Saturday, March 3, 2018

My Return to YouTube! Trump and 9/11



I've decided not to go ahead with the long documentary, "The Horror of Life's Meaning, that I've been working on. That movie would be over three hours and I don't think there are many intrepid folks on YouTube who would be inclined to watch it. Plus, in the time it would take to complete the documentary, I could make several shorter Adam Curtis-style movies out of my blog articles. Also, the script has long stretches on ancient history which would be hard to illustrate from archival footage.  

So instead I turned Will Trump's Presidency be more Traumatic than 9/11? into the above movie. I'll post the forty-page script for the documentary at some point, perhaps in stages, and maybe I'll be make a YouTube video out of part of it at some point. I can also post the introduction to the documentary. For now, I think I'll make some more movies out of my previous blog articles. Enjoy!

4 comments:

  1. Great video, and glad you're back. Your use of images and video was impressive and made me laugh several times (sheeple, zombies, etc). I was shocked at how well the music worked to be honest. Even like your tone during the reading. To that point, only one critique - the sound quality was poor. The bass levels on your narration were too high and muddled and made it hard to hear you at times. A good microphone, Ben!

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    1. Thanks, Guthrie. It's fun when the songs work well with the videos. Luckily I found some great free songs to use.

      I agree the audio quality of the narration isn't so great in the video. But the microphone I'm using is a pretty good one, I think; it's a Blue Snowball Ice microphone with a suspension boom. The problem is that I have very little idea what I'm doing in terms of recording my voice and making these movies. So it's going to take some trial and error before I figure out how to get the recording volume levels right.

      I'm already onto the next video, drawn from my article "Stultified by Reason: The Heartless Vision of Nature" (the video will cut the first part of that title). I'm trying this one at a different recording volume, so we'll see what happens. The trick is getting both the voice and the songs crystal clear while making the music quieter than the narration. Somehow Adam Curtis gets it done, and that's what I'm aiming for. He has the advantage of having a better voice than me for these purposes. Ideally, I'd hire a professional voice actor to record my articles, but we're stuck with me.

      Anyway, I'd like to do a movie version of each of my main articles, so we're talking dozens and dozens of them, and somewhere in that process I should be able to optimize the recording part.

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    2. P.S. Thanks to your helpful criticism, I just checked YouTube for videos on setting the recording levels for Audacity and YouTube, and I found a bunch, so hopefully they'll do the trick.

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    3. P.P.S. I just uploaded a better version of the video to YouTube (and updated the links on my blog), with louder narration. I had the volume for that audio track set too low, not in Audacity but in Lightworks. I think it sounds better now.

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