Ancient Woodland – #Vlomo10 Day 9

for #Vlomo10 Day 9

in the Wye Valley
near Hay on Wye, Wales

July 4 2005 – The Pressure of a Vlog – #Vlomo10 Day 8

This is from July 4 2005. I’d been videoblogging for just a few months. I was *loving* making little videos about the world around me. I just couldn’t bear to turn the camera round and point it at myself.

I’m re-posting it because it was on the now-deleted first version of FatGirlFromOhio.org and so isn’t in my archives, and as an answer to Krystian, who asked this on the videoblogging list today:

Ok, so here’s a little curiosity I have and was wondering If you wouldn’t mind sharing your experiences on the thought.

The majority of video-bloggers, and alot of my favourites feature themselves in their videos, talking to the audience directly about their day, about their thoughts or whatever. Do you think this is a personality trait, in the sense that you are just born comfortable to be in front of the camera, that you guys (or girls) have never had issues with it?

This is something that’s been plaguing me for a little while. The people that know me here, know that I love video, watching and making and if you’ve ever been to one of my site’s you’ve probably noticed that you’ve never actually seen me and I’m always behind the camera (or computer).

I ask because it’s something I’d like to get comfortable with. I’d like to have the ability to create a ‘talking head’ video series for my new site. A few of my reservations are: I have a slight accent (Welsh) which I myself often have trouble listening to others on the news 😉 and just generally not coming across like I am uncomfortable doing it.

Has anyone gone through this? Did you start out like this and got better? Do you have any advice?

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Quicktime Podcast file

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A great way to watch YouTube and #Vlomo10 videos – Day 7

http://youtube.com/leanback/
http://mefeedia.com/

One useful thing I didn’t say is that you can open any video in a new tab for commenting later, without leaving the Leanback interface. Just ctrl or command click the title of any video in the thumbnails scroller, and it’ll open in a new tab.

For #Vlomo10 – Day 7

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H264 720p podcast file

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Guy Fawkes Night – #vlomo10 day 6

The last minute of tonight’s Ravenscourt Park fireworks, seen from outside the park, on the way home with two very tired girls. A single clip for Day 6 of Vlomo. I was going to cut together a story about tonight, but then I remembered what I’d said. You see? I’m learning. So here’s the text version:

We had a party at our house, which was great – and then went to the park en masse. We agreed that we were going to stand outside the park and watch the fireworks from Starch Green – because they look just as good from there, and it’s hell inside the park: dark and crowded and expensive.

But some kind of zombie sheep effect took hold and we all kept walking into the park and paid £6 ($10) each. All of the children immediately wanted £5 lightsabres. I refused to get Amy one – and then felt like a douchebag. Luckily, we’d managed to smuggle in some booze in a child carrier backpack [classy]. So while we watched a small children’s firework display, I poured everyone an illegal glass of wine. This was the highlight. (Mostly because it reminded me of drinking Thunderbird on the beach when I was 15.)

Trying to atone for the lightsabre douchebaggery, I made the rookie mistake of loudly agreeing to let Amy go on the fairground Carousel in front of all the other children. Cue group Carousel expedition. We left before the main fireworks display.

It kicked off as we got back to Starch Green, where we’d intended to see it all in the first place. Amy was half dead. Lila was insane. The fireworks stuttered on and off for ages – from outside the park it felt particularly like a recession era display. But we did have this big ending, before we dragged ourselves home to clear up the mess from the party.

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This was shot with a Nokia N8, which Womworld/Nokia just sent me for testing, and which I assumed was set to HD video quality by default. I was really looking forward to seeing how it recorded the fireworks in HD, but was too stupid to check. Turns out it ships set to 640×480, so that’s all you’ve got here, I’m afraid. Spot the metaphor.

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Quicktime H264 Podcast file