I like things that are small. I like things that are round. I like to get close. Everything posted here are (C) The Author, obviously, and may not be reproduced without permission.
Whuh, where are we going?! Look out Mr. Hoomin, there's a tree ahead!
Lookie a wee little frogsy! It must have come out of hiding today maybe. Found it sitting on the asphalt looking all forlorn and lost right outside my apartment complex. Didn't want it to get stepped on or bitten by a dog maybe (or a cat for that matter; tons of 'em running around loose) or anything like that, so I coaxed it up into my glove and carried it off to safety. ...Or a nearby damp place with leaves and grass and shrubberies and stuff, where it seemed more safe than asphalt, anyway!
It clung on for dear life it felt like (those little buggers are stronger than they look!), but when time came for it to get off and it didn't want to, I realized why. It was warm in my hand! Lol. It wanted to stay. Sadly, I can't keep a pet frog at home, so I had to evict it - although gently. If my life had been a web comic, the frog would have come to live with me, and would sit nearby as I tap away on my computer and offer somewhat acerbic worldly advice on subjects which I, an actual human being, would be oblivious to. Mainly women, traditionally, but also socializing in general.
Stack of home-made Swedish pancakes...after I ate about half of them. Oops! :D
Recipe (double for LOTS of pancaeks):
5 dl whole milk
2 dl high-protein wheat flour
3 free-range chikkin eggs
Butter or margarine for frying in.
Pour milk into a mixer for best results. Start mixing on low speed while adding the flour and eggs. Mix vigorously, then let the batter sit and rest for 15 minutes or so.
Heat a cast-iron skillet of about 20-25cm diameter to medium-high to fairly high heat, together with some cooking fat. When the fat stops bubbling pour in a dose of batter enough to cover the bottom of the skillet with a thin layer. When the batter has solidified and the pancake has turned a nice golden color on the underside, carefully turn it over and cook some more until all done. Repeat, until you've run out of batter.
Note about cooking temperature: butter gives a great taste, but is more sensitive to high temperatures, take care you don't overheat the fat inbetween pancakes. A high-quality margarine may be easier to cook with, and might hold off that coronary infarction a while longer... :)
Enjoy these pancakes hot, flavor with anything you like and roll up into a roll, then cut into nice easily edible lengths. Examples: sprinkle sugar (and also possibly cinnamon) on top, sugar mixed with lemon juice, or spread on a thin layer of jam; raspberry is a favorite of mine, nutella... The variations are pretty much endless.
Had my birthday on valentine's day, so I went and bought the Sonos Playbar and Sub as a present for myself on that friday (and then went and had a really nice b.day lunch with my dad before moving his car so we could actually collect the bulky and rather heavy cardboard boxes with the speakers from the shop and drive it all home to my place.
Please click through to read the rest of the review and see some more crummy iPhone pictures of the sound system! :)
INTRODUCTION AND UNPACKAGING:
Having had the speakers for a little while now I felt I needed actual rear speakers, so I went out on tuesday this week and purchased a set of Play:1 satellites, which improved the sound field considerably, especially when listening to music at the computer where all sound previously went into my right ear, but with the rear speakers playing into my other ear it balances up the listening experience. It's not perfect - the Playbar still receives the main focus - understandable, as you're meant to face it - but it's better now. Also, surround sound while watching movies is improved, of course.
The hardware quality is top notch, as one might expect from the purchase price. All these Sonos devices are packaged in an Apple-like manner. The Playbar and Sub came in their own dedicated protective shipping cardboard boxes made out of tough, brown corrugated paper enclosing the mostly black packaging cardboard box inside, which in turn was decorated with stylish swirly pattern highlights and text and images to announce the contents. The Play:1 speakers were too small to warrant their own transport containers.
Upon opening the Sub and Playbar packaging up, you find the speaker units swaddled in protective non-woven fabric and suspended in blocks of spongy black foam thermopolymer. The Play:1 units are also lovingly placed in bags of the same non-woven cloth and held firmly top and bottom by very stiff and strong, custom-shaped "egg carton"-style paper fiber caps. "Green" points for not using foam plastic and instead going the recycleable route! An additional paper holder in the bottom of the Play:1 container encloses the included cables.
For a connisseur of fine product packaging, it's a real delight unpacking all of these units. One feels appreciation for the care taken by Sonos when designing these speakers and the precision with which they are manufactured and assembled, and the company shows pride in its creations by extending this care even into the way the speakers are packaged.
SONOS PLAYBAR:
The Playbar's overall appearance is black synthetic cloth, surrounding a fiberglass reinforced polymer chassis. It's capped either end with black metal speaker grilles and grey-anodized aluminium inserts around those grilles and shaped strips of similarly grey-anodized aluminium along the length of the bar, helping with heat dissipation from the electronics inside. The right-hand side of the Playbar (when sitting horizontally) has three small buttons and a multicolor LED (which is normally white - or off if disabled). There is a mute button as well as a volume up/down rocker, and these double as synching buttons when pairing the Playbar with a Controller app on your computer, tablet or smartphone. There's IR receivers for your TV remote, as well as an IR beamer so that your TV does not miss any button presses if you aim at the playbar. Inside the Playbar sits a whopping SIX mid-range drivers, THREE tweeters and accompanying NINE custom-tuned Class-D amps. Handling all this hardware is an 800MHz PowerPC CPU which runs DSP software to perform frequency filtering, simulating surround sound and so on. Furthermore, all internal cables are fuzzy-tape-wrapped, joints are sealed and cable ports are grommeted, all to reduce chance of unwanted noise from vibrations and air leakage. The Playbar rests its five-and-a-half-ish kilos of weight on a set of oval silicone feet placed at either end.
Trivia: the Sonos logo on the Playbar is not only palindromically (not sure an actual word!) symmetrical - thus reading the same both forwards and backwards - but also vertically as well, meaning it looks correct even when turning the Playbar "upside down" for mounting on a wall underneath your TV. From what I can tell this has been the case since forever, even before the company actually had a reversible product in its inventory. Weird case of forward-thinking or just coincidence? I've no idea.
There's four connector ports on the Playbar; power, gigabit ethernet in and out (although both connectors are functionally the same so it doesn't matter which one you pick), as well as optical audio in. I hooked up my Playstation 4 to the other ethernet port as my router only has three ports and I need two for my PCs; this setup also helps reduce cable clutter, and it works just fine. I notice no performance degradation at all.
Interesting detail: when the Playbar sits horizontally in front of a TV, there's a space underneath it at the front which precisely fits a Wii (U) sensor bar, with enough margin to allow the sensor bar power cable to pass through underneath the Playbar. I can't help but think that this is entirely deliberate, and that some people at Sonos must be fairly big Nintendo fans...! :D
Included with the Playbar is a flat network cable, a simple, thin-gauge single-strand optical TOSLINK cable (which users should take care not to kink I can imagine lest it be ruined) and a power cord. All included cables are black in color. I use my own optical Tech+Link optical cable instead which has worked well for me for many years now, as well as my own shielded ethernet cables as I like my cables matching whenever possible (yes, even network cables... I'm crazy, I know.)
SONOS SUB:
Visual appearance-wise, the Sub is almost entirely featureless. There's no company logo visible at all on the one side of the Sub when it stands upright, so like much of Apple's stuff it relies largely on its inherent design language to convey who made it and what it is (although I think most people would probably never be able to guess it's a bass speaker if they'd never seen this thing before in their lives.) I chose the high gloss piano black Sub (it's also available in matte black) which means scratches are inevitable if diligent care is not taken, but I hope I'll manage not to wreck it. Seeing as it's made of a high-density polymer resin (rather than say, tungsten carbide, corundum or similar scratch-resistant materials), using it as an ad-hoc shelf for things like drinking glasses, gaming controllers and TV remotes is inadvisable to say the least...
Construction-wise it is symmetrical with two large drivers (each with its own dedicated, custom-tuned Class-D amp) facing each other inside the enclosure, radiating into a large, dark-grey anodized aluminium-framed central port. Two curved internal passive horns also vent into this same space. One single multicolor LED and button (which you use for synching purposes) adorns one side of the sub, and that's it. Undeneath are sockets for power and ethernet, but if you have a Playbar or other Sonos device that can act as an access point for its proprietary wifi network you don't need to attach an ethernet cable to it. I run it wirelessly and there is no noticeable latency or interruptions in either streaming music playback, gaming or watching movies from what I have noticed. Underneath the Sub are also four soft silicone feet to hold the unit's rather substantial sixteen kilos of weight.
If the Playbar is a solid piece of audio engineering then the Sub is doubly so. It is the very definition of solid! It is simply incredibly well designed and put-together.
Fascinatingly worrysome tidbit: the Sub is - from what I can tell anyway - hermetically sealed, with no screw holes anywhere. Thus, should anything ever break inside it you CAN'T fix it. At all. Not without busting the casing open with a hammer and thus ruining the device forever. Hopefully won't come to that, not for a good long while I hope!
SONOS PLAY:1
The Play:1 speakers are really, really sweet I have to say. I just love their understated, simple yet elegant design. There's something vaguely art deco about them in a way I think, which is really attractive in my opinion. They've got awesome build quality as well and feel great to the touch, and have substantial heft to them compared to their small size at close to two kilos apiece, which also adds to the feeling of quality. Construction materials are high-density polymer resin for the body, and aluminium metal for the surrounding speaker grille enclosure which reaches all around the unit without interruption or joints. Behind the grille sits a single aluminium cone mid-range driver and a titanium dome tweeter, each driven by their own dedicated custom-tuned Class-D amp. Up on the speakers' largely flat tops there is one multicolor LED and set of buttons similar to the Playbar; a single play/pause/skip button (as opposed to mute) and a volume rocker, and underneath one finds a ring of soft grey silicone with four feet protruding, as well as the power cable socket. As I chose black speakers, the speaker cables are also black (white speakers get white power cables.) On the rear of the speaker sits the ethernet plug (which again is optional if you have a Sonos wifi access point) and a single metal screw socket for a wall mount.
As an aside, these speakers are designed to be humidity-resistant, meaning they're bathroom-friendly and shower-friendly; just don't take them with you INTO the shower, then you'll receive electric shocks and die. Likewise, you can use these outdoors, but don't let them get rained on, 'cos...ZAP.
On the whole, these speakers feel super solid, there's no flex or play in the chassis of the Play:1 whatsoever. The vibration insulating feet stops the surface they sit on from humming along with the speaker and ensure that the unit sits securely without moving around even when playing it loud, and the thick polymer enclosure largely resists transmitting vibrations as well. Wireless sound transmission is stable, with no noticeable latency, pops or clicks even in an apartment block like mine with a ton of wireless networks in range (several of which are my own.)
USING SONOS STUFF:
Setting up the system was a complete doddle. I initially used my iPhone, so it was just a matter of physically hooking up the cables, downloading the Sonos Controller app from the iTunes store and then following the instructions. Setting up the Playbar involves pointing your TV remote at it and pushing the volume up button. Doing this immediately made the software recognize the make of my remote, letting me effortlessly change volume and mute/unmute with it. If the software does not recognize your remote it asks you to teach you the IR codes in question, then phones back home to Sonos so the database can be updated. During the installation procedure all of my components downloaded firmware updates and restarted. This took less than a minute in all per device and was a one-time event (although I suppose more updates may be released at a later date.)
Setting up the initial wireless connection for the sub literally took mere seconds really, and then you follow a few steps to configure it initially so it sounds optimally. So simple anyone can do it. Once this was done, I added Spotify as a source for streaming music and I had to go through a one-time authentication process which was over and done in but a moment. After I installed the Sonos Controller software on my PC and Mac there was no need to re-authenticate Spotify again; it was already done, and furthermore, if you start a playlist on the PC, the app on your Mac or phone updates automatically. You can pause or unpause with any Controller and the others update automatically to reflect the new state without any hassle or discrepancies between the separate pieces of software. You use your TV remote or physical buttons on the speakers to mute or change volume and the Controller software reflects this. It's all quite smooth and seamless.
I then used the PC Controller software to set up all speakers as one connected 5.1 surround system for one single room, but the software can configure groups of speakers for different rooms (up to 32 total I believe, if you got crazy piles of money laying about everywhere); this however is not something I've tested, so I leave it up to other people to discover how well it works and how powerful/flexible this aspect of the system is.
THE GOOD - SOUND QUALITY:
I've only had these speakers for a couple days, but I've tried to use them as much as I can in that time period. I usually don't listen to music much while at home, but now I have. I've also watched a couple big-budget Hollywood movies to really exercise the Sub in particular, and...auhmmm...yeah. They make noise, for sure. HELL can they make noise!
The Sub is a complete and utter BRUTE actually. No idea what the wattage is on the amps in that thing, Sonos doesn't say, but like the horsepower rating on a Rolls Royce, it's enough all right. Cabinets and light armatures in my apartment start rattling and shaking if this thing is turned up even moderately high! Watching Thor on blu-ray was both a joy and quite frightening really, a joy because you could absolutely tell when the low-frequency sound channel kicked in as you could feel it in your chest even if the volume was kept down low enough that the room itself did not start to rumble along with the action. Frightening, because I'll probably get evicted if I enjoy myself TOO much with these speakers!
According to tests done by reviewers on the web - and I have no way to verify this - the Sub gives useful sound output down to 25Hz, and I've no genuine reason to doubt that. It certainly feels that way when listening, you notice the bass has a wholly different character than with an ordinary consumer-type set of speakers, or even with my old Sony HT-BE1 surround setup which had a sub, although only a really really paltry one compared to this one. The depth of the bass doesn't even require all that much in the way of volume either, you can absolutely tell the lower frequency register is there even if the volume is set so low you won't disturb your neighbors at night, that's how good this sub is.
As my apartment is quite small I have to be careful though to not turn the volume up too much while watching movies; the sound dynamic range is much wider in a Dolby Digital-encoded movie than when listening to regular music. This makes you want to turn the volume up a bit for dialogue, but then sitting close to the Playbar can be uncomfortable when lots of stuff start blowing up and things like that. Had I owned a bigger place this would not have been as much of an issue, but then again, this is hardly the speakers' fault either.
Music-wise, this setup is great. The Playbar on its own sounds pretty decent with fair bass reproduction, but adding the Sub to the mix brings in a wholly different level of tonal nuances and depth. As the Playbar doesn't have to service the lowest register anymore the on-board signal processing adjusts its EQ curves and noticeably tightens up, and it's all done automatically. Treble and mid-range improves - greatly, I would say - while bass simultaneously deepens and broadens due to the Sub starting to fill in at the lower end. This change is almost instantaneous, and it's easy to check the difference as you can toggle the Sub on or off at will in the configuration window of the Controller software.
A heavy dance music track like Daft Punk's "Derezzed" is a genuine kick in the pants with deep, firm bass track and distinct upper-range register. The Prodigy's "Climbatize" is airy and crisp at the treble end while rich and vibrant in the mid-range together with a jolly good dynamic-sounding base humming away. Strongly electronic Crystal Castles' "Untrust Us" for example feels very alive and energetic on these speakers, the song easily encompasses the whole room and makes your body fill with fizzy softdrink bubbles and makes you want to hop around crazily like a young jittery twenty-year-something. :D 80s pop works really great too when listened through Sonos speakers. ELO's "Calling America" is full of warmth and happy details, while Alphaville's "Summer in Berlin" takes me right back to fifth or maybe sixth (I forget!) grade and my yellow Sony Sports Walkman playing this song on tape into equally yellow sideways-earbuds as were popular at the time. Truly a masterpiece, with its prominent synths and muted percussion, like any good 80s synthpop tune should have, and it is reproduced flawlessly here, almost thirty years later.
British avant-garde synthpop band Art of Noise's "Legacy" does not show its age in my opinion, despite being somewhat the 80s equivalent of an Adobe Flash soundboard applet. After all, sampling was an exciting new thing at the time. Listening to that song now still evokes many of the same feelings as it did as when I first heard it as a young teen. Legendary krautrock/ambient/electronica band Tangerine Dream has done tons of awesome and mostly instrumental music over the years (decades really); their track "Melrose" is a varied and melodic tune that starts out simple with synth strings, drums and a lonesome piano before blooming out into a jazzy ambient saxophone piece with truly deep, rumbling bassy waves that feel great as they hit you. Turning again towards the heavier side of the spectrum, Front 242's classic 80s "Quite Unusual" is at least as heavy-hitting and jawsockingly represented on these speakers as its much younger contemporal electronic dance siblings, while Yello's "Live at the Roxy" is complex and layered, its delicate, disparate details well preserved and separated in space by the Sonos surround setup.
I don't mind some purely accoustic music every now in a while either, and it is a pure joy to listen to 3 Doors Down's "Here Without You", and Brad Arnold's hauntingly sorrowful voice (some would call it "emo" I guess, but I say, fsck 'em!). Sitting in the center of the surround setup envelops you in a soft bed of strings even as the song's melody becomes more intense towards the end. I almost never listen to hard rock or heavy metal, but when I do it's usually a well-known and loved ballad. Yeah, I'm a pussy, I know, you don't have to tell me. Metallica's timeless classic "Nothing Else Matters" finds no fault in these fine sound reproduction devices. Chris Hetfield's not-so-dulcet tones carry through clearly without getting distorted or muddled up in the powerful guitars and drums as the song works towards its crescendo, and the purely instrumental sections inbetween verses also come through in full color, showing that it takes even more than this amazing song to overwork these well-crafted Sonos drivers and amps.
Swedish music is also excellently presented on these speakers. "Midnight Sun" by The Sounds is a nice, forgettable little chiptune-retro-ish pop ditty that lets you appreciate Maja Ivarsson's distinct voice. The wide array of digitally controlled speaker drivers of the Playbar gives a broad stereo image that adds depth to the male backup singers as well. Meanwhile, mid-90s hit "Den Vilda" by ethnopop band One More Time is a startling experience with its masterful female vocalist duo backed by a clear piano, sweeping synths, swirling violins and throaty chellos.
Meanwhile, accurate reproduction of classical music is also not beyond Sonos; Robert Nilsson Ericson's classic "Utskärgård" in orchestral arrangement as played by Swedish Radio's Symphonic Orchestra (in a recording which dates back to the 1960s but hasn't lost any of its poignancy) makes you strongly visualize the sun, the salty waves, the strong breeze and sometimes fickle weather of sailing in the Swedish summer archipelagos. ...As we all have done, I'm sure! The more bombastic side of classical music as represented by "The Road to Sourceville" by Don Davis' "Matrix Reloaded" original soundtrack paints an intense, dynamic sound carpet of both strong highs and powerful lows that shows that these speakers can't just play it loud, they can also bring out the finest of details in accoustic instruments in a deeply enjoyable fashion. Klaus Badeldt's "Professor Alexander Hartdegen" from the movie "The Time Machine" features a gentle, floating oboe solo which despite its airy structure still strikes you with its emotive power, accompanied by delicate woodwind instruments, piano, strings and choir elements.
THE BAD:
While some people lament that Sonos' products don't have line-in or USB connectors or other inputs for hooking up music players and harddrives and whatnot, I don't really care about those things. No, what I could wish had been improved on with these speakers and the general Sonos infrastructure are almost all software related. (Well, apart from the price I suppose, because Sonos sure isn't cheap.)
See, I'm not the squirrely type when it comes to music; I don't have massive collections of ripped discs, piles of digitally purchased iTunes tracks, oodles of pirated MP3s or any of that stuff. I stream everything I listen to over the interwebs via Spotify, and at least when using that as a source you quickly notice the Sonos Controller software's shortcomings; while you can search the Spotify catalogue and select wether you wish to display results for artists, albums or songs, you CAN'T sort actual playlists according to these criteria, or even sort them at all it seems. If you have very large playlists (like I tend to; I just dump in tons of albums from various artists belonging to roughly the same style/genre that reach 1000 or more tracks) it becomes pure hell trying to find anything when albums from the same artist/band aren't even grouped together!
Furthermore, you can't play anything through the Sonos software without first creating a queue; however, Spotify playlists are inerently a queue already, and if I add or remove songs to my Spotify playlist that won't update the Sonos queue. I have to do that manually, which is fiddly and counter-intuitive and just plain irritating.
Also, when you turn on your TV, by default anything streaming stops (which isn't bad as otherwise you'd have to fiddle to change inputs) and sound playback is switched over to the optical input. However, the track you were playing doesn't pause. It is stopped completely, so if/when you then wish to resume music playback you must then start the song all over again, you can't just unpause it and continue.
Overall, the Sonos Controller just isn't a very well-designed piece of software, user interface-wise. It doesn't support media keys on PC/Windows keyboards for some bizarre reason unless you give the Controller's window focus (by clicking it), and then you might as well just click the buttons in the window anyway, it'd be faster - although the Sonos Controller software does support universal hotkeys on Apple Macs... It's discrimination, I say! *shakes fist* Also, the "Mini Controller" window does not show any buttons at all unless you mouse them over, which is dumb; do I really want to look at a tiny stamp-sized picture of the cover artwork or do I want to have quick and easy access to the user interface without having to wait for it to slide into place? NEVER EVER design user interfaces with form over function in mind! *shakes fist again, more threateningly this time* That's a cardinal sin! There's also no time indicator in the Mini Controller and no fast-forward or rewind functionality. The volume slider is also not shown at all unless the speaker icon is moused over, which is terrible, as you might get unpleasantly surprised by the sound volume if you'd changed it when playing something else and then forgot about it.
The iOS (and, I presume Android, but I have no way to verify) app is also not very well designed for use on a phone, requiring a lot of aiming fingers and tapping at buttons to get things done when dragging gestures to flip between screens and a more cohesive overall design of the app would have been more intuitive. It'll be clearer on an iPad no doubt due to the much larger screen, but not everyone can afford an iPad, and probably can't warrant getting one just for controlling their speaker setup if they have no other genuine need for it (like myself.) The iOS Controller app is also not iOS 7-optimized yet despite this version having been out for months already.
Weird omission: the Sonos Playbar does not support DTS-encoded surround audio, only Dolby Digital, which is totally bizarre since it is being actively marketed as a 5.1 sound system by Sonos, and DTS is arguably superior in sound quality. There exists a petition on Sonos' forums, but the company has so far expressed no interest in bringing support to their hardware even though the Playbar would easily be capable of performing the decoding. This is disappointing.
Lastly, I would have hoped the Controller software could have done more to normalize sound volume better - or even at all. Many Spotify tracks are fairly quiet, even supposedly loud pop music, and some tracks are much, much louder. It forces you to adjust the volume too often, lest your ears suffer, and even though blame is ultimately to be laid at Spotify's feet for having these discrepancies it'd been welcome if Sonos could have done something to work around the issue. Activating night mode is not an option, as this feature is only enabled when receiving audio through the optical input, not when streaming music from the internet or a computer... Strange, and inconsistent! Perhaps we're supposed to use headphones at night instead of our expensive speaker setups?
THE UGLY:
I've had some issues with sound stuttering after putting streaming playback on pause for an extended period of time. It only happens sometimes, right when re-starting playback of a paused song and then never again, and not at all when starting a song fresh from the beginning. Software bug rather than hardware issue? Undoubtedly, and not a very serious one I'd say, but it's there and it's mildly annoying when it happens so I hope they fix it, because damn, these speakers are expensive!
Another bug I've encountered is by rapidly clicking the dragbar that shows how far into a song you are using the Windows version of the Controller. If done quickly enough the Controller shows an error message and playback stops, forcing you to start the song all over again. Also easily fixable I bet, but how long will that take? And how long have this bug existed? I don't know, since I just bought this setup. Some companies are slow to fix these things; after all, they've already got your money so they seem to reason that any "excess" effort spent on software (meaning spitshining and whacking of non-critical bugs) is money lost.
SUMMARY:
Superior build quality, awesome hardware design, great sound quality, simple-as-hell setup and configuration, fairly straightforward user interface (unless you use an iPhone), however with some quirks and bugs making the software side the weak link. Also: NOT CHEAP.
Had a dream this morning* right before waking up. I was an invisible watcher, and a documentary about the Pythons was being screened to me, revealing that the program(me - they're Brits, after all) was actually crowdfunded, with the then-young Pythons going door-to-door, convincing a Briton family a time to contribute money to each episode...!
(Actually, this happened a couple days ago now.)
The colors in the dream are very faded, almost black-and-white. We briefly see a young, very tall Cleese dressed in a black suit and bowler hat, and some other Python I believe standing at the front door of a typical residence, one of those narrow brick row houses they're so fond of in Britain, speaking to a woman and maybe a man inside. We then briefly see an older, somewhat pudgy Terry Jones sitting slouched in an armchair, telling us something about Eric Idle, and that he had to get a regular job to support himself before the show became reality.
The teaser video - I assume that's what it was - then followed immediately, consisting of a young (I believe) Michael Palin in khaki military fatigues, who sometimes looked somewhat like Alec Guinness out of the River Quai movie, with one of those round, flat tin can-like peaked caps on his head, driving a willis jeep into frame. Colors are still faded.
He stops the vehicle abruptly in a clumsy, awkward manner as he reaches the center of the camera image. He then stands up in the vehicle and speaks some gibberish briefly, I don't really hear any words, they're just word-like sounds.
The static camera cuts, to what we assume is the reverse angle, showing a beach with two extremely simple rafters, being only flat layers of planks basically with no backrests going out either side of the camera image. The rafters are slightly angled to one another and have two levels above ground level, with rows of soldiers in uniform standing closely side-by side with their backs towards the ocean, presumably watching the officer speak. They're all the same height, and all have the same non-descript, bland facial features. They stand absolutely still for a moment, and then fall face-forward simultaneously, only being cardboard cut-outs, and thus, revealing the ocean view and a bright blue, lightly clouded sky.
Everyday, functional objects also have an innate beauty that we seldom reflect upon. All we have to do to discover it, is to stop for a moment, and look.
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
kaledo-art
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
gummygunk
prguitarman
dededos
blakekathryn