Took the week off posting to the blog, but I’ve been armchair surfing the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert all week. Last night the Man burned, and smoldered, and smoked, and then finally fell.
THE USTREAM WEBCAST COVERAGE SUCKED HARD!!! (and “F*ck your day!” if you think otherwise) YES I’M A CRITIC! And I’m going to trash the Ustream cast.
Someone suggested that if I wanted better coverage I should go out to the desert. I don’t disagree, and it would be really cool to be there, but alas I’m stuck here in Los Angeles sharing the experience with about 14000 people online (at peak viewing) and the camera operator doesn’t know how to focus the HD camera. There were 100% Technical Problems including not enough bandwidth and choppy streaming, MAJOR AUDIO PROBLEMS, loss of picture, loss of stream, terrible picture in picture that distracted from the burn, ZERO CREATIVITY!, and terrible camera technique. Learn how to FOCUS!
BEST MOMENT: At one point the picture cut to the guy operating the stream, a bearded hipster in coveralls, he looked up from the keyboard and saw that he was live on the web, made a great “surprise” face and then immediately switched the stream back. I hope someone got a screen shot of the guy’s video selfie, so we can post it!
Okay, so there you go. thanks to everyone who made the webcast happen, we really appreciate your effort, but unfortunately EPIC FAIL!
I watched the webcast and wasn’t the only person who thought the coverage sucked.
And here’s the big kicker: It took over an hour for The Man to burn. There were fireworks, and a great conflagration, and then another 45 minutes or more of “smoldering man”, “standing man” and “boring man” before the effigy actually collapsed.
A much better burn happened on Friday afternoon when they burned the “Embrace” art! There are great pictures and cool video online of the fire. Check it out!
So here are some more pics from this week:
RIGHT CLICK and OPEN IN NEW WINDOW to see larger pics!
READ PART ONE OF BURNING MAN 2014: https://joshwilltravel.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/burning-man-2014/
RETURN TO FRONTPAGE: http://www.joshwilltravel.wordpress.com (FOLLOW US!)
WATCH THE USTREAM WEBCAST: http://www.ustream.tv/burningman
Aerial footage of The Burn, Burning Man 2014 courtesy @echeng: http://vimeo.com/104852488
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