Gaden Shartse Monastic Tour

The Bluedot team has been having a lot of fun working on some promotional films for the Gaden Shartse Monastic Tour; a fund raising and outreach program from the tibetan buddhist monastery located in the refugee area of southern India. The footage in this 7:00 introduction was collected from old archival pieces from the monastery, and when we toured with the monks to Aspen Colorado in 2008.

Enjoy!

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Roadside Attractions

What is it about this crazy stuff we find on the side of the road that I love to shoot? Is it the broken dreams? The shear realism of it? Or is it the degradation brought from abuse or carelessness? I think it just reminds me how this is all temporal and fleeting….

Three Keys to Good StoryTelling

royal-quiet-den-typewriter3.JPGStories, stories, stories.

In the end it is all we have, in truth, it is what we crave.

The venue or genre is not important; whether we are writing a book, making a movie, talking to a friend or making a corporate video – we are telling stories.

After reading blogs and talking to people in the corporate video industry, I am under the impression that most are aware of the need to bring storytelling to their video in order to keep it from becoming boring.

Then why, I ask, are so many corporate videos boring?
The answer is that storytelling is a craft, and the reality is that there is good storytelling and bad storytelling.

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Mixing for Film

We’re in the process of editing the sound mix for a documentary that we are releasing in 2011. The concept of reference is always a big issue.

Director: “That sounds muddy”.
Composer: “It didn’t at the studio!”
Director: “Did they mix this on near-field monitors? No sub?”
Composer: “Yes”.
Producer: “Sigh…”

It’s a lot of fun mixing for a feature documentary. We have a huge range of types of venues the film will be played at, from straight televisions, to home theaters, to peforming arts centers and hopefully top rated film theaters. How does one make it sound good, everywhere?

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Tibetan Buddhism in Long Beach

A few selected photos of the Gaden Shartse Monks at the Long Beach Convention Center this last week.

An important initiation had been planned with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but alas – he had fell ill in Tokyo and missed the weekends events planned for him.

Bluedot was there to film the “Journey to the Roof of The World” performance of the Gaden Monks in a world class location.

Luckily, the Gaden Monks were making an amazing sand mandala, as well as a teaching by Khen Rinpoche (The Abbot of Gaden Shartse Monastery), and a talk by Robert Thurman and Thupten Jinpa.

An excellent opportunity for a few snaps!

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More Powerful Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook! A name that draws fear or disgust from many web developers. Fan or Foe, facebook is the hot place right now, as everyone is using it. What does this mean to developers and graphic designers? It means we get to learn yet another constantly changing API.

To add more interest and stickiness, there are some new tricks that will allow us to add images, video, tabbed browsing, and many other features normally reserved for only our blogs.

A touch of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

It was an exciting 10 days in Los Angeles, filming the Gaden Shartse Monastery Tour, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama at both the Long Beach Convention Center, and University of California at Irvine.

All the approvals, all the state department reviews, all the driving were worth this one moment of His Holiness coming on stage at UCI while the Gaden Monks provided an introduction purification ceremony. Look for more in the upcoming feature documentary “For All Sentient Beings”

Suns Return

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Capoeira Exhibition

US Premiere of Fly Away Beetle at the Eugene Celebration 2011

Deactivate Visual Editor – WordPress

I just recently had a client that needed a sniffing javascript to serve up an iPad version of their cinematography. While this was easily added in the WYSIWYG editor within wordpress, if you hit the “visual” tab, Poof! The javascript would become broken in a strange enough way that required too much debugging. Instead of leaving a possible trap to our clients, we needed a solution: A great plugin to deactivate the visual editor when editing specific pages or posts within wordpress.

The visual editor is nice when pages and posts are simple, but when you try to add special text such as php code to a page then the visual editor oftentimes has to be deactivated to edit the page. This plug-in allows you to set which posts should not use the visual editor by setting a custom field ‘deactivate_visual_editor’ to true. This allows the visual editor to be deactivated for the given post/page, but remain active for all others.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/deactive-visual-editor/