7/6/10

Movies are an interesting part of the fabric of my life.  I've always enjoyed watching them but I've never made much of an effort to do so.  Most recently, there's the case of the 007 saga.  I still intend to watch each of the movies (including the old Casino Royale) before I leave home.  Yet, whenever it looks like I may have some time to kill, I can't seem to convince myself to sit still for two hours and watch the next one on the list.  If I happened to find myself inadvertently looking at a television set though, I would watch any of them without hesitation, and probably would enjoy it.

After a day that found me doing very little other than basking in the comfort of my air-conditioned home, I headed over to the CTL terminal and retrieved a laundry basket from my truck.  On the way back, I swung by the local supermarket and grabbed a few groceries.  Then I was back home and wondering what to do.  Ballgame at 7pm.  Clock says 5pm.  Might as well watch a movie then.

My youngest brother had mentioned to me that Hot Tub Time Machine was quite funny.  As a self-appointed connoisseur of humor, I had my doubts.  I fired up my DVD player and watched it anyway though.  Assuming that there were any memorable lines, I didn't want to be left out of the loop.  One of the old favorite pastimes that my brothers and I share is the extemporaneous exchange of funny movie quotes.  Each of us has quite a mental library from which to draw.  Unfortunately there were no memorable lines today and the movie wasn't all that funny.  Win some, lose some.

After the movie was over, I found a video stream for the Tigers game.  I set it up and everything looked fine during the pregame show and the commercials.  Then, once the game began, my internet connection went to shit and I wound up listening on the radio.  Luckily I had bought beer and food before returning home, so I wasn't at all disappointed by listening to the game (a riveting victory) and working on some other things.

Then the ballgame was over and it was time to find something else.  My buddy went to his closet and returned with a DVD to watch.  The Big Lebowski.  No matter how many hundreds of times I see that one, I can always watch it once more.  Yet I don't ever think to pop it into the DVD player and watch it.  Just one of those things, I suppose.  "I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' 'er easy for all us sinners."

There's nothing particular on the agenda for tomorrow, so I'm free to spend whatever is left of tonight trying to come up with a presentable video of my fireworks from Independence Day.  The story goes as follows: My sister was trying to take pictures of the fireworks as they went off, using her cell phone.  She couldn't ever time the photos properly to coincide with the explosions.  Then she decided simply to start recording video and held her phone in the air, pointed at the part of the sky where the explosions were occurring.

The resulting video footage lasted sixteen and a half minutes.  Our entire show had taken somewhere in the nighborhood of twenty-five minutes, so one might conclude that my sister missed the first five or ten minutes as she was trying all of the still photo options.  While we were still up north, I managed to send the raw 3gp video file from her phone to my phone via bluetooth.  (The file was much too large to use as an e-mail attachment or a text message.)  Then, after I got home, I couldn't find the USB cable for my phone, so I had to send the file to my old computer again via bluetooth.  (No bluetooth on my new computer for some reason.)  This way I was able to get onto a USB flash drive and ultimately onto my current computer.

The process of e-mailing the video to everyone was another pain in the ass.  I use free e-mail services, so my attachment sizes are limited.  This meant that I had to split the video into four parts and send four e-mails.  Then, in case anyone wanted the actual raw video file, I had to put it into a three-part zip archive and send a few more e-mails.  Then, in order to come up with something that would be workable for internet posting, I had to do some editing.  I trimmed the fat and got the video under ten minutes in length, making it suitable for YouTube.  I toned down the volume of my sister's running commentary, during which we hear discussions about my little nephew peeing in the grass and how "fucking pissed" the cows were.  And I added a couple of songs to fill in the quiet that had been created by lowering the main track's volume.

I'm still working on getting an exported file of decent quality that I can post to the web. Until then, the four parts of the original video (in wmv format), complete with dead air time and my sister's goofy audio input, can be found here, here, here, and here.  I'm not sure exactly how I inherited the role of A/V editor here, but I'm not too thrilled about it.