Yay for me getting another video within a month. My motivation has been lacking lately, and my skill even less. Yay! …

This is the first video with my new equipment, so bare with me while I work out the quirks and figure out how to use everything properly. I can already tell you I’ve broken several filming techniques, namely the rule of 180 degrees. I also need to work on audio issues and exposure settings to make sure everything is uniform.

Past that though, this video is pretty fun. I got some help with the story from one of my friends / colleagues / something at the theater and then basically stripped it down to this basic argument of craziness. What a way to start off my revolution, trying to manage over 6 people all at once and having no script and an outline I made in 5 minutes during school.

It was a lot of fun though, and interesting to make. Several of the scenes we filmed weren’t on the tape, and I’m not sure why. I need to figure that out probably.

Other than that, thanks to all that helped, and hopefully we can improve next time. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to leave them on here or YouTube.

By the way, the girl on there is my lovely girlfriend. I don’t hug just anyone these days.

It’s been quite a while since my last video, and I’ve been really slacking on getting content out to you all. Rest assured, things are in the works and the delay is going to be well worth it. I have new equipment on its way.

That’s right. No more lame digital camera with 1000 watt lights washing out everything as my film medium. No more crappy “stories” or “sad excuses for jokes”. I’m going big time, boys. I’m busting out the big guns. And by that I mean I’m just using a new camera, and will sometimes be able to go more in depth with some videos and go “on location” more often.

Don’t worry, my same wacky crazy self is still here. Penguins, pink hair, Lazy Town, it’s all still here, just in better resolution and quality. I also hope to actually act more and bring in more people to help out. Plus, summer is just around the corner, meaning a lot more free time for these awesome vids.

So get your RSS feeder ready (or whatever it is you use to remind yourself to visit my site) for some more kick awesome vids. Coming within the week (I hope).

My first attempt ever at stop motion work. What do you think?

Download the full HD version here

So here’s the back story on this one. I hooked up the other night with a girl who is, quite simply, the only girl in Bedford I’d ever consider seriously going out with. She’s great, very cute, and very morally sound. Anyway, I wanted to make a video about that somehow, and I kept trying all these ideas but none of them really worked. I finally sat down, heard a song by Sugarcult, and somehow got the idea for stop motion.

From there I decided to, naturally, use penguins. The story was supposed to be a penguin trying to announce his love by he kept of failing. Since I’m new to stop motion, the story telling was kinda hard, but I think it worked out a lil bit. I was told by one of my friends it was “adorable, really cute, and not even corny”. As a bit of a bonus, I dedicated to the afore mentioned girl, Elizabeth.

It took two hours to make for a little under one full minute of video. Will I do it again? Yeah, it was a lot of fun, but very time consuming.

Thanks to (in no particular order) Curt, Beth, Jake, Adam, Jameson, Anna, Jimmy, Camella, Kevin, Kara, Laci, Elizabeth, Katrina, Kayla, Ricky, and everyone else with the youth group. It was a great night, thanks. =D

I was hoping to do a more detailed video, but the time was right and I wanted to make a quick one to get people from complaining at me daily. I went outside having no clue what I was going to do. I shot a few scenes of me running away from something, but I had no idea what. I even got up on top of my car to sit and think “…what in the world am I even running from?”

Originally, I’d hoped to incorporate my dad’s current student somehow, but I figured she’d be all like “Wow, you freak, back off before I hit you over the head with my violin.” So, I got the idea I’d be running for the sake of running. Not funny, but then again, not expected for that’s slightly smile worthy. I got a good work out though, and got to act really exhausted and stuff.

Better luck next time.

Did you notice how shaky I got when I poked the hot chick? I guess I’m a geek after all.

Anyway, I figured I’d take this opportunity to talk about the experience of vlogging once a day for a whole month. First of all, the reason I did this was to be like Zefrank from The Show w/ Zefrank. He is freaking hilarious, and if you get the chance, check him out. I wanted to be like him. Besides, he got voted like top 10 sexiest geeks, so more reason to try and be like him.

I tried really hard to imitate him at first, but it just didn’t work out. It seemed forced and unnatural. I had to be myself, and that meant doing a video idea a day, even if it meant crappy results. I had no other option. I set out to do it though, and so I started.

[FEB] 1
This began the whole thing, and I can hardly call it a video. I really wasn’t ready though. I was trying to be like Ze but it just wasn’t working and I didn’t know what else to do! So, I filmed this as filler, and then right after, changed clothes and got to work on #2.

[FEB] 2
Totally filmed this right after #1 which is slightly ironic. Not really, but whatever. I pulled some stories off Digg.com and Fark, then made this. Oh, and I pulled an incident from school where one of my acquantances from German class, Kayci, asked me why I showed no emotion. It was ironic of her to ask me that, since I had just lost at a game of minesweeper and was going rather ballistic with emotion. Girls are silly.

The other thing, about “del *.*” a few people got, but those who didn’t: that is the command to delete all files with an extension. Basically, it deletes a lot of important stuff on your computer. I don’t run the voice recognition thing, and I somewhat doubt this is actually possible. I don’t want to try it for some reason…

[FEB] 3
Oh the joy of waking up at 2pm in the afternoon and having to do a video right away. I planned to do a bunch from the LAN party we had that night, but nothing funny happened except the crazy static electricity. Instead, I did a video response to Christine’s vlog which was pretty freaking amazing. I knew most of it already, but I still had to make fun of her. BlindSlip. =P

At the end, that whole “Dressed in blue” deal was another true story. This kid next to me asked me that question after seeing everyone dressed in Colts jersey and sweatshirts. We live in Indiana. Why do you think they are dressed in blue, my lovely friend? If only I’d had my camera…

[FEB] 4
I went to church, they were all razzing me about my videos, and were trying to give me a bunch of ideas. They then started talking about church relationships, but not like “kissy-kissy” relationships, just…you know…that other kind. Anyway, I figured I’d take their ideas (oh, I mean…borrow) and apply it to my lovely penguin Candy.

My church youth group loved it, and that makes me happy. The rest of you, yay, but I don’t care as much. =P Just kidding, but yeah. If you didn’t notice, I accidently left the original audio in for the poke scenes. You can hear the crappy static from the air. Bad editing scenario #1.

[FEB] 5
This was a waste of time, but it’s all true. I really wanted to make a video of the superbowl to One Winged Angel. I DVRed the whole thing just for this video. Then my DVR craps out and it can’t be fast forwarded. It was faster just to play through the whole thing, which would have been insanely slow and not worth it.

I just vlogged about it, and left it at that. Oh well. I can survive the bad rating. And the audio clip at the end, is my friend Matt saying “Wowza” back during the days of Gamer’s Crunch, a podcast we did. Funny to me, “WTF”-stuff to you.

[FEB] 6
The first time I planned to do a video at school. I swear, everything tries to kill me when I try to vlog at school. This time, I have a freaking wreck.

I go to school by car (duh) and have to go by the junior high, on the street where all these crazy parents are letting their kids off for school. Well, none of these people can drive, and this lady in a parked car decides to pull out in front of me while I’m trying to turn into an alley. I swerve, as not to hit her, and run into a telephone poll. Gah.

I did get to school, but far too late to make my video. It was going to be about poking too. I still have a few clips I’d taken a few days earlier. One of them is of Kayci, so maybe if I upload it, it will get 1 million views for having a hot girl in it. Wait, no, she wasn’t kissing another girl, so it will only get 500k.

[FEB] 7
This was a fluke. I filmed it on a day that wasn’t actually a snow day, and I had no idea we’d have a snow day on February 7th. As it turns out, we did anyway. Lucky.

No one really understood this video, except Christine. It was trying to be a National Geographic parody about penguins and armadillos. That, and I wanted to play around with fun music and some scenic clips of the snow. Yes, the cam shows were shakey, but I didn’t want to get snow on my tripod. Sue me.

[FEB] 8
I loved this video. Romance, technology, that sort of thing. I was trying to lead you to believe I was in love with Brooke, since her MySpace was open as a tab, but leave hints that it was actually for new RAM (notice the NewEgg tab next to it). I just threw in a bunch of puns about the deal though.

What’s most ironic about this whole thing is after I put in the RAM, my computer got INCREDIBLY unstable and wouldn’t even turn on for a while. Turns out it was a power surge, but I thought it was the RAM for the longest time. I had to reformat, and as such, edit the whole thing on my laptop at school. Then I found out my ending sucked, and I was sad. I like it now though.

Oh, and the RAM works fine now.

[FEB] 9
Ok, this one was amazingly crazy how the viewers took it. Let me preface this by saying I bought a HappySlip shirt like, the day before she officially announced them. Since I was helping Christine, I got early access to view it and give feedback. I bought one then, and had it sent standard shipping. Somehow, it got here next day, and I was crazy happy. I told Christine, she wanted to see it, so I figured I’d make a quick video.

One of my friends, Jessie, loves Lazytown for it’s crazy lyrics, and I heard this song for the first time that night and decided to go with it. Note: I’d never heard the song! I was learning the lyrics as I went. I only had a few hours to make these things, so don’t expect crazy good quality, hah.

I just sang infront of the camera a bunch, slapped it together, and called it a day. I threw in a shirt promo just for the heck of it, and because Christine is awesome. She ended up featuring it on her profile, which was really nice, but attracted a lot of haters. Still, the exposure is awesome, so thanks!! =D

[FEB] 10
Another Saturday afternoon one. I had no idea what I was going to do for this day. I logged on to Digg.com, found this image, and rolled with it. I saw a comment being “witty” to combine a few of the deaths. I figured I’d combine all of them, so I did. I think this is one of my best in the series, if I would have just spoken more clearly. Reading is hard when on camera.

[FEB] 11
Another video response. Why do I only do video responses to Christine? Exclusive contract? Nope, just lazy.

Again, no idea what I was going to do, but that Friday night I’d found a bunch of cat pictures. I figured, you can’t be mad when you look at kittens, especially these kittens!

Yes, I know I made a slide show, but come on…THEY’RE KITTENS! And it had music, and fade effects. There, I’m better than those other newbies!! …I hope anyway.

[FEB] 12
Moving right along, this music is freaking amazing and is from a remix album for DOOM. You can find it over at ocremix.org (or maybe it’s .com, I can never remember).

We’d registered for classes on this day, and I told one of my friends as I passed him in the hall “I’ve registered for another year in hell.” He laughed pretty loud, so I figured if I extended on it and slapped it on YouTube, at least two people would laugh just as loud, and that’s all I aim for these days.

I love the scary music, really do. Oh, and this was during those times videos would come available then go away, so my mom saw the thumbnail and started yelling at me for killing people on YouTube and getting blocked. It was pretty funny.

[FEB] 13
Boring, wasteful, space filler. Basically, I was lazy. Oh, and Jessie was wanting to see raw clips from Bake a Hot Sexy Cake and I can never saw no to hot asians (well, not for an extended period of time). The clips I picked were the least embarassing. Trust me, there are far worse, and no one will ever see them again.

[FEB] 14
This was the only video I’d been planning for a long time, and it doesn’t show. I’d picked the song a long time ago, but apparently I didn’t actually plan any scenes or anything. As such, it was a very boring lip-synch vid. Maybe those haters learned I could lip-synch though, when I knew the words.

The song is by Lemon Demon, I can’t sing this well. It was posted on his blog a while back, and he said it was basically a song about nothing, but I tried to make it into something. If only I’d planned it more, I could have made much more fun of things.

One note, the MySpace scene took a lot of help to make me seem popular. I asked a lot of my friends on there to just message me anything, and they did, but very few of them got shown. You know who you guys are though, and I thank you a lot!! Maybe one day we can all do a big video together or something…I dunno…

[FEB] 15
I loved this one too, because I got to play my favorite game of all time: StepMania. I was hoping to fool you all into thinking I was getting ready for something actually important. I know I at least fooled one person, Mitch, so that’s cool. =P

Normally, I use FRAPS for StepMania videos, but Vista doesn’t perform so well, so I just had to set my camera up infront of my monitor for one take, then my fingers for another take, and then my face for another take. I got to play that song 3 times!! Oh yeah!! =D The song is a remix of LOVE LOVE SHINE and can be gotten from bemanistyle.com.

[FEB] 16
Ok, this one was special. Another day I had no idea what I was going to do. I was recieving a lot of hate from my Lazytown video and Christine had recieved a few nasty emails too she was telling me about. I wanted to complain, and I figured the best way was an overdramatic approach. I also figured I’d announce myself leaving YouTube (that didn’t work, no one caught on and thought I was just taking a break until Monday). Daxflame had done something similar, so I figured I could get a few more subscribers like him (actually, he got over 1k).

Anyway, I don’t script or plan out any of my videos, I’m always adlibbing (unless it’s to lyrical music). As I’m sitting there, I just happen to look up and see my penguins. I figure it’d be fun to say my penguins were kidnapped, so I did, and I rolled with it. Lucky I did, because people loved it and thought it’d make an awesome series. Another subscriber, TrentDonovan, went even further to give me some really awesome ideas on how to do it. So we worked on it, and it was pretty amazing.

[FEB] 17
This video wasn’t supposed to exist since I’d threatened to leave YouTube, but no one caught on. Oh well. I planned to have an action sequence in here too, but the stuff I had filmed turned out crappy and I really needed to split it up anyway. So, I just sat and started more with the story. Lots of imagery.

Also, no one really noticed this. In #16, I said they’d kill one penguin for each video I made. Well, I made a good 5 videos (before the plot changed) and not a single penguin was killed. No one noticed that, which I thought was really surprising. Heh.

[FEB] 18
The action sequence!! That’s my house, too, so now everyone can stalk me. I really like how it turned out, though near the end could have been better camera angles, I looked really weird.

Thanks again to TrentDonovan for playing along and helping out so much. Also, thanks to everyone else who made video responses through the entire thing. I tried to include every comment or video response, even if they didn’t make the final cut. I think my brother’s comment about Ebaum’s World was cut because I was sick and couldn’t speak clearly. Sorry big brother whom I love so much.

Thanks also to Christine for playing along.

[FEB] 19
It’s true, I really did get sick after shooting #18. When I went to sleep, I got a major head ache. Turns out it was the flu, which killed me the entire week. As such, I just had to make a bunch of these boring vlogs. It was really sad, because I wanted to make real videos about all of this, but I just couldn’t.

Again, all these videos were unscripted and unplanned. I had no idea how the plot would turn out, it was all based on what you guys thought, said, and did. Pretty cool, eh? Yeah, Trent’s idea. He’s amazing.

[FEB] 20
Another boring vlog because of my sickness. I tried to put a spin on things with the opening. I don’t like regular vlogs, I think they are boring and a waste of time. That’s why Renetto, Boh3m3, and most of the most popular YouTubers upset me. They don’t really do much creative stuff. Go ahead, flame me for that comment, I know it will happen.

Notice how I’d planned to shoot at school for #21. Guess what? Foiled. I got the flu. The heaven’s don’t want me filming at that school for some reason.

[FEB] 21
I woke up with a temperature of about 103. I was getting ready for school, showered, dressing, and I just couldn’t continue. I fell asleep. I woke up a little later, saw my soup and stuff on my desk and was like “Wow, this is awesome imagery.” I grabbed my camera and filmed.

Then, I got weak again, fell asleep. Woke up some time later, tried to push through editing, then uploaded it. I put little effort into this, since I was sick. I was just trying to pump out one video a day at this point.

[FEB] 22
Crap. I missed a day. I just couldn’t make one. I was even more sick than the previous day, and I just had to sleep all day. I watched a lot of anime though, and saw MythBusters which I do love. Sorry though.

[FEB] 23
Here’s one I planned to be another vlog. I went out for a walk, filming, trying to explain a few things. Well, the footage was very shakey and my speech was very short of breath. I guess I’m out of shape, crap.

Anyway, the second part I filmed I planned to say “The penguins were returned by the kidnappers, and they are threatening me with this note.” You viewers took it to mean “The penguins were behind all of it.” Well, it differed from what I was thinking, but man, I so went with it.

Sorry for the really short, crappy video though. Didn’t even have my February or StephenCraton.com tags.

[FEB] 24
Like I said, you guys made this happen. Another vlog type, but lots of camera movements. Actually, I didn’t move the camera at all and just used my editing program. Here’s what I do:

I record on my digital camera which can record at 320×240 or 640×480. I record at 640×480, but since YouTube needs 320×240, I’m recording twice as much as I need to. It’s ok, though, since I resize and move around in my editing program. It lets me do a lot of simulated camera moves that I normally couldn’t do since I work by myself. Just a tip.

Anyway, then I recored my voice and found a good voice distortion program called Vodi. Just Google it. It costs something, but worth it since it actually works and is easy to use. Let’s my import a wav file, and spit out some crazy voice. Pretty awesome.

[FEB] 25
This time, I spun it the way I wanted to. I had a class assignment due the next day, so I couldn’t go with the series anymore. Plus, I was sick of it, since I had just been sick (heh). I figured I’d just shoot them and be done with. Kind of mean, right?

Don’t worry, they didn’t die!!

[FEB] 26
Done for a class assignment, and honestly, this is nothing like the story. Don’t tell me teacher like that. Yes, he had a big nose, and his “friend” Christian was trying to “woo” the lady whom Cyrano liked. It’s complicated, but suffice it to say, this video does not to the play justice. Go read it, or rent the movie.

Again, this video took maybe 2 hours to make, and I think it was pretty crappy. Ironically, though, I got a 100% on it. My teacher loved it, and gave me a “20!!!” for creativity. I bet it was because I export it onto a DVD with 5.1 Dolgy Digital Surround Sound. That had to be it. Esspecially since the master track was in stereo.

A lot of people think I’m going to make this into a real project during the summer. Sorry, but nah. I don’t know the book well enough to do that, and I was interested enough. The assignment for class was to make a trailer, so that’s kind of what I did. That’s the only reason it sounds like a trailer.

[FEB] 27
Another sickening vlog. Geez. I fell asleep at like 6pm though, and didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. Still getting over the sickness. It just had to be during my FEB series. Sigh.

I got a C on the essay by the way. I didn’t know very much apparently.

[FEB] 28
Planned on making a fake documentary. Realized I didn’t have time to. Made what you say instead. That simple.

Oh, and the song is really cheesey on purpose. It’s from Pokemon, and when I was a kid I’d always cry at the song because it was “Pikachu’s Goodbye”. Made me sad, so I figured it might make you kinda sad at the end of this huge series of videos. It’s from the first Pokemon sound track, called “The Time Has Come (Pikachu’s Goodbye)” by Marti Lebow. The cheese is overflowing, onto the floor, flooding the hallway. =P

So that’s the end of the entire series. Thanks to everyone who helped out with ideas, being in videos (even if you didn’t make the final cut), and just sticking by my side. <cheese>I appreciate every single comment, video response, subscription, and friendship I’ve made through this entire thing.</cheese> But seriously, I really do, thank you all.

Hopefully my future videos will be a lot better. I’ll admit, none of these are my best due to time restraints and lack of planning. If I do this again, I’ll do it better next time. Until then, check for the next video! And check out TrentDonovan and HappySlip!!