Toastmaster K - The Blog!

Previously posted on YellowLightsMovie.com by Tom Kochem:

I just returned from the awards ceremony at Indie Fest, and I am pleased to announce that Yellow Lights won two awards - Best Cinematography, and Best Feature Film!!! The awards were given by the Academy of Independent Cinema Arts and Artists. This makes Yellow Lights an Academy Award-winning film! Okay, maybe not quite. In any event, we were just hoping to win a student film award, so to win the Best Feature Film (overall) was a great honor! Thank you again to everyone involved in making the movie!

Indie Fest was a fun week of networking with other filmmakers, seeing their work, and talking with them about true independent film. We will soon post links to the sites for some of the other filmmakers that we met this week. Most importantly, for all of those who are wondering - we will soon be updating our website to include the graphics of the olive branches surrounding the two awards! Apparently, that’s how you know your movie is real.

[tags] Yellow Lights, indie, Indie Fest USA, movie, award, AICAA [/tags]

I found this in the Creative Gigs section on Craigslist. If I’m not doing anything that night, I think I might join up in this just to say I took part. Keep in mind that the group behind this is trying to make a profit by selling their dance videos, but I still think it could be hilarious. LARP’ing meets Hip Hop:

“On October 27, 2007, (Oct. 28 in some parts of the world) zombies will get together in over 100 cities on six continents to dance “Thriller” at exactly the same time in an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the World’s Largest Simultaneous Dance! We would like to invite you to join us! Last October 29, 2006, Thrill Toronto saw 62 people learning the Thriller dance in 2 hours, rehearsing for 2 hours then performing the dance to set the first Guinness World Record for Largest Thriller Dance. We need over 200,000 people to dance “Thriller” to win the Guinness Record. We currently have people in over 121 cities, in 18 countries who will Thrill The World. The dance is easy to learn with our Thriller Teaching Videos 2.1 available on YouTube.com and on DVD. Go to www.thrilltheworld.com for weblinks and info about the DVD. To date, the oldest participant who learned the dance in 2 hours is a 53-year-old man who had never danced before! And a 5-year-old is rehearsing for the big event, too! Anyone can Learn The Dance! Even if you have two left feet!”

[tags] Thriller, Michael Jackson, Guiness, World Record, dance [/tags]

To those of you who I met today at the Comic-Con, here is the footage of the Lost Panel that I shot from the front row in both mp4, Flash, and Windows Media formats. The file size for all of them are rather large as this is a 50 minute video. Unfortunately, due to restrictions by Comic-Con, I could not film the special video clips that they showed. If you want to save these files to your desktop, just right-click and select “Save Target As…”

Lost Panel - Mp4 Version

Lost Panel - Windows Media

Lost Panel - Flash Video (.flv) - This may require a separate download of a Flash player. I recommend the VLC Media Player which is a free download.

Here is the whole panel video:

Also, here are a couple great pictures from the panel.

Also, here is a shot of some attendees dressed up as some of my favorite Nintendo characters. They’re only a few characters short of a Smash Melee!

UPDATED: Added links to mp4 and flv versions of the video.

UPDATED: Added Windows Media version.

UPDATED: Added embedded Google video

[tags] Comic-Con, San Diego, Lost, TV, photos, Harold Perrineau [/tags]

I don’t know about you, but when I was going through my [tag]CNN[/tag] RSS feed and came across this article about a new tomb that has been found in the Valley of the Kings, I got friggin’ excited. I consider myself an Egypt nut and would love to visit the Great Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings someday.

“The tomb contains five or six mummies in intact sarcophagi from the late 18th dynasty, about the same period as Tutankhamun, but the archaeologists have not yet had the time or the access to identify them, the archaeologist added.”

To me, this is an amazing discovery and I cannot wait to find out what new mummies they find. If I had the time, I would definitely continue my work in learning how to transliterate hieroglyphs.

[tags] Egypt, mummies, Valley of the Kings[/tags]