The Tim Horton Story (Dumb Song Wednesday)

This video was made by the YouTuber ChristopherMast. He is making a series of videos called "Dumb Song Wednesday". A week previous to the release of this video, I had made my suggestion for the next dumb song and it was to write a song about Canada's Tim Horton without looking up who Tim Horton was. ChristopherMast is an American so I thought it would be an interesting experiment. He agreed and here it is. I thought it was funny that he managed to mention coffee beans in the lyrics.

Finger Guns

This video was originally going to be nothing more than a little effects test.

My little nephew was over and we were playing with Lego. Just for fun I pulled out the camcorder and shot some footage of him pretending to shoot guns with his hands. He lost interest in doing this very quickly but I got enough footage to play around with adding a mussel flash, gun smoke and sound effects.

After I finished a little video of him shooting his finger guns I got the idea to add some shots of what he was shooting so I added some shots of my china cabinet and a bit of the wall beside it. Every effect shot I added to those shots was done with FXhome's VisionLab Studio. On FXhome's website there are all kinds of additional downloads. Some made by the company and some by users of the software. I found everything I needed to create some damage to my house.

Then I came up with the idea for the rest of the video as you see it now. It was a fun little project.

Educational Film Fail

I've been wanting to share this moment for a while now. It's total bathroom humor but when did that get old?

During my trip to Europe back in 2001, I visited family in Sweden. While there I went to Gripsholm castle with my cousin and his girlfriend. As we entered the castle, my cousin started to share an interesting historical fact. The ending was so unexpected. I laughed so hard that I almost dropped the camera. My cousin alway makes me laugh. He's just naturally funny.

I shot this footage on an 8mm camcorder. I did my best to give this a 16mm film look which was mainly motivated by the fact that the footage from that camera was not the best quality.

The hair that you see on the screen was something I added because I remembered watching old films in high school and a dancing hair on the screen was very common. I created it simply by drawing it in 3 different positions on a green background then animating it in my editing program and then compositing it into the video. It turned out alright I guess.

The overall film look is just an effect that came with Adobe Premier Elements 7 so it was pretty easy to do.

Fart Fear (Ralfi) - the Small Release

This is a shorter version of "Fart Fear (Ralfi)". If you want to know where on earth the idea for this video for this came from, please see my previous blog. I made this version because I wanted to share just the song and music video for it. I spent a lot of time on this 30 second song and video. I learned that editing music videos is a lot harder than one would imagine. The editing is very tight and every second counts. It was all shot in my basement. I wanted to have a very raw, grainy, concrete look to this video.

The little YouTube end video menu screen or whatever it's called, was something I've been wanting to do for a really long time. It wasn't possible to do until now because the quality of the video had to be really good so that it would look as close to exactly as the real one. Thanks to YouTube going HD and the general quality improving so much, I could finally do it. When I started it, I thought it was going to be pretty easy. It wasn't. There was a lot more to it than I thought.

The little loading icon I did in a very traditional animation manor. I made it in Paintshop Pro 6 (Yes I am still using that after all these years). I created it frame by frame and then just brought it all into my video editing program.

The actual menu I had to re-create all together. I made it all in layers using a screen shot as a reference on the bottom layer. The menu isn't exact but it's convincingly close I think.

All the fonts and the way it animates was all done in my video editing program.

The car window bit was done in FXhome VisionLab Studio which I use for all my compositing and color grading. The hard part was having the window semi-transparent but have the little video length indicator box non-transparent and have them move together. I'm still new to a lot of visual effects. I don't really know if I'm going to pull a visual effect when I start but I just keep at it until I either figure it out or fail miserably. In this case I figured it out.

Fart Fear (Ralfi)

Hello!

Well, here is my first post. My new "Fart Fear (Ralfi)" video (above) has been up for about a week and has done quite well. Well, quite well for me anyway.

My creations are so random. This entire song and video idea all came from Ralfonzo83's video series entitled "Screwed". He now has just the final video up but it was a series of 4 videos and when I saw the 4 thumbnails for those videos, which had only Ralfonzo83's face on them, they all looked like he was trying to fart. From that, "Fart Fear (Ralfi)" was born.

The song took me about a month to record and mix. Most of that time was the mixing process. I really need to upgrade my recording software and hardware but that is in the works for this upcoming year.

The music video portion of the video was shot in my empty basement over the course of two hours or so with just one work light off to one side. The editing of that took me about 2 months but I was really taking my time with it. I learned that editing music videos is a lot harder than a sketch because the edits have to be really tight and every second counts.

The footage around the music video portion was shot by my good friends Ralfonzo83 and Speedyconkiwi and was emailed to me. I had originally written and created a crude demo video of their parts, shot by shot, and sent it to them. They shot their video almost exactly what I asked for with some personal flair on their parts. The footage was fantastic.

With that final piece of the puzzle I finished editing the video as it is now in about a week. I couldn't be happier with it!

ST