On NBC

Pentatonix is going to win. It’s easy to see that right now. Barring a pair of horribly out-of-sync and out of tune performances in the same night, they’re your winners. Let’s break this down:

Afro-Blue: Confused group. Great at doing jazzy reimaginings, but often overthink it or get too complicated. They’re up and then they’re down over and over again. Some of this is the judges’ fault. In true Idol fashion, one week they tell the group to cut back on the jazz stuff, then the next they complain they’ve lost their jazz identity. Afro-Blue is confused.

Vocal Point: Some minor pitch issues, too distracted by school, not quite strong enough. What is their sound? They don’t have the lead man everyone will identify with. Nice guys, but not different enough from the pack to stand out as something that will win.

Urban Method: There’s still a problem with the women in the group. Even when the judges praise them — see the country song this week — they still sound a little insecure to me. And that weakness has plagued them throughout. They can’t rely on the rapper to carry them, but he’s their strongest part. He’s energetic, comfident, comfortable on stage, and one of those rare things — a rapper who can smile. I hate rap, but I enjoy watching him work.

Dartmouth Aires: Traditional college group. Will probably make it to Top 2 or 3. But they’re just too big, and their sound often gets lost in a chorus of voices. They have a couple of amazing leads to give them a character to hook onto and an identity (which is what doomed other groups like the Yellow Jackets), but the rest of the group is just sorta there. If you dropped four people, you probably wouldn’t hear the difference.

And, realistically, in setting up a tour in support of an album,bnobody wants to fund 15 band members for a road trip. Brian Setzer can only do it with his orchestra by going to Japan.

Pentatonix: The future of a capella. Small group makes them financially feasible to produce. They have a cohesive sound. They’re not a band slapped together for this show that hasn’t gelled. These guys are for real. Every person is strong and can handle the spotlight. They have the most charismatic, energetic, and creative vocal percussionist on the show. Their creativity is wild, and even when they pull it back – see country week, again – they make it a better song.

Pentatonix will win. They’re the group this show was created for, and the group Sony would be most happy to have.

At this point, if I had to guess, I’d say the eliminations will go in this order: Afro-Blue, Vocal Point, Urban Method, Dartmouth Aires. There’s lot of wiggle room in there, though. The judges are just looking for a reason to bounce groups at this point. They’re all great groups, but if they give the judges a reason to kick them off the show at the end of an episode, the judges will jump all over it. So, one
bad performance each week will doom a group.

And it’ll be a lot of fun to watch, because it’s some of the most creative singing television has ever seen, week after week.

When it’s all done, I plan on buying the first season of the show (which I’ve never seen) just to see more of Delilah’s Amy Lynn Whitcomb. She had a very poor choice of hairdo back then, but it’ll still be worth it. Please note that the safest Delilah ever was on this show were the weeks Whitcomb held the lead vocal. The second they let her sink into the background, the group had immediate issues.

“The Lonely” is a dark song, and the most likely to be used on “So You Think You Can Dance” this season. I haven’t checked her tour schedule for the summer, but I’d bet anything there’s a hole in it sometime in June or July for Perri to be there for a victory lap to perform a song from this album. The blatant reference to “Dancing slowly in an empty room” in this song makes it an easy choreographer target. (Though “Bang Bang Bang” would make a kick-butt Quick Step. ;-) I love the piano progressions in this song. It acts as both piano and percussion in the song, which is a nifty trick.

Guess what song they used on “So You Think You Can Dance?” this week? Perri is out on tour and not available to perform on the show, but I almost nailed that prediction…

* Cute, Motorola.  He’s reading “1984″ in an ad for the XOOM tablet, featuring the masses looking like Apple Zombies.  Cute.  Congrats on being the first Android 3 tablet, due out just in time for the second generation of Apple’s tablet.  Good luck with that  OK, so it’s actually looking like it wil be out a couple months sooner — but what about that $800 price tag?!?  Yikes!

* Very subtle of “Cowboys Vs. Aliens” to mention that it’s by “The Director of Iron Man” just before the shot of the energy cannon thing in the guy’s hand.

* I loved loved loved the “Captain America” trailer on just about every conceivable level.

* The Darth Vader commercial was as cute as all the pre-SuperBowl hype had it being.

* I’m glad I wasn’t watching the halftime show with my parents.  It would have been tough explaining how The Black-Eyed Peas qualify as music. But, hey, at least we know that it wasn’t all lip-synched for a change.  Who in their right mind would lay down a track that awful-sounding to lip-sync to?

* The half-time show is about spectacle, though, so good for them on that.  You can’t beat a “Tron” half-time show for that, can you?

* Congrats to Usher on not pulling a groin muscle with that last jump over Will.I.Am.

* GoDaddy isn’t even trying anymore, is it?  Their commercials are just teases for their website, which I have no interest in visiting afterwards.

* The SuperBowl is like the “Ed Sullivan Show,” isn’t it?  Who’s the big name guest star in the audience tonight, kids?

* Did that just make me sound 30 years older than I actually am?  Yes, I guess it does. I’ll shut up now.

* OK, one last one: Heard the Groupon ad was insensitive, horrible, and pure evil.  So I watched them on-line. I laughed out loud, mostly because I knew they were the kinds of ads that would piss off a certain type of people.  I am evil, and that’s OK with me.

Includes Kathy Kinney, Colin Mochrie, Greg Proops, Brad Sherwood, Ryan Stiles, all familiar from previous Carey improvs; Heather Anne Campbell, Chip Esten, Jonathan Mangum, Sean Masterson.

The official word: GSN (Game Show Network) and Drew Carey introduced today the line-up of talented actors and comedians who will join Carey in DREW CAREY’S IMPROV-A-GANZA, his new original, primetime daily strip show for GSN. Carey and his fellow cast members will create a lively, unpredictable and hilarious half-hour of improvised sketch comedy, complete with audience participation. DREW CAREY’S IMPROV-A-GANZA will premiere March 28, 2011 on GSN.

Me, I had a nearly-five year old model Canon XTi camera, one 50mm f/1.8 prime lens, and a 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens.

Uh oh.

But two things work in my favor with that: First, I had a great seat. We were off to the right side of the stage, eight rows off the floor, just about even with the front of the stage. So, basically, we were just over eye level with the Wiggles, and not that terribly far away. My 50mm lens would just squeeze in the entire stage. My 70-300mm lens would give me portraits of people close up, and full body images of performers at the far end of the stage.

Second, Lightroom has good noise reduction features. LR3 is amazing, from what I’ve seen, but I don’t have it yet. (Won’t work on my ancient PowerPC-chipped Mac.) But LR2 does the job just swell, thanks. Plus, I don’t plan on blowing any of these images up that large, so I don’t need them to be so clean.

I had to shoot the entire concert at ISOs 800 and 1600 (mostly the latter) but I got images that were surprisingly usable. Plus, it’s the Wiggles: They light up the whole stage. And I’m not trying to get pictures of the people in their seats where it’s dark. I’m happy to have them disappear.

Still, shutter speeds weren’t always super fast, so I had to do two things to compensate:

First, I shot in burst mode. For every picture I wanted, I’d take three, figuring one of them would come out sharp enough.

Second, I chose my moments. Having watched the Wiggles concerts before, I knew some of what I was in for. I knew the poses that specific Wiggles would hold. I knew where in the song the most movement would be and so should avoid those spots. So choosing more pictures of people closer to me (more open f/stop at closer distances on my telephoto zoom) at times when they’d strike a pose was a big help.

But I still had one LARGE lesson to learn, and it’s the one that hurt the most. I’ll discuss that on Monday. (CLIFFHANGER!)

The Wiggles ride in on their Big Red Car

Do not watch their television show.
 
It’s that simple.  From the conversations I’ve had with people who don’t like the Wiggles, the one thing I notice about them is that they had to sit through endless loops of the TV series, which is a cheap green screen affair that’s soul-crushing to adults.  Kids eat it up, but adults want to grind their teeth.
 
Here’s the trick: Ignore the TV show and buy the two concert movies.  Just enjoy them for the music and the theatrics of the live stage.
 
Yeah, that’s right: The Wiggles are a Live Band, not an Album Band.
 
Coming soon: Lots of photography lessons learned from photographing a Wiggles concert.

Wiggles Big Big Show Concert DVD

So damned primitive, it was. Now, my 46″ widescreen television is too small for me, but I know there comes a point where one has to make a choice between art and finance. You can only afford so much. . .

* My Commodore 64 monitor was used at one point as a TV, also. I had an older VCR hooked into it. I remember pausing through “Tiny Toons” learning to draw from that.

* That first DVD player didn’t last long. Bought a standalone DVD player that Christmas for $199, I think. Maybe $299? Tough to recall. Looked much better on the 27 inch TV screen in the living room, complete with surround sound system that was a repurposed Cambridge Soundworks system sold normally for computer games, I guess. It wasn’t until 2001 that I bought a new Sony Trinitron TV that did anamorphic widescreen on a 4:3 CRT, and looked stunning. “Stunning” was by the standards of the time. Widescreen TVs were available at that point, but not yet practical. There wasn’t much at all on TV in 16:9 format, and HD was still years away.

* We went through a few VCRs in my family from the time we got our first (I’m guessing 1985). What amazes me, in retrospect, was the different ways those VCRs marked time. Most of them measured time in what we called “blocks.” Our first had a physical counter — three scroll wheels that spun in time with the VHS tape. You could push a button to reset the counter to 0. So you knew the next episode of “Tiny Toons” started 100 blocks later.

Problem is, the next VCR had a new measuring scheme, and so your “blocks” were useless.

* Perhaps the greatest limitation of the VCR was that you couldn’t watching something back from the beginning while you were taping it. Today, that’s the cornerstone of my DVR habit, which has prevented me from watching TV commercials for the past decade.

* I got my first TiVo as a Christmas present in 2000, I believe it was. I quickly paid for the lifetime subscription. My parents are still using that unit. It’s made that $300 back and then some. I later upgraded to the Humax TiVo that included a DVD burner. Didn’t get as much use out of that DVD burner as I thought I might, but it came in handy a few times. Thankfully, I paid month to month on it, so I didn’t lose money on the deal.

* The TV I grew up watching was on the floor, built into a piece of wooden furniture, on top of which sat the living room’s main lamp light and, of course, the cable box. We had several cable boxes, from ones that had thirteen switches across to ones that you slid a pointer along the line of channels to change stations. We were years away from a remote.

And the TV had a physical issue in it where the screen would suddenly and randomly get very dark. The brightness just dropped right off the scale. A simple slap to the side of the TV (often during “Cheers,” it seemed) did the trick to brighten it back up.

* I remember MTV when it still had music, Nickelodeon when it ran black and white sit-comes in the middle of the afternoon (”My Three Sons,” “Mr. Ed,” et. al.), and HBO when it had “Fraggle Rock.” A cornerstone of my Sunday mornings was watching Hanna Barbera cartoons of the 70s on USA Network. Remember when cable TV didn’t really go past channel 27? Or 36?

Sorry, just had to write that all down. I was feeling old today.

I can give you countless example of what happens, but here’s the formula:

Season One: Your introduction to a person or people in an unusual circumstance doing cool things that you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to. These episodes are very documentary in style. They stand back and let you view the action from a relatively close proximity. Their characters come out through normal actions. It’s fun.

Season Two: The producers realize that they have a hit, and that’s why they have a season two. So everything must be BIGGER and BETTER. So the producers stop the documentary nature of the series and start forcing the “stars” of the show into fish-out-of-water situations. Their reactions — whether of fright or of excitement — are captured and teased at every commercial break.

Suddenly, the situations are no longer real. The reactions are, but the people in the reality show would never be there without the reality show.

Season Three: Everything falls apart completely, as the “stars” of the reality show start to think of themselves as “stars.” They’ve seen their press. They’ve watched their episodes. They know the drill. Now, they overact and overemote. Everything is life-and-death. The once documentary nature of the show has drifted into complete dramedy, only missing a script by the barest of Hollywood technicalities.

See “Jon and Kate” for the prime example. We went from being amazed at their grocery gbills to watching them appear on Oprah to watching the paparazzi stalk them as Kate discusses her life as a celebrity to the camera. See “Cake Boss,” which went from making cakes for local people and small organizations to making cakes for the Army AND VISITING THE BASE TO FIRE WEAPONS along the way. See “The Real World,” which hasn’t been the same since the cast grew to expect to have jobs or to have their one big vacation or to wonder who they should kick out of the house for maximum drama. See “Survivor,” where players learned to play the game from previous seasons and now play the game more than the people. (This is almost forgivable. It is, ultimately, a game show. But, still, you can see the producers working harder and harder to come up with outrageous stunts, crazier personalities, and new twists in the game play.) See “Big Brother,” while you’re at it.

The competitive shows suffer from this to a slightly lesser degree, but it still holds. Look at “Dancing With The Stars” or even “So You Think You Can Dance.” SYTYCD has ditched its old stage for an overlarge glitzy neon-fest, while the judges rip the dancers apart whenever they fail to deliver a five star performance. It’s almost like nothing is good enough for them. Look at “DWTS” where they add bigger casts (still fitting in the same molds — football star? Old man? Olympic athlete? etc.) and push them even harder to the point where a new one is injured every week. They’re not just doing one dance every week now. They often do two, or an extra group number, or a faster Quick Step, etc.

Here’s what the second season of “Cake Boss” has taught me: Enjoy the first season of these reality shows. Then move on, because they’ll never be the same again

If you believe it, it’s hilarious. I giggled out loud. What do you think? Are you more cynical than I?

Ewoks Go Nuts

The moonwalking part had me in tears.

Will Chef Ramsay ever again hire someone whose hair would pass a health inspection?

Will Chef Ramsay ever pick the right winner?

Did they cut the budget this year?  Is that why the final two only got one hour of two?  Is that why they didn’t get to decorate their restaurant and bring in their family members to help?  Honestly, I didn’t miss that part too much.  It always seemed like false drama to me when something would go wrong during construction just at the end of the halfway point.

And will the producers ever have the guts to invite in contestants for their cooking abilities rather than their abilities to fit into a two dimensional caricature/archetype that they can exploit for drama?

Despite all of that, I can’t wait for next season.  Which prompts the final question:

When will Chef Ramsay run out of restaurants to staff?