Posts Tagged video
Video hodge-podge: Open Mic Night, JoCo Day, and a few musical evenings
Posted by Angela Brett in News, video on December 2, 2010
On Friday I went to an open mic poetry night run by the Leman Poetry Workshop. I had forgotten about it until my calendar reminded me the day before, so I didn’t have time to prepare anything to read. In the end, I read two poems I’ve already read at other gatherings, and also recorded for YouTube. They seemed to go down well. I told a few people there about my blog, so I’m reposting videos of the two poems here in case they want to see them again.
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Video: Chemistry
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on July 4, 2010
Well, my last six months are over, without the rules really having been adhered to, and I’m still alive. On the subject of Still Alive, Steam is now available on the Mac so I finally played all the way through Portal on the very Mac that sang Still Alive for my last video (the older Mac only lip-synched, although it was perfectly capable of singing.) And on the subject of my last video, that wasn’t my last video after all, because here’s a new one. It’s a ‘performance‘ of the scientific love poem Chemistry, which I wrote during Writing Cards and Letters and revised for a challenge on Fictionaut.
It’s one of those things that was meant to be simple but resulted in my buying lipstick, cotton swabs, a T-shirt, nerd specs and two fake moustaches, and breaking a wine glass which I never used anyway. I bought the moustaches in New Zealand because I couldn’t find any here. While I was there I recorded another video, which is not quite finished yet, so watch this space.
To save you a click, here are the words and study guide, mostly cut and pasted from other posts but with some irrelevant bits taken out and other bits added:
Video: Mac singing Still Alive
Posted by Angela Brett in The Last Six Months, video on March 29, 2010
The weirdest thing happened yesterday. I was using Ayu, my as-yet-unnamed MacBook Pro, and suddenly Axis, my old PowerBook G4 booted and started singing Still Alive, the theme to the game Portal. I really should stop naming my Macs; I hear it makes them sentient.
Okay, that’s not really what happened. Actually, a couple of weekends ago, all three of the parties I had been invited to (yeah, I don’t understand how I got this social life either; just believe me) were cancelled or too difficult to get to, so I used my unexpected free time to do something I’d wanted to do for ages: get my Mac to sing Still Alive. You might remember that one weekend way back when I had an excuse to avoid being social, I wrote a parody of Still Alive, and a program to get my Mac to sing it using the TUNE input to the built-in speech synthesiser. Back then, I had to enter the notes and durations to sing one by one, and it was too tedious to do the whole song.
V Day’s over, because it has to be.
Posted by Angela Brett in The Last Six Months on February 15, 2010
Isn’t it though? The title of this post is an homage to Jonathan Coulton’s song ‘Summer’s Over‘, about things (or in his case, Things) ending because they have to. As Valentine’s Day was ending in my time zone, I recorded a video of my poem about love ending because it has to. It’s Love Letters, from my own Thing a Week. This poem also serves as a mnemonic, should you ever forget the alphabet.
I also added a stanza to Chemistry, a funnier love poem, so that I could participate in the Valentine’s Day challenge over at Fictionaut. Here’s the revised version. I would have liked to record a video of that one, but I didn’t have all the props I needed. Perhaps another time.
Little Things That Don’t Necessarily Count, But Still Involve Numbers.
Posted by Angela Brett in Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, The Last Six Months on January 24, 2010
The problem with relaxing rules is that they keep on relaxing all by themselves. In an attempt to make up for missing a few weeks, here are some small things I’ve done. Firstly, a big thing which I played a small part in: the video for Gödz Pöödlz‘ song ‘345-5316008’, also known as ‘She Boogies’. The song was written in response to a Masters of Song Fu challenge to write a song about a number, which is why every word of it can be displayed on an old upside-down calculator. For the video, they asked for photos of calculators showing the words, and girls dancing with calculators. I submitted an ‘eligible’ calculator picture, and some dancing with the closest things I could find to calculators. I don’t usually dance, if I can help it, but I thought it’d be a good excuse to wear my Klein Four T-shirt, and I wouldn’t have to show the video to anyone I knew. But they edited it to make my boogying less embarrassing, and the rest of the video is great, so here it is:
Another small video thing I’ve made is episode two of Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, in which Arch-Enemy continues his conversation with Mr. Super-Elephant by inviting her out. I started this series on December 14 with a silly improvised three-line scene to try out xtranormal, and decided I may as well continue in this fashion, since it only takes a few minutes. Don’t expect it to make sense, or be good.
And one final small thing which I’m only adding to make these add up to something less small, is some kind of weird poem-like thing I wrote in a few minutes one day. The first line was something I actually thought would be cool to do, but then it unexpectedly turned grim. But compared with the Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, it makes sense:
Poem: Urgent Journey
Posted by Angela Brett in Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, The Last Six Months on December 14, 2009
Her heartbeat brings you rhythm, love, and nourishment and life
Till muscles push you out and out, and out and out and out and out
and out to meet the world.
Cold, kaleidoscopic cacophony,
warmed with awed caresses,
melts into your new cocoon
of boundless metamorphosis.
Everything to touch
to play
to know
to be
Freedom jostles safety,
your everything expands.
You brace it with your own faint beat
and feel a lifetime in your hands.
You start to think you’ve found your groove,
and life is full of fun,
and then you see the finish line
and know you have to run.
Reach potential, reach new heights,
reach for all of Earth’s delights,
leave the nest and leave an heir,
leave your traces here and there,
make a fortune, love, relax,
spend ahead of death and tax,
Smell the roses, make your mark,
lighten up and light the dark,
take it easy, take a breath.
Take it all before your death,
know and teach and hear and see,
know the stars of cult TV,
take it easy, make the time,
make the hay while in your prime
make your day, and make it count,
count your days, a small amount,
amount to something, race the clock,
earn a tick for every tock…
Give it all you can… or not.
you’ll reach the end no matter what.
A birthday, a half-birthday, a video and an announcement
Posted by Angela Brett in News, The Last Six Months, video on December 3, 2009
Yesterday was Jonathan Coulton‘s birthday. Here is a collaborative video put together in about 14 days by 13 people (at least, 13 who contributed video; others contributed ideas) on his forums, as a birthday present. It’s a cover of Jonathan’s song ‘I’m Having a Party‘, with a few changes in the lyrics (and a title change to ‘We’re Having a Party’) to make it more suitable for a group of fans to sing to him. I’m posting it here because I did all the video editing (under the pseudonym Angelastic) except for the awesome tiling in the final chorus. See below for details on how this little idea blossomed into something scarily huge which was nonetheless sculpted into a less scary huge thing in the nick of time. You’ll also see why I’m a little too tired for fancy metaphors tonight.
Video: A Laptop Like You
Posted by Angela Brett in video on November 11, 2009
This is a video I made for Jonathan Coulton‘s song ‘A Laptop Like You‘. It stars my trusty PowerBook G4, which I bought in early 2005, just before moving from New Zealand to Geneva. I recently replaced it with a MacBook Pro, but my PowerBook wanted to become an internet superstar before retiring, and I just can’t say no to that sweet little thing. I love the song, I love my Mac, and I have all the right props, so I knew I had to make this video.
The song in the credits is ‘When You Go‘, also by Jonathan Coulton. His song ‘Code Monkey‘ is also referred to in this video, and a few other songs directly or tangentially related to Jonathan Coulton are referenced in the Skype userlist. Bram Tant, who valiantly confronted various Vista hassles in order to pretend to be my not-really-love-interest for about 50 seconds, and then unexpectedly got a MacBook Pro on the day he filmed his part, also makes music. He hopes his new laptop will help him record songs for the Masters of Song Fu competition.
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 