Bill Cammack

So it got to the point where I knew what clips I was going to use, and I had my script for my dialogue. I had already finalized my intro, and “all” I had to to do for the credits was edit the template. Unfortunately, I messed that up because I didn’t keep track of how many “special thanks” I had. The way I did it, when I looked at the credits, they looked normal. I hadn’t recognized that a row of people I wanted to thank had fallen beneath the frame, and wasn’t showing up on the screen. The only reason I noticed this at all was because I looked at the credits after compressing and uploading the video, and I noticed that the bottoms of the letters on the lowest names on the list were slightly cut off. In my curiousity about how this could be possible, I realized that there were two more names that completely didn’t show up at all in the credits. When I increased the font for the names, the lowest ones got pushed off the bottom of the screen. Adjusting everything higher in the frame and recompressing took care of that. :) So the initial 6 or 7 people that downloaded episode 05 with Democracy Player got the version with the incorrect credits. :D

I put people in my “special thanks” section that I could remember offhand and that I could go back to my comments and see had given me constructive criticism or something that was useful to me as support in doing this 3rd (Technically episode 05) episode of “The Lab”. Based on comments that Justin Kownacki, creator of Something To Be Desired made, as well as things I’ve noticed about internet shows and understandings I’ve achieved through myriad conversations with Dre, I intend to do more with viewers and commenters than say “thanks for the info” and keep on rollin’. I agree with Justin that the future of internet shows is interactivity. I wanted to make sure I mentioned some of the key people that gave me the energy that eventually became “The Lab” Episode 05.

Unfortunately, having everything together isn’t the end… it’s the beginning. You still have to make it happen. You still have to deliver the lines you wrote with the intention with which you wrote them. Without that, all the surrounding elements are perfectly worthless. As I mentioned in Recording Episode 01 of “The Lab”, “performing” dialogue isn’t as easy as it looks, AND it’s an emotional drain… or maybe it’s not a drain… Perhaps it’s the opposite… an emotional high that you go on and then you’re released from it at the end of the process when you wrap, and that’s what feels like a drain. Either way, it’s not something you want to do when you’re not in the mood to do it. I’m very glad I’m not a peformer, because I wouldn’t be interested in doing that every day…. not even MOST days or even SEVERAL days! :D Putting in my hour in front of the camera once a week is WAY more than enough for me.

Doing my lines was easier for me this week, because I’m pretty much “over” the process. I’ve already done it enough times to know that I *CAN* do it and approximately how long it takes me to do it. I was more in a “get it over with” mode than a “get the lines perfectly the way I want them” mode. It still took me 45 minutes to do, because until you physically say the lines over and over, they’re not natural enough to “perform” them AND remember what the next set of lines is. I remember looking at one section in particular and thinking “Damn… I shouldn’t have written so much stuff!” :D It was something like three full sentences with a break point at each one of them, so as I was finished “performing” section 1, I had to start ‘loading’ section 2 so I could pass through seamlessly as if it were ‘stream of consciousness’. Like I’m writing this right now as it comes to me, but if I had to SAY all of this stuff… in a row… in one take… it would take me forever to practice it long enough to have it seem like natural conversation. I could probably repeat it verbatim very quickly, but I would sound like a robot… worse than when people read information off of teleprompters that they really have no technical knowledge about.

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