Release Early, Release Often: The Video Introduction to the Weblog

Release early and release often, they say. Following this credo, I present the very, very first draft of a little video project I’ve decided to hack together. It occured to me that new visitors to this website might make use of a little introduction to the community: who are the people and places in my life that I write about, and how do they all tie together? And so was born the idea of a video guide to same.

I know nothing about video, little about sound, and almost nothing about how to use the two together, combined with something interesting to say. It’s a challenge, in other words.

I needed to to start somewhere, and so this afternoon I just dove right in. After an hour’s work, here’s a rough draft; consider it the video equivalent of a sketch on a napkin:

The video was shot with my Canon S1 IS digital still camera, which has some pretty decent video-taking capabilities. The microphone in the camera is really intended for the photographer to take notes with, though, not to pick up people across the room. And there’s no external microphone input. So the audio is pretty poor quality.

I edited it all together using iMovie which was stunningly easy to use and surprisingly capable (letting me do things like upping the audio on the speakers and lowering the music when it was called for).

While the final product isn’t much like my mind’s eye, it does bear some resemblance, and is a good place to start from. Stay tuned.