Social Brain Wave: News

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Eighth Video: 1940 Ali-Baba Bound

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34fSVaK89f8

Code:
ACT I						0:00	Opening Credits & Title card
	Here's the Situation			0:35	Sahara setting, Legionaire Porky sings
	It Just Got Worse			1:13	Sneaky spy charcter casually awaits P
	Hope					1:24	P walks in front of spy
	Might Lose It...			1:24	P keeps walking past spy until "Psst!"
	FIRST CONSTRAINT, Got it!		1:35	Gets secret message of Ali-Baba fort attack
ACT II, Part I	
	First Lesson				2:12	Porky gets Kiddie Kar camel, trebble toes to music
	Second Lesson				2:56	Fort arrival, all gone, Ali-Baba beer glasses gag
	Third Lesson				3:33	A-B calls 40 Sleeves as P departs, P races to fort
ACT II, Part II
	Last Lesson Lead's to...		4:01	P locks door, head ram, gunfire exchange
	Oh, No!					4:23	Suicide Bomber, wall scaler, fat foot, camel threatened
	It's All Okay, Now			5:14	Camel bugle calls help, Mom gasses up and races
	Total Loss. Story's Done, Unless...	6:14	Ali-Baba has P & C under knife
ACT III	
	SECOND CONSTRAINT, Solution!		6:19	Racing camel Mom bops A-B out of fort
	Build to Outcome			6:27	Suicide Bomber's big chance, he races to fort
	Build to Outcome			6:40	P opens front door, C's open back door
	Outcome Achieved!			6:53	A-B & 40S await, SB detonates them into tents
						7:11	End

Column Y: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsyjRZagXJnadHo3UlVyeWRia0dxVng2SE56T0J6TkE#gid=0
3,100
 
New 'Places of Nature' Video: 'Blackberry Blooms at Sunrise.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qouw2YHmDlQ



I think this one has some really nice shots best viewed fullscreen at your computer's max rez. :)
 
Thank you.

I own several acres of rural land at the edge of a rather busy city.
So, several of these are on my land, and some are on the adjacent properties.
So far all of them have been within ten miles of my home.

The biggest PITA is collecting audio for anything longer than twenty seconds without a car driving by.
Good Lord.
The audio doctoring I gotta do is ridiculous.
In my head I'm cussing and b!tching everytime I hear tires and engines rolling and ruining the next thirty seconds of audio, or some distant fire or ambulance siren, or some [expletive] jet passing overhead.
Most of what you hear is only twenty to forty seconds, cleaned up, filtered, then copy & pasted over and over and over to string it out past the four-minute mark. :yes:

I can't imagine trying to shoot anything on scene with live actors.
The unwanted cr@p I hear (and my hearing isn't great) drives me nuts.
Grrrroaaaaaannnn... :grrr:
 
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Video # 16: Whip-poor-wills, Crickets, & a Dog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKRSFFv7DqU

Full screen at 1080p looks nice.
3,844


This is technically my most complex video yet.

Usually I just scratch my head, cogitate about some thematic thing to go shoot in the next few days, go shoot it, transfer from SD card to computer, edit video, edit audio, upload, done.

Not with this one.

Nah, nah, nah.

First I gotta run around outside in the dark trying not to scare away the whip-poor-wills while I go crashing through the weeds and bushes just to record audio.
Even well past dark there's plenty of cars driving by to bugger my audio collection.

Well... WTH are people gonna look at on my nature video while listening to the dueling night time whip-poor-wills*?
Umm...
Stars.
Yeah. Sure.
'Cept my cr@p cam doesn't do dark & night fer beans.
So...
Hmm...
Gotta wait for a clear day, chroma key out the sky, monkey with the brightness/contrast/hue of the remaining trees, then pop in a pic of a starry night - right?!
Nope.
Sunny, cloud-free days make shiny tree leaves chroma key out along with the pretty light blue sky. Thhp. Raspberries.
Gotta wait for a overcast day with a nice even coat of clouds to chroma key out while flat dark trees remain.
But you can't wait until evening. Nope. Gotta shoot 'em in the day so that the trees won't have a ton O' grain to them.
Yeah, well... Don't forget this is summertime in the northern hemisphere. Bug bonanza.
I gotta set up the camera, press record, then step back four paces so that the gnats swarming my head don't buzz about the camera's lens (too much.)
Yay.

Then I gotta hunt down a large public domain picture of stars.
Yeah, well...
Hubble pics might be public domain, but anyone with a half ounce of brains knows looking out over their lawn at night doesn't look anything like THAT!
So...
Gotta go hunt down a proper constellation chart. (Headzup: a google search for "star chart" doesn't get you what you want, FYI. ;))
Finding a LARGE USABLE constellation chart ain't easy.
Find it, copy it, edit in MS Paint, make rotated copies in Photoshop, find out they're too big for Premiere + my computer to handle because I saved them with big fat whoppin rez.
Crash the computer a few times, restart, go back, edit down each constellation image.
Restart the NLE, invert the B&W images, monkey with "channel mixer" to get the night sky, stars and text just right.
Figure out the movement of the pan & motion for the stars behind the trees.
Chroma key out the overcast sky from the trees, monkey with the brightness/contrast/hue of the trees (grumble because the wind blowing the tree leaves at night sure looked cool on the ultimately unusable daytime shoot. :grrr:)
Go back and edit the whip-poor-will + crickets audio, drop in that WAV file, and bingo!
That's all there is to that.

Zzzzz...

This is usually a much easier process.
But I think this one looks and sounds pretty cool for what it is.



* How effing stupid do female whip-poor-wills gotta be for them to wait and decide which of these singing bastards gets to sire her royal eggs?
I mean these poor suckers are out here singing for hours on end night after night.
"Good God, you stupid girl birds! Make up your mind already!"
Night after night - for weeks!
Do you wanna get laid or not?
Bah!
 
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Haha... Commitment! That's what it's all about.

Gotta point out though, the stars should be rotating around Polaris... it is the one that moves very little, being almost directly in line with the earth's rotational axis (1 degree or so).

Pretty cool.

CraigL
 
Thanks, guys. :)

Gotta point out though, the stars should be rotating around Polaris... it is the one that moves very little, being almost directly in line with the earth's rotational axis (1 degree or so).
Yeah, my bare bones $45 NLE only lets me slide images in straight lines. :(
Can't rotate, or haven't figured out how short of doing animation - which I'm not quite THAT committed to producing. :lol:
 
Some great work by Ray here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZruHeebmvb8

We've been bouncing this back and forwards for... AGES. It's an advert for my album!
I can't thank Ray enough for all his hard work, I'm impressed and really pleased with the end result.
 
Hey! I recognize that material! :lol:

Aw... it only took us a few dozen back-and-forths to get this done. ;)
No big whup.

And I can't thank MetalRenard/Samy enough for being so patient working with me on this, my first advert!
I hope to work with you on more projects, Samy, and will vouch for you to anyone else for such.


P.S.
Everyone here @ IndieTalk oughta at least goto MetalRenard's bandcamp page and give his album a fair listen to - especially if you miss good guitar and drum rock.
http://metalrenardmusic.bandcamp.com/
 
I did a trial run of Facebook's "boost this post", their version of paid advertising and thought I'd tell you guys about it.
I paid £10 (around $15 equivalent, or slightly more) and that got me 21 000 views (i.e. it showed up 21 000 times in their ads on the right of the home page). From that, 23 people hit "like", about 60 watched the video and I got a couple of comments, no sales.

I set it to appear for 17 to 50 year olds in the USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Sweden, Finland and Japan, the countries where metal is most popular and where a large quantity of the population speaks English.
The verdict: Worth the £10 for the exposure, but since it didn't make that money back through sales I'm a bit sceptical of using it again. My previous bout with Facebook's advertising went much better. Plus, working with other Youtubers has got me well over 2 million views in the last year, so it's better to work with people rather than spending money on advertising if exposure is your goal.

Last time it cost me £4, I set it to appear for "friends of friends and friends of followers" (or something) and it got me 1600 views, 3 likes and a sale (of £4.50, which paid for the ad).
Next, I'll use Youtube's advertising scheme and see where that takes me. First I need that written document from Ray though... :P
 
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