Bencredible

One of my guilty pleasures is watching WWE in fast forward. Yes I know it is fake, but the theatrics are *amazing* and they do a great job of drawing an audience.

@Cariann has learned the valuable lesson that if you don’t want to know what I see on TV, don’t ask! I have completely ruined a bunch of television for her by pointing out things that many just don’t see or hear. WWE is no exception and now I’m to point out a very, very minor item to you.

One fun thing to look for on WWE are the slow moving superstars.  There are only a couple. Most superstars run to the stage, or at least move with a bit of speed. Randy Orton is the exception and is one of the slowest moving people we have seen. I actually timed it once, it took 2.5 minutes for him to get to the stage/ring and be ready (music ended) from the moment the music started. It took over a minute just to get to the stage/ring itself! He moved so slow that the people behind him had to take half steps to try and not run him over. It was very, very funny to watch. Of course this was during a match with the Undertaker who is also a slow moving superstar who took a bit over 2 minutes to get to the ring and music end. He doesn’t need to run, he just saunters down to the stage/ring on his own time.

If you add that up it is over 4 minutes of just walking to the ring with no fighting, and yet they STILL make the entire experience amazingly entertaining. If you’re a WWE fan start watching for the fast vs slow moving superstars, it is a bit fun!

Oh, and if you want to know other things like the evil clown laugh in HHH’s theme music, why we hate reversed arenas, or how to predict who will win the match, just e-mail me and I’ll let you know. Be warned, after I show you some of this stuff you’ll never be able to watch TV the same way again.

Cariann and I were at the Mall of America earlier today looking for birthday presents for my twin brothers. While there we noticed a huge dance presentation in the main rotunda. That reminded me a bit about an old business plan I had of bringing community access television to shopping malls. The plan was called ‘Focus Net’ and it would allow communities to have their own news program and shows local to them. Long and short of it is I was never able to make it go, but I have always thought that putting a TV studio in large shopping malls was a good idea.

I was thinking that maybe Spacevidcast should open a studio space in the Mall of America. Encased in glass and shifting the time of the show to a premium time that users would be in the mall, we could create a local and worldwide buzz by really, really engaging people in person. Allow for a live audience, or allow people to watch the control room, or whatever they want. When a shuttle mission (or Constellation, or whatever) is happening durning mall hours we could move to the main rotunda and do a live show from there with a huge HD projection behind us showing the live launch coverage. Big lights, loud noises, and people in-person, on-stage asking their questions.

There is a HUGE Lego ISS model hanging in one area of the mall (oddly enough over the Lego store) and it might be cool to have them make us another HUGE Lego ISS model that we can use as part of our set. When a new module is added to the ISS we could have a ceremony of sticking the new module on to the ISS Lego model. When we want to explain something we can walk around the Lego model, take that unit off and show it around. Thought that may be fun and interesting to look at.

The core idea here is that people like what they can get involved with. People also like bright shiny objects, loud noises, and cool effects. I think we can do all of that by taking over the old Planet Hollywood space on the 4th floor of the Mall of America. Why MOA?  There are over 40 million visitors annually that visit the Mall of America. How many people is that? Well to put that in perspective the Mall of America attracts more visitors than Disney World, Graceland and the Grand Canyon combined, or 7x the population of the entire state of Minnesota. That is a LOT of people, and a lot of potential eyeballs that could get passionate about space again.

As always money is holding me back. I think a large vision like this may attract someone like a Boeing, Lockheed, NASA or other large space firm who really wants to get their name out that and stands to benefit from the upcoming boom of space travel. Imagine us broadcasting from the multi-million dollar Boeing Studios at the Mall of America. Great branding for them, great show potential for us and our ability to win over new space geeks helps everyone involved.

I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this one. Do you think is is a good idea, bad idea or needs some work? I can get some numbers on what it would cost to actually take over the Planet Hollywood space, or a different more highly trafficked space as well. This can’t be done on my day job budget, so I need a HUGE sponsor. Anyone have any ideas/contacts there?  We can make a nifty video showing it off and give out the bigger vision to anyone interested.

I’m excited.  I think this is a good foundation for an idea and could really take Spacevidcast places.  Thoughts?

A huge THANK YOU to Crow River Coffee Company and PSB Satellite for allowing us to install this great C-Band dish and helping to set it up.  We could not have done it without you guys.

No, I won’t let this go. We can do better and it is annoying me. Here are my thoughts on how to fix the set problem. Let me know what you think in the comments.

This is what is sorta looks like with a white backgorund and blue lights rather than a black background.  I think it looks a log better.  I guess we’ll see when we put the plasmas wit h the black carts in front of all this.

Of course finding a projector to work in such a short throw with enough brightness is hard, but I think I have just the item: the Sanyo PLC-XL51. We could have that 4′ 7″ away from the white scrim and project a 20′ wide image which would cover the whole back wall. Problem is that this projector costs $4,000. As such, we can’t afford it just yet and I’ll probably wait until Spacevidcast brings in some good revenue to go that route. But still… Cool concept. I think it would look *awesome*.

Here’s an idea that Cafn8ed, Cariann and I had while looking at the set… What if we change out the main black curtain for white (which we already have) and project a giant animation on that (maybe a slow moving Earth)?   We think that may solve the black hole of nothingness problem we have on the set right now.

The second problem we have is that the camera 2 shot is just too wide.  This is happening because we have two 50″ plasmas in the shot.  The solution might be to put those on stands but have them mounted vertically rather than horizontally.  This would end up pulling the shot in quite a bit and making everything closer.

There is of course cost to all this.  Each plasma mount will be around $600.00 and then we have to buy a projector to get the image on the back wall and that could be an additional $3,000 or so (depends on what we get).  I can demo the projector part just to see if it works, but the mounts we will pretty much need to commit to.

What do you guys think?  I know I can’t show you yet, but using your imagination do you think this would make the set a bit more…  fun?  Make it more active so it doesn’t look like we’re broadcasting from a basement?  Thoughts?

We had a lot of issues last week. One of the problems was the framing of the shots, which was limited because the only black we had was on the wall directly behind us.

We’re getting there. Bit by bit, piece by piece.

As promised in the uber long pre-show this last week, here is a tour of the new Spacevidcast studio.

This video was taken on the drive home from the Crow River Coffee Company which is where the new Spacevidcast studio is. Basically I’m happy with the show but worried about the technology. I think I may be asking too much of CamTwist and Blackmagic.

As you can imagine Cariann and I have been prepping quite a bit for the big return of Spacevidcast. I always strive to look at what I’m doing and find ways to do it better. I think the new version of Spacevidcast will be no exception.

We have been driving to Watertown a LOT recently (which is where the new studio is) and today ran in to a big of a snag: the system we were going to use to hold up the plasmas won’t work.

We will be broadcasting from cafn8ed’s coffee shop and I figure since he has been nice enough to not only lend us his shop but also his time, we should return the favor any way we can. For starters the two shiny new plasma TVs we have could be used when we’re not there which is like 99% of the time. That means that they need to be on beefy stands that can survive the impact of a 7 year old who wants to run straight at the shiny object. This is not an easy problem to solve with a 120lb top heavy 6′ structure.

In the end I’m sure we will figure it out although we may not have a permanent solution in place for the first show. I’m also concerned that I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew, but we will find out. Cariann and I are slated to go back out tomorrow and do an equipment run through to make sure we have all the gear needed to make things work. Then on Wednesday we will be doing a dry run through without broadcasting to make sure that we’re all on the same page. After that… well… show time!

I usually like to surprise people with new set designs, web designs and whatnot but instead of taking the closed Apple approach I decided to open up the process and show everyone what has been going on behind the scenes. To that end here are a couple of photos showing off the general concept. Note that the stands for the plasma will be changing to something more like this:

EACH ONE of those stands is $500.00 plus about $100.00 shipping.  That’s over 1/2 the cost of the entire plamsa itself!  Speaking of, here is a look at what the wide shot will sorta look like (this is taken on the crummy iPhone camera and will look much nicer with the full cameras):

And this is what the tight shot will sorta look like.  Again crummy camera please forgive:

And finally here is a wide shot of the studio.  We will probably need to drape the side walls in black and we know we will need to drape the floor in black to make sure the look is complete.  What I really want to do is have a giant shot of the earth animating against the whole back wall and have the plasmas mounted from the ceiling but we simply can’t do that in this space:

Of course NONE of the cameras or lighting is set up in these shots.  I have no idea how I’m going to do the main lights and not get a ton of reflection on the plamsas.  We will make it work though.  The hair lights will be interesting as well, but I think I have a solution for those.  Right now my biggest problem is finding something pretty to put those Plasmas on that doesn’t cose just as much as the plasma itself!