brightly_lit

Let's talk about vids, specifically one of the vids I made for gishwhes. The item said "At gishwhes headquarters, we do almost everything right, with one glaring exception: we have not yet commissioned a gishwhes theme-song. We need a catchy, 10-second jingle that we can play every time the Slangaroo takes the stage."

Here's what I did with it:



Initially, I had very ambitious plans for this video, with a loooooong caveat at the end, read like in those commercials where someone who can speak incredibly quickly is trying to get all the limitations and conditions in really fast, but I was struggling mightily with depression that day, and then I discovered the video was only supposed to be ten seconds, and simpler is usually better, so I hewed it down to the basics, and voila!

I knew exactly what I wanted for the graphic, and septembers_coda thought she might be able to pull something together in PowerPoint.

PowerPoint ... I could tell you stories about PowerPoint, but in sum, I've always thought of it as the lol MS Office program because, well, I've never given a slide-show presentation to anyone and never expect to, and the slides you can create in PowerPoint often seem to boil down to "This is a slide. The slide says I'm talking about _____. And indeed, now listen to me talk about _____."


Al Gore doll

The amount of information you can actually fit on one of those slides seems negligible and is generally a repetition of the most basic aspect of whatever the speaker is saying that, uh, probably didn't need a slide to be communicated or remembered. But enough about my prejudices! I can snicker about the uselessness of PowerPoint on my own time (but loooool).

ANYWAY

I tease septembers_coda because she uses MS Office for EVERYTHING. For gishwhes items that call for images, or a collage of images, or anything to do with images, I use an image editing program. She uses MS Word. Whatever the item calls for, she can come up with a way to use MS Office to complete it. I like to tell her that one day she'll create a full-length feature film using MS Office, because by gum if she didn't put together not one but two animated graphics for my videos in PowerPoint!

I asked her for the slangaroo (this year's gishwhes mascot) on some sort of rainbow-y or glittery background, hopping into the frame, and then sort of zooming in/coming out at the viewer. I figured out how to make it hop, and she did all the rest.

Meanwhile, back on the audio end of things ....

My image editing program might be hilariously outdated (but at least it's not a word processor! ;->), but I DO have good audio editing software! So I put together a little jingle, complete with tuba and xylophone (would any jingle be complete without them?), sang it as cheesily as I could muster, sped up the graphic, called attention to the asterisk in the best way MovieMaker would let me, and WE HAVE LAUNCH.

OKAY, POWERPOINT, I grant that you're not completely useless!

s_c and I have a longstanding tradition of making up songs to the tune of other songs. Vegas might not have been much fun for us, but I DID come up with this ode to spaghetti, to the tune of "Sound of Silence." (This is not in fact my first ode to spaghetti, nor, I'm sure, will it be my last.)

Hello pasta my old friend
I've come to chow on you again
with the noodles softly glistening
and the meat gently sizzling.
And the sweet of the pasta is a counterpoint to the beef
and basil leaf ...
Amid the sounds of slurping.