The Story

While filming something with my good friend Darius Bashar, I accidentally left my camera standing on a tripod in his car while we started driving. All it took was one hard turn for the camera to fall down and for one of my fears to come true: my microphone was broken. In reality, the functionality of the microphone was still intact, it was just now impossible to mount it onto the camera even after countless attempts to superglue the cold shoe pieces back together.

I went on for months sort of sulking about my loss – the RODE VideoMic is $230 + tax on the regular, and it seemed stupid to buy another just because of the cold shoe. I did the stupidest thing I could think of and resorted to taping the microphone on whenever I was filming something – making me look rather unprofessional and making my tiny camera look even worse than it already was.

Finally, last week while filming with Andrea Liew, she asked me “Why didn’t you just buy another one of those parts you broke? I’m sure you could buy it for a couple bucks, it’s plastic!” After hearing that, I immediately cringed due to my extended stupidity and shot out an email to the Canadian service agent for RODE products: Audio Distributors International.

Within a couple hours, I received back an email from Eric Lasnier telling me they would not only replace the part, but they would do it for free! Well, the package came yesterday with two, count them, TWO cold shoe replacements!

I am quite impressed and appreciative of the prompt response and service that I was given by ADI, and they’ve probably just made a customer for life. Thanks guys, you’ve saved my life (and career!)

Nothing else necessary.

As stated in the ReadWriteWeb article, they are set to release their first feature length film – Perkins 14. It actually looks like a decent horror film (Which is hard to say nowadays) and it was fully created by this fantastic online community. Hopefully, this kick-starts a trend of films created with great content, and not just adaptations of popular literature and pop-culture icons with massive special effects budgets.

I am a little jealous that I didn’t create the idea first, but that is how the world works. So to the Massify team – kudos and good luck, I fully support your venture! To everyone else – check out Massify, you might see me on there in the future!

On November 28, 2008, the Daily Challenge team set out with the challenge to “Walk down the street with a sign that says ‘Donate a High Five’”. Naturally, we had to do it. Here’s how it went down.

Accept the challenge:
www.dailychallenge.org/challenge.php?id= 199

Join the movement:
www.dailychallenge.org

Join the movement!

Meet: ViddYou

Viddyou is a free and premium personal video service focused on offering the best quality in video, privacy control, and overall ease of use.

There are a few restrictions: HD conversion isn’t fantastic, 250MB limit per upload, and a max of 5 minutes recording time. For a free account, that’s not bad, and it’s only $34.95 per year if I wish to remove those limits.

Here’s a sample – and a free plug for LIVE Conference 2008:

Like it? Try it out! Let me know your experiences!

EDIT: Found a great new feature – under ‘Community’, you can start your own community to post specific videos to. We’ve separated some sensitive videos this way and it seems to be working quite well! Awesome feature!