Wed, February 9, 2011

Hey there! Wondering why you wait forever for e-mail replies from me, or I forgot your birthday, or the damn Oscar ballot still isn't ready yet, or the updates on onebee have slowed to a crawl?

Here's a quick example, just to give you an idea how I'd answer that question. Between last night and today, it took approximately three and a half hours to get from the "before" version below to the "after" version.

The clip loops three times, because I'm aware that for some people the really short video clips don't play on the first try, so hopefully looping makes it long enough. (Although if you hit play to load it and then hit play again once it's loaded, I believe it will play fine.) I realize I could probably make this a YouTube clip and save everyone the hassle, but …meh.*

Looping the clip also gives you a chance to play "spot the differences" – just like the old Highlights magazine. Enjoy the fun, and allow your mind to boggle at how such minutiae possibly could have taken so much time. Also, you may begin to go insane at hearing the same short dialogue clip over and over again. And you can trust me that it only gets worse when you've been working on the same clip every day for nearly three solid months. (The really crazy thing is, it's still fun in a way – even though it's intensely frustrating in other ways. Sometimes I just have to pause and remind myself to focus on the splasher-doers.)

*Actually, if it were just "meh," I'd do it. It would be easier than figuring out a fix for the QuickTime video, which is on a long list of site improvements I obviously don't have time for. The problem is, the picture quality at YouTube isn't as good, and I'm still a little twitchy about releasing my work to them forever, for them to monetize however they want without my say. I prefer doing it my way, although I fully acknowledge that the first time I hear a classmate say, "I just got a job from some studio that saw my reel on YouTube," I'll be uploading absolutely everything and just giving Google my bank account number if they want it.