I had about five minutes worth of thoughts on social media and Web 2.0, but first I had to overcome technical hassles and keep the cats out of the litter box….
(and here’s the YouTube URL for it, in case the video box is acting squirrelly)
Note: Family Travel is taking a blogging break until Monday, January 7 2008 in order to whittle down the “Honey-Do” list before Sainted Husband returns to work. Thanks for your patience.)
This is a six-minute video clip that I filmed at First Night New Year’s Eve celebrations on December 31, 2007 in downtown Austin, Texas.
We had a great view of the yearly parade down Congress Avenue; it was almost entirely people-powered, with lots of bicycles and pedicabs and creative good humor.
Happy New Year, Family Travel!
(For those who can’t see the embedded box below, here is the direct link to the video on YouTube: First Night Austin
I’ve posted previously about my stop in Independence, Kansas in summer 2007 to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House on the Prairie,” which was reconstructed on its original site using traditional materials and layout.
As I played with my disposable video camera and finally reviewed its contents, I found that I’d made some clips when I visited the Ingalls home with my daughter.
After some minor wrestling with Microsoft’s Movie Maker on my laptop, this is what we saw on the prairie (although it was too dark to film the interior, I can assure you that the one-room house had a couple of beds, a table and chairs and a few cooking items, and that was it for amenities.)
Earlier this year we took a family press trip to Virginia’s “Historic Triangle” (Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown) and our tourguides gave us a disposable digital video camera to play with.
The CVS disposable costs about US$30 and then another US$12-13 to develop, but it did motivate me to film without my usual over-analyzing and artistic angst. Once I show you the good clips from it, I’m going to start using the video mode on my Kodak digital camera, for better video quality.
I’ve never had a video camera, so I made all of the usual newbie mistakes: panning/moving the camera too fast so that the resulting video induces vomiting, simply forgetting that I had the thing in my purse, and then not getting around to getting the clips off of the camera and onto my computer.
With great fanfare, I’d like to announce that in addition to filming a little video clip of me with a laptop camera, I actually drove over to my local CVS pharmacy yesterday and got the contents of the camera onto a DVD. I popped the DVD into my laptop and voila — a whole lot of “OMG, I forgot I filmed that!”
So, here is my first attempt at doing a little travel video work for Family Travel’s Photo/Video of the Week — it’s a short narrated clip from July 2007, taken on Duke of Gloucester Street in front of the King’s Arms Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg.
(1/12/08 – The original video seems to have somehow disappeared, so here is a link to it on YouTube in case it drops out again….)
You know what happens when you go to the Best Buy electronics store on a Friday and buy a little video camera for your laptop?
You cannot wait to post that first “vlog” post; a video blog.
A short personal welcome to Family Travel, from Seafarer….