Here is a little video knocked together of our Trip to Tasmania last weekend -

Also, if you have the time check out the Vice Guide to North Korea a 14 part (about 30 minutes in total) documentary of Shane Smith getting into North Korea. It is a fascinating insight into the isolated country.

BhangLassi filmed at the Cat and Fiddle in Balmain on the 10th April 2008. The band will be launching their new EP. “Orange” on the 10th July at the Excelsior - so get down their to get your copyas its sure to sell out in no time.

This is a first time HD video on G2007 of the song Four Degrees that rumour has it was partially inspired by Cooster - the video is in HD 720p format which is the same resolution as HDTV 1280×720 but clearly the bitrate of the video is a lot less (so that it doesn’t take 4 weeks to buffer) at around 1800kbps. You should be able to go full screen on this one and look ok as long as your monitor resolution is around the same level.

This is the first HD video on G2007 as I finally now have the software necessary to work with the AVCHD MTS output files of the camera. I used Sony Vegas 8.0 to produce it and the FLV Encoder of Flash CS3 to get the video into a format that can be played in a flash supporting browser!

The Vegas tool is fantastic, this is a screenshot of the original raw video from the camera which loses a lot of the colours thanks to all the red light -

Original Video Colour

Last year we hit The Cave and it was brilliant! So Rach organized it again but a few months earlier which made it a little bit warmer! A bigger group than last time went and we had some great fun. On Saturday we did a walk in the Blue Mountains at Wentworth Falls. This was one of the first times that I’d been there and the water falls were actually flowing which some power, thanks to the recent rains.

This video gives a better feel of the weekend trip (music by SpoonaSound - Dark Side of the Spoon) -

A few of the cave dwellers have started taking drumming lessons so there was a lot of drums to go around, also the entire BhangLassi band were on hand to perform some acoustic numbers as well as preview a new track which they had laid down.

Get photos and another perspective over at Marcus’ blog and on Facebook.

Here’s the exact location of the Cave for the interested parties -

Get more info about the Cave and booking information at Hatters Hideout.

Last week we saw Daniel Kitson perform “The Impotent Fury Of The Privileged” which was a brilliant comedy / lesson in life adventure at the Factory Theatre. I won’t go into too much detail about it for fear Kitson will come across this blog entry and hate what I have written about it “he’s got it all wrong!” - checkout danielkitson.com for more info about.

This weekend we had a ‘lads weekend’ down the NSW South Coast, Marcus’ mate Scott is over from the UK and he is a keen surfer so we hunted out some surfing locations around the Jervis Bay and Ulladulla area. Unfortunetly the wind was blowing a gale from the South and most of the beaches were too big or just messy. Our base was Green Patch, in Bodoree National Park which had a lovely white sanded beach that we could chill out on in the evenings. Here’s a video of the experience which tells the story of the trip -

Scott and Marcus are staying an extra day, I hope they get some good waves!

The lassi played a last minute gig on Tuesday night at the “Bald Face Stag Hotel” in “Leichhardt” which were winners for “worst named hotel” and “hardest suburb to pronounce” consecutively in 2007.

As it was on a Tuesday night and there was not much notice there wasn’t much of a crowd, however, it did let me get some non-shakey tripod based footage of the entire gig. Here’s “Where are you” from half way through the set last night (strong language alert for the first 10 seconds) -

Rate and download Exclusive BhangLassi Tracks at TripleJ Un-Earthed. Rating the track improves their chances of getting into the “Top 40″ and thus getting played on radio, thus getting a record contract, thus becoming a international rock band. Whilst I live off of the ebay sales of all the footage I’ve got. Everybody wins.

PS: Still have not got a handheld camera.

Here is a short video of all the best bits of the trip to the UK, excluding meeting up with old friends as I didn’t have the camera with me when we did that! Also a slightly larger video format as a test

Or download a higher quality WMV (61meg) of the video for a crisper experience.

Happy New Year!

A low pressure system off of Queensland has brang brought a bucket load of swell down to Manly. We went down to the Bower on New Year’s Eve and I filmed some footage of the surfers who were out in the fairly large swell that day. It does get bigger than this at Manly but not very often. Check GlobalSurfari.com for a recent surf forecast.

Or download a higher quality WMV (35meg) of the video for a crisper experience.

A short video of Prague to get a feel of what the place is like in motion, set to some classic Czech style music, I think -

Or download a higher quality WMV (17meg) of the video for a crisper experience.

Well goodbye China hello England! There is something very strange about waking up in a hotel room in Shanghai on the East Coast of China and then going to bed in a little village in the middle of England the same night. I’ve mostly been in the loft packing boxes to ship to Australia since I’ve been here, but we did go out for a very strange lunch at a German owned Guesthouse in Stratford-upon-Avon.

I made this video in China just before we left -

Or download a higher quality WMV (60meg) of the video for a crisper experience.

Hot off Seal Rocks 2006, comes Seal Rocks 2007! This time we broke last years 13 people record with an estimated 28 of us!

The place has become extremely popular in the last few years; even we could notice by the amount of camp sites there were on the weekend. It has been on the TV on holiday programs and Canon used it to promote their HV20 camera. Of course, most of the popularity is probably due to the 4.3 million* daily readers of G2007.

Check the video, the music is by one of my favourite bands, BhangLassi -

Higher Quality Windows Media Download (36 meg)

In the video you see a tree getting chopped down, don’t worry it was not to make more room for tents and 4WDs but it looked like it was rotting in the centre and so would have been a bit of a hazard. Actually it was pretty funny when they were chopping it down, Marcus, Dan, Mez and myself were sitting around our camp next to the tent and car, and the guy was chainsawing through it. Half way in the other guy said “woo woo wooo…. the winds blowing that way” and pointed towards us, the tent and my car. That is why in the video you see the truck pulling it along as it comes down.

This was the first time that we visited Seal Rocks where the main beach behind the camp site was not like a washing machine, in fact it was the opposite, a beautiful clean beach with lovely waves breaking (although a bit too close to shore to surf).

Sunny Days and Clean Water

It was a really nice trip and sad to be back, the video embedded in this post sums it all up. If you have the time and bandwidth, the high quality version is well worth the download (it’s 3x the size but 10x the quality in my opinion).

* Estimate - actual readers may vary.