My video: sashtake1

It was well received.  My normal rule is that I want a 6 to 1 return on delivery time vs. participant benefit time.  It took me about 6 hours to create a 1:22 video so it’d have to be viewed 1581 times for it to be “worth it” by my calculus.  There were a little over 100 people at the banquet and I’ve thrown it on Facebook as YouTube would pull it immediately as a blazing beacon of copyright infringement.  To meet my false parametrization of time, I’ll just assume everyone I know on Facebook watched it twice.

Sometimes I yell things at OA Executive Board meetings and this sometimes gets me into trouble.   At one meeting earlier in the lodge year someone mentioned that the lodge wouldn’t be having a chapter video competition so there’d be no videos at the lodge banquet to which I responded “Oh, there will be videos”. That turned into me challenging Brendan MacDonald to video contest. Tomorrow is the banquet so I started working on mine which was going to be an educational video about the power of the OA sash.

My first step was to find background music, preferably something with pizzicato strings a la 1950s educational music and found this:

I wanted something more like the background music here:

And finally, Steve pointed me to this:

Which was near perfect.

Along the way, I found that educational video is a thriving industry with its line musicians, sellouts and mavericks.

I had allotted six hours to the task and I’d blown 3.5 looking for background music and a 1950s style font.  Progress.

For the past three years I’ve done a promotional video for Ockanickon, initially to fill a gap when an offer to film one by some third party fell through and I volunteered to do one on condition that someone else provide the raw material.  This year I received 3800 pictures from the photography crew at camp, more than I received in any other year  and coupled with my new SSD I was looking to make short work of the promo.  I quickly encountered difficulties:

  • 1200 shots were simply out of focus.
  • 800 were improperly illuminated.  My favorite being those of night activities where the flash caught only a single white object like a shoe or volleyball in the dead stillness of night.
  • 700 depict a single child staring at something, completely bored, or with an indeterminate activity involving a book or pencil.
  • 600 involved volleyball, the volleyball tournament, or sitting around Totem lodge.
  • Golf, horseback riding, rafting, law, dining hall program, the health lodge, mountain biking, CPR and all other leader training had no pictures taken of them at all.
  • Ecology only had pictures of people washing their hands.
  • Eagle only had pictures of kids staring into the distance or doing a dog pile.
  • Handicraft had 4 pictures, but they were quite nice.

I faked a picture of mountain biking by doing a ridiculous crop + rotation on a guy passing by Neshaminy camp site.  Also, I found a wonderful picture of adults engaged in a whipped cream eating contest where if you rotate it and crop out the kids it looks like a group of village elders climbing a glacier with their beards.

I reduced the pool to about 140 usable images that met my requirements and made a video.

Next year I’m either going to provide a shot list or stage everything after the fact at my house.

If you’ve never heard the howl/cry/shout/wail of a red fox it’s surprisingly similar to the sound of a woman being stabbed in the night.  The first time I heard this I was terrified, but being lazy, just kind of assumed it was a dream or an animal.  After the atavistic rape din repeated itself a few times I tried to find out what it was.  I googled “animal that sounds like woman being stabbed” and rather quickly red fox came to the top.  Here’s a video:

Around this time, I found out that Max responses strongly to this noise.  Tonight, we were having trouble getting him to go out before going to bed so, on a hunch, I brought up the above video, played it and Max went tearing for the door to chase down the non-existent fox.  My father frowned at me until I pointed out the spot on the driveway where Max peed.