As incredible as it sounds, from time to time I DO remember that I have a website.

I’m also aware that I haven’t updated since July (the Spanish version at least).

The truth is that my lack of time and inspiration haven’t done any good to the blog. After I returned from the US in August I didn’t know what to write about. Many times I started writing something only to leave it empty again.

I should shame myself and say I’m sorry.

John, my roomate in Texas, one of my last days at UNT

After finishing the 3rd year of Radio, TV and Film studies at the University of North Texas I moved to Washington DC for 3 months. During that time I was working at Voice of America. In fact I still work with them in the “Technomaniac” column for their website.

At Voice of America my last day at work

When I came back to Spain I thought it’d be a little bit stupid to keep the same path I had taken with the blog: showing how the life is for a foreign exchange student in the US. Of course I could now do the same for the rest of the world, showing the life of a Spanish student. But that would mean little for the Spanish readers and it didn’t sound like a very good idea.

My last night in the US, at Virginia Beach

For personal things, there’s already Tuenti, Facebook, Twitter… and I haven’t had many interesting things happening to tell.

So then… what to write about?

It’s something I should start thinking.

Some interesting things DID happen, like my being a producer for a short movie at the University of Navarra.

 
Shooting the short movie “La Caja” (title of work in progress)

Or my being a technical director at the International Documentary Festival Telenatura.

The trophy for the “Best Documentary” in Telenatura, for “The Forest” from the UK

And Anchel.com has been alive for 6 years now.

And yet I haven’t done anything to celebrate it. Maybe I could post something to commemorate?

We’ll see…

Leer en español

On NTTV, the local TV station for the University of North Texas, we created at the beginning of last semester a group of Spanish-speaking students to create a new show for hispanics. Now the show is almost ready to be aired and this is one of the sections of the 30-minute show.

My work on this video was both producing, directing and editing.

THIS IS NOT A FINAL VERSION, but a preview model until the rest of the contents and the logos are ready. Here it goes:

 
Improv Comedy Group de University of North Texas en Ardillando (NTTV) from Anchel Labena on Vimeo.

Leer en español

In Spain lots of people complain about the “americanization” of many TV shows. But the truth is… IT’S FUN TO PRODUCE THEM!!

I will explain myself: each of the students in our class had to produce and direct a TV game show contest and record it all LIVE. My contest was a “lite” version of the Spanish TV contest “Wordpass” (I even had to create a system to show on-screen the real-time scores for both contestants to emulate the original contest and use 4 cameras at the same time). The picture above is from the last game show we recorded. Directed and produced by our classmate Oz, I was the host for a pie-eating contest. The ones next to me are Sam and Dustin, the two contestants.

As you can see, we all enjoyed the pies in the end…

I might soon make some of the videos from the contests available here on this website ;-)

I will leave you with another random picture: Rock Band 2 in some friends’ room.

Leer en español

I only want to upload today a small radio ad I recorded in my Radio & TV Announcing class here at UNT. It’s not anything big, but like all the projects I do, I keep them safe and, sometimes I like publishing them online.

The ad is for a fake videogame. The picture used as the background is in Spain, at the studios for Cadena SER Cinco Villas (radio station back at home) but it was good enough for this purpose:

Leer en español

Starting with which number of inches do you think a TV screen is really big?

32”?

40”??

Maybe 50”???

In Spain, screens of 50” are incredibly high. Start thinking of over $2.500 at the very least.

But here in the USA with the philosophy of “bigger is better” (specially in Texas), there’s no problem in finding TV screens of the humongous size of 73”!!!

Ready with all the typical specs of hi-tech TVs, it comes with all the new standards like 1080p, HDMI connections, Digital TV… and many more.

So what about the price? It’s as cheap as $1750!

Oh! And just for the sake of filling today’s post with something else, here’s a picture showing the marketing that the movie Quarantine (the American remake of the Spanish movie REC) with some other random pictures:

In case somebody wanted to know, this here is my roomate John :-) The guys in the first picture are Salome and Luke.