SitRep

It’s been a long hard week. I’ve had to make some difficult decisions, I’ve gotten sick, and the wind-down of the school year for my family is always rough. Regardless, it’s officially summer now, so let’s do an update.

  • The studio is starting to break in nicely. The overall design is one thing, but it’s when the space reacts to heavy use that the details start to come out. The SD card reader mounted to a shelf, the USB switch to move some of the peripherals from one machine to another easily, the mounts for the webcams… all that starts to solidify. An finer example- I’ve got a birds-eye view webcam over my analog desk. That camera is mounted (via a Manfrotto plate system) to a SuperClamp that’s gripping the overhead shelf. It means I can either use the webcam there, or with a flick of a lever, swap the camera to a proper video camera (or still, for that matter) to shoot higher end video. Fast, easy, and versatile.
  • I’ve begun some work on a proper update to my most popular YouTube videos. Years ago, I made a short series of videos about Lord of the Flies, and it’s time to update them. It will be a project for the next couple of months- and after those videos, I’m hoping to make a set for Catcher in the Rye. After that, who knows. But my better half and I are starting to break down the segments and outline the topics, so it’ll still be a while until you actually see any of them. But I’m working on it.
  • This site has been eating through it’s bandwidth this month- there was a pretty hefty spike in viewership, and at the same time I put up some uncharacteristically media-heavy posts. I’ve redone the media for those (a bit smarter with the jpeg compression is all), so that should help.

a new playlist.

I’ve been dumping the full-res (such as they are…) videos that I make (for instagram) to a playlist on YouTube here.

They’re all short (duh) and are aimed at telling (very) short stories from my day-to-day functions. They are not, in and of themselves, products, really. I suppose they mostly just serve as a sort of ongoing drill to help me improve. Or something.

But everything looks better in slow-mo and I really dig the way some of the color grading looks on these. And 14 seconds is short enough that even I don’t get too bored…

As you were.

Some new test footage.

Since my previous camera went belly-up, I’ve picked up a Nikon D5300 (which I like in every way thus far). This is some of the first test footage that’s come off that camera, with just a quick edit. I used a 30+ year old Vivitar 28mm f2.5 Konica AR lens with a ND8+4 rig for light control (and so I could shoot wide open…).