Vimago Blog

We just updated our portfolio with a few new projects we have been working on for a while.
This film was produced by us on assignment by Formas. It is a short documentary about honey bee research at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala.

This next project is a film we produced for Tobii. It is a productfilm showing off one of Tobii's latest products in the field of eye tracking.

This last project is a big one. During 2011 we conceptualized and built the new website for SKAP. (The Swedish Society of Popular Music Composers) Which looks after the members' artistic interests and matters concerning copyright, distributes subsidies, scholarships and prizes and promotes Swedish popular music. Read more about it here

Today the Swedish tv channel TV4 did a phone interview with adventurer Emil Börner, who Daniel is making a documentary about. Emil is currently in Tibet, and since March he has been riding his bike towards Beijing, China, a project called The Big Trip. Daniels photography was displayed during the interview (see embedded video).

Read more about Daniels documentary

In the autumn of 2010 I had a meeting with Emil Börner of www.thebigtrip.se. When I left that meeting I was inspired. Emil had told me that he was planning on biking from Stockholm, Sweden to Beijing in China which is a journey of 15 000 km. Why he contacted me was because he was looking for a filmmaker who he could work with throughout the project. I thought about it and told him I was very excited on working with him. Emil had during 2010 started this project and got sponsors on board but in the end of 2010 he lost his bike partner. Soon though he found a new one. This someone turned out to be Oscar Johansson. They met on a Swedish forum called www.utsidan.se where many adventurers meet online and discuss everything from equipment to the best travel routes. In January we laid out plans and a roadmap on what we during this year would film. After some thinking we shot a couple of short films about preparations for an adventure and a new promo which they could use for promotional purposes. Both Emil and Oscar live with disabilities. Emil broke his back 1.5 years ago and Oscar has Tourettes syndrome, which he was diagnosed with at the age of 12. But through rehabilitation and focus they have both got to the state where they are able to do this journey. Through this project they are also gathering money for a Swedish charity organization called Viktoria fonden During February their project started to get more and more attention and closer to their departure they got to go on Swedish television where they during live broadcast spoke about their project. 4 months later I traveled down and met them in Diyarbakir, Turkey. Then during two weeks we shot a documentary about long distance travel and what kind of experiences you get during the journey. It was a fantastic experience as a filmmaker to get to go to eastern Turkey and film where it is a very beautiful landscape and generous people who invite you left and right on different events. Everything from a Kurdish wedding to having breakfast with farmers on the countryside. As for gear I brought about 50 kg of tripods, rigs, cameras, lenses, computer, harddrives etc... I shot the whole project on Canon HDSLR's (5d mark II and 7d) and for some action shots I went for 2xGoPro Hero HD. This was really fun since this allowed me to shoot very nice stills of the production as well being a one man band. So I left my XF300 at home. Now the post production continues and the all the footage is processed and looked over for a trailer. The complete film will be ready somewhere early January of 2012 since that is when both Emil and Oscar are back home.

Next week (June 25-26) I am travelling to Berlin, Germany, for two days of Drupal Design workshops and sessions. I am really looking forward to it!

The event is organized by the "secret European Drupal underground frontend united movement", and they have managed to set up a great program.

Check out all the tweets about the event (#ddceu)

Today is sunday and DrupalCamp Stockholm May 2011 is over. I have spent the last two days at Konferens Odenplan, listening to great seminars and meeting a lot of nice and talented people.

I was at the event both as an attendee and a media sponsor, Vimago documented the event on film. Now we have to edit all the footage and the finished material will be published soon.

This was my second Drupal event (I attended Drupalcon Copenhagen last year). The difference was obviously the size (not so much ooohhh wow from me this time), but even though the number of attendees wasn't that large NodeOne did a great job managing to get such great speakers from all over - thanks NodeOne!

Some of the speakers:

• Todd Ross Nienkerk, Four Kitchens
• Bo Mikael, Bonnier Publications
• Greg Dunlap, NodeOne
• Brent Deverman, CNN
• Addison Berry, Lullabot
• Moeed Ahmad, Al Jazeera

See complete list of speakers

All photos in this post was shot with my iPhone. Sorry for the bad quality.

We are many who have been waiting for this day, and now it is here - Drupal 7 is released.

Drupal 7 Marketing Video from Jeff Robbins on Vimeo.

I have yet not started using Drupal 7, but from what I have seen and heard it will be a blast to use. We will very soon upgrade vimago.se from 6 to 7. And on friday we will all celebrate the release of Drupal 7.

This last weekend the Vimeo Festival took place in New York City (8-9th of October). We flew in from Stockholm, Sweden to see what it was all about! The event had some really interesting talks/workshops http://vimeo.com/awards/schedule. At the festival we had the opportunity to talk to some of the creative minds behind the Vimeo World art exhibition. It was a really interesting experience to hear the thoughts of the creators behind all these installations. Check out the interviews with the people behind it that we got on tape! :)

Vimeo World at the Vimeo festival 2010 from Vimago on Vimeo.

WebAnywhere

WebAnywhere is a screen reader for the web. Visually impaired people can use it to access websites from any computer. Run your website through it and listen to how visually impaired people see it. WebAnywhere beta tool

The Markup Validation Service

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) hosts the Markup Validation Service which allows web page authors and site administrators to check HTML documents for markup errors. It can be of great use to find those unclosed elements or other errors. The Markup Validation Service

WAVE - Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

This tool is really useful. It shows your original web page with added icons that reveal the accessibility of the page. WAVE

Colorblind Web Page Filter

See your web pages as visitors with color blindness see them. Colorblind Web Page Filter

Google Analytics

Google Analytics generates statistics about the visitors to your website. It is the most widely used website statistics service and the reason for it’s success is probably because it is so easy to use. If you want to try it out you need a Google account and also know how to add the Google analytics code to your site. Google Analytics

Almost a month ago Vimeo announced the release of their new and much improved video player. This new player supports all kinds of mobile devices and is called Universal Player.

I have started using this new player on my personal blog and it works perfectly! Now I can just add the embed code from the clip and voilá suddenly iPhones, iPads and other devices can see my stuff right ahead without using Adobe Flash. It is though demanded that you have a Plus account at Vimeo to be able to serve this ability to the viewers.

This of course puts Vimeo a leap ahead of their competitors like Youtube and Exposureroom. Vimeo has also in their long and thorough blog post about this explained how you with the use of a javascript may replace all the old embed code on your site to the new.

Since the old embedded code still works you can use that in social media like Facebook since the new embed code requires iframes to work.

Here is an example of using their new embed code right into the blog post in Drupal:

See! It works like a charm. By the way the clip I linked is a teaser from a short film I am currently working on.

Over the years I have stumbled upon the concept of high speed photography a couple of times. The quite exotic technology that is used is expensive and nothing really for the consumer/prosumer since it is often used when testing ballistic weaponry.

Many may have seen the Tv program on Discovery channel called Time warp where they create cool examples to show people what happens when you record video with a high frame per second rate. If you haven't seen it, check out Time warp best of Youtube.

Last autumn I was looking around on Youtube on different kind of videos where people made their own high speed photography projects. Now since a Phantom camera costs a fortune, a consumer might want to take it down a notch and look at other solutions. I did it with still photography and my old trusty DSLR (Canon 40d).

I was of course not able to create high speed video but for me stills were enough. What I did was that I took my external flash Canon 580 EX II. Connected two cables to the baseplate of it which I in turn connected to two pieces of aluminum foil (Plus/minus polarity).

As you see in the photos above which I took during the experiment I used some kind of rifle as well. I asked a friend of mine which had a .22 caliber rifle and I put everything together and connected the cables. Then turned off all light sources nearby and put the camera in Bulb mode.

After opening the shutter of the camera I told my friend to fire and when the bullet hit the two pieces aluminum foil which in turn touched and connected the two cables. It made the external Flash go off. Since the bullet was the trigger of the flash I was not able to catch the bullet in the photo but I got pretty cool pictures of the water balloon exploding.