Turns out neither really broke The Land Of The Free, but that comment always stuck in my head as a broad generalisation.  Surely our good friends across the Atlantic couldn’t be so different, right? A few years later I endured an entire episode of Seinfeld on a friend’s recommendation, and realised that there must be something in the water.  I don’t care how many people watched it, it’s not funny.  See Two-and-half Men for further evidence as to why popular doesn’t mean good.

Back to irony – this one’s a corker.  Not only does Jason Derulo manage to rip off two different songs in the first thirty seconds of his own unique offering,  he also follows it up immediately with the lyric “check that out, what they playing – that’s my song, that’s my song”.

Except it isn’t.  It’s Day-O and Robyn S’s Show Me Love. And some auto-tune.

Nice try though.

This:

+

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]]> http://www.adamandkev.com/wordpress/music/apologies-from-a-nation-5-jason-derulo-us-of-a/feed/ 0 http://www.adamandkev.com/wordpress/the-dollar-bin/do-your-own-thing/ http://www.adamandkev.com/wordpress/the-dollar-bin/do-your-own-thing/#comments Thu, 12 May 2011 17:56:27 +0000 Kev http://www.adamandkev.com/wordpress/?p=284 “I don’t care what people think of me. I care if I’ve done a good job and I care if I’ve told the truth.” - Ricky Gervais

I hear a lot of people quote Seth Godin, Simon Sinek (I’m not linking – the guy’s now selling “Inspire” cufflinks), and a host of others who have made a business of talking about mindset and passion. Not without good reason – these people have something valuable to say, providing you take it as inspiration and not just add to it to a catalog of rhetoric you spill out every time you mention your business.

One of my heroes is Ricky Gervais. Yep, the fat guy from The Office and that Golden Globes ceremony.  In a post-Globes interview with oft-hated fellow Englishman Peirs Morgan, Ricky talked at length about the importance of doing what you believe in, and more importantly not allowing your direction to depend on what you think other people will like.

Or, more eloquently “you do your own thing, and then you see if you survive. And I wouldn’t have it any other way, because if you start second-guessing and you’re trying to find people that are like you, or change it to make certain people like you, you’re finished.”

In every job, every business, every sport and every hobby there is a degree of subjectivity as to what is “good”, “better”, or just “utter shit”.  The worst thing you can do isn’t to piss someone off or be criticized.   Sometimes that’s the best thing you can do.  Chances are it means you’re doing something different, trying something new.

And if people don’t like it?  Ricky says it better than I ever could.

“You know, it’s not my job to worry about what people think of me. That’s a job for a politician. OK?”

]]> http://www.adamandkev.com/wordpress/the-dollar-bin/do-your-own-thing/feed/ 0 http://www.adamandkev.com/wordpress/music/everybody-can-experience-music-in-a-profound-way-we-just-have-to-make-different-tools-tod-machover-mit/ http://www.adamandkev.com/wordpress/music/everybody-can-experience-music-in-a-profound-way-we-just-have-to-make-different-tools-tod-machover-mit/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 23:53:10 +0000 Kev http://www.adamandkev.com/wordpress/?p=281 As someone with zero musical talent, I’d say the most fulfilling thing I’m involved in right now is a collaborative music-based project called Playground (more on that later). Being involved in a creative musical experience is a good thing for a lot of reasons, but not that accessible to most.

Adam recently sent me this TED talk, with the simple words “you have to watch”. It’s a tale of geekery, Guitar Hero, and a guy with cerebral palsy that creates and conducts his own musical scores. More than anything it’s a powerful demonstration of the use of music to bring people together to create.

It’s one of a handful that I’ve sat through for the full 20 mins without skipping – testament both to my impatience and the brilliance of Tod Machover and Dan Ellsey.

Col Gadaffi video report and Toyota ad make poor bed fellows.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Beeb. But who thought putting ads in between a video and it’s caption was a good idea?

I see people that I know and respect giving their Follow Friday suggestions, and I then have the internal recognition that I’d have to do at least 18 seconds of research on each person to figure out if they’re worth following.  That’s time I could better spend studiously retouching, prepping my tax return, or more likely watching 12.7% of Rebecca Black’s Friday video.  Again.

So given that when you state a problem you should probably have a solution, here’s my version of #FF.  It’s like follow friday, but with a reason.

People we follow #1: George Moen, President of Blenz Coffee. @georgemoen

George Moen: Loves Canada. Loves coffee. Hates cameras.

I met George a coupe of years ago at a High Output networking meeting.  Since then we’ve shared some good times.  Olympic golds, cheeky shandies, and ambiguously suggestive caricatures.  In between he’s dropped a more than a couple of nuggets on us – he taught us Twitter, showed us the power of working with a team of inspired people who know their shit, and repeatedly drilled in to us that the best way to produce something worth showing is to embrace the idea of failing publicly.

That last one is the most important – if you fuck up, it’s still a long way better than not trying it at all.

George is worth following because every now and then, and usually without much fanfare,  he’ll drop a hint about something he’s secretly working on.  It’ll probably be based around social media, and chances are it’ll be out of left field for a coffee company.  And it’ll probably be a great idea.

This one’s unpleasant.

Rubber-faced 12 year-old lip-syncing unconvincingly to song about Hannah Montana wearing her jeans = bad.  

But age appropriate.

Parents and/or management deciding to broaden her target market to pedophiles everywhere = worthy of Child Services investigation.

People of Long Island, please do something.

The same friend that took us down to see Datarock in Seattle gets around in Vancouver’s music scene.  She’s introduced us to a bunch of very different acts, and we’ve worked on many projects with her.  She’s currently running an event management company, is in two bands (one with a record deal, the other soon to be playing their first gig) helps manage a couple more, and also works on a top-secret project with us called Playground.  Long story short, she’s busy.

One of the bands she introduced us to was The Famous Players, a staple of the Vancouver party band scene.  We were shooting a group shot but capturing the members either on their own or in small groups.  Fortunatley whoever was on the camera spotted something just out of frame and pulled back a bit to crack this one off.  ’Nuff said.

It's not just monsters that lurk in the shadows.

I have a confession to make.  I have a friend. Possibly more than one. But one in particular who has a special talent. I’m going to call her the Oracle, and she wants to remain anonymous. Mainly because she doesn’t like being photographed.

She’s studying at UBC. I think its a course about soil, math, and feminism. Or something. Either way, it’s really fucking hard.

Come exam time, she locks herself in her room for 14 hours a day, and focusses all her mental strength on one thing.  Not studying.

There is one beautiful byproduct from this intense procrastination – she knows everything there is to know about the Internet.  She’s bored of a meme before you’ve even heard of it, knows the end result of every civil uprising before its started, and has seen every film that has ever been made or ever will be made.

She also knows all about new music, and can pick a winner like that dodgy guy at the race track who drugs the horses.  And she’s picked another one.  My confession?  Most of everything I’ve blogged about and come to love (The Morning Benders, Thom Yorke dancing, and Bangs) came from the Oracle.  But not the Stornaway cover of Ride on Time. NME gave me that gem.

Granted this guy has already had a mention or two on Pitchfork, so those of you that are still hip with the kidz might have heard of him.  Obviously I hadn’t.  The Oracle had him picked out a few months ago, and already he’s blowing up.

So here’s teenager Tyler the Creator, with one of his less offensive songs (that’s very relative by the way) and a video that looks a bit like Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” if the entire crew had been honking on crack and watching snuff movies before writing, producing, and shooting it.

Unfortunately for those lots of people, they’re probably not reading our blog.  Can’t really blame them. But just in case, here’s one of a few gems we live by.

The Problem:

While Adam’s all about the portability of his trusty silver Macbook, I have an iMac at the office and (much like DJ Hi-Tek) a PC computer at home.  The iPad generally travels with me but it’s essentially a frisbee when it comes to multi-media content creation.  So I need access to files in both places, and I’m amazing at losing or breaking USB sticks. The last one got submerged in cat food. Long story.

The Solution:

Sugarsync

This free nifty little app allows me to sync a few folders between work and home.  I sync a few:

1. Derivative working – when I’m going to work on a file, I process the RAW (that’s sat on a server in the office) to a 16/bit PSD in this folder.  Like magic, within a few minutes it’s on both computers.

2. Lightroom folders that involve presets, etc – by syncing these it doesn’t matter which terminal I’m sat in front of, I always have the same development presets, export presets, web gallery templates (etc, etc) at my finger tips.

3. Ditto Photoshop folders.

The reason I use Sugarsync for this and not another popular app called Dropbox, is that Sugarsync gives you a whopping 5GB of free space compared to Dropbox’s 2GB.  We do use Dropbox as well, but for something a bit different.

And, if you’re ever in a bind you can always download your files from their website and work on someone else’s computer.

I know what you’re thinking:

1. Why not just buy a laptop?  Well, they suck for video editing.  And it’s $3K I’d rather spend on something else.  There are in fact many other reasons.

2. You use a PC?  Aren’t they shit?  I’m not touching that. But let me say that they both work sometimes, they both break sometimes, and they both have their advantages and disadvantages (that have nothing to do with cost). Anyone who thinks one is universally better than the other is a moron.

At some point soon there will be singing.

But not yet.

Cryptic.