Swamplot Archives by Tag: Videos

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Latest Entry in the International Houston Bicycle Video Competition

Video: Aubin Malassagne; music: Le Comte de Fourques

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Thursday, October 22, 2009

A Place for Houston, in the Greater Scheme of Things

O Houston: In the ephemeral hurly-burly of daily life it’s often too easy to forget just why we’re here.

Video: Sharad Patel

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Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Four New Houston Metro Rail Routes, As Seen from Above

Found: extrapolated video footage of Houston’s soon-to-be light-rail routes, as viewed from . . . a crop duster. Hang time for the 4 routes shown: 8 minutes and 8 seconds. Your travel time and elevation may vary.

MIA: The University Line.

How old are these renderings, anyway?

Video: Gino Martin

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Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Houston Bayou Ballet: Dance of the Upper Ship Channel

And now, a rare look at the Second Ward’s indigenous Ship Channel dance ceremony, performed along the gentle banks of Buffalo Bayou and celebrating the bountiful fall harvest of crushed concrete.

Video: Freneticore

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Friday, July 17, 2009

The Bats of West Bellfort

   

KHOU-TV has tape of the newest residents of the Idlewood Park Apartments at 11675 West Bellfort, just east of Kirkwood: A colony of bats that’s been living inside the walls of at least one building. An animal removal specialist from Trutech has installed a bat valve on a portion of the building’s second story. “They come out during feeding time which is between 5:30 a.m. and 6:15 a.m. They may have been in there for weeks, possibly months, but residents didn’t tell management until earlier this week. A resident shot video of the bats leaving for the morning and showed it to management. . . . ‘We will be here every day for two weeks to monitor what’s happening and to see what occurs with this. Because of the video, we saw there were a large number of bats, so this won’t be overnight where they are going to get out and fly out,’ said [Trutech's Derek] van Delft.” [11 News]

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

A Little Romance at Pak’s

And now, yet another Montrose convenience-store fantasy.

Video: Sharad Patel

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Garbage Playground: Developing Houston’s Blue Ridge Mountain

That gonna-be-170-ft.-high pile of trash going up across the street from Shadow Creek Ranch? Nothing a little smart landscaping can’t handle. Rice architecture grad student Lysle Oliveros’s proposal for the Blue Ridge Landfill makes for a rockin’ video. And Houston needs a mountain, anyway.

Video: Richie Gelles

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Friday, May 8, 2009

Houston Ship Channel Surfing, from the Turning Basin to Galveston Bay

Houston ship pilot Louis Vest assembled this video from more than 2000 still photos he took on a 3 1/2-hour journey on a 600-ft.-long Panamax tanker navigating the Houston Ship Channel:

The ship was only moving at 5-6 knots for the first half of the trip and up to 10 knots in the open areas away from the docks. The journey begins just below the Port of Houston turning basin at the end of the channel and continues down to Morgan’s Point at the head of Galveston Bay. We still had 32 miles to go to get out to the pilot station in the Gulf of Mexico at that point.

Vest fastened his Nikon D700 to an outside rail and set it to take a photo every 6 seconds.

What does this trip look like in the daytime? Vest made a similar video last year (high-res version).

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Dorm Room!!!

Wedding DJ, videographer, and UH student Sammy Butts loves his dorm room at Moody Towers:

3 years down, still a few to go… reserved the room again for next year. Just love the view of Downtown/Campus/Med. Center.

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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

All Quiet on the Upper Katy Corridor

“What I see on my bike rides,” writes 2-wheeled real-estate observer Lou Minatti, “is that construction has ground to a halt in Katy.” A few more louminating observations on the cycles of West Houston real estate:

The main upscale neighborhoods in the Houston metro area lie between downtown Houston and Katy, in the corridor south of I-10 and north of Westheimer/FM1093. Houston residents know what I am talking about. That narrow 30 mile x 8 mile corridor contains the trendy new “lofts” near downtown, expensive new condo towers in the Galleria area, River Oaks, Memorial, the Villages and Cinco Ranch. . . .

Me? I live north of I-10, the crappy side. It was a nice quiet place when we moved out here in 1995. It’s still an OK place, no real problems. But property values have been flat since 2000. The houses on this side of the freeway are between $100k-$150k. Here’s the thing: Long-time readers here have seen my videos and have seen the inventory and foreclosures from my bike tours. The new houses in these videos [both featured in this Swamplot post from last fall] have all been sold, and this is AFTER the shady lending was stopped. I did a video update three weeks ago [above] and didn’t post it on YouTube because there’s almost nothing on the market! In my subdivision of 900 houses there are two houses for sale and one foreclosure. That’s it.

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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Last Organic Outpost: The Motion Picture

Last year Transit Antenna, a 7-person “mobile living experiment,” camped out at Joe Nelson Icet’s Last Organic Outpost, did a little farming, and painted the giant “FARMART” mural at the top of the adjacent Comet rice mill. The group, which travels the country on a city bus converted to run on waste vegetable oil, documented its visit — which included a stint in the Art Car Parade — in a series of website posts.

And not long after the rambling group left its urban campground, Transit Antenna’s Seth Gadsden posted this half-hour documentary the group put together about goings-on at the Emile St. farm and its Fifth Ward neighborhood. An HD version is also available.

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Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Houston Elevators: An Inside View

Today’s as good a day as any to highlight the work of YouTube user hcp051000, aka Senior Airman Pan, who has compiled an impressive array of videos documenting the performance of some of this city’s finer vertical conveyances.

What’s it like to ride in these Houston elevators, really? Now you can find out — and shop for your favorite — from behind the comfort of your own computer screen.

Here’s S.A. Pan’s ride in the colorful cab of a Dover elevator at the Kemah Boardwalk Inn Hotel:

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Friday, April 25, 2008

More Evidence Parking Lots Are the New Main Street

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Are you an architectural renderer struggling to bring life to yet another vast Houston shopping-center parking lot in the drawings developers have commissioned you to create? This video should bring you inspiration! Go ahead and draw in that parade — that street festival — that touching moment of parking-lot excitement. You won’t be faking anything!

Today’s baton-twirling parking-lot-parade marshal was photographed by Jason of the Around Town Houston blog — as he waited in the drive-thru at Burger King on Westheimer, just east of Highway 6, just around the corner from the West Oaks Mall.

Practice makes perfect!

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Friday, March 28, 2008

Bring Life to Your Bathroom with This Advanced Staging Technique

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About one minute and 28 seconds into this video advertising a home that’s been on the market since late September of last year, we get a little . . . surprise.

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Monday, February 11, 2008

West Houston Real Estate and Roadkill: A Report from the Street

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Blogger and head Michael Pollack cheerleader Lou Minatti posts this street-level video report on the state of the real-estate market in Katy and West Houston, and includes the following odd claim:

I’ve never seen a stucco house in Houston before.

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