Articles about videography, shooting, filmmaking, editing, special effects, disc and digital media, and sharing videos online, using technology to create, edit and publish creative endeavors. (Get that camera out of my face!)
I love watching television, films and videos even more than creating and producing them because that takes SO MUCH MORE TIME! But it’s great fun and exercise, and when they are done, you can watch YOUR OWN STUFF! We’ll get into that. Maybe some visual clips and examples? Yeah.
These days, video also means photo slideshows and presentations and little phone clips — we’ll get into that too.
— David.
Always more tips and tricks and cinematic conversation to come….
Some recent posts:
When By The Pool Is Not By The Pool - I’ve lived in houses with pools on occasion in my life, and unlike a house that is near the beach, lake or ocean, we don’t say the house is by a pool. Why is that? And stranger, why do we sometimes just forget that we have a pool or even look at it every single... Continue Reading →
A Wet Road At Very High Speed - This is how some people choose to live their life, and it’s definitely an adrenaline rush, but that is not the subject we are exploring today. This wet road was traveled at a high but normal freeway speed for filming, but then sped up a lot for the video I posted on YouTube: Rainy Oregon... Continue Reading →
AI Shakepeare I am, I think - Wherefore thou art ? I’ve been doing other things, being busy, being lazy, being asocial. Talking to people in person, even. Talking to no one and sorting through my stuff to organize it. Or just go through it, even, and not leaving it any more organized than before. And I had forgotten about this little... Continue Reading →
Happy 360 Christmas lights –Actually more lights than that, but VR-style. - What do you do for the holidays when you want to go somewhere (or even just Out) and share the joy, but you really just shouldn’t? After setting up the Christmas lights, I took my extra time and had some fun with the Samsung Gear 360 (2017) camera, and spent a little learning time* to... Continue Reading →
Songs Are Often Sunny - Bandcamp link Here’s a happy uplifting instrumental song I made (a while ago – don’t know how this didn’t get posted) over a few weeks on GarageBand iOS. Cheerful and upbeat? No idea where that came from, but like a puppy it crawled into my lap and stayed. For those that don’t write or play... Continue Reading →
Eye contact matters - Can I just say kudos to The Late Late Show with James Corden for a brilliant solution to the annoying off-axis, lost eye contact that happens on video interviews!We humans don’t know where to look; we should look in the camera, or at least not downward at a screen just staring at the other person….... Continue Reading →
From Stormy To Sunny - I suppose if we had a choice between the two that’s the direction many would pick, and that’s what the sky did for me the day of this Thanksgiving timelapse. Creatively speaking it worked out quite well in this instance, but I have written a lot of songs that were inspired by going the opposite... Continue Reading →
Sometimes Creative Work Feels Like This… - You spend a bit of time out in the open air, and it belongs to you: wide open spaces of creativity and experiments. No responsibilities or destination, no demands. And then everything rolls in with little warning, and you become overwhelmed at the majesty and insistence and speed of it all. And all you can... Continue Reading →
Music Video Or Ad? (Always Both, Right?) - Last week I posted directly on the Facebook page for this blog after I created a promotional video for an upcoming concert and the client had issues publicizing it with their own Facebook post. https://www.facebook.com/478531892336962/posts/875709779285836/ SERVICE WITH A SMILE I may get into how I captured and created the visuals later, but let’s get into... Continue Reading →
Music: You Are My Present - You Are My Present, a song by David Watson. Performed live to tape. Well, digital. It’s my birthday so I put this relevant song on Facebook today, and thought I would share it here. I wrote this song years ago, shortly after my wife gave birth to our first child, but it really does apply... Continue Reading →
Video Revisit: The Best Camera Should Maybe Be With You? - Some considerations on whether you should leave your cameraphone in your pocket and just set up a real camera or camcorder when filming your kid or an event — maybe even for family gatherings? And especially for sports, you know, in case you want to actually be able to see the ball on your screen... Continue Reading →
Automatic Star Trek Post Made By A Robot! - Well, AI, but not enough people liked the Steven Spielberg – Stanley Kubrik movie And not an android, because it doesn’t look like a human, though that would be a better title. This video was created without editing from a pasted URL using Lumen5 AI-driven software, as reviewed the other day on this very blog. I... Continue Reading →
Everyone Needs A Repurpose In Life - Playing with a new video tool called Lumen5 today, that I think may just be out of beta. They use AI to help you quickly create social videos out of existing articles, or from scratch if you so desire. At least that’s the promise. Premise? In real life, of course, a proper polished product takes... Continue Reading →
Wait, Video With Words On It? Cameraphone Tips Revisited - Here is a video version of an early post on cameraphone tips and editing, updated with a fresh look and more pictures than ever! Welcome to the video era, again! (Been happening since movies were invented, then TV, then TV again, then 3D and VCRs and DVDs and HD and Streaming and — it’s not... Continue Reading →
Bark! Insert Dog Pun (And Video) Here - Amy the Dog in “Dog Years,” a movie made with Google Assistant. A few years ago I wrote * about how cool this app was and how easy it made it to share pictures and video snippets in video form. It’s better and worse, but still neat and still only on Android and iOS. Click... Continue Reading →
So Many Apps: Microsoft Hyperlapse - Part one of who knows how many: I thought I would test one of the many camera apps on my phone that I have most forgotten about, waiting for another soccer game to start (which I was filming for a Florida company with a pretty cool setup I may discuss later.) This was done on... Continue Reading →
It’s Creepy Coffee Time! - I don’t drink coffee, but the women in my family do. This is what it feels like as an outsider. I made this on my phone a while ago, possibly using the built-in Android camera, but I don’t recall, and I just wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the... Continue Reading →
I Will Read (Watch) This Again: Michael Caine on Acting For Film, plus Beating Creative Blocks - Came across a blog post today from Stage 32 featuring a couple of videos that might be of interest to creative types that might want to download them into their brain (see what I did there? A truly terrible attempt at a joke. That’s what you call a first draft, and would cut in editing.)... Continue Reading →
Fake It Until You Make It Is Terrible Advice For Artists - What does it even mean? Try hard until you succeed? No, that would be fine. Is it some perverse sexual wordplay? Well, art is art, but no. So, pretend that you can do something until you do? That’s great if you’re in an 80’s movie*, but really, if you are trying to make something…. Wait... Continue Reading →
Nine Minutes of a Sleeping Puppy (dreaming of organizing gigabytes of video) - An adorable sleeping puppy accompanied with soft piano music. I was testing camera equipment in early 2016 and pointed it at the new dog (Waffles). Pulled out a few fluffy adorable bits and changed out the soundtrack with some piano improvisations I’ve recorded over the years. This recorded off my old Canon HV20 which was... Continue Reading →