Design, Art, Music, Technology, Travel, Active (Skate, Snow, Martial Arts) and Life
This is an interesting video. A lot of great historical moments and milestones of snowboarding. I thought this was a great post since it is already snowing up in the hills of Colorado, and I can’t wait to get up there.
A friend just showed me some Andy Hug footage. Up until now, I was unaware of this martial arts champion. A Swiss martial artist, Hug passed away in 2000 leaving behind an impressive legacy of a warrior.
The Kyokushin Karate practitioner had a very lethal leg. His kicks were not only powerful, but they were fast and very dynamic. His popular kick was the straight forward kick, and as you will see in this video, a lot of his opponents were hit on the way down of the kick.
As much as I appreciate Ju Jitsu and the popular MMA circuits, it is nice to see a martial arts fight where there is a little more stand up action. He did win several K-1 championships; “K-1 is a combat sport that combines stand up techniques from Muay Thai, Karate, Taekwondo, Savate, San shou, Kickboxing, traditional Boxing, and other martial arts to determine the single best stand-up fighter in the world (the “1″).” (definition by: Wiki)
Check out this “Best Of Andy hug” part 1 video from YouTube:
This reminds me a lot of Dae Won Song and Rodney Mullen technicality, but applied to rails. They’re not huge hammers, but still, crazy!
Watch all of it!
Gou Miyagi
What can I say… I have been in the scene since pioneering videos such as Scream of Consciousness (Burton), New Kids on the Twock, Big Jean Fantasy, Upping the Ante, Coming Down the Mountain (TB series), to the infamous current Mack Dawg films like Meltdown Project, Decade and even the current Double Decade (Double Decade is off the hook!). even with all of those being great films, That’s It, That’s All is AMAZING!
Travis Rice and a group of other talented riders have been making this film for the past 2 years. Featuring the talent of Travis rice, Nicolas Müller, Terje Håkonsen, Jeremy Jones, John Jackson, Mark Landvik, Pat Moore, Scotty Lago, Bryan Iguchi, Jake Blauvelt, Danny Kass, and a few more. Put them together with Hi Def, 35 mm, and super16 filming by amazing cinematographers (Curt Morgan) & photographers, Red Bull, Lib tech, and Quicksilver sponsors behind it, and you get one of the best snowboard videos ever made!
I used to be able to name tricks as they rolled across the screen. Deciphering the spins and flips was key in learning new tricks for myself. There are some things that Travis does in this video that I have no idea what to call them.
Also, it doesn’t just feature flips, spins and corkscrews either, even though they are performed on back country hits. There’s some Big mountain riding in endless powder sessions, first descents, ridge lines, heli-boarding, all of that good stuff to make this a well rounded video of many styles of riding, gorgeous cinematography, and an ear-pleasing soundtrack. I like the creative play with the intro as well, unique views of the film processing was pretty cool.
The passion and skills these riders have in this realm is just unbelievable. They have taken it to a few orders of magnitude higher than most seasonal progression does.
Check out this Modern Day Samurai with some amazing swordsman ship – I mean AMAZING!
I caught wind of this on the Lewis and Floorwax mornign show here in Denver on 103.5 The Fox. I heard about it, but the radio can only convey so much. what they were speaking about and how this artist could draw from a super photographic memory sounded amazing. Even the stories from his childhood of drawing acurately from the age of 5 sounded too amazing to be true.
I’m going to do some more research on this artist, but have a look at this video. Steven Wilcher is autistic and very artistic.
Here is good post from O’Reilly Media about the brain as a camera.
http://www.oreillynet.com/headfirst/blog/2007/11/the_brain_is_a_camera_1.html
This is an awesome installation by world renown guerilla street artist Bansky. This differs from his traditional stencils and graffiti pieces that have been posted up all around the world.
As a demonstration and representation of the exploit to animals that the human civilization has had to the animal world, this piece will definitely get you thinking. It is amazing how much details and work was put into this exhibit, including the creative ideas and the work into the animatronics & sculpting.
I came across this post today.
http://timheuer.com/blog
AAC and H.264 support is going to be a great step for Silverlight. Adobe introduced it with Flash Player 9 it it had opened many doors in the media realm of Flash and Flex development, including HD video playback.
As for Silverlight adding this, it seems like a big step to attract other platform users. I personally work on Mac OS X and prefer my audio to be in AAC over MP3, and most of my video is in H.264. I hate it when a company tries to monopolize, capitalize and force users into a proprietary format or interface. I understand the business tactics behind it, but it is annoying. Now I’m working on both Vista and OS X on my MacBook Pro, so going back and forth is inevitable.
I remember the days of building Flash media players and having to re-encode my music into MP3, and it was just another unnecessary step and degrading one at that.
I am curious on how the audio handling overall is in Silverlight now, since the prototype Netstep application Jordan Snyder and I designed/developed back in February at The Msft Artist in Residency training. Silverlight2 beta, just couldn’t handle audio very well, yet we continued with our idea anyways.
I wonder if Expression Encoder will be able to encode H.264 and AAC. We’ll have to see.
