We’ll see

I have shingles.

You can see what I look like here.

Shingles (tagline: This Time It’s War) is the sequel to the popular virus Chicken Pox. It turns out that after you thought you’d defeated the Chicken Pox in childhood, your body failed to blow it out the airlock. It crept into the ganglion of your spine, where it stayed, hiding, waiting, until (woken by an unknown force) it bursts back out of your skin and clamps down on your head and bleeds acid all over your face, eyes and nerves.

It looks bad, feels a lot worse, and can cause blindness. RA. (It hurts too much to RA louder than that). I’ve had two eye check-ups (including one from an eye doctor who feigned horror when he saw me and jumped back going “AAAHHH!”), and I think I’m clear on that front – but even without the cornea damage, the pain is bad enough.

The strangest effect has been on my brain. It’s attacking the nerves on the right side of my face and eye – which is controlled by the left side of my brain – and that’s how I feel: like my rational brain is in lock-down.

At its height, at the end of last week, I could answer basic Yes and No questions, but anything more taxing sent me into a panic. I couldn’t process simple tasks, or retain any information – even before they gave me drugs.

Anyway, the real reason for my post is not to whine about my bad luck. I’m now half Canadian, so my British whining is starting to be tempered by irritatingly cheery optimism.
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For everybody back home – VloMo Day 5

I was putting together a big elaborate post-election video… but in the comments to the Placenta video, Frank Carver reminded me to take my own advice: the key to success in posting every day for Videoblogging Month is to avoid ambition – don’t up the ante each day. Just carry your camera with you, capture a simple moment and share it.

And I’ve been really enjoying Elsie Escobar‘s VloMo videos – she’s recording her baby girl’s first few weeks. She made me realise: I have a videoblog, we’re thousands of miles from home, and I’ve hardly posted any video or pictures of Lila for all our family and friends. She’s seven weeks old and almost 14lbs already! So to start with, here’s 90 seconds from breakfast.

I love how all these VloMo videos and comments are creating responses and conversations.

Watch videoblogging month videos at:
http://mefeedia.com/channels/vlomo08
and join the group at Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/groups/vlomo

Shot on my Nokia N93 phone.

Formats Available: iPod/iPhone compatible MPEG4 (.m4v)

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Halloween in Cumberland – VloMo08, Day 1

Is this what Halloween is like everywhere in North America?

Madness.

Speaking of madness, it’s suddenly Videoblogging Month again. Already? How did that happen?

Last year it was called NaVloPoMo, but it’s (sadly?) just been renamed Videoblogging Month 2008 – VloMo08 for short.

Post one video every day in November. That’s all you have to do…

2007 was the first year, and it turned out to be an incredible collaborative experiment. Exhausting but rewarding. I hope this year is as much fun.

Actually, I think for me it’ll be *more* fun. Last year I just didn’t have time to watch enough. But then, between us all, we made over 1000 videos in 30 days.

You can watch (and JOIN IN) at our new Mefeedia channel:
http://www.mefeedia.com/channels/vlomo08

I can’t wait to see the videos start coming in.

Meanwhile, it’s now 2 a.m. – so you’ll have to excuse me. I have a *lot* of candy to get through before Amy wakes up.

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

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All Canadian

A ‘son et lumi‚àö?£re’ for British Columbia’s 150th Birthday today.

Shot on the dock behind the local halibut burger bar.

Everything about this, and about that sentence, is Canadian.

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Indecision – an interactive hyper-videoblog story

RAAAAAAAAAA!

I finally did what I’ve been meaning to do for about 2 1/2 years. I made a hyper-videoblog post.

You can only see it on YouTube – here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtQg_LCq_T8&fmt=18

The thing that finally spurred me on was YouTube’s new Annotations feature. All this time, I’ve been waiting and hoping that they would introduce something like this.

But at the moment, they only allow you to use it on their site – no embedded players yet.

There are six different parts to it – what path you take is up to you. Click the options at the end of each clip to choose what I do.

I really was feeling indecisive about what to do with my evening – and it proved the perfect subject. I made it up as I went along, and it took 30 mins to shoot and 90 mins to get the clips onto the Mac, onto YouTube and Annotated with links.

I’ve always thought that for my hypervideo dreams to become reality, hyperlinked video would need to be a) easy to use, b) easy to create and c) within a setting that people are already comfortable with.

I’ve been working on much more complex hypervideo stories, and if this quick slapdash bit of fun seems to work, I’ll start putting some together properly. Let me know what you think.

It’s been a good week for me with my old nemesis YouTube. Tumblr saw my High Quality YouTube Embed Generator (thanks to Wreck and Salvage) and implemented it as standard on all Tumblr YouTube embedded players. So I helped make the world a prettier place.

The future is now! Even if this particular part of the future looks a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book from 1982.

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One Minute Sunny

I like lumière videos. I like setting up a frame, as if taking a still picture, and then letting the camera roll for 60 seconds to see what happens within the frame. Often, something serendipitous will happen within the composition and within the allotted time.But lumière videos are silent, and I’m a big fan of videos with natural soundtrack.

Like Ryanne (and Jay)’s films, cut simply together, each clip with its natural background hum. There’s something very moving about the short rhythmic pulse of these sounds and images together.

I shot this one as a lumière , but it’d be half as good without its natural soundtrack. So I’m calling this a ‘son et lumière ‘ 😉

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_et_lumiere_(show)
(I used to love these, before irony)

Shot with the in-camera ‘Color Accent’ setting on the Canon IXUS 860, which allows you to sample a colour and turn everything else black and white.

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Ripen

Shot with the in-camera time-lapse setting on the Canon IXUS 860.

Music:
Roadrunner, by Gurdonark, via NegativeSoundInstitute.com

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Sun

Video thumbnail. Click to play

Click To Play

30 second lumi‚àö?£re

it's been almost too hot and sunny at the Vancouver Island Music Fest. the Puntledge River, which runs through the woods next to the festival grounds, draws as big a crowd as some of the stages.

Formats available:MPEG4 Video (.mp4), Flash Video (.flv), Cellphone – via Ovi (.3gp)

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