They've finally come

November 22, 2005 5:35 PM

Alive in Joburg. Large Quicktime via Protein
posted by atom128 (20 comments total)

Whoah.
posted by Freen at 6:43 PM on November 22, 2005

Very interesting ! Really an out of ordinary conceptual framing and very well done video, winning combo.
posted by elpapacito at 6:44 PM on November 22, 2005

Very cool.... This is what War of the Worlds should have been!
posted by Robot Johnny at 6:47 PM on November 22, 2005

I am on hour two loading from DSL.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:39 PM on November 22, 2005

I think they're getting slammed. The whole thing loaded in about 10 minutes when I first linked it.
posted by atom128 at 8:43 PM on November 22, 2005

Keep at it. It's worth it.
posted by Freen at 8:49 PM on November 22, 2005

It really does look like it should be a bigger movie; maybe that's what he's going for.

Also, I love it when they do CGI on shaky, grainy video; it really makes it look more believable. The shot of the guy in the helicopter over hundreds of power cords snaking into the ground is awesome.
posted by fungible at 9:38 PM on November 22, 2005

Reminds me of this vid. Similar look'n'feel, and robots in SA. Same ppl who did it?
posted by slater at 9:55 PM on November 22, 2005

Yes, same people. They also did the Transformer Citroen Ad.
posted by atom128 at 10:01 PM on November 22, 2005

Ratel = Honey badger. Cute name. Angry animal. The police even named their APC after them.
posted by PenDevil at 11:23 PM on November 22, 2005

Also I'd just like to shout out to Telkom for their shitty internet services, basically meaning I will probably never be able to view this video.
posted by PenDevil at 11:26 PM on November 22, 2005

I noticed that it was almost exclusively the Blacks in that clip who were subtitled, though they were no harder to understand than the whites.

It has parallels with Apartheid, but quite a few differences. For one, the the South African people were there prior to the white incursion, despite claims by those Europeans that the darker-skinned residents had "only just arrived themselves." I believe it was the Venda people, among others, who had their artifacts stolen, hidden, and denied by the Devil Cecil Rhodes and collegues. Several of their artifacts to this day are kept in obscurity at South African universities. Secondly, the Blacks in South Africa were not "taking" resources; those resources were their own to begin with. Though I suppose this is just a corollary of my first point.

Still, I enjoy the quality of the visual presentation. Thank you for sharing.
posted by Kwanzaar at 5:01 AM on November 23, 2005

My browser crashed while it was downloading, and now I get a 404 message on the actual video file. Any one have a mirror?
posted by illovich at 7:14 AM on November 23, 2005

same here, 404. my quicktime crashed the last time i tried to d/l this, though i'm sure it's unrelated. itching to see the whole thing!
posted by moonbird at 7:28 AM on November 23, 2005

damn... anybody save it?
posted by slater at 8:48 AM on November 23, 2005

my home comp is downloading now. er, trying to. if i get it, i'll host-n-post or make a torrent.
posted by moonbird at 9:14 AM on November 23, 2005

I've got it....all 80MB of it saved (it took 3 hours to get on my fiber line) so if anyone has a tracker I can point a torrent to I would gladly seed :)
posted by gren at 12:12 PM on November 23, 2005

Ahh hell, for now, http://earthgov.org/video/Alive_in_Joburg_compr480.mov for 100GB of xfer or so...if anyone does have a torrent tracker, I'd be happy to move this.
posted by gren at 12:24 PM on November 23, 2005

I was expecting something a little meatier. This has the feel of trailer. Some nice special effects though. If anyone is still here and is having problems seeing it, I've reduced its size (13.5Mb) and for one week or 25 downloads it's available here.
posted by tellurian at 3:05 PM on November 23, 2005

It's at archive.org now.
posted by atom128 at 5:38 PM on November 23, 2005