Jakob Montrasio’s Net.

Shanghai Sideways.

// May 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // China, Videography

Shanghai Sideways: On a Changjiang Motor Bike! from MK Media Productions on Vimeo.

www.shanghaisideways.com

Discover Shanghai from a sideways look, seated in the side-car of a classic motorbike.

Enjoy an incredible cruise through the city and avoid traffic jams. We make you feel the pulse of this fast changing city and take you from modern Shanghais futuristic look to the heart of the 1920s French Concession. Tours follow a ready-made route or tailor-made to suit your interest.

With Shanghai Sideways, you enjoy the company of a foreign guide and driver who is a long term Shanghai resident. Although our classic motorbikes are antics, they all are perfectly maintained and monitored to guarantee your comfort and safety.

Version 0.3.

Shot with a Sony Cinealta PMW EX1 and edited in After Effects and Final Cut Pro.

John Rabe: Some photos from the shoot.

// April 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // China, Photography, Shanghai

In October 2007, I had the chance to join the JOHN RABE movie team in Shanghai and took it immediately. What followed were almost 4 months full of excitement, pain and so much learning and experience. It was the best time of my life. And now, the movie finally started running in german cinemas. It will probably also start running in China on April 29th. I can’t wait to see it.

I started working in the VFX department under the command of Joachim Grüninger. He taught me an insane amount of things and gave me many chances to learn how shooting a movie works, what the rules on a set are, and, and, and… Thank you so much, Jo!

The rest of the crew were super nice people, too… The director Florian Gallenberger was very nice and calm, the assistant directors were very nice, too, and the rest of the international crew also. We had germans, french, chinese and japanese working in the team. And our 2nd unit director was from India, how cool is that. I love it when so many cultures work together.

Now that the movie has opened and many people will hopefully go and see it, I think it’s time to publish all the photos that I took during the shooting of the movie. Some were censored, due to contracts and stuff, but most of them are online now. I hope you enjoy them and the look behind the scenes that they offer.

We shot the movie in Shanghai, Wuxi, Baixian, some photos in Wenzhou… My wife and I were also working as Extras in some scenes - in one scene with John Rabe himself, played by Ulrich Tukur, and in another I was sitting right next to Steve Buscemi, who plays an doctor in the movie. I have no idea if they made it into the movie, though - I only now that my name should be listed in the credits at the end of the movie. Yay!

If you have seen the movie, please leave a little comment about it and how you liked it. Thanks.

Now enjoy the photos sets:

New HDR’s.

// August 7th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // China, Photography, Shanghai

It’s been a long time since I last posted some of my images here. I’m trying to upload at least 5 new works every week to flickr, but recently I’ve fallen a bit behind - there’s much business stuff going on at the moment and I’ve to take care of a visiting family member, too.

But I managed to squeeze in some time here and there for some new pics in the last weeks and here they are! Enjoy.

This is the new CCTV building in Beijing. It was supposed to be finished before the Olympics but that didn’t work out too well. So now they try to finish it by 2009, as far as I know.

Here are some shots that I took in Parma, while visiting my sister. They are some months old, but I never got around until recently to edit the hell out of them. Parma is a nice little city, these were taken downtown. The food there, especially the bacon and cheese, are uber delicious.

My sister got a new dog just two weeks before we arrived… She’s such a cutie, so here are three images from Agatha.

Last picture from Europe: Switzerland. We went by train from Heidelberg to Basel, then from there to the Como lake to visit my grandparents for a couple of days. Then we went from Como to Parma and stayed at my sisters for a night. Then we went by train from Parma to Bologna, then from there back north to Levico. Boy, that was a trip, and the horrible italian railway didn’t make it any better.

Fun fact: My wife got into Switzerland illegally. When changing trains at Basel, we got off at the wrong Basel station - Basel Bf, not Basel SBB - and had to enter the swiss Basel by kind of a subway. There was not passport control, of course… But when we entered Italy and they checked my wife’s passport, they were a bit pissed and told us, that they have the option to send us back now. Gladly they didn’t do it, but we decided to travel back to Germany with a train via Austria, which really is in the european union. Damn Switzerland!

And now some China images. Shanghai, of course. It’s been a really, really hot summer so far, and working without air conditioning is not possible at all. We even run the A/C at night to get a good sleep. I wonder how people without air condition survive this heat.

I shot above image out of a window from the 30th floor in our office building. I got the sweet Nikkor 80 - 200 millimeter lens from my grandmother, who now shoots with Canon. It’s a really good, sharp lens. Shanghaiist featured this image with the caption “The Concrete Jungle” when I released it on Yahoo’s flickr.

The full moon was really bright some days ago, I tried to capture that with a long exposure.

I titled this image “We Are The Night” because I like The Chemical Brothers’ music a lot and because XuHui really is a night-active place.

Believe it or not, this is what you see at night when you look out of my toilet window. It rocks to live in the 18th floor.

The last picture of today. I’ll just quote what I wrote on flickr for this image:

We were looking for a new apartment some months ago, and one apartment these dumbasses from a housing agency introduced to us was directly next to a future Expo site, where lots of people were bringing trash away. Needless to say, we did not want to live next to a construction site and looked for a new apartment agent directly afterwards.

And that’s it for today this week. Hope you enjoyed my newest pieces!

And let me tease you a bit: Big news coming soon. Really big. Wait for it…

Crazy Contest.

// March 11th, 2008 // No Comments » // Internet

The website winning the web is holding a contest for webmasters who are really in need for some free advertising: Over 6.000 dollars worth of various internet and advertising related stuff can be won. The biggest prices are $650 Cash from Azoogle Ads, $500 Cash from PepperJam Network and $250 Cash from NeverblueAds. If you win one of these prices, some visitors are for sure yours!

All you need to do is subscribe to a E-Mail newsletter and add a feed to your newsreader. There are also some other ways to gain more chances to win - that is basically why I am writing about this contest! I could really need some advertising, you know… Mac Pro’s don’t come for free.

Anyway, if you want to be one of the at least 39 winners that will be drawn on March 31, then better get started now!

BlogBackupr: Awesome!

// March 3rd, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Internet

There’s a new web 2.0 service in town: BlogBackupr! It’s, as the name tells, a blog backup service. For free, daily backups!

Currently, WordPress as well as Blogger.com are supported. All you need to do is register, put in the address of you blog and then give it the admin credentials, so it can perform backups. It’s still in the beta phase, and that has a good reason: Only text is backed up, not the theme, the plugins et cetera. But still, there are never enough backups, are there?

After registering, this is the first thing you see after logging in:

So the system understands what CMS you’re on and you can easily add more than one blog.

If you click on export, you can download the Backup as a WP RSS, normal RSS, Text or HTML file. Nice!

You can also view the backup posts:

All in all, BlogBackupr is a great service. It’s great that it saves all posts, but I guess in the future, when it will be able to do even more (backup templates, wp-content, plugins, comments, …), I would even be willing to pay for it.

Backups are always necessary (I got 3 different plugins backing up this blog) and the more, the better!

So don’t waste any more time and back up your blog now!

iPhone Wallpaper: My Contribution.

// February 28th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Photography, Technology

I took personal favorites out of my 200 most popular flickr pictures and converted them into the iPhone accepted wallpaper size of 320 to 480 pixels.

Feel free to modify them or whatever, they are all with a creative commons license.

Enjoy these free iPhone wallpapers:

That’s it for now. If I can ever afford an iPhone myself, I’ll probably make more.

I can’t even test them… *cry*

John Rabe - Little Report, With Video!

// February 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // China, Shanghai, Videography

When Ben commented to my last post about the pictures from the movie John Rabe, I just headed over to YouTube to see if anything had been released there - officially or not. Sadly, I found no trailer - but a little report! DW, Deutsche Welle, was on the set reporting and seemed to have been allowed to capture some stuff with their cameras.

Now the bad side: The video is almost half an hour long and over 60 megabyte big.

But I watched through it and the John Rabe part is right at the beginning! So just watch it until the report of John Rabe is finished, the rest has nothing to with it anymore.

Here we go:

CSS Text Shadow added.

// February 26th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Internet, Technology

I tweaked around the blog some more and decided to add a nice text-shadow to the headlines. If you’re using a 3rd-world browser, you probably wont see it though, it’s a Safari only supported CSS thing.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been using FireFox myself for quite some years, hell, we even organized a release party for it back in, uhm, 2003? for the very first release in Heidelberg, Germany.

But when digital friend Ben introduced me the Safari plugin Saft, I tried it out and sticked with it, never looking back. Safari & Saft together kick the Fox really in the nuts. It has so many features, check it out here. It costs near to nothing for all the brilliant features offered and is a must-have for serious bloggers and surfers.

The thing is that Safari makes websites look so much better by using some kind of anti-aliasing on the text. If you surf a lot and read a lot it’s so much more comfortable.

Anyway, back to the CSS. So how do you use the CSS declaration in your style sheet?

Here are some examples.

You can only read this with Safari.

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #000 0px 0px 3px; color:#fff;.

How about a red shadow?

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #f00 2px 2px 2px;.

Elegant headline shadow needed?

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #aaa 1px 1px 1px;.

Here’s some shadow above the text…

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #666 0px -5px 1px;.

Blue shadow far off? No problem!

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #00f 15px 15px 3px;.

Last example: Extreme blurred shadow!

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #6f0 3px 3px 5px;.

Nice, right?

It’s quite easy to apply, generally you have four values to set up your shadow:

1. First you set the color of the shadow. #f00 for red, #0f0 for green and so on. Any hex color is possible.

2. Now you set the horizontal space to the text (the x-axis), 5 pixels for example (5px). Can be any number, I suggest using px here.

3. Then the vertical space relative to the text (the y-axis), 3 pixels for example (3px).

4. The last setting is the amount of blur that the shadow should have. A value of 0px gives the shadow no blur at all while any setting over 5px makes the shadow completely unreadable. I suggest a setting between 1px and 3px.

Oh, and Safari is also available for Windows now, if you want to give it a try… Download the beta here!

As you can see (if you use Safari), this is quite a cool declaration and quite useful for styling headlines and such without having to use images. If only other browsers would support it, too…

Let’s see what the future brings!

Spottt: Free Link Exchange.

// February 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Internet

Regular visitors don’t only know that I’m playing around a lot with the themes and CSS of this blog, they also probably spottted the new ad I’m running on the sidebar.

It’s a new service called “Spottt” (yes, three t’s) by the guys from AdBrite.

Let’s give it a try! They will, after they reviewed my blog, put ads from other blogs there. In return, my ad will show up on other blogs. It’s a bit like that BlogRush widget that is in my sidebar, too. Only smaller and hopefully with cool and funny advertisements.

In a couple of days we will see what kind of impact this has - I’ll keep an eye on my Google Analytics statistics to see how many new visitors it brings.

Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem Trailer!

// August 26th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Trailer, Videography

So much gore! So much violence! So many aliens! So many people! The army! Oh! My! God!

We finally get what we’ve been waiting for.