
Formats available: iPhone Podcast File (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

—

MP4 podcast file

I used this music on Vlomo Day 3 last year, too – but tongue in cheek, at the start of The Placenta Video.
I know it’s schmaltzy, but sometimes you find a piece of music which fits a video so perfectly that you just can’t not use it, even though your cheese alarm is waking people up three streets away.

—
iPhone video & podcast mp4 file

Shot late at night on Nov 1st, Day of the Dead, in my father in law’s rambling old country house.

As I mentioned yesterday, I and a bunch of other people are playing a big game of video consequences this month. Each day, someone different makes a 90 second video, inspired in some way by the previous day’s piece.

Adrian Miles kicked it off yesterday with Like A Match, a love poem in audio, looping over a video of a match being struck, which changes when you move your mouse over the video.

The rules are that your video has to be 90 seconds or less, and inspired in any way (you don’t have to explain how) by the previous day’s video.

While I was pondering my response late last night, and filming the log fire we were gathered around, I caught this moment, which I decided to share as it is.

Then I went up to bed, in the haunted room. At 3am, Kate and I lay wide awake in the pitch black. Old country houses are dark. Every few minutes there was a loud and unexplained bang of wood on wood from somewhere within the room. Turning on the light would have woken the baby, so we spent a rigid hour with Kate asking me to whisper reassurances in her ear about the lack of scientific evidence for ghosts. Neither of us wanted to admit to the other how freaked out we were – Kate had already been in bed when I shot this video, and I didn’t want to frighten her by telling her what I’d just heard. Eventually, she quietly got up, turned on the light in the hallway, left the door open a little, and the noises stopped.

Turns out that Kate had had the same conversation with her stepmother yesterday evening about ‘the flamingo room’ – only she had the details, which for obvious reasons aren’t widely available, but which do add an eerie extra level of synchronicity to this video. If you want to know, the code is here, you’ll just have to View the Fire again, and think “Fox” and “Source”

—
(Update: Dennis’s response to my video is here)

—
iPhone Video / Podcast mp4 file

As with previous festivals and events that I’ve videoblogged, I want to post a fair amount while I’m there, and I don’t want to drown you in a sudden flood of little photos and videos, so I’ve set up a special Posterous Blog for the event:

http://dinard.posterous.com

> and the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/dinard

I have also set up a dedicated Blip.tv account – so I’ll embed the whole Show Player below, and you can see any and all videos all as I post them, from within this one blog post.  Without flooding the RSS feed or your email inboxes.

A bientot!

It’s taken me a week to find the time to sort through the footage and cut it down to a watchable size – but here are 8 minutes of highlights from the 18 or so hours of non-stop filming we did on Day 1. We had some technical hitches with uploading, so I didn’t post from the road as much as I’d wanted.

@philcampbell, @vikkichowney and I were sent by Nokia & Womworld on an 18,000 mile tour of Twestivals last weekend, with instructions to document the trip on the new Nokia N86 8MP – we started in Helsinki, and then headed off in different directions – me to Bucharest, Phil to Dubai, Vikki to, um, Birmingham – where we handed our N86s over to @bvlad and @freshplastic who continued the tour – all of us reconvening in Oxford on Sunday night.

Twestivals are essentially meetups of Twitter users in scores of cities around the world, to raise money for local causes. Each city’s cause was chosen by an online vote.

Nokia sponsored our trip (as well as carbon offsetting our miles) by giving a Euro for every 5 miles we travelled. So in the end, we raised around €3600 for local causes. Plus we carried with us a free Nokia N86 for each Twestival we visited to raffle or auction.

More to come – and I’ll post some links to all the media that I and the others generated.

Formats available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4), Flash Video (.flv)

A little something from earlier.

I’m not going to be posting everything here – just a few bits and pieces. You can follow the whole tour on Twitter here: @ruperthowe - and by following the #n86tour hashtag that the three of us are using (just put n86tour into the search box) – and most of my video will be on my Flickr stream – when my phone is actually posting things properly. Bloody technology.

iPod / iPhone compatible MP4 podcast file

but Inglourious Basterds is a perfect example of why i hate reviews: you come out of a Tarantino movie that’s not as good as some other Tarantino movies, and you have to list the reasons why. and so you make it sound shit. when actually you know it’s 54 times better than any of the movies you just watched trailers for. Case 39 with Renee Zellwegger and a demon foster child? fuck off.

apples and oranges, innit?

so. to be clear right from the top:

this is an A Grade Movie.

it has the scale and the chutzpah that you’d expect. and Tarantino and Robert Richardson (cinematographer) do that thing they do with the camera where you know you’re being shown a big beautifully lit sweeping camera move that draws twatty amounts of attention to itself but you don’t care because it makes you feel so happy. there’s no script editor at work here, scenes go on far longer than you’re used to. it’s brilliantly pitched in the spirit of the great old war movies that know they’re fictional Boys Own stories, rather than the earnest modern ones that try to fake historical authenticity. there are Tarantino chapter titles instead of contrived carefully-scripted plot points. it’s chaotic and bitty and feels like a bunch of short film ideas strung together, or maybe even like levels in a video game. in short: it is not McKee. halle fucking LUJAH.

and yet

if you’re reviewing a Tarantino movie, you have to compare it to other Tarantino movies.

so. what is this? In 30 words or less:
it’s the Tarantino war film.
nazis are bad. Spit’s jewish commandos kill nazis. pretty jewish cinema owner hates nazis. their stories converge.
much shooting, scalping, explosions. moral ambiguity, guilty laughs.
surprise.

and that’s pretty much it. i think that’s the problem. like Kill Bill Vol 1, i realised afterwards that i hadn’t had enough of the Tarantino I love: the banter and characterisation. even in the long scenes of dialogue.

and i don’t think it’s the casting: i’m a huge fan of Spit. this is the kind of redneck role he’s so great at (tarantino wrote it especially for him) but somehow he ended up pulling more of a Mickey the Pikey than a Detective Mills or Tyler Durden.

where are Vincent Vega, Budd, Max Cherry? not here.

in the end i only really gave a shit about one of the characters: Mélanie Laurent’s Shosanna, the cinema owner. and i suspect that was mostly because she’s so distractingly crushworthy (and much more interesting than the flawless Diane Krugerandroid).

when Tarantino started out, he was pioneering complex interweaving narratives, where you simultaneously root for and against large casts of well-drawn characters. post-HBO, the bar is set much higher for all that, and it seems like Quentin’s not quite keeping up.

christ. poor Quentin. i wish i hadn’t written any of this. i feel dirty. and you know what the worst part is? next week i’ll go and see The Taking Of Pelham Fucking 1 2 3 and I’ll give it 300 words of surprised gushing praise. why? because it’s directed by Tony Scott; and after Days of Thunder, it’s impossible to be disappointed by anything he does. it’s all upside. this is why Tony is smarter than Quentin: after Top Gun, he deliberately made a movie so bad – so insultingly lame – that it pressed Reset on everybody’s expectations of him, forever.

that’s what you need to do next, Quentin: go out and buy Robert McKee’s Story, and make the Tarantino car racing film.

until then, this is getting an A minus.

and i am going back to write my own complex interactive narrative with large cast of conflicting characters that you’re supposed to simultaneously root for and against, that will doubtless be an eighth as good as anything Tarantino has ever done.

FUCK

Watching Cumberland’s Taiwanese Lantern Festival from our house on the hill.

iPhone and iPod video file