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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!

Gahhh, my friends page is full of such wonderful stuff today, especially in amilliondays! Most of you are talking about t.v. and music and show, and you know I'll be talking about that a lot in coming weeks, but for now I'll blab more about gishwhes, because it's my favorite event of the year and it's still not over for me mentally (fegvep!! coming soon).

Gradually managing to catch up, on lj and everywhere else, after gishwhes! Our house wasn't quite the wreck it's been in past years; just some clutter, mostly, that cleaned up quick. One year there was food coloring on the bathroom walls and an entire tray full of gingerbread; at least it's not that bad this time around!

I promised in amilliondays that I'd post my gishwhes items from this year, but since it's Throwback Thursday, I figured I would post my items from past years, since that's certainly a thing that's made me happy in the past, and I'm not sure I was brave enough back then to post my items! It'll also serve as an introduction to this year's items inasmuch as maybe it'll show you why I'm so pleased with my growth as a video-maker, because my first year's videos ... pretty basic. I've learned a lot, thanks to gishwhes. It's the only time of year I make videos, and I have an absolute ball at it. I was a film major once. That dream seemed long dead, but for 15 seconds at a time for one week out of the year, I get to delve into it!

The item was: VIDEO. It turns out that jellyfish will be big winners in global warming. Create a PSA to help the humans prepare for a future with jellyfish overlords. 23 points

Fun with Windows Movie Maker, which it turns out isn't the virtually useless video editing program I thought it was! I only learned that this year. The transitions still aren't the best, but with enough creativity and experimentation, you can make them look pretty good. This was me just starting out using the program:

Jellyfish PSA:



VIDEO. Tweed Porn. Let's see it with an appropriate porn sound track played on a lone kazoo. (No nudity required.) 23 points

LOL--I like that no nudity is REQUIRED. Merely SUGGESTED, maybe? Were I to do it now, I'd do a lot more with the visuals. ... Then again, the dimly lit room, cruddy camerawork and close-up is rather suggestive of porn. Still, I adore this one, because we totally went for it, Patty's kazoo-porn-music is hilarious, and the whole team came up with ideas for the script, most especially SpringLea, queen of puns.

Don't make me get the lint roller!



VIDEO. Which is faster: a baby learning to crawl or a turtle? Let's see a race. 26 points

An otherwise almost completely uninvolved last-minute member of our team (who kind of seemed offended by the whole idea of gishwhes--it seemed like the person who talked her into joining hadn't actually told her what she was signing up for) happened to have a crawling-age baby, the guy on our team who has virtually every object you could ever want somewhere on his property happened to have a turtle (we named him on the spot so we could cheer him on in the race), so we managed to get this item! Toby, dude ... maybe you should have trained more.

Baby vs. Turtle Race



IMAGE. Gingerbread Villages are always so cute and quaint. Make a gingerbread village that shows urban blight: needle exchanges, prostitution, heavy police presence, etc. 97 points

Here's the source of all that food coloring and gingerbread! If you look closely, you can see all sorts of unsavory details ....

http://i.imgur.com/XgR0O7e.jpg

I'm loving all the amilliondays happy, people!! And seeing what used to float your boat/still does. <3

For my first official entry in the Hundred Days of Happiness meme, I'm gonna share something that always makes me happy, in part because it combines three things I love: s_c, SpringLea, and gishwhes!

This was for the gishwhes item: "Make an action movie trailer. The main star: a pot roast." This one always makes me laugh.