My hard drive is cluttered with video rushes. Shot for no other reason than that there was a video camera present. Home movies, mostly. This one is special, although the camera work and the lighting are not too brilliant. I wanted to do some editing on it, but decided to leave the clip for what it was.
I did not even take the time to edit out the pink-wigged witch. The clip shows jazz musician Boris van der Lek warming up on his saxophone and testing the acoustics of my previous studio. [2003]
What seemed to be a casual moment became a historic video document.
First of all, do not worry. I am not going to turn this blog into a video board, but I need that functionality. While comparing Google and YouTube for video integration, I could not help thinking that they both have serious disadvantages. YouTube assigns a static first image to the movie that is way too compressed and the play button is downright ugly. However, once a Tube video is playing it is less compressed/pixelated than a Google video. First I thought it had to do with the upload format (avi or mpg), but after some testing I saw little difference.
So, there was only one possibility left and that was to host the videos myself, just like I am used to do on movies.ameanet.org. Easier said than done, because things work differently on a blog. So I went on an Odyssey to find the right plugin. I must have installed 4 or 5 of them and they were all beta, although the programmers claimed differently and that caused large problems in the WordPress environment for which they were designed.
Finally I ended up at a site of a fellow Dutchman Roel Meurders who had coded a plugin that was so basic that I wondered if it would work at all. The plugin was built around a flash player done by Jeroen Wijering. The first player I found that did not clash too much with the design. The install was a breeze, but I was a bit disappointed that there was no first static image upon page load. I read through the comments at Meurders’ blog and found a post by Priit Tamboom who had added autostart and buffering to the original script and yes, finally it works the way I want it to! So, I would like to thank the two Dutchies and the Estonian. Great job!
To honor them I have selected a short video of Gus Visser, an American of Dutch descent. And his singing Duck of course.. I wonder how he did that. One finger up the Duck’s ass?
The video was posted here before as a downloadable but it is so much more fun watching it in line.
My Gorilla reading Charles Bukowski, posted on both YouTube.com and Google Video Beta, is on her way to Hollywood. Not physically, of course, but the Tube version was posted on a popular Los Angeles blog that seems to be an E-zine on all things related to life in general and LA in particular.
Unknowingly I uploaded the animation/video on the birthday of the late Charles Bukowski, who was born in Andernach Germany, but spent most of his life in Los Angeles. Well, you know what they say about success in show business – talent and good looks are a must, but nobody gets anywhere without a little bit of luck..
Next thing I need to do now is to find out Dylan Thomas’ birthday for one of my other creations; Bulldog Laddy reciting ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light..’
No, I am not trying to make fun of poets or poetry. I am just trying to mix some low and high culture to educate the geeks.