Posts Tagged video
Fake Ace of Diamonds: Chemistry Live
Posted by Angela Brett in 52 ways to say I love you on July 1, 2012
Last Ace of Diamonds, I stalled for a week by posting a video of a poem I’d written previously. I’m not sure if I’ll have the real Ace of Diamonds done in time, so I’ll do the same again. The real Ace of Diamonds, which I will publish as soon as it’s ready, is a a sequel/prequel to the last real Ace of Diamonds, and it’s also about stalling and procrastination, which seems appropriate. This is me reading my poem Chemistry (which was the two of diamonds, and already has a video) at the open mic night on JoCo Cruise Crazy 2:
And here’s a more close-up video of it that Jason recorded:
I sure am stalling a lot this round. It’s embarrassing considering I started with something I really like that was done in time. But hey, I still have an hour till the deadline, so maybe I’ll get the real Ace of Diamonds done in time anyway. If you’re wondering why I’m onto diamonds now when I went from Spades to Hearts last time, it was simply the next card in the first deck I looked at.
In other news, here are some things that music lovers in Europe might want to do:
- Back Marian Call’s kickstarter or otherwise support her European Adventure Quest to get Marian and her very talented guitarist Scott Barkan playing in your country or even your living room. If you want to know what she’s like and somehow find video more appealing than downloading music, you could watch my videos of her two concerts and Scott’s concert on JoCo Cruise Crazy.
- Go see The Burning Hell if they come near while attempting to break a record by giving concerts in ten countries in 24 hours. If you want to know what they’re like, you could watch the videos I’m currently uploading of them at Viertel (my favourite concert venue on land) where they will return for the world record tour.
- Keep an eye on Jonathan Coulton’s tour schedule, because he’ll be at Union Chapel (my second favourite concert venue on land) in London on September 20, and will no doubt visit other places in the UK and Europe. If you don’t know what he sounds like yet, you haven’t been paying attention; pick a video from my YouTube channel at random and he’s probably in it.
I know I’ll be doing all three things.
King of Spades (Moxy Früvous parody)
Posted by Angela Brett in 52 ways to say I love you, Alcatraz Rules and Regulations, Bäume, Dinosaurier, Famous Pirates, Fische, Golden Gate Bridge, Holland, Hunde der Welt, Johnny English, Kama Sutra, Katzen der Welt, Kennedy Space Center, Models, Scenic New Zealand, Star Wars, The Best of Switzerland, Writing Cards and Letters on June 24, 2012
This is a parody of King of Spain by Moxy Früvous, written by me and sung by my not-so-top-secret collaborator, whom some of you recognised as Hello, The Future! She was sick for a while, which is why this is a week later than promised. There’s an mp3, but it probably makes more sense with the video.
Here are the lyrics (forgive the spacing; if I could have a superpower, it would be to always be able to make WordPress space lines the way I want):
Once I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
Oh, how I planted that naked lady now I’m just a playing card
I’m telling you I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
And now it takes lady luck to play me
Wan, 2 3 4!
Chicks dug me, spades really suited me
digging up bones from the late Cretaceous or planting downy birch trees
Now I eat humble pie whenever the ace is high
Caught in a flush for a poker cheater, plotting to crush the other guy
Once I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
A pirate’s deckhand, burying lucre now I’m just a playing card
I’m telling you I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
And now my hand sweeps the deck at Euchre
Once this was the King of Spades
Folks would rave, they’d die so I’d dig their grave, the people said:
“King, how are you such a genius?”
“Your mounds are convex”
“and holes are concave!”
Kill chafer grubs so I would have safer shrubs
I’d do yardwork all through the weekend
and dig diamonds to give the lonely hearts clubs
Once I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
Old tree falls, new sea walls, you sat back, I’d hack that. now I’m just a playing card
I’m telling you I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
Now the Ace hits me up to save you at blackjack.
Once this was the King of Spades
Ladies and Gentlemen, make your bids for the instrumental bridge!
Now some of you might be wondering how I came to be a playing card
after being a real life king of spades. Should I lay my cards on the table?
(shouting)
Deal me in!
You see late one day, I’d just dug a wishing well
Clearly I had to test it, I’ve pride in the service I sell.
And I thought, well this number’s fun, but I should be in the pictures
Next thing my heads are pounding, I’m upside down,
and I’m too legless for britches.
Ship and flatfish, banquet and cat dish
How I wish I’d never made that wish.
Counter to all intentions, I only have two dimensions.
If you’ve felt you’re bored with the cards life dealt
Remember, real life beats royal flushes
so dig your way to gold rushes!
Once I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
I was dealing out gem stones from pyroclastic now I’m just a playing card
I’m telling you I was the King of Spades now I’m just a playing card
And now my dealer is Angelastic.
Once this was the King of Spades
It was obvious I should parody this song for the King of Spades. I assumed I’d end up writing a nonsense song describing all the Kings of Spades I have in rhyme, and that it wouldn’t make any sense at all without a video showing the cards. Sort of like Jonathan Coulton’s Flickr. But to make a video, I’d need someone to sing it. Naturally, I thought of Hello, The Future! since she has already written one King of Spain parody, and when I first met her she was wearing a ‘Hello, The Future! is the name of my Moxy Früvous cover band’ T-shirt. Also, I knew she had a fez and had experience wearing a fake moustache. I commissioned her to do it even before I’d written anything. Once the lyrics were written, I sent her my shouting parts, some noises I made with my rainstick (which I am determined to use in everything now) and a plastic box full of kings of spades, and the one line which I realised, to my horror, would only make sense if I sang it myself, and she mixed it all in. It ended up being some kind of story about a real-life spade maven who turns into a playing card, and it might make some kind of sense without the video, but it’s still more fun with it.
One thing I hoped I could make clear in the video was that the ‘naked lady’ line was referring to amaryllis bulbs; I’m not sure how widespread that name is. But alas, amaryllis is out of season here.
One of these days, I should put this and several other things on my podcast. Unfortunately, I chose a podcast hosting platform which is a real hassle to use, so I’ve been lax in adding things to it.
I used cards from several new decks of cards this week. Obi-Wan Kenobi from a Star Wars Heroes & Villains deck I got in Sweden made an appearance (he’s a King of Spades, but was the ‘Wan’ as I shouted ‘1 2 3 4’), as did a Queen of Hearts (in the lonely hearts club) from the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. Also in the lonely hearts club is a King of Spades from a Kama Sutra deck I found while searching for panties to throw at Paul and Storm. Underneath the ship card, you can see some information from a Golden Gate Bridge deck I was given on JoCo Cruise Crazy 2, and somewhere in there is a King of Spades from a pirate deck I bought in Aruba (the same place I got the rainstick) during that cruise.
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.
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 