Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

Why not take the next 3 minutes to get to know a little experimental punk band called The Mae Shi? BB Video's pub crawling music correspondent Russell Porter takes advantage of a dreary London afternoon by having a little chat with Jeff Byron and Jacob Cooper from The Mae Shi.

It's hard to nail down exactly what the sound of The Mae Shi is. Suffice to say that it has left very few boundaries uncrossed. A quick check through their Myspace player produces driving punk songs like "Vampire Beats" and "Boys in the Attic" while at the same time providing some catchy emo-esque riffs in "Run to Your Grave" (also featured in the video above). Over the last few years, The Mae Shi have made their rounds, touring with the Germs in 2007, and playing a whopping 15 shows in Austin during this year's South By Southwest Festival.

Their most recent single, "R U Professional," is a tasty Christian Bale tribute:

Previously:

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Read the rest

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

Today we present "Godel ????? Film School," an animated short from the PSST! 3 Film series. Like the other shorts in the PSST! project, this one's the result of a collaboration between three teams of animators. Those teams worked together to express a single story with a uniquely animated and separately produced beginning, middle, and end.

"Godel" begins with a colorful family of ink blots digitally morphed onto a gothic landscape of kittens and disembodied Walt Disney heads. Their nightmarish adventure ends as they land in the sedative seats of a dreary film class. This delightful short was animated in part by David O'Reilly, whose work we've featured previously on Boing Boing Video.

About the PSST! 3 project, curator Bran Dougherty-Johnson tells Boing Boing,

The main creative challenge is really self-initiated. It's to create original and inspired work on no budget and in collaboration with other teams. That in itself is a challenge, but the reward is unfettered creativity and self-expression with no restraints. You can see in the films that the artists involved took this idea to heart.

Art is a form of reality creation. With PSST! we are opening a space for Motion Graphic Design and Animation to do something other than commercials and endtags, to build community and to create our own work.

PSST! 3 will be screening in New York City on Wed. March 25th at the Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Read the rest

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

On Wednesday, March 11, 2009 the United Nations' Commission of Narcotic Drugs held its 52nd session in Vienna, Austria, just10 years after Kofi Annan's pledge to have a "drug free world" by 2008. Representatives from around the world attended the conference voicing support and opposition to the centuries old "war on drugs."

Working with Witness and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, we cut together excerpts from "Dare to Question? Using Video to Take on UN Drug Policies" and other testimonials appealing to the United Nations to reconsider its hardline policies combating the cultivation and use of illicit drugs.

Most of the experts interviewed agree that an ideal world would be a drug-free world but perhaps we should put that on the shelf among other concepts like a world without war, disease, or Fox News.

Some interesting facts according to drugstatistics.com:

75% of drug related arrests are related to marijuana 65% of drug related arrests are for simple possession of marijuana

The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union also staged a press conference at the entrance of the Vienna International Center speaking from wire cages, attempting to draw attention to unjust penalties and human rights abuses of drug offenders around the world.

We'd like to especially thank the Director of the HCLU, Mr. Balázs Dénes and Istvan Gábor Takács, HCLU's Video Advocacy Guru and Peter Sárosi, DPP Director. Read the rest



Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

Mononchrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner takes us backwards through time to Cyberpipe's Computer Museum, a huge collection of functioning vintage computers located in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Dunja Rosina, Head of Project and a founder of the museum, shows us the collection which includes such dinosaurs as the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, and the worlds first widely used business computer the IBM XT. Dunja and Johannes share nostalgia of the days of pirating games from the radio, the importance of the mouse, and the golden age of gaming in one color.

The space is free, fully interactive, and provides Internet access, workstations, educational programs and more to the public at no charge.

Special Thanks to Eddie Codel for his help with this episode!

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.) Read the rest

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

A disclaimer for the capitalist entertainment pellet above: This is a paid ad for Cheetos. This is also the 6th and final security bulletin from the long-lost Communist enclave of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. This ad allows Boing Boing Video to post all remaining content ad-free.

IN THIS EPISODE:

We proclaim victory over the extremist political enclave Soviet Unterzoegersdorf with this transmission, in which they announce their final protest against the "golden showers" of liberalism and threaten to take their plight to the United Nations.

IN COMPLETELY UNRELATED NEWS:

Ze good fellows at monochrom have developed a proletarian adventure game: Soviet Unterzogersdorf in which "a fictitious and misplaced handling of the past and present is put to use as a criticism of culture and collective memories."

Hmm... good bye FPSs, time for a does of meta-cultural exploration.

Previously:

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Read the rest



Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

In today's Boing Boing Video episode, we present an excerpt from the National Film Board of Canada feature "Roadsworth: Crossing the Line" a documentary which follows the work of Canadian street artist Peter Gibson, aka Roadsworth.

Gibson integrates provocative art with government traffic signage, questioning the ownership of public space.

In 2001, he began his street painting campaign to question car culture, and encourage his neighbors to share the road with fellow bicyclists. What began as a sort of street safety PSA evolved into an illegal art campaign spanning almost 3 years -- until Gibson was finally caught, with paint-stained hands, and charged with 53 counts of "mischief."

While many of the street scenes he painted may long since have been painted over, the legend of Roadsworth lives on through this film.

For those of you attending the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas next week, you can watch the whole feature in entirety on Saturday, March 14th, at The Hideout. Details here.

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video. Read the rest

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

Today we present "Legends of Exos," an animated short from the PSST! Pass It On film series.

In "Legends of Exos" we are launched into a psychedelic land of stained glass, tracking a warrior on his way to battle. His attack segues into a lovable world of fuzzy woodland creatures but concludes with a finale that Burton fans will find comforting.

PSST!3 Pass It On is collaborative film project is composed of 17 films made by 51 teams of directors and animators from around the globe. Each film is broken into three parts -- beginning, middle, and end -- and each part is created by a different team.

Check out the PSST!3 website for more on the project, and you can purchase DVDs of the entire collection there, too. We'll be bringing you more from PSST!3, as well as insight from Bran Dougherty-Johnson, in upcoming episodes of Boing Boing Video.

(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

Read the rest

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

Les Claypool apparently has an thing obsession with pigs.

Boing Boing Video cohort Matty Kirsch captures another interesting conversation with Les Claypool, now we explore the rock legend's preoccupation with swine, and the presence of porcine symbolism in his work.

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.) Read the rest

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

Les Claypool is a man of many dimensions. Known for gathering an eclectic mix of talented musicians from around the world, Les has fronted a number of projects including the Frog Brigade, Colonel Claypool's bucket of Bernie Brains, Sausage, and Electric Apricot.

But, when Les visited the Boing Boing Video studio, we asked him about the band he didn't get to play for. In 1986, before Primus came into fame, Claypool auditioned for a heavy metal band called Metallica after their bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a tragic bus accident.

BB Video pal Matty Kirsch got the inside scoop on all things Les: past, present, and future. Since boingers seemed pretty jived about the interview we posted earlier in the week, we thought we'd give you a little more Les love.

Previously:

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.) Read the rest

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

For all the charity and humanitarian aid that's been poured into the Darfur region, and all of the celebrities pleading for change -- it seems nothing has changed. People are still dying, atrocities continue, and the war worsens. This sense of futility is what makes the project we're sharing with you today so interesting.

The ultra-low-budget documentary "Christmas in Darfur?" follows the challenges two amateur filmmakers (and their limited crew) face as they attempt to make a film about what it was like for aid workers to spend their holiday season in this war-torn African desert. Boing Boing Video guest correspondent Sean Bonner interviewed the film's director Jason Mojica about that experience, and we bring you that conversation today, along with clips from the finished film.

Driven by the desire to understand the gap between all the global attention to Darfur and the worsening conditions there -- and with no experience in filmmaking, or any connections in Africa -- the filmmakers' guileless approach takes them deep into the refugee camps of Chad and Sudan.

"Christmas in Darfur?" is about an hour long and available online for anyone to freely view, embed, or dowload. You can watch the full film online at christmasindarfur.org. And you can make a donation to the filmmakers, if you are so moved -- they're still trying to recoup the costs of making the film. Look for the PayPal link on the left side of this page. Read the rest