Mission Mission

Tim Harrington, the Art Director and Animation Instructor at BAYCAT (where I’ve spent my 9-5 for the last 8 years) did an offsite animation workshop at his wife Ali’s 4th grade class at Dianne Feinstein Elementary School last Friday. The result was too good not to share. Gotta love San Francisco’s diversity.

It’s a good thing that antenna operators are equipped with portable video recording devices (in the form of smartphones) these days:

And here’s another tower tour from 2009:

[via Monkeybrains]

American Hipster, a new YouTube reality show about America’s next top American Hipster (I think), just did a profile on Jeremy Tooker, the owner of Four Barrel cafe / artisanal bike-storage facility. Check it:

The absurdity of sipping coffee samples from a tasting spoon and spitting them out into a cup is apparently not lost on him, either.

Melanie Ruiz put together a nice video portrait of men working in the Mission. Specifically the kind of working men who work outside.

Watch it big on Vimeo.

[via Mission Local]

“SF Mission Protector” posted this video busting a local graffiti artist last night:

In all fairness, the dude knocks on the window twice to let the guy know that he’s gonna call the cops. But this kid just waves and carries on putting a bird on it (“it” being a wall in this case). The cops show up and grab him.

Who is this mysterious “SF Mission Protector”? Does anyone know any orphaned billionaire business owners around the ‘hood?

[via Uptown Almanac, Mission Loc@l]

The Beijing Guitar Duo is playing for FREE tomorrow night, March 23rd at the Community Music Center on 544 Capp.

Watch as they shred circles around your 3 power chords with impeccable classical technique. See what tens of thousands of hours of practice and probable parental abuse can do. I wouldn’t wanna be caught in a hellish guitar duel for my soul with them, that’s for sure. Check ‘em out:

They start at 6pm.

Porto Franco Records hipped us to this video of the Rob Reich Trio looking sharp and performing Puttin’ on the Ritz. It was shot in that weird store that sells a bunch of neat expensive old stuff (AKA Viracocha).

Be sure to watch for the drum solo at the end. Drummer Beth Goodfellow kills me every time. She reminds me of Sonny Payne on some of that killer small combo Count Basie stuff on youtube.

You can catch Rob and Beth at Amnesia every Wednesday 8-10pm as part of Gaucho.

Bowien, chef at Mission Chinese Food, remarked that the Popeye’s Two for Tuesday increase (from $1 to $1.29) was “fucking bullshit” on a recent feature on Vice TV, the natural next step up from his Martha Stewart appearance.

Why isn’t the neighborhood in an uproar about this?

Oh if you want, you can see the rest of the episode here. My takeways: we’ve all probably eaten some of Danny’s hair, cleaning a live crab is gnarly as hell, and Spices is about to get some long-ass wait lists.

[via Vice]

Skitchin’!

There’s a video, but you’re gonna have to go over to tumblr to see it.

[via Tenderloin Geographic Society, who apparently hangs in the Mission to escape all the gentrification going down in their 'hood]

Well I sure know what I would do if I had a kick ass view of Sutro, make a bunch of timelapse videos of it. Thats what Jonathan did.

Check out this stunner. Kinda makes me feel like I’m soaring towards the Ivory Castle on Falkor, my trusty luck dragon:

The instructions for making your own are simple, just fire up that Linux machine you have lying around and dig through heaps of ffmpeg forums:

I used gphoto2 running on an Ubuntu machine to grab photos, basically as quickly as I could get them off the camera (roughly one every 5 seconds). I’m getting them at fairly large resolution (2048 x 1536), though I crop and downsample them for the video. To create a 20fps video from the still photos, I use ffmpeg, which is amazingly powerful provided you get the command line options right.

He adds:

So as the unrepentant perfectionist, I still see some areas of improvement. Despite a fairly decent camera mount, I still see more camera motion than I would like: I am going to try bolting the camera directly to the building, but I suspect the building itself moves.

God damn plate tectonics. Maybe he could bolt the camera to Sutro?

[via rotormind]