This cracked me up to no end. I make fun of Iowa quite a bit, having gone to college in the corn fields, but I gotta show some respect to this.
Posts Tagged ‘video’
A Steampunk Rapper? [video]
When your genre appears to inspire parody rappers, maybe things are reaching the end of a cycle:
This is the first single off Professor Elemental’s album, the Indifference Engine.
Heh.
He’s even part of a weird stage act called The Uncanny Valley. Man, why does all the cool stuff happen in London?
The Eternal Memory of the Internet
I came across a hilarious video today that I shared on Facebook and Twitter. In it, a young man recounted a field trip from his youth, growing up in the South, that was incredibly racist in nature. Racism isn’t funny, but his recounting of the experience had great comedic timing. The video was shot by a friend at a party, apparently after the narrator had had a couple of drinks. The repercussions of sharing the video never occurred to me, or anyone else, I suspect.
A friend commented on the Facebook post later this evening to say that the video had been removed, and he posted a video of the young man explaining why he’d asked to have the video removed. His reasoning was hard to argue with. Basically, he was afraid having something like that on the internet would hurt his prospects of a career in the future.
It’s hard to argue with that kind of reasoning. Truth is, employees, like editors with slush, are so inundated with resumes these days, they’re probably looking for any reason they can to pass on potential employees. Whether that’s right or wrong is irrelevant—they’re doing it, they will continue to do it, and arguing about it won’t stop it, so long as there is a surplus of labor and a shortage of jobs to be done. (Even though I don’t really believe that’s necessarily the case across the board).
The internet doesn’t forget anything. Sites like the Wayback Machine make sure of it. Youthful indiscretions, foolish behavior, or moments of weakness are practically etched in stone today, and half the time, we’re doing the etching ourselves (although in this case, the young man’s friends recorded the video and uploaded it). I can just imagine the first political races where the candidates have a life of internet history behind them. They candidates are either going to have had lived boring lives or we’re going to have to become more tolerant of faults in our potential leaders. I suspect the impact it’ll have, if we don’t become more tolerant, will be a very negative one. We often say that last people we want in office are the people who want the jobs. This will just exacerbate that. We’ll end up with people who knew they wanted power from a very early age and planned for it. That’s a frightening thought to me on some levels.
The video showed all the signs of being a breakout viral hit, and the young man could have tried to ride that to some measure of fame like so many have done before. It takes a principled person, I think, to pass up the chance of sudden fame to stick to your goals. He’s tried to “put the genie back in the bottle,” but people have already reposted the video against his wishes. If his career plans don’t work out though, he’ll definitely have a future in stand up. I imagine some comedians would argue that’s damning him with faint praise, as far a real income prospects go…
I wish that young man the best of luck, regardless.
Sometimes, I’m just overwhelmed with how different this world is than the one I expected to be living in. It’s marvelous and troubling, frightening and exhilarating all at once. We live in the bloody future, in very strange days.
Today’s Link: Metal Ancestors (video)
I came across this video made by a friend of mine via Facebook yesterday, and I can’t stop thinking about it, so I thought I’d share it with you all today. Levi’s a video auteur who shoots with a DSLR. It’s bloody remarkable what he accomplishes with a minimal budget—I’m really impressed by how smooth his panning is. I’ve seen the gear he uses to accomplish that panning, and it’s not exactly high dollar.
Metal Ancestors features a local tourist attraction called the Swetsville Zoo. The less I say about it, the better—let the video describe it to you. I haven’t made it out there yet, but after watching this, I really want to find the time. I might even get my camera out of the closet for the occasion.
Metal Ancestors from Levi Thornton on Vimeo.
There are low-cost creative tools everywhere you look—tools enabling people to do amazing things that look as professional as the stuff made with $50,000 worth of camera gear. I love living in the future.
Similo: An SF Short Film
This is snurched straight from Irene Gallo’s excellent blog Tor.com. It starts out a little slow, but I think the payoff is worth it. And fantastic production values all around.
Ray Bradbury & Prunes
Doesn’t he hate being called a SF writer?
Five reasons this book trailer rocks
I forget where I got this, but I think that it’s the level of quality I’d like to see in more book trailers online:
Having Tim Curry as a narrator is probably outside of the range of what we can afford as SF/F writers, but still. Let’s go over what makes this awesome:
- Tight pacing. 2 minutes long, and packed with information. If there’s a negative here, some of it is too fast. But that is preferable to too slow.
- Rapid-moving, well designed motion graphics. The movement is varied. It’s not a bunch of slow zooms or pans on a graphic like many book trailers I see. Stuff comes in and leaves the view at an angle. There’s perspective. It has a coherent visual style also.
- Illustrations! This is much easier when your book has illustrations already, but maybe an investment in an illustrator would increase the “stickiness” of a book trailer. It’s a visual medium, and you need some imagery to catch the eye. Simple stock photos probably aren’t good enough. And you can only use your cover so many times.
- Professional narration, with the highest quality sound. So many book trailers I have seen end up sounding like they were recorded in a bathtub. PC microphones are a travesty. Studio-quality audio is not cheap. Alas.
- Prominently displayed URL at the end. This isn’t a criticism of other book trailers as I usually don’t make it to the end in other ones I have watched. But I liked how it left you with a call to action (go to the website!) I don’t know how much promotion Lemony Snicket really needs for these books, but if I didn’t know about them already, this would have sent me running to the site.
My After Effects and Premiere skills are pretty rusty, but I think I’m going to try and add them back into my skillset. I have a voice actor studio I’ve done work with in Denver at the old day job, and so I think I could probably offer a decently affordable, high quality book trailer service. Youtube is the third most visited website on the web. It’s power to bring your book before a new audience is unparalleled. I’d really like to offer a service to tap into that power.
