Results tagged “videos”

       

If you've ever pulled an all-nighter to finish an assignment, you can stop patting yourself on the back, slacker, because a group of fourth-year Ryerson students put all your cut-and-paste efforts to shame with the final project in their Radio and Television Arts degree. Third Floor Sessions is a series of ambitious music and multimedia events that is part live show for an in-house audience, part live internet broadcast, part HD multi-camera videos, and part fully produced MP3s of the live set that will, at its conclusion, span five months, hundreds of hours, four (maybe five) bands, and piles of sanity.

Who doesn't wish they knew Natalie Portman?

Remember when we pretty much scolded The Most Serene Republic for releasing a mostly mediocre record? And remember how we said that the most redeeming moment on ...And the Ever Expanding Universe was not only a standout on the album, but an absofreakinglutely excellent little slice of post-millenial indie rock? Well, here is the video. Finally. A good new reason to listen to this song nine times in a row.

A few nerdy dudes, two couches in an otherwise barren basement, and a video camera. With MuchMusic turned over to Leah Miller's minions and whomever wins the all-pervasive VJ Search 2.0, this simple format stands as a striking alternative to the glamorous folk with the obnoxiously loud in-studio audience on Queen West. But with the launch of AUXtv, with an impressive 285,000 viewers in its first week, the channel's new late-night spot—Talk Show Night at Juicebox Manor—may look more like the future of cool music programming for the coveted 18–34 set.

If you ever wanted to hear Har Mar Superstar try to pronounce "Degrassi Junior High," or listen to a techno remix of "O Canada," or reinforce your pre-existing feelings for Ellen Page, here's your chance: in the Crappy Holidays team video above, Justin Long, Har Mar Superstar, and Kathryn Aagesen (don't worry, we had to Google her too) prepare a Canadian Thanksgiving feast for—or is it with?—Ellen Page. And her eggo is preggo...with comedy!

This year was Busking for Change's second: the event, which sees big-name (and other) musicians playing on city streets collecting donations for War Child ,started last year, and was born a little earlier, after Our Lady Peace's Raine Maida busked for War Child all around downtown for twelve hours back in 2007.

Aliya-Jasmine Sovani is the anchor of MTV News, and, as an MTV News intern recently informed us in Eye, she listens to an "eclectic mix of Led Zeppelin, MGMT and Britney Spears." But did you know that she is also a woman, with breasts?

Breaking news: bands are bands because of their love for other bands. It's true. While it's often easy (and so fun and we're sure it results in opinions totally agreed upon all the time, by everyone) to pick out an artist's musical influences or identify a sound of an album, it might be more time and cost (and safety) effective to just let the band tell us of whom, exactly, they are not worthy.

James Redekop loves to cycle. Between 2004 and 2009, he estimates that he's cycled for six hundred and fifty hours and covered more than eight thousand kilometres. Using the GPS data from these rides, Redekop created the Etch A Sketch–style animation above (the red lines represent five minutes of his cycling and the red arrows indicate rides outside of Toronto). But turning his riding into a cool animation wasn't always his intention.

It may be at the other end of the budget spectrum as compared to our very first Sound Tracks–featured video, but the first video from Toronto's Diamond Rings is possibly even more intriguing. Just watch. Over and over and over.

What happens when your poor-listener girlfriend forgets that you're backpacking around Europe for two weeks with no access to your mobile phone or the internet?

Believe it or not, music videos still exist. Sound Tracks trolls the internet to find the best and the worst of local artists' new singles and the good, bad, or otherwise noteworthy visuals that accompany them.

On the second full day of the city workers' strike—June 23—Torontoist photographer Christopher Drost set up a camera rig in a window at the corner of Runnymede and Annette streets. Set to shoot one photo every ten minutes (and one every two minutes once the deals to end the strike were in place), the camera looked out towards the street and over two waste bins, one on the south and one on the north side of the street, snapping shots all day and all night for the whole rest of the strike.

Hamilton gets a bad rap, much of it based on the only view of the city most Torontonians get: overlooking the steel factories from the Skyway Bridge. While Toronto sometimes bills itself as a "City Within a Park," the moniker is actually more apt to our Steeltown neighbour to the west, which repeatedly kicks Toronto's ass when looking for ways to get back to nature. Seriously.

Are you suffering ill effects from the temporary disruption of your yearly prescription of trips to the Toronto Islands via the Sam McBride or the other ferries? Do you miss riding your bicycle from Hanlan’s Point to Ward’s Island, hearing the sound of children playing at Centreville, or other island-centric activities? True, you can hop on a water taxi or find your own means of crossing the harbour, but those methods of transport cannot handle the crowds the islands are accustomed to seeing at this time of year. Fear not if you are suffering withdrawal symptoms (or feel, as the blood-red headline in yesterday’s Sun shouted, that CUPE killed your summer)—cultural archivist Retrontario provides you with a minute’s glimpse of how the islands normally look at this time of year. This provincial ad first aired around 1980 and enticed visitors from all corners of the province to check out, in the narrator’s words, “a walk on the grass kind of place.”

Kanye West recently took a short break from infuriating everyone in the world and making sweet kicks for the kids to direct a video for Degrassi: The Next Generation alumni Drake (née Aubrey Graham). And Drake recently took a short break from regular summer vacation stuff such as being—along with Michael Jackson's death—among the most-trended Twitter topics this week, dating Rihanna (allegedly), signing to Lil' Wayne's record label, and having two songs in the Billboard Hot 100 to give the words "make your bra strap pop" from his single "Best I Ever Had" a whole new meaning. A whole new set of meanings, if you will. Big, bouncing, I-can-use-bad-stereotypes-if-I-pretend-they're-ironic-but-really-I-just-like-them Kanye West meanings.

On May 29, 2008, the Toronto Cyclists Union was launched. And much as he had done to kick off his earlier group, founder Dave Meslin called on his Torontopian indie-rock buddies to put on a show at the Bloor.

Have you ever had one of those days where you just want to shout at your coworkers to shut the hell up because you—unlike those gabby, inconsiderate fools—are actually trying to get some work done? Chances are the yearning has crossed your mind, before being promptly snuffed out by the fear of getting your walking papers in the process. That second part of the equation—the self-restraint—seems to have been overlooked today by one unfortunate CBC Newsworld translator who, during an announcement by Minister of Public Safety and MP for York-Simcoe Peter Van Loan, suddenly stopped providing French-to-English interpretation in order to yell "I can't hear! Fuck!" at one of her (by now probably former) colleagues.

Children's songs can be depressing, really. It seems strange to lull small children to sleep with songs about babies falling from treetops, or have them sing about ashes and then play dead. But one of the most memorable and haunting lullabies speaks to a more viable fear―one of long-lost loves and stolen sunshine. It's a song that inspired a fun-lovin' spinoff nearly a decade ago, and now, something more sentimental.

Word association time! When you think of the Cannes Film Festival, happening now on the sunny French Riviera, which of the following pops into your head: a) prestigious awards like the coveted Palme d'Or, b) celebrity-studded red-carpet events, or c) insightful online comments like "go suck a dick" and "LMFAO"? Granted, options "a" and "b" have the edge, but thanks to the National Film Board of Canada, YouTube flamers can have their piece of the film-fest pie too.

On any given Sunday, you may have seen—or may yet see—a chartered TTC streetcar gliding through your neighbourhood, with a local band on board and a small army filming them. As part of an ongoing project called the Transit Tapes, created by Orbyt Media and partially bankrolled by Astral Media (which means not everything they do with the TTC is a hilarious disaster!), artists are being thrown into the back of streetcars and filmed playing songs as the cars rumble around town.

If you've ever been watching television and immediately jumped to back up the DVR lest your eyes had deceived you (a certain Super Bowl halftime performance perhaps?), yesterday's broadcast of Sportsnet's Hockey Central may have been one of those moments.

We showed you photos of the Urban Repair Squad's latest intervention in a post on Tuesday—wherein we firmly insisted that the future health of the region's transportation infrastructure hinges on the presence of two twelve-foot-tall plywood figures—but today we have a video for you! The clip is a "bit of a first," the URS tells us, in that "It was made collectively."

At first it all seemed simple: Billy Bob Thornton, famous actor, goes on CBC's Q last Wednesday and is a total dick to the show's host, Jian Ghomeshi, for hinting at Thornton's Hollywood fame rather than his barely known band, the Boxmasters. And that's how it played out, for a while, landing on Perez Hilton, Gawker, the Star, BlogTO, the Canadian Press, Digg, etc., etc., etc.

If you live or work downtown, and a bunch of white foam people have been floating by you, tumbling into buildings and onto the ground and dissipating, or rising ever-higher up through the clouds, please don't freak out: they're just (another) marketing campaign.

It sounds like a hit, and now it looks like one, too: "Gimme Sympathy," one of the better tracks off of Metric's to-be-released Fantasies (you can still listen to the whole album streaming on the band's website), now has a great video to go with a song that may well be the one that finally pushes the band past the tipping point and into the mainstream—a track whose pre-chorus hook is, appropriately, "we're so close to something better left unknown."

Red Eye is a 2005 thriller directed by Wes Craven and starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. Enough people know this, and few would mistake it for a docudrama.

For five years now, a camera has been keeping close watch over the Art Gallery of Ontario's development on Dundas Street. And for a minute and a half, you can watch just some of what it caught flowing by in a spectacular high-resolution time-lapse video.

"Philosophers tend to focus on the 'why' of that question 'why are you here'—I wanna focus on how the here relates to the why, which is to say, why are you here, why are you some place in particular?"