The Jingle Punks Hipster Orchestra

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Steve Mullis

A friend of mine from grade school has a great company called Jingle Punks. They do music licensing and placements for indie and unsigned musicians. They have an awesome business model and a great product that I’ve watched blossom and grow from the sidelines.

Being that the company is a music company, many of the folks that work there are also excellent musicians. So, borne out of a bunch of talented people hanging out and doing cool things together, came the Jingle Punks Hipster Orchestra. So far they’ve done some cool stuff, basically covers of popular songs.

Check them out here covering MGMT’s “Time to Pretend.” And go to their site to check out their other covers and show some support and download their MP3s.

Just a few more days …

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Steve Mullis

Michael Bolton is a cinephile

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Steve Mullis

A YouTube search story

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Steve Mullis

… of me. I was just messing around with this and thought it was kind of interesting. You can’t do any major production but it is still kind of cool.

L.A. Noire

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Steve Mullis

I’ve only recently gotten back into console games, and even so kept it limited to games either me and the Mrs. can play together or games that just have a little more depth in general and replay value; Red Dead Redemption, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Mario Kart Wii for example (Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is the exception and is just pure beat-em-up fun). I usually don’t get all that excited about a game that I feel like I want to get it as soon as it is released, but this new release from Rockstar Games looks to be amazing.

L.A. Noire takes the style of the GTA series of games and Red Dead Redemption and kicks it up a further notch with a ’40s-era police detective theme. Needless to say, I’m pretty impressed with what I’ve see so far and look forward to the hard work being put in to this one. It’s really amazing how far games have come, and I’ve been playing since the 2600 days.

I’ll let these videos speak for themselves.

Investigation & Interrogation

Technology

Orientation

Beastie Boys trailer

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Steve Mullis

This is going to be epic.

Amazing puppetry (TED talk)

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Steve Mullis

The Singing Wilderness

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Steve Mullis

Cool video of the BWCAW area.

The Singing Wilderness 2.0 from Interstate Films on Vimeo.

Random selects from our most recent shoot in the BWCAW. Five days in the Horse and Fourtown Lakes area, shooting on the Canon 5D. Previously the film has been shot on 16mm, Super-8, Mini DV, DVC-Pro, and HDV (!)… Please go to http://singingwilderness.net/wordpress/ for more info.

The future of breaking news coverage

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Steve Mullis

Today we had a natural gas explosion in south Minneapolis that caused a large fireball and was a breaking news event we covered. However, what was unique about this event was a video we were sent (as were several other media outlets) that was the first video available of the fireball.

The video was shot and sent by Robert Stephens (@rstephens), who just happened to be driving by at the time of the explosion. Stephens is the founder of Geek Squad, and full disclosure, is also on the MPR board. However, he did not give the video or his pictures only to us. He shared it via social media and gave permission to all organizations to use via those channels. What was most interesting was his followup tweet:

He did all of this, on the move, with tools anyone can easily obtain for less than $1,000. If our breaking news journalists would have had these tools, they too could have transmitted similar high-quality material back to the mothership for immediate posting. Now of course this isn’t news that these tools can aid in breaking news coverage, this was simply another example, albeit a relatively high-quality one. I was just amazed at how quickly it was put together, edited and distributed via social media channels.

You can see more photos from our team.

Hmm, perhaps I’ll rethink getting an iPad2.