Eiffel Tower Lights

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Ever since the Millenium celebration, the Eiffel Tower has been equipped with a powerful, rotating searchlight, and hundreds of smaller lights that make it sparkle ("étincelle") every hour, on the hour.

It creates a beautiful effect, especially on a rainy night. Seen over the rooftops of Paris from the window of my apartment this summer, in August of 2006.

Water baby

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Cedar Lake, in Minneapolis, on a beautiful evening in late August, 2006.

size matters

Now that I have a sizeable chunk of server space, I've decided to create a larger and a smaller download option for each video haiku.

I'm talking about file size, not screen size: I'm very fond of the 320x240 pixel video window, and I think I'll stick with that - but the "large file" link will take you to a less-compressed version of the video, featuring more detail in each frame and more frames per second.

The file size is roughly double; 3-5 mb for small, 8-10 for large. If you have a pretty fast connection, it's probably worth the trouble to wait for the large file to download. This will matter more in some videos than in others - particularly the ones with a lot of movement.

I'll gradually be going back through the videohaiku archive as well (over 60 posts already!) and adding the large file option - so feel free to browse through the older posts if you want to see them at higher quality. And, if you have any requests regarding which posts I recompress first, let me know in the comments here - I'd be more than happy to oblige.

Paris Metro

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Riding escalator handrails in the Paris subway system in June of 2006.

Web spinning

In the Kruchowski's doorway in Minneapolis, on the night of August 23, 2006.

Airport Games

Two young girls in the gate area of the Charles de Gaulle Airport, outside Paris, in August of 2006.

Stairway to Re:Voir

The stairs leading up to the office where I work in Paris, in August of 2006.

Chess Players

In Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, in August of 2006.

Barnyard Harmony

On a farm near Cervieres, in the French Alps in July of 2006.

No animals were harmed in the making of this video haiku.

Wildflowers

It's impossible to convey with video the sheer density of life in this frame, on a microscopic scale; the grass is teeming with grasshoppers, ants, bees and butterflies... so you kind of have to use your imagination, along with your ears. Humor me.

Recorded in the foothills of the French Alps, near the village of Cervieres, in July of 2006.

Beyond 800

So, a month or two into video haiku, I figured out how to install a counter on the site (I'm pretty slow with this technical stuff), and I set it to count unique hits - to only register a hit when a new IP address visits the site.

I don't totally trust it, but I've tried to fake it out by coming back to the site multiple times in a day, and it seems smarter than that- so as far as I can tell, it's working. And it passed 800 hits just the other day. Which, in theory, means that over 800 people have visited the site in the last three months or so.

I think that's pretty cool. It may be the largest audience I've ever had for my work, including my "serious" film projects that have been in festivals and on tv - how many people can possibly be watching PBS at 11 pm on a Sunday in Minnesota, anyway?

So I just wanted to say thanks - for visiting, for linking to this site, and for (maybe even) telling your friends and family members to check it out. It's been fun and satisfying to work on, and your support is more than enough encouragement to keep it going.

I also highly recommend starting your own videoblog, if you have a bit of free time and a camera - it's a wonderful way to share scenes from your life with people around the world.

Soccer Spectator

Or "football", as all 6 billion non-Americans call it. Almost abstract, due to the compression and the changing light levels, but kind of nice nonetheless, I think. A fine summer day in a park near Paris, on July 14th, 2006.