Jakob Montrasio’s Net.

Academy Award Babes…

// February 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Videography

In case you’re more interested in how the female audience of the Academy Awards looked like then in which movies actually won something, here we go…

Canadian website JoBlo.com has put online three big galleries with all the actresses you could wish for.

Part one contains the following celebrities:

Jessica Alba, Cameron Diaz, Heidi Klum, Nicole Kidman, Keri Russell, Katherine Heigl, Kelly Preston, Helen Mirren, Renee Zellweger, Vanessa Paradis, Jennifer Garner, Ellen Page, Diane Lane, Anne Hathaway, Penelope Cruz, Amy Adams, Kristin Chenoweth, Marion Cotillard and Hilary Swank.

Click here to see the first part.

Part two contains the following babes:

Penelope Cruz, Amy Adams, Anne Hathaway, Hilary Swank, Jennifer Garner, Cameron Diaz, Katherine Heigl, Keri Russell, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman, Kristin Chenoweth, Jessica Alba and Cate Blanchett.

Click here for part two.

And finally, part three with the following movie hotties:

Kate Beckinsale, Natasha Henstridge, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Christina Milian, Eva Herzigova, Sharon Stone, Petra Nemcova, Sofia Vergara, Radha Mitchell, Zhang Ziyi and Tia Carrere.

Click here to see these gorgeous women.

Thanks, JoBlo!

DVD9: In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.

// February 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // DVD, Reviews

Jason Statham plays a farmer called Farmer (no joke) who has to go on a mission to save the world, after an evil sorcerer (Ray Liotta) decides to take over it. His son gets killed on the way along and his wife captured. There’s also Burt Reynolds as some dumb king as well as men in suits who are supposed to be a warrior race called “Krugs”. The cinematography has written Lord Of The Rings all over it but can’t deliver - the script and editing are just too confusing. The action scenes are well done but cut too hectic. Even Leelee Sobieski didn’t seem to understand the story, thus here weird facial expressions all the time.

But I can’t really write a fair review, since we stopped watching this mess in the middle. It’s simply unwatchable. I had a couple of other unwatched movies who all started screaming “watch me!” after just three minutes.

Audio:

Stereo english, clearly recorded in a cinema.

Video:

Okay…

Subtitles:

Horrible messy english subtitles and chinese.

Female view:

I had to talk my wife out of divorcing me after this debacle…

Best moment:

Pushing the eject button on the remote.

Conclusion:

It’s more fun to invest the 9 or 10 kuai this disc will cost you into two line 1 subway tickets during rush hour.

Covers:

Live blogging the Academy Awards!

// February 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Videography

13:03: And that’s it, all the winners listed below. That was both the first and last time that I live blogged something. It’s not so much fun, to be honest…

12:42: Best Achievement In Directing & Best Motion Picture Of the Year: Joel and Ethan Coen! YEAH! No Country For Old Men!!!

12:31: Best Performance By An Actor In A Leading Role: Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Hope the DVD is out soon, didn’t see that one yet.

12:24: Best Original Screenplay goes to Diablo Cody for Juno.

12:17: Best Documentary Feature goes to Taxi To The Dark Side.

12:13: Best Documentary Short Subject, that is: Freeheld.

11:59: Best Achievement In Cinematography? Robert Elswit, There Will Be Blood!

11:52: Best Achievement In Music Written For Motion Pictures (Original Song): Falling Slowly.

11:43: Austria wins Best Foreign Language Film Of The Year with The Counterfeiters. Original title: Die Fälscher.

11:33: The Bourne Ultimatum wins again?! Best Film Editing… When does In The Name Of The King finally gets an oscar?

11:09: Best Performance By An Actress In A Leading Role: Marion Cotillard, La Môme! That’s La View En Rose in english.

11:03: Both best sound editing and best sound mixing go to The Bourne Ultimatum.

10:47: Best Adapted Screenplay: No Country For Old Men!!! Go, go, Coens!

10:35: Best supporting actress: Tilda Swinton! In the awesome Michael Clayton, of course.

10:28: Best Animated Short Film: Peter & The Wolf, Suzie Templeton and Hugh.

10:22: Best short: Le Mozart des Pickpockets.

10:14: Best supporting actor: Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. Go Coen Bros.!

10:10: Oscar for art direction: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Go Tim Burton!

10:07: Best special effects in… The Golden Compass.

09:56: Best make-up for La Môme.

09:53: Ratatouille gets the best animated movie oscar. Go Pixar!

09:42: Jennifer Garner presents the oscar for costumes: It goes to Alexandra Byrne for Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

All times GMT +08, China time!

2raumwohnung in Nanjing

// October 20th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // China, Videography

Yesterday was the first official day of the german festival here in Nanjing. The first act on the big stage, where I got an job as a camera man, was a chinese orchestra which performed german classic songs. Was nice. But then came the main event: The german-nationally famous electronic pop band called ‘2raumwohnung’ and boy did they make the chinese people dance! The audience was kinda calm during the first songs but then switched to dancing and clapping and whatnot. Without any alcohol! Unbelievable, I’ve been to some concerts but I’ve never seen anything like this before. Just watch the video I uploaded to get an idea (so how was I able to shoot this while I had to do my real job as a camera man? 2raumwohnung didn’t need a live video stream, they had their own visuals for the background - so I was off work). YouTube is still blocked, I’ll try to make some more videos while being here.

 

 Podcast Video [6:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

My first driving lesson in China!

// September 22nd, 2007 // No Comments » // China, Videography

Last sunday was the ‘premiere’: I had my very first driving lesson in Shanghai’s Xuhui district, near Caobao road line one subway station. The license costs me about 4000 kuai and it will take ‘at least’ 3 months to get it, as the teacher said. No driving this christmas, too bad! Anyways, I had my Nokia N93i with me and decided spontaneously to document this driving license project as a vblog or video podcast for my other big website, mysan.de. So waste no time and head over to mysan.de to see what the first day was like. Since I speak german in the video, here are some facts: I have to take lessons once a week for three months. Taking more lessons every week wont speed that up. I will have to learn on a backyard for two months, only then I am allowed on a real street for the first time. We have to practice certain ‘moves’ over and over again, because we will have to do exactly these in the final test. So for the next two months, we are going to practice parking the car and other stuff in the mentioned backyard. Boring! Usually, we have to show up at the backyard at 9 in the morning and stay there until 5 in the afternoon, but we had a talk with our teacher and now we just need to spend the afternoon there. And the reason for that is because we share the car with two more people, and every 20 minutes or so we change the driver. Waste of time! So we told the teacher to teach the other two people in the morning and us in the afternoon. I really don’t want to spend the next three months every weekend in the back of a car, not driving myself for over one hour every time. That’s just stupid. Tomorrow we have our next lesson, expect the next episode next week or so.

Zhu and Gou: Almost done.

// September 20th, 2007 // No Comments » // Videography

This is a graphical view on the contents of the ZHU AND GOU DVD that I am currently producing. Regular users of the software will immediately recognize that I am using Apple’s DVD Studio Pro to create my wedding movie DVD. Anyway, all the content is created and encoded, the only thing that we are still working on are the subtitles. There will be german, english and chinese subtitles. Since most of the talking is in german, I am doing those first, then translating them to english, then my wife will translate to chinese on the basis of the english ones. What a project! The movie is 1 hour and 10 minutes long, I edited with Final Cut Pro, I had about 16 hours of material available (it was no fun to go through all that, believe me), taken with 4 different cameras so I had to use a lot of color correcting plugins. I even had to widescreen the whole movie since one camera recorded in 16:9. You gotta have patience, I think i watched more at the rendering loading then actual video…

So, dear friends who are waiting for the DVD, it will reach you soon. Stay tuned for more soon.

One Missed Call remake trailer.

// August 31st, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Trailer, Videography

‘Intense sequences of violence and terror, frightening images, some sexual material and thematic elements’.

Rating: PG-13. Yeah, right… Looks exactly like the original anyway.

Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem Trailer!

// August 26th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Trailer, Videography

So much gore! So much violence! So many aliens! So many people! The army! Oh! My! God!

We finally get what we’ve been waiting for.

Visual OverKILL: The trailer.

// August 20th, 2007 // No Comments » // Trailer, Videography

ANIMOTO rocks so hard, I decided to make another ‘trailer’, as they call it, on their website. This time with the best images from my Visual OverKILL! set from flickr. Hope you like it!

ANIMOTO: Sweet!

// August 17th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // China, Videography

That’s a nice answer to YouTube and flickr: Mix these! With ANIMOTO, you can take pictures from your flickr account and animate them with music. You can choose music from ANIMOTO’s library or upload your own mp3. ANIMOTO analyzes the pictures and music and creates you a cool video out of it.

Now to the downside: You can only creat free videos that are 30 seconds long. For 3$, you can create a ‘full-length’ video, which means more then even 10 minutes, I guess. Actually, I wanted to invest the 3$ to try it out, but you can only pay with Google and for their service you need a credit card which I don’t have. Why can’t I choose to pay with PayPal, damn it!

Above is a 30 second clip I made with the site. Pretty nice…