Banner photo of Larry Eugene Meredith, Ronald Tipton and Patrick Flynn, 2017.

The good times are memories
In the drinking of elder men...

-- Larry E.
Time II

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Bloggin' and Walkin' and Complications Thereof

Okay, so I've been reading some others talking about why they Blog. It's their therapy. It's their relaxation. It's their addiction. Yeah, well it may be all of that, especially the last. I have always claimed writing was a curse or disease with no cure. And sometimes it is just plain hard work.

I mean, there are things you need know and don't. For instance, I don't know if the word is blog or Blog. Is Blog a proper noun or just some generic thingamabob? I'm always capitalizing the word, but maybe I shouldn't. A writer is supposed to know such a thing, is he or she not?

Why don't we have a neutral word for he and she. See, there is another style book question. Do you stick with he or stick with she when making general statements or must you alternate? On the other hand, must you always use both? It'd be much easy if we had a pronoun like hesh or something. A writer is supposed to know such a thing, is hesh not?

I writer ought to be writing, too. Have you noticed my production was down these last few days. There are a couple of reasons. One has to do with writing. I joined a writers' group and got self-conscious about my grammar or lack of it. I bought a new book for the purpose of brushing up on such things as whether I sat that book down or I set that book down. I did this because some of my time has been taken up reading and critiquing eight other writers' work for the meeting this Friday.

And then I took a walk. Yes, I know, I am always taking walks, but in this case I decided to do another taping. Now I had some video snippets of my stroll to put together. Ah, ha, I said, I will make one big film this time. So I worked at stitching these snippets together, adding special effects, music (something that would come back to haunt me) and a narration. Beautiful, it came to just 30 minutes and some things timed out just perfectly and I felt I nailed the ending. All that was left to do was the upload to YouTube to finalize the effort. This is when I learned YouTube limits videos to 15 minutes.

I had to cut my opus up into three parts (I was afraid splitting it in half was cutting too close to that 15 minute barrier).  It took more effort that you can believe. I basically had to start all over for there was no way to slice and dice my finished epic. I had to reassign the strips, re-add the music and redo the narrative. This took time, a lot of time, but at long last I finished and all three sections uploaded to YouTube without a hiccup.

Except I got an email notification saying one of my videos may contain copyrighted content. I try my best to not use any such animal. The only thing it could be was the music. The pictures, the film, the narrative were all original by me. When I looked at my playlist on YouTube, I saw several marked as possiblily using copyrighted material. Now I had used classical music as background and figured that was written before 1922 so would be public domain. However, I guess the performance of the music was  what was copyrighted.

I went in and deleted all my videos where I used music. I then removed all the music from my masters and loaded the altered films back to YouTube. Bingo, any warnings went away, but so did some of the spark. I felt the videos needed something beyond my dreary voice and shaky filming.

Once again I deleted all my videos from YouTube and once again I reproduced them, this time using bits of music supplied by Apple, supposedly in the public domain. If I receive any notice on these, then I guess music will not be in the background of my tapes, unless I start composing my own and pluck it out on my son's guitar.

At any rate, below is my latest effort. It is called "Cauffiel in the Wind". (And you need ask yourselves, did "hesh" capitalize the correct words in that title?) And, by the way, you set the book down on the table next to where you had sat to read.

Oh, and I suggest you turn off my music player so you can hear the videos.



CAUFFIEL IN THE WIND

TO THE PIKE

TO THE BOULEVARD

TO THE HOUSE AND BEYOND


It isn't easy Bloggin' with a lap full of cats, either. 

4 comments:

Vương Tử Trực said...

Wow! You're amazing! I couldn't stop reading till the end.
You can upload to Google Videos instead of cutting into parts (Youtube belongs to Google too).

Ron said...

How frustrating to put all that effort into your videos, especially nailing the music part on the ending. That's what I did with the memorial video I made for my Mother. Then after you sliced and diced your 30 minute video into three parts only to find out that you could upload a 30 minute video. I'm at work now so I start watching your videos now.

Ron said...

Hey Lar! Your creative juices have been unleashed! Wow!
You could have been a filmmaker! Steven Spielberg......watch out!

Tamela's Place said...

That sounded like alot of work Lar. You did good though it was another nice walk and to learn some history is a plus. So are you enjoying being a part of this new writer's club?

Tammy :)

P.S. cute pic. at the bottom. Cats are relentless about being smack dab in the middle of everything your doing lol!