I came across something today and it lead me to a few other things, you know how that ol' YouTube gets you that way...you can spend hours clicking "related" videos...what a great idea on their part.
Anyway, the first one is about a sculptor (Theo Jansen) who might be a modern day DaVinci. He makes these kinetic scultpures that "walk" using wind power. This is more than just art, I think:
The next one uses what seems to be an iron liquid or something called Ferrofluid, and when magnetic waves are applied to it, it reacts in a really interesting a beautiful way.
And the third one is a cute little dancing robot named Keepon that has quite a few moves programmed into him, and he reacts to the different sounds of the music, as well as things that excite him and things he doesn't like.
OK, so, why I found this was because I was looking for a way to make a feed from a Facebook Group on Praying for our pastor, and then figuring out how to post it to a Wordpress Blog (see the sidebar). (update: I took it off...had second thoughts about this because anyone can post whatever they want on the Facebook Wall...that might not be approrpiate to have on the website. I'll have to rethink this.)
Well, I figured it out...and, something else in the process.
I found a way to make one feed from multiple feeds, and it was a cool process. I used Yahoo Pipes, and I really liked the interface. You drag boxes around and connect the boxes with little "wires". It's really cool. I'm posting this YouTube video because it explains everything you need to know to do a basic mash-up (it's from techbays.com).
You can see the mash-up I did of my 4 blogs on the sidebar of this blog.
So, let's say you are running a blog about underwater basket weaving, and you daily read blogs about pool maintenance, basket weaving material supply warehouses, SCUBA gear gadgets, and eCommerce shopping cart building for crafty websites, and you think your viewers want to view this wonderful information themselves, well, you can mash-up all your favorite blogs, create a pipe, burn your new pipe using feedburner, and add the new feed into your blogs sidebar.
I've just recently jumped on the YouTube Train uploading a few videos here and there. I'm on a Mac, and I have iMovie. I like iMovie, it's fairly similar to FinalCut, Premier and even the AVID software (well, without all the cool stuff you can do with those other apps). But it's linear editing, and once you get the hang of it, it's fine for simple editing. I'm just dropping clips in and using transition effects, titles and adding music...simple stuff.
Anyway, I found a site here that explains how to make a YouTube video that works really well, it's basically what I'll explain below.
A couple things to know about YouTube is that there's a 10 minute time limit, and a 100Mb size limit, and the ratio for the movie is 320 x 240 pixels.
Knowing that, here's what you need to do )oh, I'm using iMovie 5 (HD):
1. Main Menu, file, go to "share" 2. Compress movie for: select Expert Settings, click "share" 3. Name your movie, select where you are going to save it to 4. At the bottom, Export: Movie to MPEG-4, then click "Options" (NOTE: the next time you do this, if nothing needs to change, there will be an option to chose "Most Recent Settings" underneath the "export" drop down where it says "Use:") 5. New dialog box: File format: MP4 6. Click the "Video" tab Video Format: H.264 Data Rte: 2000 kbits/sec Optimized for: Download Image Size: 320 x 240 QVGA Preserve aspect ratio: checked Select: "Fit Within Size" Frame Rate: 30 Key Frame: Automatic 7. Click "Video Options" button Restrict Profile(s) to: Main Encoding Mode: Best Quality Click OK 8. Click "Audio" tab Audio Format: AAC-LC (Music) Data Rate: 64 kbps Channels: Mono Output Sample Rate: Recommended Encoding Quality: Best 9. Click OK 10: Click Save 11. Wait 12. Upload to YouTube
That's it. That will get you a pretty good quality video. Here are a couple I did for my wife's Pet Portrait Painting. Here's a painting of a dog, and here's a painting of a cat.
I thought this would be a great way to market her website. I took pictures of the painting while she was painting it (trying not to get in her way too much), and then made it into an animation.
Basically, I grabbed the folder with all the pictures in it, and dragged the folder into the place where the clips go...at the bottom. I selected them all, (the duration of pictures was already set to 1 second) and clicked the transition to crossfade and clicked apply. That added a cross fade to all the pictures. The I added titles, dropped that in at the beginning and the end, and made the last picture last longer by dragging the end of it to the right. Then I added music, faded the sound out at the end, and that was it. Pretty simple.
I think YouTube is a great way to promote her website. I've been wanting to do this for a while now, and I think I'll do it whenever she paints something.
My 4 year old stuck her head into one of the pictures while Leigh was painting the cat. She's so funny.
My wife's website is dogonawall.com. She paints pet portraits using acrylic and canvas. You send her a picture of your pet (and some money) and she'll do what she does. Check out the gallery on her site...she's really good.
My dad sent me this. Wow, I am utterly impressed. Derren Brown apparently knows how to "suggest" things to people, and get them to believe stuff that's not true. He's using several techniques, but what it looks like is that he breaks unconscious patterns, presents commands, uses hidden words as suggestions and distracts.
This video I'm presenting has to do with a couple of advertisers that Derren "hires" to come up with something for him in a short amount of time.
What I think is really cool here is that one of my teachers a long time ago told me that art is stealing. What he meant was that everything we create comes from our memories, and our memories are a collection of things we've seen, heard, read, whatever.
Now, I believe (contrary to what most people try to convince me of) that there is in fact original creations, original ideas, and never-before-seen inventions or works. Sure, maybe they are built using memories of things that have been seen, but I believe individuals can take an idea farther than it has ever been taken.
Now, this video shows that we are highly suggestible, and as visual artists, even more so. I am most definitely always on the lookout for interesting things. Like variations in repetitive things, graffiti, logos, websites, flowers...anything.
It all goes in, then flops around in there for a while, then comes out sooner or later.
I'm going to be watching some more of his videos here.
