Monday 27 June 2016

Things I Made (4): Chris Ayer lyric video

Animated a simple lyric video for Chris Ayer's single a few months ago. Nothing much, but effective.


Monday 20 June 2016

Things I Made (3): Kytopia Session - TIAN

We record sessions at our office in collaboration with 3voor12Utrecht. This is one of our latest published sessions and we are working on many others. Still have to finish at least 12 tracks, but we all do this for fun so work comes first. Check all the sessions we make on our YouTube Channel and make sure to follow TIAN on Facebook for their latest updates.


Saturday 18 June 2016

We are live from Dreamhack

And we are live after a few days of setting up the livestreams at Dreamhack Summer 2016. I was mostly busy with the Smite and Paladins stream, but make sure to check all of them during the event.

HiRezTV - Twitch

Monday 13 June 2016

Things I Made (2): Teaser Studio Stekker 2015


Still planning on making a full documentary about Studio Stekker as I have three years of footage on my hard drive. This is a small teaser of the 2015 edition. A project that invites artists from all over the globe to collaborate on new music in Utrecht. The first quote is in Dutch, but the other ones are in English.


Sunday 12 June 2016

On our way to Dreamhack Summer 2016

On our way to Dreamhack Summer 2016 for some streaming thingies with Rauben, Marc and Hexiit. Early morning without coffee to finish some other things at the office and straight to the airport where we learned that the flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm was definitely canceled due to some strikes. Typing this in the train to our final destination as we had to take the train from Copenhagen. 

My first time at Dreamhack was in the winter of 2010 I think where I edited some videos while two others were streaming Counter-Strike 1.6. Then I was promoted to be the guy that fell asleep and flipped the bird to around 1000 viewers live. Well that was back then. I became a professional in not sleeping... 



I am working on a book about e-sports and thought it would be interesting to include a bit of this as I realised at Dreamhack Winter 2012 that e-sports was here to stay. Still a work in progress.

At this point I work as a freelance director, producer and editor for a variety of different projects that are not exclusively game related, but my interest of the whole e-sports culture still intrigues me. The moment I realised e-sports had became a full on business was at a Twitch afterparty at Dreamhack Winter 2012 when I ordered a beer on their tap, but we were already too late to the party. No more free booze for us kids we thought… Withdrawing some cash at the nearest  ATM and back to the party. Ordering and wanting to pay for our whiskeys Justin “TheGunrun” Ignacio shouted in his joyful manner: These guys are drinking on us the whole night! That was the year we did a production of League of Legends with a team of four people, had at some point almost 250.000 concurrent viewers, were DDoSed because one of us had their xfire open (I will not name and shame, but we have a shamepointsystem in place for crewmembers from then on and I probably take second place) and had a dedicated area for people that wanted to watch the League of Legends tournament. To clarify this was before Riot started their own LCS and if you do not know what I am talking about you will get it when you read the rest. I am not the gossip kind of person, but at some point I will throw in the occasional anecdote from my own experience.  

Will fly back on the 22nd of June and have no idea if there is time to write anything the coming week.


Dreamhack Winter 2010
Dreamhack Winter 2010



Tuesday 7 June 2016

Tools to scrape Instagram without any coding

Well I did the one list for Twitter a couple of days ago so this is a short list of tools you can use to extract data or pictures from Instagram. This one is a bit tricky. As of June 1 the API changed and some of the features may not work anymore. I quickly tried some of the tools I have laying around so I will probably add some more in the future.

odrive - Mac/Win/Lin - LINK
This used to be my go to tool when I needed photos with a certain hashtag, but now it is only possible to download the instgram pictures of your own and the once you liked. Still a nifty application as it can hook up loads of platforms to extract some data of it and can function as some kind of Dropbox.


4K Stogram - Mac/Win/Lin - LINK
Still works downloading Instagram photos with a certain hashtag or location (the last one did not work when I tried), but most importantly you do not have to log in to your own instagram account. Downloads all photos and videos to your pictures folder. There should be a handy way to also download the metadata, but have not dived too deep into this software.

Hotfolder Prints - Win - LINK
Hotfolders Prints comes with an Instagram Hashtag Monitor that takes some time (according to your settings) to download the photos with a certain hashtag. Most importantly the program also downloads the metadata of every picture into separate xml files. If you are handy with excel or other programs you can automatically import the data as a spreadsheet. The software is usable for a 15 day trial and is a bit pricy at 175 dollar.


Still have some other tools, but need to test them with the changed API, but the tools described can give you a start on scraping Instagram data/photos. 



Monday 6 June 2016

Things I made (1): This is not a showreel

Was asked to make some sort of showreel for a work thingy, but at this point I don't really feel the need for a showreel. So I compiled clips from a selection of projects I worked on the past 5 years into a minute video.




Music by Colin Benders. Check him out on http://www.twitch.tv/colinbenders

Friday 3 June 2016

My thoughts (1): Innovation


Lately I have been thinking about the use of the word innovation. Everyone is throwing it around like it is something that makes their product or thoughts more worth than it should be. Most of the time “innovation” only means “we made it cost effective to market it to average consumers” when people talk about technology. When reading a paper it often means we slapped around some other ideas, ignoring counter ideas, and formed our own opinion that is a breakthrough in science. I am not talking about quality research here before you start crying on your PhD. True innovation almost never reaches the general public or gets picked up decades after its invention when the cost are reduced or there is a use for the product. Most of the time we do not even think about an invention as innovating. Simply because it not reaches the popular discourse. Do you remember that special spoon to scrape out the last custard from a glass bottle. I was mind blown when my mother used it for the first time. True innovation in my opinion.


To be honest it has become the most insignificant word of the decade, just like the word authentic, that is often misused. Businesses, academics and researches use it to highlight a positive change, but what they only do is glorifying their own work. What change? What innovation? More sales? More papers that are published? Does it help you to gain something for yourself or does it help society? "Innovation" has become a marketing term, but should be used for real and new ideas.

"My thoughts" posts are just a rambling of words and often written in a short period of time without any research. 

Wednesday 1 June 2016

Tools to scrape Twitter without any coding

On request I relist some tools that can help anyone to extract data from Twitter without any knowledge of coding. Did I miss a tool? Let me know in the comments and I will add them.


TAGS6.0 - Any OS - LINK
One of my favorite tools to scrape tweets from an account or multiple keyword search. It is a Google Sheets add-on that can update hourly so you don’t have your computer running during the sessions. I have one sheet already scraping for over a year for one keyword related to one of the companies I sometimes work.





My Twitter Scraper - Windows - LINK
A free and open source Twitter Scraper built by Software Engineering student Jason Dixon with the capability to scrape Twitter realtime. It returns username, tweet, time and location in a CSV file. Make sure you have Java 1.8 installed and get your Twitter API OAuth tokens at https://apps.twitter.com by creating a new Twitter application.




NodeXL - Windows - LINK
While a lot of people seem to have trouble with NodeXL to scrape tweets I had some success with it some years ago. NodeXL is an extension for Excel 2007 or higher (I recommend to just use Excel 2007). We probably need to wait for a fix, but sure one to keep in the loop.  


Nayoun & Gephi - Windows - LINK
Not easy to install, but you can use Nayoun & Gephi (as I describe in my other post) to live visualize different aspects of Twitter. You can export the data to a csv file in Gephi.





IFTT - Any OS - LINK
Not for huge volumes of tweets, but you can use some recipes to send certain tweets (like your own or hashtags) to a Google Sheets. Not that almost all recipes are limited on the amount of tweets they can extract at a time.