Saturday, November 7, 2009

I Have Been Warned...or should I say "WARNERED"?


Yes, you're right. I should have known better. And even though I didn't want to face facts, I had an idea it might happen but yet, I still had to try. If I never tried, I never would have known for sure and that feeling of not knowing, gnawing away at me wouldn't have been any less painful and so I had to give it my best shot and let the cards fall where they may.


I decided to make my own Mind Movie. Now, I'm sure most of you out there know what I'm referring to but for those that don't here's a quickie explanation. Basically a Mind Movie is a 'Vision Board' turned in to a Video, streaming along with the music of your choice. Meant to inspire you to chase after your dreams, remain focused on your goals and to pursue your passions. While a Vision Board is just a static collection of pictures meant to inspire you, a Mind Movie has much more of an impact on the mind. You are also able to add various pieces of text, here 'n' there which adds a bit of a 'subliminal messaging' kind of a feel to your movie.


All of this in hopes of helping to remind you of why you're going through all the daily stuggles, the trials and tribulations of life and enabling you to stay focused on your goals and dreams. We all can use a constant reminder to help us stay on track, a way of keeping the negativity at bay.


So I began to make a list of most of the 'things' I wanted for myself, my family and my friends. Not necessarily just things in a tangible sense, like cars, etc. but basically the way I wanted my entire life to be overall.


First step, gotta be Google to find lots of pictures to fill my Video with. Next thing you know, I have too many pictures but I can always narrow it down to the chosen few. OK, I now have a pretty good idea of which ones I'll use here. Some aren't exactly what I'd hoped for but they will do as reminders to help me stay focused and on track.


Then it's on to finding the right music to go along with my movie. Hmmm.... should I get something to pump me up, like a Rocky Theme or something along those lines? Or perhaps one of my favorite songs? One that brings back good memories, back when life was good? Not that life was ever really that good but with time comes faded memories and some of the bad stuff has a way of disappearing. Hmmm, with or without lyrics? Jeez, didn't realize that this would be the most difficult part. Finally had a pretty good idea of what I wanted. Now, how to get that song downloaded, saved and then add it to my video.


That whole process turned out to be a project in itself but again, thanks to Google and all the other wonderful people on the internet that have had to struggle with that as well, I was able to find the info needed to tackle it and so I finally had my song of choice added to my video.


Of course, it was then that I noticed the rather large discrepancy between the length of my song and the timeline of my pictures. No need to worry, I still have to add in all the text boxes, the subliminal messaging and so with those added to the mix, should help to lengthen the video overall and bring things a little more in line. I wanted the pictures to end at the exact same time as the song. I mean, what self respecting music video director/producer/editor would have it any other way?


Hadn't realized how difficult it was going to be to come up with 'stuff' to say, meaningful little messages to myself throughout the video that would inspire and motivate me. And so off to You Tube I went in search of other Mind Movies to find a bit of inspiration. I began noticing that they were all basically very similar. "Here's my Yacht, Here I am flying my plane, Here I am driving my new Lamborghini." I didn't want such a 'generic' video, one that was more or less a one size fits all. I wanted my video to be a bit more personalized, like my pictures are and so I decided to go through the pictures I had already selected and add my 'sayings' according to the different places and things in my storyline.


Wow, I'm kinda liking this. It's finally starting to take shape. So after adding all my text, my song was still longer than the length of my video. Not wanting the song to come to an abrupt ending, just when the vibes were starting to feel really good, I needed to add a few pictures in various places in order to make everything copasetic at the end. Voila, looks like everything lines up. Pictures and the audio all seem to stop in the same place. Damn I'm good! But something's still not quite right. Hmmm....


Got it! The song just goes so great with the pictures but things would flow even better if the pictures were arranged to go with certain parts of the song. I had no idea how addicting this video editing thing can be but what a difference it's making. Syncing the pictures with the high and lows of the music really adds to the feeling of the pictures, the text and the overall video. So after a bit more tweaking, I had to call it done. While there are still a couple things I'd like to change, overall I'm reasonably happy with the finished product. Especially for my first attempt at a music video. HA HA!

BRYANS MIND MOVIE



OK then, save it to my computer and I'm done. Now I have a video I can watch any time I wanna get motivated, stoked on life. Then it occured to me, might as well add it to my You Tube Channel. I haven't posted a new video there in months so no doubt I really need to anyway. This should work out great, way under the 'time limit' that You Tube specifies and giving my subscribers a little more inside info on me as a person has to be a good thing, right?


A couple of clicks and let the uploading begin. While that's going on, I'm filling in the video titile, description, tags, all that stuff and after a few minutes I get the message that everything has uploaded and I'm good to go. Woo Hoo, mission accomplished! Another video added to my Channel. Then up pops the message saying that the audio portion of my video has been disabled, muted, shut down. What? Disabled? How can that be? They say that it's a copyright issue but this song is on tons of other You Tube videos so it really makes no sense. Then they send me a link to some 'library' of random BS songs that are nowhere near the right length, let alone the same 'feeling' of my video. After spending all that time editing, making sure the song was aligned with the pictures the best way I could, just wasn't gonna happen. Wouldn't do my video justice to have some other random song on there.


Of course I took it a bit further to see how others were getting around this situation and basically, if your video is muted by WMG then you are out of luck. So after looking over the library of offerings, just in case I could find something 'close' that will allow me to post the video anyway, I see that now they have removed my video entirely. Who knows what happened, just a complete removal. I guess my video was just so damn good that they felt threatened by my editing skills as well as the use of 'their' song. I did see a couple places where people mentioned that this whole copyright thing should be worked out sometime in January but I'm not gonna hold my breath, that's for sure.


So it looks as if I'm going to have to keep my Mind Movie to myself, which is how it was originally intended anyway. Kind of a shame as I wanted to be able to see it when I went to my You Tube Channel but I don't want to risk having my entire Channel deleted, so I'm not about to press the issue.


Then it occured to me, I wonder if I can post it on my own Blog? Might as well give it a shot. Took me quite a bit of effort, getting the movie formatted so that it will play inside my post along with a 'player' that would do the same thing. And so with tons of trial and error, I seem to have conquered the issue and the movie and player are both embedded within my post. This will definitely make it much easier next time I want to include a video so even though it was a struggle, to know that I persevered and made it happen, that's huge for me. Especially since I'm so computer illiterate.


So let this be a lesson to others out there that hope to have their video on You Tube, better check with the library first. You have been warned.....


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