Jet Set Zero » Tsukiji

Episode 204: Electric Fish Town

Jedidiah Mitchell — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:20:49 +0000

Fish and nerds both have their own district in Tokyo, but Jed must once again make his home elsewhere…

So, there have been a lot of changes with JS0 recently, but one of them isn’t our release schedule: we should be back to every Monday with regularity now that our new site, trailer, and merch (hint hint, it’s awesome!) is underway.

This is the last episode in which I’ll be a character for a while: it was a blast living with the crew in Tokyo, but it was hard too. I teach an animation class here at a university in Massachusetts and I needed to get back for the February start of the semester. Because we’re flying so low under the radar I pay most of my own way editing the show while the cast pays its way recording it, and the reality is that traveling with the cast is too much of a financial drain for us right now.

Who knows though? I might be back on the road before long.

Tsukiji Fish Market Timelapse

Rob — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:30:25 +0000

This video is the first in a stunning series from the mind of Bryan Gomez–videographer, field producer, badass–who conceived of the timelapse, shot it, and cut it together himself. All I did was stand there. But for that story, continue reading.

Tsukiji is the largest wholesale fish market in the world, and a terrifying place to stand still for 20 minutes. The first thing I noticed as the trucks rolled past was that this wasn’t Vietnam– no one was swerving out of the way for me. The maelstrom was, at times, only inches from my unprotected skull, and as I stood there I was repeatedly bumped by passing trucks, and once felt the icy graze of frozen tuna knock my leg.

Of course, it’s immensely disruptive to fishermen to have me standing in their shipping lanes. Although I thought I gave them enough space, one particular forklift operator disagreed. You’ll notice him pull up to me toward the end, though you may miss him yelling at me for a solid minute before shoving me and moving along. You definitely do not see him coming back by as we were packing up and slapping me from the seat of his truck.

We were on CNN

Brian — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:20:50 +0000

The other day we woke up early and headed out to Tsukiji fish market at around 5 AM. As it was the first day that the market had reopened to foreigners (they were barred due to bad behavior a month ago) there were a number of Japanese film crews there. In addition, one from CNN. They explained that they were from Anderson Cooper 360 and were shooting Americans from around the world reading Martin Luther King’s famous speech. We were happy to help them out in the shot that it would really make it, and sure enough – it did.

You can find footage of the speech here with our team starting at around 1:13 in.

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