Happy Solstice, everyone!

And now... the production staff!

Believe it or not, this is not a one-person operation. Anymore. I have enough people involved in enough of my video-making process that I can call them my production team now, and we're all cool with that.

So here's a video introduction to them, as well as to my two main characters who I play on-camera. There's no rhyme or reason to the organization of this video, it's just clips of my main staff that I had and stuck them together with some still shots and commentary.

It's like... part weird documentary, part home movies montage, part music video... But hey, the real point is... this is a look into what it's like makin' movies with Ven, and a brief introduction to some of the people who help me do it. Not all of their work has been featured here yet... in fact, my resident composer, Thursday, was just recruited about 48 hours ago... and some of them ended up unfortunately being sort of UNDER-represented... particularly Mouse, who has been my camera assistant, editor, inspiration, and overall support since the beginning... but whether you've seen their work or not, they've all contributed in some major way and will continue to do s in the future.

Yes, even the 3-year-old.

There are a few other people who aren't part of my production team but are still worthy of mention. I'm going to try to do a second video to give them some recognition, too. I have no idea how soon this will end up happening, but it's on my list of things to try.

"The Impossible Dream"

I have far too much fun doing these.



Here we revisit the Somaturge in singing form. Fun fact: I actually recorded myself in full costume singing this song all the way through THREE TIMES thinking I would stick clips in between the art... but I have so damn much art saved, it was totally unnecessary and would have sort of defeated the point of the video.

I think I've decided to call these fan art things "DeviantArtists' Alley." Because I am completely shameless in my willingness to rip off more popular video makers' series titles. *cough* *http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththeglasses/aalley*

Anyway, this is me singing as the Somaturge. Because I love doing his voice. This was more challenging than I'd thought it would be -- if for no other reason than because I am singing at the lowest end of my range that I can sing in and still be doing this voice. In fact it took me several takes to get it right because it's really difficult to make this character sound loud, much less belt a note and hold it. I think I managed, though. :3

New Microphone Get! ~ Fan Art Fan Video here!

audio-technica AT2020 USB microphone.

And then I discovered Broadway Karaoke tracks.

And then history was made.

Yes, this is me singing. The only alteration done to this track was some kind of filter I apparently unintentionally had on while recording. It made my voice all echoy. It sounded good, so I kept it, and claim the bragging rights of having done this in one take.

And for my next act...

I had planned that my next review would be the super-spectacular Vegas spectacle EFX.

My plans for that review are quite epic, but I've decided to postpone it while the newest member of Team Somaturgy works out the kinks in her magic wand. Which is to say... I have a special effects person! We're spending a few hours every evening together now working together on some basic practice stuff so I can get a feel for what kind of effects I can realistically write into my script and expect the two of us to be able to edit it sometime before next Easter.

One of these days, very soon, I really ought to post an intro to my whole production team. Yes.

Anyhow, EFX is being postponed and instead my second review will be on Brent Spiner's Dreamland.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I still can't figure out how to use film clips I haven't filmed myself and I want to play with trains. *cough*

And before anyone says "Dreamland wasn't ever intended to be performed onstage! It's not a showtunes album!" ...it's a Broadway performer using songs as a vehicle to tell a story. It is therefor a musical. Also this is my show and I reserve the right to define "showtunes" however I dang well please. ;)

Helter & Skelter's Bubblegum Boogiedown Showtunes Show Episode 1: GOYA

2 weekends of filming (largely because I am busy and prone to disorganization during the week, and have only REALLY late nights to use to film anything)... 10 hours of editing... 20 minutes of finished film...

This... is episode 1.

Click To Play

I do apologize for the abysmal sound quality that persists for most of the first 2/3 of my bits in the boiler room. I had no idea the camera mic was picking up that weird background noise (which I couldn't even hear), and I couldn't speak louder than I was because literally about 15 feet to my right, albeit on the other side of a wall, was a sleeping 3-year-old.

...yeah, there are a number of technical problems with this video. I do see a lot of them and consider them learning experiences which I will probably have figured out how to fix by the next episode. But hey, if you want to point out what I did wrong, please do. I don't see EVERYTHING. ;)


Coming soon:
~Episode 2... subject undetermined as of yet
~An interview with Helter and Skelter, conducted by her loveliness Mouse La Jabraille
~Skelter Goes Grocery Shopping (if any of this footage turns out to be usable, I haven't had a chance to even look yet)

Vlog: Filming for new series, introducing Skelter...

Click To Play

The Somaturge reports following the first filming session for the new series, "Helter & Skelter's Bubblegum Boogiedown Showtunes Show," a review series covering... what else... musical theatre.

This video introduces Skelter, the snarky co-host who usually works with Helter. You don't get to meet Helter until the review is finished, but here's an idea of how the chicken "talks" to the audience. I do use him a lot more in the review videos. Here he's just been kidnapped nd helf hostage by that puppet-building psycho, the Somaturge. Not that that stops him from snarking every chance he gets.

Making the Character: REVIEWERS!

But first, A VIDEO!

Click To Play

Ain't she just the sweetest thing?

Right, to the point. My script for the first episode of my review series has been as finalized as it's going to get in written form and is really, TRULY ready to start filming. I know I've been saying that elseqwhere for like... 4 or 5 days... but now I actually mean it due to having had some valuable insight from a beta reader and rewriting the beginning and the end. And here is why.

Initially, when I decided to review musicals, my reviewer was basically a less evil version of the Somaturge. Then I found a chicken puppet so it was the Somaturge and a chicken puppet. I wrote the script to incorporate humor wherever I could think of a place to make a joke, but incorporating the chicken was awkward and had a lot of potential to just look... tacky and pointless. The jokes were pretty funny, I thought, but I wasn't sure how to put them on film, since dubbing in a voice recording is still something I'm working on being able to do more seamlessly.

So after doing little bits of tweaking and not making it much better, I finally devoted a good solid half hour to doing nothing but just THINKING about it while I did other shit I didn't have to think about at all, and I figured it out.

First, my character, Helter, is not going to be just me trying to act as the Somaturge in a less intimidating way. Helter's just a completely different character. Different voice and everything. I came up with this idea that this golden feather pin I'd been wearing in my hat could be a prop -- this feather is what lets the chicken talk, but only to the audience. He talks in subtitles, which I, as Helter, can't read. I only read his body language and view him as a sort of adorably psychotic pet.

Okay, so... why do I have this feather? Where the fuck did I get it?

That's when I started breaking down boundaries of reality. Christ, I have a camera and apart from reviewing real musicals, there's no reason why I should limit their existence to this world. So... Helter, I decided, is not this guy's real name. I crossed out my original intro in the script and shortened it down to just a few lines where I casually mention that I'm a former adventurer recently returned from a successful quest, which is where I got this feather, and now I'm in witness protection, as a precautionary measure. The chicken, speaking in subtitles, turns out to be sort of a sinister character who immediately outs me by "yelling" my character's real name to the audience -- Helden Griffin -- and making a vague and sinister reference to an evil entity who is still alive and coming for me.

A Daedra.

Like... from Elder Scrolls games.

So my schtick now, rather than being something vague and just weird for the sake of being weird, is that I'm actually a video game PC who stole a magical artifact from a Daedric god (which one will be revealed in time... MUAHAHAHAHAHA...), and then escaped into the "real" world where I'm hiding from the pissed-off god and making videos because I'm kind of bored. This schtick might make more "sense" if I reviewed video games, but I think it is FUNNIER to have ae escaped video game character reviewing SHOWTUNES.

I don't know much about what the artifact I stole does, I just took it because stealing magical artifacts is kind of just something TES-universe adventurers... do. A lot. I will eventually assign SOME power to it that Helter knows about and explain why he thought it was something worth stealing, but allowing the chicken to talk to the audience is its primary relevant function at the moment.

So now... Helter is a complete 180-degree shift from the Somaturge, who is a sociopathic magical mad scientist with messianic delusions. When the Somaturge gets riled up, he does so very quietly, and then people die. A lot. When Helter gets riled up, there's no subtlety about it. He'll scream at you to shut the fuck up or sing praises about things he likes and it's a bit hammy but not so much so that it stops him from getting right back to the point. He also doesn't take himself too seriously, and will tease and dance and be a bit of a clown sometimes. This is very in keeping with his role as a supposed "hero" but of dubious heroicness. We know he did something epic -- stealing an enchanted thingy from a god -- but he doesn't come across as a typically honorable knight sort of hero. He's enthusiastic and self-assured, but every so often we'll get to see that even the chicken can intimidate him when he wants to. In fact, he's basically the chicken's bitch without realizing it.

...this is going to be a fun series to develop. Because it IS still mostly about the reviews, but now it's coming from a character with a lot of potential for additional epicness.

Progress report!

Sorry for the lack of entries lately...

Two major updates:

First, I got an opportunity to do a title card for JewWario, of youcanplaythis.com, thatguywiththeglasses.com, and the upcoming Blistered Thumbs site, a branch of Channel Awesome.

So I've been drawing. A lot. I've also made one new movable puppet and FOUR "puppets" that are really just drawings of characters who hang on the marionette rig strings in the background if I want to take the big puppets down.

Second, I have finally, FINALLY figured out what my review series is going to focus on. Of course in hindsight it seems almost PAINFULLY obvious. I won't give it away yet, but I managed to figure out this one particular genre of entertainment that is NOT covered by any of the reviewers on Channel Awesome (as far as I can tell), and that I know a LOT about.

Oh, and I can do my videos with heavy involvement from a chicken puppet. Which is hilarious.

I'm going to try to get a finished script down tonight and HOPEFULLY even get some filming done after I finish Justin's title card.

I'm actually really excited to do this series. I may make two videos before I release any of them just to see how well it holds up over multiple productions, but I think it will. I have a massive stack of CDs and a singing chicken that says it will. MUAHAHAHAHAHA.

A real (impressive!) update!

Click To Play

Let;s hope that embedding code works.

Well, there's a video of me testing out my golem rig as the Somaturge using a hand-drawn puppet of the Nostalgia Critic.

Now I know it's been a while (...by my definition...) since I last updated. SO! How long did it actually take me to set this up?

Drawing all components of the rig took... ehh... about 5 hours at the outside. A lot of them had to later be adjusted and have elements added to them after initial tests. And there are actually still more pieces of this puppet I haven't filmed or even finished, there are still a few expressions half-colored and not yet cut out. And the gun... that needs work.

Filming all of this? An hour and a half, I guess, and then another half hour or 45 minutes for editing. It's simple and short, I just had to go through the 6-8 takes I did of EVERY. SINGLE. MOVEMENT. and pick the best ones to put in the video. And then there was the time it took the switch the faces and hats to get like... 2 seconds of footage.

To me, this is worth it. Because this is AWESOME.

My next project will be trying to do an actual movie review. This may or may not be successful, since... if you hadn't noticed, I haven't yet figured out how to edit in clips from other shows or movies. But if I can figure it out, I want to do a full review of the movie Perfume, using zombie versions of two of the film's dead characters as hosts (the cat and MAYBE one of the women... I think the distilled cat would be funniest, though).

Vlog #2: My puppets are haunting me!!!

You know what... I... I just... yeah.

I probably should institute a curfew on my access to video cameras, art materials, and... um... consciousness.

Whatever. Here's some of me being bonkers.

Makin' Golems!

I... really just have to say that I fucking rock.

That's all that can be said about what I have managed to do with a few screws and nails behild the bar here in the basement studio.

So you get a video... consisting entirely of some clips of the Somaturge setting up the golem rig with a test puppet, set to some rockin' tunes from three of Ven's favourite artists.

There is a great deal of camera-whoring going on here. But it's okay because I look awesome. There are also plenty of shenanigans introducing the faceless puppet I made to test out the rig, the Styrofoam head that has now become my nemesis and been named Naga, and my essential badger familiar who serves basically the same purpose as Harry Potter's owls, except badgers are cooler because China Mieville says they are basically immune to magic which is why they are used as messengers in Brock Marsh, the wizards' quarter in New Crobuzon.

I feel I should take this opportunity to mention again that my Somaturge character is heavily inspired by Judah Lowe from Iron Council by China Mieville. I honestly am not trying to rip off his character -- the first time I read that book, I bonded with Judah by the time I was about 1/4 of the way through it. He is one of only 3 or 4 characters I have ever encountered in any media form who I would say are a really accurate representation of a large part of my essential core being. So a lot of the Somaturge was with me already, all I'm really borrowing from Meiville's influence is some little details referencing his world (like the badger messengers) and the more refined definition of what a "somaturge" actually is. And yes, I got the name from his book. Credit where it's due.

Now I'm just showing off the fact that I can make it look like I ACTUALLY CAN animate golems back here. That kicks ASS, man! I mean SERIOUSLY!!!

Making the Character: The Somaturge

So then I decided to make an ~art film~.





Who is the Somaturge?

The Somaturge is the main character associated with Somaturgy productions. The character both is and is not me. The character is... a refined, focused collection of aspects of me, reflective of many of the elements of my personality that are most essential to who I am... but not all of them, and not in a balanced way.

The Somaturge is a fictionalized and idealized self. Idealized in the sense of having what I feel to be an "ideal" personality based on a few primary components, not in the sense of being without flaws. The Somaturge is an incredibly flawed character -- but in a way I control and in a way I find interesting and entertaining. If sometimes in a somewhat sadistic way.

The Somaturge is genderless, but mostly meant to be read as more "male" than "female." I'll therefor use "he" to refer to him. So... he is a mad scientist with the heart of a poet. You don't see much of the mad scientist element in this video, but that's to come soon enough. He can be played to comedic or dramatic effect as necessary, having somewhat of a leaning towards the archetype of the "sad clown." He has, naturally, a sordid past and manically unstable life in the "present."

There has always been a Somaturge character somewhere in my repertoire of creative works -- a character I invent and play with who fits more or less this same pattern. So I can't say that there is actually very much of this character that I've based on other people's works -- but to give credit where it is due, there are a few who helped to shape the naming and definition of the Somaturge and his purpose.

First and foremost, the word "Somaturge" is one I first saw in the book Iron Council by China Mieville. That character, Judah Low, is one of the three fictional characters I most identify with, the other two being Therem Harth rem ir Estraven from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Pierre Gringoire from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo. From that book comes part of the idea about golems connecting with stories, but I really learned about golems a very long time ago, from the movie It!, starring Roddy McDowall (my favourite actor of all time) as a museum director's assistant who discovers how to bring a golem to life and use it to his own advantage. It's a blatant rip-off of Frankenstein but I like it so much better.

There will be a lot more to be said about the Somaturge as this project lurches forward, so I think I'll leave it at this for now until other aspects become apparent through my ability to SHOW them in videos as well as EXPLAIN them in over-long blog entries. Just know that there's more to the character than the rather emo critter you see in the video above.


About This Series

Somaturge poetry WILL be a continuing series. I have been a life-long lover of poetry and I strive to show others how to appreciate it. There are so many people who say they "hate" poetry, usually because some dumbass grade school or high school teacher "ruined" it for them by forcing them to dissect some poor dead sap's verses to the point of meaninglessness. It's tragic. I've kept several blogs in the past that consisted only of reposting poetry I enjoyed, but I think dramatizing it and reading it aloud may help to get the point across and translate to a broader audience what I see and feel and hear when I read my favourite poetry. I want to do that with the Somaturge (as opposed to reading as myself or any other character I make up for other video series) because I think poetry should be as genderless as I try to make that character, open to interpretation from everyone. The Somaturge will inevitably end up cast as different "roles" (just wait until I'm ready to tackle J. Alfred Prufrock, JUST YOU WAIT, muahahaha!), but still remain always himself in some sense. I like the challenge of that. And I like thinking that I can eventually hone my film-making skills enough to make my dramatized readings entertaining and interesting enough to make my favourite poems accessible to more people.


Additional Notes

Just as a point of interest, that's not real wine. I mean... it could have been, but it's not. It's water that got colored as a side-effect of my testing out a science kit I want to review on polymer properties. The dyes turned the water the color if white wine. I funneled it into an old bottle and poured and pretended to drink it.

Why didn't I use real wine? Well... because I'm still sadly a recovering victim of a cold that tricked me into thinking I'd recovered from it, then hit me again the day after my filming session for my last video. So now I have an annoyingly persistent cough and am living off Hall's cough drops.

I don't know if you've ever tried to mix cough drops with wine, but trust me... the taste is a lot worse than pretending to drink dyed water. Besides which, I don't exactly need any alcohol to make my brain fuzzier than it's making itself at this point. :P It would have been a waste of good booze to use real wine when I wasn't going to drink it. But I think this looks real enough.


And finally... it's worth noting that most of the footage you see here comes from the FORTH time I filmed this. The first takes, based on my original concept, were filmed in Mouse's parents' boiler room, of all places... I had this idea about being backlit and shooting a silhouette against the weird diagonals of the woodwork under the basement stairs... and it might have been pretty cool, if I hadn't shot all the takes I did about three centimeters to the right of where I should have been, leaving a tiny sliver of a bulb exposed, but it was enough to make all of that footage totally useless. Except for the audio track, some of which is pasted into this video over my NEW footage.

And I honestly do like this better -- the original footage is just... a talking head. I feel like this at least makes a gesture towards telling a story and setting a scene. It is vague, but I like it, I like that it contributes to the development of the Somaturge's character by letting me ~act~ instead of just showing... a talking head.

Lesson learned: Art evolves.

The story of today's filming

In brief:

I spent about an hour this afternoon setting up to shoot what I thought would be really simple stuff for the video described in my last post.

It was not.

Mouse and I did two takes all the way through and both times, the light was 3 centimeters off, resulting in JUST enough of the bare bulb backlighting me being visible to make all of it completely useless. Lesson learned: Always shoot a few seconds of test footage just so you can be as sure as possible that you're sitting in the right place.

The audio track is fine, though, so I'm going to try to just take out Mouse's audio and paste it into my new footage, which I am about to film as soon as I let the battery suck in some juice for a few minutes and tinker with the lighting a bit more.

Also need to go root around in the closet upstairs and see if we have any bar napkins...

Current time: Midnight. Goal: Shoot, edit, and upload video by 3 a.m.

It's go time...

Day by day...

I went afield for my last report just about a day or two after the cold I'd had the previous week seemed to have backed off. This turned out to have been a mistake... for some reason... I doubt I could have exactly prevented this, but the day after I got BACK from that venture, I was feeling under the weather again. And by the next day... yeah -- voice more gone than that cold apparently was. It's been back with an annoying vengeance, preventing me from doing any new filming.

But since I couldn't work on my science kit reviews, or anything else involving me in front of a camera, I decided I could STILL be productive, and I poked a buddy of mine to inform him that he had been recruited for my project of madness and should poke around in his social circle to see if anyone else was interested. I'll probably hear back from him tomorrow.

And in the meantime, I did do a little bit of minor character development and brainstorming for the science kits reviews, and Mouse and I went to the toy store and bought another kit to review, and I thought that was all I could do for the time being until about half an hour ago.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and creativity is a necessity for me. So I was thinking about what ELSE I could do on videos just in general, not only funny stuff, and it occurred to me to do readings of poems I like. Not my own poems (yet), but poems I feel are worth knowing about.

Wouldn't you know it, the last poem I posted to my personal journal as being worth remembering is a poem that is kind of a dialogue, each verse separated by another narrator asking questions. And I happen to have my best friend right here to read those lines aloud while I read the verses in between in my gender-neutral Scarecrow voice, which I think will be very effective.

And even better... well, she's pretty hot, and this poem happens to be a love poem that describes a woman's body like a roadmap. Fortunately, my BFF here happens to be the accommodating type and allowed me to just do a really quick shoot of her lying on this black leather couch in the basement wearing nothing but her panties and bra and my fedora obscuring her face, so I could shoot a few slow panning shots of the camera just travelling along her body. I HOPE I will be able to use these shots under my voice track at the relevant point in the poem, to artistic effect.

My voice has come back enough that I can do the Somaturge's voice and I think once I get a couple of lamps set up down here tomorrow, it shouldn't take longer than like half an hour for us to film this with the both of us speaking, and then won't take much longer to edit it since it'll be very straightforward. I could even go into iMovie right now and set up the title screens. Which... I think I will, since I have nothing better to do at the moment. If I'm feeling especially enterprising I MIGHT upload the shots I just did and play around with those in the editor too, just to see what kind of effects I can get from them and whether they're usable at all.

This will be a serious, ~artistic~ video, which I know a lot of amateur film makers get over with in their high school years. I never had that opportunity so I'm indulging that angle of my creative viewpoint here and now.



And just to underline again, in case anyone was still under any misconceptions about this, makin' videos is hard work. It's up to you to decide whether it's work you love enough to keep doing or not once you realize exactly what that means.

Live On Set...

COMING SOON:
~The Spontaneous Journalist goes live on the set of Transformers 3 (if I can get away with it)
~New review series: SCIENCE KITS FOR KIDS -- the Somaturge will review science-in-a-box available to the children of the 80's, 90's, and today. Current progress: Two lab assistants recruited, first episode in the process of being scripted for filming hopefully sometime next week. Topic: Astounding Polymer Properties Observation Kit.

ABOUT THIS VIDEO:
...Seriously, this was an amazing experience but it WAS pretty brutal for someone who is really NOT used to getting up early in the morning and spending 3 hours tromping over farmland. I kind of destroyed one of my legs scrambling over rocks wearing the wrong, wrong, WRONG shoes for such a venture. Oops?

It was still fantastic fun and I cannot thank the people who allowed me the opportunity enough. :D

Relevant to makin' videos aside from what it was like to actually FILM this:
I took about 45 minutes of footage overall, over the course of about 3 hours. It took me a little over 2 hours to edit it down to this point, which surprised me because I thought I had been working longer but apparently not.

As you can see, I've figured out how to pull a few more tricks with the editing software and gotten better at filming and editing myself.

Again I say this: makin' videos is not for pussies. No matter what it may look like we are on the internet. ;3

Vlog #1: Now with title screen music!

I am not usually this fidgety when I just stand there and talk to the camera. But I was rushed and tired so you'll have to excuse the somewhat babbling nature of this report.

But in summary, tomorrow I'm makin' videos with some people who do it professionally! WOO!

Update in the midst of labors...

Hey guys, you know what?

Editing is really, really, REALLY tedious work.

I mean... this is some incredibly monotonous shit. And I'm just editing material out of one continuous take here.

Partly, this has to do with the fact that I have an hour of footage that is literally just me talking.

Partly... this is a LOT of footage to have to go through and paste together.

For me, this is not a defeating obstacle. I expected this. But I'm making a post about it to underline the point to any other video-making newbs out there -- YOU SERIOUSLY DO HAVE TO SPEND A LOT OF TIME DOING VERY BORING EDITING UNLESS YOU ARE A WIZARD AND MAKE MAGICALLY ENTERTAINING VIDEOS YOU CAN PERFORM FLAWLESSLY IN ONE TAKE.

Yeah, this is worthwhile work, but it still feels like WORK right now. Of course, unlike the work I do at my soul-killing Real Life Job, this work is still stimulating and satisfying to me (...my text sounds like a sex toy commercial suddenly...) because I really do love the process of making these videos and turning them into something instructional and hopefully often entertaining for other people to enjoy and make use of...

But the difficulty is part of the process, and the process is what I'm blogging about. So people? EDITING IS REALLY BORING AND TEDIOUS WORK NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU LIKE YOUR SUBJECT MATTER OR THE CONTENT YOU ARE EDITING.

Capslock is cruise control for cool, don't you know.

So yeah, it's going to be a WHIIIIILE before I turn this footage into videos I can upload and post here. So in the meantime (again, humorously implying that there is anyone watching and waiting for content at the moment), let me post my REAL first video, the very straightforwardly cut-and-spliced video of my BFF and me claiming land in the name of our own nation, Melospiza:





I am sorry to say that the videos that result from the footage I'm editing right now will not be as entertaining as the land claiming video here, for several reasons:
1. They will always just be me talking to the camera, unscripted;
2. Mouse is hot. I am not so much.
3. The basement footage is.... shot in a dark basement and mostly me talking to the camera against a backdrop of vaguely-defined brown and cream-white scenery. This video at least has the dynamic of having been shot while we were wandering around in the woods.

So... yeah. Enjoy that, I guess. Hope. Whatever. Be enlightened!

Makin' videos is not as easy as you think it is. And by the way, AGAIN, I am doing this project, filming these videos, writing these entries, all in addition to working a full-time job. This takes a lot of time and energy. You want to make videos? YOU BETTER BE PREPARED TO NOT BE A PUSSY, BITCH!!!

A brief detail

Just finished filming content for my next video, which I hope to have posted either later tonight or tomorrow evening.

I have... just a little over an hour of footage to go through, second by second, and try to edit into something cohesive and instructive.

ALL of that footage is pretty much just me talking to the camera, unscripted.

...

Lord knows I love listening to myself talk, as the existence of AN HOUR OF FOOTAGE OF JUST ME TALKING proves, but.... man, this is going to take some extra balls to tackle.

And by balls, I mean I need some Dr. Pepper. Oh yeah.

It's editing time, bitches.


In the meantime -- and I do know it's a joke for me to even pretend that I have any regular readers yet, much less people who are actually sitting out there waiting for bated breath for the results of this shoot, but I'm going to pretend anyway -- IN THE MEANTIME, here's a link to my DeviantArt account:

http://halfwest.deviantart.com/

I have a few new drawings up that I've done just in the past 5 or 6 days of the guys from Channel Awesome, and a ton of content beyond that. Check it out. I actually am ALSO in the process of trying to construct a website where I can move ALL of that stuff and host it in my own webspace, but wouldn't know know it... I'm no more a web designer than I am a filmmaker so... yeah, that's going to take a while to appear in any kind of presentable form.

Solving the camera problem

Well... work has just ended and yet just begun. I'm back to constructing my basement set and I think I've just solved a problem that's been nagging in my mind -- how to mount my camera. The tripod I have is one of those bendy-leg gidgets that can either be stood up or have its legs wrapped around... whatever. It looks kind of like a K'Nex robot. It's awesome that way.

But it's also very short. Like... 6 inches short. That, in and of itself, is a problem easily, EASILY solved by the application of the phrase "well then just set it on top of something." And there is no shortage of potential "somethings" I could drag over and set in front of my bar. But I'm the picky type and I'd really want to be able to make every shot CONSISTENT. Trouble is, I can't set something PERMANENTLY in the middle of the floor in front of the bar -- it would be blocking literally the ONLY place anyone usually ever walks down here, the most direct path from the stairs to the laundry room.

But I've just now found some old metal rungs that used to be part of a shelf unit in the bathroom. I have no idea where the rest of it is and I doubt it will ever be of any use to anyone in this house again as a shelving unit -- it is, after all, rather old and collecting a bit of rusty tarnish. The thing is about 6' tall, maybe 9" wide, with rungs every 6" or so all the way up... it looks like a ladder.

Now, it just so happens that some years ago, when my sister tried to take over the basement for her personal uses, she removed the ceiling. The... entire... ceiling. A small area above the stage was painted and put back up but the rest of the main room of the basement remains sans ceiling, leaving the structural beams exposed.

It also just so happens that there are some perfectly spaced beams at exactly the right distance from the bar.

I believe a little bit of that parachute cord my dad has in his tool chest will give me a strong fastening and let me hang this thing from the ceiling loosely enough so that when I'm done filming, I can swing it upwards. I have a couple of carabiners around in MY tool kit. One of those fastened to a beam just above the bar will let me hook this rig up flat against the ceiling when not in use. Then it'll always swing back down to the same place. My tripod will wrap securely around the rungs and I can adjust the height by increments of about 5 inches and then also get angle shots from as high as this room would ever let me go, or from lower down without my having to play the box-and-book-stacking game.

So I'll begin that in a few minutes. But first, since this is a blog recording the process of EVERY STEP of learning to make videos from scratch, I want to discuss a question every newbie videographer is going to encounter early on -- how do you pick the right camera?

The answer is -- I have no idea.

What I did was decide how much I was willing to invest in a camera for this project, and go to Best Buy to see what they had in stock. It turns out that it isn't very easy to figure out what makes all these different models... all that different. But they did have some handy printed sheets stacked about that covered the basics about video cameras. I read them over and spent about an hour browsing and tinkering and testing and re-reading until I decided on a camera that seemed to have a lot of potential for more advanced functions, but wasn't so advanced as to be the filming equivalent of fucking Adobe Anything. And it had one feature I really, REALLY liked -- SUPERZOOM, MOTHERFUCKERS. 70x. I can pick up things on this camera on full zoom that I cannot see with my eyes focused towards the same point as my camera lens. That... is a very attractive option to me.

Your preferences and mileage may vary. I didn't get TOO hung up over OH GOD I HAVE TO FIND EXACTLY THE ONE AND ONLY PERFECT CAMERA OR I WILL BE DOOMED! That is bullshit. Unless you are filming macro slow-motion clips of frogs or water droplets for the Discovery Channel or something, there is no magical One Camera that holds all the power of Sauron and will let you conquer the world (wide web) with the click of a button and a tweak of the settings. If you're reading this because you're like me and starting out as green as they come... just get something within your price range that feels comfortable for you to handle and has some options on it that appeal to you as a film maker, however vague your ideas are as of yet.

And if anyone absolutely MUST know, I'm using a Panasonic SDR-H80 with 70x zoom, 60 GB storage PLUS the option of buying a card for it as well, and something called "web mode" which I think means you can actually push a button and make the camera know that this video is going onto YouTube so it gets optimally formatted to do that or something. I'm actually not entirely sure how that works, because the instruction manual for this thing is just about the least comprehensible thing I've ever read in English that wasn't fanfiction. But that feature wasn't a priority to me because I'm in this to learn how to make PROPER VIDEOS with editing and everything, not to point and click and spam YouTube with single-take crap.

And as for my editing... I'm using iMovie, which came preinstalled on my MacBook. I'm not using a MacBook PRO or any other bells and whistles except that I did have to purchase and download some software from the Apple store that would let my computer read the format my camera records in. I have no idea whether this is like... a common thing with camcorders, that they're really optimized to be PC compatible and Mac users can go stuff themselves or figure out how to get around the problem... but that's something worth knowing when you go buy a camera, especially if you're on a tighter budget than I am and can't afford to buy software just so your computer and editing software can recognize and work with your footage.

I will also note one other issue I had in choosing a camera, which is that I'm a lefty and apparently they don't MAKE camcorders that are structured for the likes of us, pfaugh! ....Well, I'm sure they DO, somewhere, but you can't just walk into Best Buy and purchase one. I'm doing what I've done for my whole life with uncountable numbers of other tools -- just get used to using it right-handed. But if you're a lefty who is so left-oriented that it's really difficult or impossible for you to adapt, you're probably going to want to go internet-shopping instead of to Best Buy.

Making progress with... a SET!

I know, I know... you don't technically need a set to be a YouTube video star. You don't even need one to be a SUCCESSFUL YouTube video star. Or a successful other-video-hosting-option video star. You don't need a set to be entertaining, interesting, or popular.

But in my opinion, it helps. At least... all the video folks I know of who top my list of favourites tend to do their filming in a consistent, purposefully-designed setting. Even if that setting is just a blank wall. I think a blank wall is always going to look better than just.... whatever random shit you happen to have stacked around your room at the time.

I am fortunate enough to have been raised in a house with a PERFECT potential set -- a bar in the basement. No one really uses the basement or comes down here except to do the laundry. I am free to claim this space and use it as my own. It has a wonderful sort of MOOD to it, which comes largely from the fact that nobody's really done anything to it except dust it every 10 years or so since it was constructed in the 1970's. Thus, without my doing anything AT ALL to it, it already has a very otherworldly feel to it, like a place that's been estranged from the normal procession of time and evolution of aesthetic taste. It's just downright cool that way.

All we've ever used the bar area for is storage, and not even for very MUCH storage. There's a lot of shelf space back here for relatively little in the way of things that need to stay here. So it'll take me a matter of maybe 10 or 15 minutes to shift all the stored things that need to stay here for the sake of maintaining everyone's sanity into shelf space that isn't going to be visible to the camera. Doing so frees up shelf and counter space I can now use to decorate and make this time-portal to 1972 even more suited to my themes and character by turning it into a sciencey anachronism stew. How? Well, mostly by relocating selected books and my electronics kits and power tools down here and arranging them to represent the Somaturge's tools of the trade, with the added bonus that they really ARE my own personal tools of the trade and having them all down here will make this a good space for me to set up my laptop and do some scripting or research with all my reference books within easy reach and out of the way of high-traffic areas of the house.

So that's tonight's project, which I've started on already by clearing the visible shelves and will now get down to the task of turning the 1970's bar into the Somaturge's lab.

I'd like to get some more filming done tonight but it's unlikely that I can, and besides I still have my preliminary basement tour footage to edit.

Tonight's projects... I must be both Martha Stewart and Steven Spielberg. Wish me luck...

Test footage

This... may be one of the shittiest videos ever made.

In its defense (and mine), you must understand that I have never done this before. As a child, I did not have access to video recording devices. My parents didn't own any, and if my friends did, they sure as hell were not about to let a bunch of kids go play with the thing. I have no formal education in the use of video editing software, and the little I have in audio tech is functionally useless. I fully admit that it is annoying as hell to have a ripple-cut between virtually every single sentence in this thing. I know the title and credit screens are badly timed, weirdly formatted, and... oh yeah, that little matter of the missing soundtrack.

This video makes me look like a total fool.

So why the hell, you ask, am I uploading and blogging it?

Because... this is the process.

I've seen a lot of people who look at film makers ranging in levels of professionalism from Tim Burton to independent folks who do all the scripting, camera work, directing, and editing either completely by themselves or with the help of only a handful of other people... newbies like me who see the potential and decide that's where their calling is. I've observed that a lot of these people refuse to even TRY to maintain an objective view of their work and think that as long as they can point a camera at themselves and eat the scenery, they're going to be successful. Because they are ~geniuses~.

Right. Well. I've felt the bite of that bug, too. I've lived a life driven by the desire to find a spotlight and ham it up. I've spent nights dreaming about epic shit I could do if I only had the time or the money or the equipment or whatever. I have no aspirations towards becoming a Hollywood starlet and never have, it's just all about the art to me, the creative process, the potential for independent success.

I think a lot of people share that drive and desire with me in exactly the same way. I've seen a lot of them take advantage of it on their own and become successful independent writers, directors, producers, editors, and actors in their own series. And that is the gift of YouTube and other video hosting options on the internet. It really is a lot easier now than it was when the seeds of my imaginary successes were planted.

HOWEVER... this still takes a lot of fucking work. I've done only really three videos consisting entirely of pasted-together clips from my camera and I can see that, and I went into this project knowing that it would not be easy.

So after all that tl;dr, the point is... I've been fortunate enough to be able to gradually acquire a variety of technical components that will ultimately go into making videos -- I've had a Macbook for a while now, and was recently able to afford a camcorder. Since my obligations at work mean I can't continue taking classes this semester, I decided to instead spend my extra time working on promoting myself through my art in a way that is equally or MORE productive than taking classes. I'm pursuing a dream a lot of people have, and doing it (for now) entirely with my own money, using whatever free time I am able to grasp between responsibilities towards work, family, and personal chores.

I'm blogging my really shitty videos to show people that no matter how good your ideas are, you can't be a Picasso or Da Vinci starting the day you buy your camera. I'm blogging my first nonsensical, badly-edited, badly-acted, unrefined, vague, experimental, 2-a.m.-recording-session BULLSHIT because it is truly SHIT. But this is what it takes to follow your passion.

I don't know whether this will ultimately be a successful venture. I don't know whether any of the ideas I intend to express through my videos will be liked or even watched. All I know right now is that I'm 26 years old and living with my parents and it's about goddamn time I stopped fucking around and took advantage of my ability to afford a camera and a webspace and just shoot for the stars, because whether or not my video ideas ultimately gather any significant audience, I know objectively that I have too much fucking talent to waste it as a perpetual student and unqualified employee doing a job I hate, and hate myself for doing.

Whatever life you have outside the thing that sparks your soul into electric motion and makes your blood pound and your mind spin in the euphoric knowledge of your own potential, you have to pay your dues and learn to walk before you can run.

Genius doesn't manifest overnight, if it manifests EVER. This is my progress, my experiment, my experience, recorded here for whatever good it might do to someone who comes after me, or entertainment it provides for whoever wanders casually into my corner of the internet. For good or bad, this is me, finally, determined and naive and stupid, giving up sleep and food and a lot else because goddammit, I can't NOT do this.

Pedestrians who stray this way, may you be able to someday proudly raise the middle finger of contempt towards all the assenine bullshit that stands between you and your fucking life, and may that day be soon.

Welcome and progress updates.

Greetings (no doubt long after this is posted) to anyone who has found me here.

I am Ven Gethenian, the Somaturge, and this is by blog space. Here will be posted mostly news and updates pertaining to the progress of the site, videos, content, etc.

As of now, I'm in the final editing stages of my first video. I'm not going to lie -- it's probably going to look a bit silly to anyone who knows arse-all about video-making and editing. But this is my first and I'll have done my best, given my total lack of any prior experience worth noting. All that's left is for me to try to record an audio track for the title screen and credits and see if this program will let me stick it in there in a way that isn't too jarringly abrupt and only puts the music over the text screens.

...jesus, I must sound like the newbiest newb that ever newbed.

Whatever. Anyway, I'm also in the process of rennovating a fantastic recording space. You see, once upon a time, allegedly during the 1970's, a previous owner of my native abode used the basement as a nightclub... allegedly, it catered to a more homosexual crowd. It hasn't been significantly rennovated since, apart from my sister's brief interest in sprucing the place up which ultimately resulted in little more than the removal of the ceiling tiles and half the blacklight-room in the back being painted (oh, the sex that must have gone on there...). So here I have this beautifully dated bar... I've just done some electrical tinkering and got the place lit up again. Now it needs only for me to reorganize the shelves that will be visible in frame for it to be a suitable backdrop for film-making. Lord knows I don't mind playing Martha Steward for the sake of my art -- there are more tedious chores I could be doing. Like editing. Good god, editing.

I'll be doing some test footage in a few minutes to see if I can find a good spot to lodge my camera and figure out how well it likes my lighting setup and all that stuff. My sister will be dragged into this project tomorrow, if we're not busy decorating the place for Halloween.

I'm hopeful that I'll have at least the intro video up by mid-week, if not a full review. That may be a bit ambitious but I've never been someone who tended to allow mere common sense to stop me for shooting for the moon. ;)