Tuesday Update for March 19th 2024
Oh god, I've been doing videos, haven't I?
I seem to have forgotten about what I made this Substack for: Updating you about when I post things online. I’ve posted a few things online in the past few months, all of them videos, one of them I made this weekend.
Now, I warn you: These differ vastly in scope, length, and effort expended, and they differ minutely in tone. However, I made them, and I sowed them across several disparate YouTube channels, the reasoning for each I will try to explain:
On the Channel that Carries Just My Name:
The 2023 Tennessee Tussle Open (Sponsored By Staples) — 57:16
Several Makes and Misses by My Friends and I To This Point in 2024 — 1:14
I notice that we have two thumbnails of Ben Triumph accompanying these two videos. He’s an emotive figure! I’ve let the original channel, the one that’s just my name (and also technically isn’t my original channel, my actual originals are both crystalized in 2008 and 2009 respectively, just as I like them) sort of fall dormant over the last two years. That one had become the place for my video game-focused videos, and as I really slowed down on playing video games at all (and did even less writing about them) over the last two years, I’ve had nothing to put up there. I decided to use that one for these more contained — read: less steeped in the YouTube video genre — films that I’ve made. I have a few others I’m working on - A few based on photo walks that Ben and I went, one about film development, and one built off of pieces of auxiliary conversations that I’ve picked up with an idling camcorder in the past.
On “Vids from the Site”
The Fiona Experience - 2:06
My_Top_Ten_Shaq_Dances_in_The_I_Know_I_Got_Skillz_Video.mp4 - 1:08
Song for Fiona - 0:16
Fiona the cat is a tremendous subject for short-form video. The Fiona Experience was shot with a Sony Handycam on Digital8 tape, which is why it looks like that. I like what that camcorder gives me. It leaves me with a limited pallete indoors, a 4:3 resolution, and a sense of physical weight that accompanies any movement of the camera (it’s a big lunk of a camcorder). I shot the Fiona-centric video on a Canon digital camera that my grandfather gave to me a few weeks ago. I learned quickly that the microphone was an afterthought and it’s not great in low-light, but given that I pulled it out to record a comically short, improvised song that I wrote about the exact situation at hand when I recorded it (if Fiona were to have left the pile of blankets, I would have needed to rewrite half of the song), it fulfilled its job.
The middle video (I suppose I could have otherwise structured this in a fashion that didn’t leave me going 1-3-2 here in the final paragraph, but I’m already two, nearly three lines now into the final paragraph, so I’m not going back) actually breaks one of the rules that I’ve set for “Vids from the Site” which is that I primarily upload only raw footage there. This one’s edited (though, because I’m a sneaky trickster, I didn’t actually use Windows Movie Maker: I made lookalike WMM transitions in Adobe Premier), but I don’t know where else to put it. Every now and then, you get an idea that is so good while watching Shaquille O’Neal’s “I Know I Got Skillz” video that you simply must make it a reality, and that’s what I did here. In this video I dare to ask the question: What if there was someone, presumably in 2006 or so, who felt it necessary to rank the brief snippets of dancing that Shaquille O’Neal does in the video for his song “I Know I Got Skillz”? This video presents a mockup of what that might have looked like.
That’s what I have for you today! Everybody have fun this week!