My Breakfast in 7 minutes

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Toronto's Times Square

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Hopey the Commuter

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Missing Tracy

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I miss Tracy. She's my muse. I can follow her with a camera like no one else. We work well together that way. So, I re-worked this little piece of something I already have... I can't wait until she gets back from her travels.

Hopey on Sitting

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Click on Image for MPEG-4 download

I'm experimenting with compression. I was finding my 3ivx quicktime files too pixelated. So these are .mp4 files - Let me know what works for you and what doesn't. Any tips appreciated.

Playing with Blue Screen

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This movie was made in 1.5 hours late last night. I spent all day out of the house, at work and at meetings, thinking about it my blue bedroom walls (courtesy of my last roommate) could function as a blue screen. I've wanted to play with colour keying for some time now - so last night I finally did it. I think it went rather well. I had to crop out the light switch that ended up in the shot - and apart from a bit of "see-through" in the corners of my eyes, I'm pleased with the experiment. I mixed it up with footage of me spying on my dog from the weekend and threw on a song that is my Garageband remix of my favourite Journey song.

Tell me what you think.

A Presciption for Change

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Today I'm picking up my prescription for T. Tomorrow I'm going to learn how to inject myself. Within the next few weeks my voice is going to start changing. I'm waiting to get my legal name change certificate - and it may not come until January. I have to be okay with that.

I really don't want this blog to be all about that one part of my life - I have so many other things that I'm interested in, and I also am determined to intermingle serious personal clips with fun stuff. Part of me hopes that I can document my journey in transition regularily and that it will help someone somewhere know that they are not alone.

Chair Dancing

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music: LCD Soundsystem

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Okay, serious thanks to the 3ivx Demo on Michael Verdi's page. Only three videos in and already I have learned how to lessen that tin sounding audio that my first two clips had. It's such a well laid out, easy to follow tutorial. I really can't believe how fast this is all going. I am talking to everyone about this. I want to help as many people as possible get to do what I'm learning to do. Today I totally sold a new aquaintance not only to video blogging (she can use it to shop around her tv show idea) but I also got her on the bandwagon to join the video editing co-op that I'm on the Board for. It called Trinity Square Video and I've been a member there for 4 years. If you live in the Toronto area and you need anything like editing equipment, cameras, or just to do dubs from various mediums - check them out.

Like really aloof cats and dogs

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Be patient. I know it starts off slow but the end is worth it. To me at least. My dog and my best friend/roommate's cat are learning to get along. They've lived together for 3 months now. My dog is kind of afraid of cats, well she's a chicken in general but she's a rescue so you can't blame her, but she's slowly getting more assertive. In this clip however, I nudged her - she never would have jumped on her own.

Delay

So, my second video clip - a much more interesting piece with my dog and my roommate's cat (working with what i've got here people) is delayed because I accidentally uploaded the .jpg and not the .mov file. I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this and I'm glad it happened right off the bat so that I will always be more careful. I like to learn from my mistakes.

Anyway. All last night I was hanging out with my girlfriend and I wanted to tell her how exciting this discovery of video blogging is - but it still feels to new to talk about. It's like my private little slice of heaven and I'm still feeling a little protective of the idea. Maybe once I get my groove on and am producing little shorts on a regular basis - then I will be more inclined to share with my real life people.

I'm going to start playing with Flash again. I pick it up and put it down, but I think that this video blogging revolution will be a perfect environment for messing around with computer animation.

The First Video

My First Online Video

Serious thanks to Michael Verdi at Freevlog. The tutorials are fairly easy to understand. I had a few issues with the creative commons publisher, but that's all ironed out. The Internet Archive is the coolest site I have ever seen on the internet. Having just read "Weaving the Web" by it's inventor Tim Berners-Lee not long ago, it's nice to see it all start to come together. Now I can add content to the web for others to use as they like and I have found places where I can gain access to foreign knowledge that is actually of interest to me.

Whew.

Returning to the Blog

I am trying to learn how to video blog - I've been discovering fabulous sites like Rocketboom and I am inspired to do a regular video feed. The part about how people can subscribe and get regular updates is still fuzzy - but I have learned how to host my images and videos for free at This Blog.

More to come.