Posts Tagged video
Queen of Spades: Pancake cake (video)
Posted by Angela Brett in Alcatraz Rules and Regulations, Culture, Recipes, Writing Cards and Letters on June 3, 2012
As I mentioned, last weekend I was in Sweden with some friends, and my birthday was a few days later. My Swedish friend read us a well-known story by Sven Nordqvist about a pancake cake (Pannkakstårtan in Swedish), and then made me such a cake for my birthday. I made this video about it. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but cover the edges with cream and it’ll be okay.
I used the following songs:
- Pancakes are the Cool by The Cow Exchange
- But You Get to Have Cake (a parody of Faith by George Michael) by Robert Lund and Spaff.com
- Cooking (to be continued…) by Jonathan Mann (Incidentally, I used the sequel to this in a video of a light show on a building.)
- A few seconds of Jonathan Mann’s cover of Finished With Lies by They Might Be Giants, for the Mink Car Cover project to raise money for the FDNY Foundation. The cake is not a lie.
- Cakes by Berkeley Social Scene (from Song Fight, in case you want more songs about cakes)
Ace of spades: It’s not a (real) heart
Posted by Angela Brett in 52 ways to say I love you, Flowers and Animals, St James's Gate, Writing Cards and Letters on March 11, 2012
I told you I wouldn’t just be writing this time. Here’s a music video for Jonathan Coulton’s Dissolve, using footage from my unboxing of the level 4 bundle for the album Artificial Heart, which this song is on, and some from JoCo Cruise Crazy and the things I did in Florida before that. I really hope you like it.
Long before I received the package in the mail, I heard that simply opening the box was quite an experience. I carefully avoided reading about what exactly was in the mysterious box, and decided to turn my unboxing into a music video for this song about a mysterious box. As it turned out, a lyric from the song was on the lid of the box. Clearly somebody had to create this video. Maybe somebody else has already done it; I still haven’t watched anyone else’s unboxing videos. If you want to understand what I’m doing, search for level 4 unboxing videos online. Some of them probably include the instructions we’re following.
I eventually received the box just four days before I flew to Florida to visit Universal, Kennedy Space Center, my very first standalone Paul and Storm show, and of course, JoCo Cruise Crazy 2, so I used some footage of those things in the last part of the video. Victory in the warm sun!
If I’d thought about it, I’d have started on the ace of hearts this week instead of the ace of spades. But a spade looks a lot like a heart when upside down, and there were a few other references to hearts on my aces of spades. It’s not a real heart, but it is a real artificial heart.
I filmed this using my new camera, a Canon PowerShot S100, which shoots in full HD and autofocusses while filming. My favourite moment is when I open the box and the camera automatically focusses on the lid of the box, then focusses back on me just as I start smiling. That was quite a lovely fluke. There’s also some nice changes of focus wile the nostalgia device moves around. Everything in this video was shot only once with no rehearsal, while I was opening my level 4 box, or in Florida, or on JoCo Cruise Crazy. This is new for me; usually I spend far too long getting the footage exactly right. There is a small mistake on the calendar part; I did not do the KSC Close-Up tour two days in a row. I also left in another clip which I think I intended to replace by something else, but if I don’t tell you which it is it’s not bad enough that you’ll notice it.
In case you’re wondering, this video contains 11 ‘dissolve’ transitions, but the transitions that occur when Jonathan sings ‘dissolve’ are actually ‘fade to white’ transitions. Also, the yellow country you can see when he sings ‘here’ of ‘If you need me, I’ll be anywhere but here’ is Jamaica. That’s on a big globe at Geneva airport which I filmed as I was on my way to fly to Orlando.
A new video! A new video! A new video! A new video!
Posted by Angela Brett in Holiday Highlights on January 2, 2012
My boss gave me a new car for Christmas, the very day that I got my new camera, which can take high-speed video. So it seemed natural to combine the two. The soundtrack is ‘A New Car’ from the album ‘Brontosaurus’ by Da Vinci’s Notebook. Paul and Storm (the comedy music duo formed from roughly half of Da Vinci’s Notebook) said they wouldn’t sue me for using it.
The new camera is a Canon PowerShot S100, in case you’re wondering. Most of setup at the beginning was shot with my Canon PowerShot G9 in time-lapse mode, and the rest is shot with the S100 at 240 frames per second, 320×240 pixels. The domino shot looks a bit dim because I tried to do it in natural light, since the flickering of fluorescent light is too noticeable at high speed. The rest was lit with a halogen lamp.
Practically everything went wrong during the making of this video. I learnt:
- Either my dominoes are bad quality (they were from the $2 shop), I’m terrible at setting them up, or dominoes in general are more difficult to set up in a line than one would think. I ended up putting them on their sides.
- Natural light after spending far too long setting up dominoes on a winter afternoon is not bright enough for high-speed video.
- I’m not as good at building houses of cards as I used to be. Or they don’t make playing cards like they used to.
- Natural light after spending far too long setting up dominoes and then spending far too long setting up playing cards on a winter afternoon is not bright enough for high-speed video.
- Halogen lamps don’t flicker at 50Hz.
- A container of glitter hit by a toy car goes a long way.
- When dealing with piles of shaving cream, always know where your towel is.
Maybe I should make a blooper video.
Edit: Oh, alright. I made a blooper video. It uses ‘Incompetent’s Lament‘ by Paul and Storm as the soundtrack, which contains the F word, so if you don’t want to hear it, just turn the sound off.
Video: Anniversary Cards Redux
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on December 3, 2011
Do you remember Anniversary Cards, in which I wrote a ‘Roses are Red’-style poem for each of the songs Jonathan Coulton wrote for his Thing a Week project? Well, recently Jonathan ran a Thing a Week Redux in which he reposted each of the Thing a Week blog entries five years after the original, with some new commentary. Just like during the original Thing a Week, I didn’t get around to reading it very often. However, as I was catching up with it around five weeks from the end, I got the idea of revisiting those Roses are Red rhymes and turning them into a video to celebrate the end of Thing a Week Redux. I didn’t get it done in time, so I saved it for Jonathan’s birthday (December 1) instead. Here’s the video:
That was not specifically made for his birthday, but this other video I was involved with (mostly on ridiculous percussion that didn’t make the cut, and robot choir in the final few verses) was:
It’s based on A Talk With George, which Jonathan has said was his favourite Thing a Week, and rewritten, sung, strummed, mixed, filmed and cut by the great people on Jonathan Coulton’s forums, most of which I have met or will meet in real life at concerts in the UK or on JoCo Cruise Crazy.
And now back to overexplaining the first video.
Video: Séjours linguistiques
Posted by Angela Brett in Holiday Highlights, video on August 21, 2011
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, if only because it was an excuse to make a fort out of language books. Here is a video of my reading my poem Séjours linguistiques (originally titled ‘Discours inférieur’ in order to have a tenuous link to the playing card of the week.)
Stochastic induction of epizeuxis is my bird feeder made out of a coconut
Posted by Angela Brett in News, The Afterlife on February 13, 2011
The following video is not an example of creative output on my part, for by giving Secretary of Geek Affairs Wil Wheaton the CERN T-shirt featured, I simply did what clearly needed to be done. I am nonetheless pleased to have induced what I believe to be an example of my favourite word, ‘epizeuxis‘:
Here is a picture of the card that comes with the T-shirt, which has an explanation of the equation (click for the text of the card and a higher-resolution version of the photo):
I have written an ‘origin story’ in the style of Peter Sagal’s, explaining the improbable series of events that led to my being on a boat in a position to give Wil Wheaton a CERN T-shirt, and drawing a parallel between the above video and Peter Sagal‘s bird feeder made out of a coconut. However, it ended up somewhat long (1000 words) and show-offish, and I have been too busy watching concert videos to edit it properly (indeed, I arbitrarily stopped editing it when I noticed the word count was exactly 1000), so I’ll put it below the ‘more’ thingy for you to ignore. I’m not sure whether all of the events are in the right order, but the story is 1000 words long so it’s too late to edit them now. It looks like I’ll even have to include the superfluous second introduction, since I accidentally included that in the word count.
It’s a shame, really, because I promised somebody I’d include the word ‘shanty’, and now I can’t edit it in. But you can’t argue with integer powers of the number of digits most humans have on their hands.
Valentine Day Massacre chapbook
Posted by Angela Brett in News, Publishing on February 10, 2011
Just in time to arrive late for Valentine’s Day, Červená Barva Press have released a chapbook of poems mentioning the word ‘heart’, which were posted on Fictionaut in response to a Valentine’s Day challenge. I’m going to assume they removed the customary apostrophe and ensuing S in order to avoid any unintentional SQL injection. Anyhow, this book includes my scientific love poem, Chemistry, which you can see me reading while wearing two fake moustaches here:
The words and explanations of the science behind it can be found on a few previous blog posts, so I’ll just link to one of them.
Feel free to buy a copy of the chapbook for yourself or your valentine. I don’t get any money from it, and neither does anyone else except for the publisher, because apparently we did it for love, but if you buy it, you’ll get to read quite a varied set of poems, which will make you happy. Alternatively, you could read the poems on Fictionaut by searching the site for ‘Valentine’s Day Massacre’.
On the subject of fake moustaches, I recently went on a cruise with Jonathan Coulton and many of his famous friends and fans. The cruise featured a moustache formal, so if you would like to see how my moustache has changed over time, here’s a picture of me at the formal. I’ll probably post more about the cruise later, if I can come up with a sufficiently creative way of describing it. In the mean time, you could enjoy the many videos I took of the cruise.
Video: Return of the Pants
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on February 6, 2011
You remember those red pants I wore in the ‘A Laptop Like You‘ and ‘Love Letters‘ videos? They weren’t mine. My sister gave them to me years and years ago, and after seeing how much they improved those videos, she wanted them back. So when I went back to New Zealand in May 2010, I took the pants with me. This is how it went down:
Since then, I’ve thrown the weird underwear I’m wearing in the beginning at Paul and Storm, because that’s what I do with weird underwear.
Here are the words to the ‘poem’ part, minus the oattakes:
YouTubers, I have a confession.
Two tubes in my possession,
once used to belong to my sister.
From before she was fat,
and she’s no longer that,
so in keeping them, I think I’ve pissed her.
While I wasn’t at fault just to wear them,
when their owner was not even near them,
to not give her credit was rude.
While they’ve not made me famous,
They’ve saved me from shame, as
They certainly made me less nude.
So it’s time to put things right.
I’ve suitcase and pants and a flight,
some chocolate to sweeten the deal and,
with a smile and a wave,
if the volcano behaves, (this was just after flights resumed after the Eyjafjallajökull eruption)
I’m off to see Liz in New Zealand.
Liz: I’m sure glad she’s coming;
the lack of pants is numbing.
I had to grow pubic hair to cope. (Note: this was originally ‘leg hair’ but she only had pubic hair handy)
After many a year
in just underwear
I’d just about given up hope!
Me: Here you go, sis, have your trousers;
their stardom is greater than ours is,
so go in the bathroom and strip.
Liz: I got my big bum in,
and my gruts hold my tum in
though I can’t quite do up the zip.
The rimshot-like thing and the word ‘pants’ which you hear after that come from Christian Davis’s recording of Jonathan Coulton playing ‘Mr. Fancy Pants’ at Park West on 28 February 2009.
You might have noticed I changed the theme of my blog. This was because there was at last a new variable-width theme with a customisable header, and I thought it might suit my ‘Creative Output‘ picture better. Unfortunately, the title of the blog covers most of the picture, so it didn’t really work.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 