TGWTG Year Three Tribute Video & My Hotel Room Is Haunted By The Ghost Of Disco

There is a Facebook group dedicated to the promotion of the TGWTG 3rd year anniversary movie, whose subject is still a mystery, when it is released. While we all wait for the release of a trailer or a hint or anything we can get Tweeting about, an idea was devised to organize a side project -- a compilation of videos made by fans to express what their connection with the site has meant to them and thank the producers or whatever they wanted to say to them.

I knew from the moment that plan was proposed that I wanted to be part of it. But before I could even begin formulating even a vague concept of what I wanted to do or say for my contribution, a friend of mine brought it up and told me that although she wanted to contribute, the things she wanted to say were not things she was comfortable saying on camera to a potentially very large audience of mostly strangers. I told her that if she wrote down what she wanted to say, I would happily be her on-screen "voice" and record it for her. And that is exactly what I did.

So here is my contribution to the Year 3 fan video. The first part (a little more than half) is me speaking for my friend. The second part is my personal contribution.



Now, while I was trying to find a place to set up my camera and do this so the background wasn't COMPLETELY obviously just a hotel room somewhere, I noticed very quickly that my camera was behaving.... very, very oddly. The result was a lot of outtakes and tests which I have compiled into a second video.

Until further notice, the only explanation I have for what happened here is that my hotel room is haunted by the ghost of disco.

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...

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...