David Shepherd & Rev. Samuels listen to King Silas

The new NBC drama Kings premiered last night, and it’s an intriguing show to me. The basic storyline is taken from the Bible’s account of the rise of David and the kings of Israel. Though many details have (understandably) been updated and changed, there is still a remarkable amount of content and a number of overt and subtle allusions to the Biblical accounts.

It will be very interesting to see how the series develops. I’m hoping there’s enough mainstream appeal to keep it going; my gut tells me it could be a fight for this to survive, what with all the Biblical notions and all. There are enough changes and updates to the story (including a couple big twists near the end of the 2-hour premiere) that should give it enough appeal to keep it around for a while, but given the current reticence of mainstream media towards most things Christian, we’ll have to wait and see.

If nothing else, I hope this show encourages people to dig into the Bible, especially the books of Samuel and Kings, to learn more about Samuel, David, Saul, Gilboa, Shiloh, and more. It was fascinating to see some of the allusions to the Biblical record, especially some of the more subtle ones. (For example, as the king prepares for the dedication of the new capital city, he’s informed that Rev. Samuels is running late, and decides to go ahead without him – a small incident in the show, but a direct allusion to 1 Samuel 13:8-14.)

If you saw it, I’d be interested in your thoughts too. If you missed it, you can see it on Hulu. Chime in!

Luckily there was room for us in the lounge (now that’s a bit surreal, sitting in the bar at Denny’s at 6am on a Tuesday) so we didn’t have to wait as long as others who aren’t at least 21 yet…

Of course, part of the conversation surrounds the question, why? Why would Denny’s presumably lose a ton of money? The logical answer was just to get people in the door. And that was part of it. As we were almost finished, the penny dropped. Coupon books for everyone offering 25% off a few things for the next few visits. The tagline on the front of the book: “8 great reasons to keep coming back”.

Clever. It’ll be interesting to see if it ends up working or not. They sure got a lot of free press about it. (Barring the SuperBowl ad, of course. Which as a whole, incidentally, were rather uninspired this year (except for Doritos crystal ball and the Angry Eyes) – one can tell the big investments in TVland are really starting to dwindle.) I shall keep a (non-angry) eye out to see any followup over the next few weeks.

‘Twas a good time, gentlemen, even if it was all a marketing ploy (isn’t everything?). And even if it was at 6am. I’ll forgive you for that. This time.

All video is essentially stop-motion animation. You take a series of still pictures and play them back in order. The faster you play them, the more lifelike they become, until at some point they become “moving pictures”. Play one picture every 5 seconds, you have a slide show. Play one picture every 1/2 second, it’s hard to concentrate on any of them. Play one picture every 1/10 of a second (or 10 images (aka “frames”) per second) and you get really jerky “video”. Play 22 or 23 frames per second, it’s approaching fast enough to look like video.

Get to 24 fps, and all of a sudden, you’re watching a movie. Very cool.

Go to 30 fps and you’ve got TV. (Ok geek nitpickers, I know that regular TV is 60 fields interlaced, not true progressive 30 fps. And that it’s really 59.94 and 29.97 for NTSC video. But now you’re just ruining the fun of the journey with technical details.)

So with all that in mind, I give you another YouTube video. This one is a fan-generated video for the band Modest Mouse. Someone took the provided footage, printed each frame out on paper, then took digital pictures of each frame and re-assembled them digitally, playing them back fast enough to re-create the original video. The rest of the footage looks like very fast stop-motion animation (which it is).

It’s an amazing video, with an amazing amount of work behind it. I’m still amazed it didn’t win the contest. It’s one of the coolest videos I’ve ever seen.

Here ’tis…

Hope you enjoyed it as much as I continue to!