Video Roundup for August 2015 (part 1 of 3)

Sorry it’s been so long, should do these more often, not that hard to post a video after I do it, blah blah blah.

WARNING : As usual, lots of music, but at least a lot of them have slideshows now.

Starting up, we have this sweet little number, A Special Treat.

Funky, fun, not the tightest integration ever, but still quite pleasant.

As you can tell, when I can’t think of a title, I use one that refers to whatever audio clip I have used to end my tune. I use audio clips because it’s a lot easier than figuring out how to end the damn thing.

Next up, we have “Lead In The Chimney, Same As The Door”.

Like I say in the YouTube description for this piece, that is literally the first thing that popped into my mind when I was trying to come up with a title for this piece. And this worries me.

But it was too weird and specific not to use.

Not my best work. It’s fast, but that’s about it. Well, and a certain amount of craftsmanship. But otherwise, it’s just overcaffeinated twitchy garbage.

Damn I am harsh on myself. Lighten up, me!

Next, I get all serious about homelessness and humanism and status and stuff.

This is what happens when you start off a talk without an end goal in mind. But I have given up on end goals because there’s almost no chance I will actually end up there.

Every time I start talking, it’s an adventure.

Given that, it is surprising how good those talks of mine end up being. They are usually a lot more coherent than other ramblers, at least. I’d love to be able to produce tightly edited, fully realized, popcorn sized content bites, but at least point in my life, I don’t have it in me.

But some day I will!

Next we have me messing around with foreign language video by adding my own subtitles, this time to a trailer for a German cyberpunk movie from 1981.

I had agreed to work my magic on that trailer before I realized it didn’t have much speech in it. So what you are seeing there is absolutely every second of speech in the trailer for Decoder.

As for the content, I have two main methods when it comes to doing those. I either make up an absurd story based on what’s in the video, or I base the subtitles on what it sounds like they are saying.

This one was mostly the latter, thus, more random-ish.

Back to music : “The Key To Parenting”.

Gah, that was awful. Oh well, they can’t all be gems. [1] It definitely seems to me that things sound good in my head, while I am making them, that are actually absolute crap.

I feel lucky that any of it comes out okay. I mean, intellectually, I know that all good art comes from making enough bad art to get good at it, but yikes.

Next up is another talker, and warning, it’s over ten minutes long. Apparently, I had a lot more thoughts on the subject of workplace social dynamics than I thought.

That’s how I look with the overhead light and my bedside light AND YouTube enhancement!

Maybe I should dye my beard blonde.

We would be a lot better off if we took off our individualist blinders, accepted that we are social animals not rugged individuals, and stop pretending that nothing exists outside personal concerns.

We are more than an aggregation of individuals. We are social, we are connected, we need one another.

We are human.

Next up, wistful melancholy.

Hmph. I swear, the mix favored the piano more when I composed the damn thing.

I have had those utterly gorgeously sad piano sample for a long time, and that night, I decided to use them. And it would have been gorgeous if I had gotten the volume balance right.

As is, it’s pretty but disjointed and unbalanced. Despite all my efforts, the non-piano elements overwhelm the piano part rather than enhance them.

So much of my creative output would be great if I just took more time with it.

Maybe Kwantlen will teach me to not be in such a hurry to be “done”.

Next up, music…. and astrology!

As many of you know, I am an expert astrologer. Initially, I picked it up from my sister Anne, but then went on to study more on my own, and I know it more or less inside out now.

So in retrospect, it’s obvious that I would be unable to post Vallejo’s Zodiac without saying something about each sign.

As for my little piece of music, not bad. Better than some of the other stuff I am posting tonight.

Not sure those machine-gun strings were a good idea. Oh well.

I have no idea why there is no title for this talk.

I could have called it “Listen To Their Day”, or something.

People don’t really get this point, even though we talk about the value of listening all the time. Since at least the time of Dale Carnegie and his book, How To Win Friends And Influence People, we have been telling each other that we really should listen to one another, but we don’t do it because we are so goddamned spoiled that the idea of enduring half an hour of listening to someone who isn’t as fun as television seems worse than being asked to donate a kidney.

Finally for night, I go a little nuts with the rhythm.

A lot of my little pieces of music end up sounding like they ended just when they were getting started, but that piece kind of takes the prize for that.

Again, too eager to be “done”. Premature publishing! Maybe I should just think about baseball.

Anyhow, not a bad little piece, feeling of non-completion aside. I absolutely love that crazy, delicate yet driving bongo beat. It needs stronger drums to lend it weight, but it just sounds so cool.

I guess that’s it for now. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow with more video madness.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Productions!

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