VHS

A few days ago, Mom and I splurged on a DVD recorder! Yes, that's right. We went to Best Buy and bought a Toshiba DR430 DVD recorder for $128. The sole purpose of this, at least for now, is to convert all of our old VHS tapes to something more modern. Like DVD! If you have a DVD, you can easily convert it to pretty much anything else that's modern.

The first thing that came to mind, which really brought this idea into a serious light was my recent activity on Lego animation, all of which I've been posting on Youtube. Of course, I actually started animating back in 1999 or a little before, from what I've seen with all of the conversions I've been making this weekend. This includes working with media such as Lego, clay and Andrea's stuffed animals.

Almost all of the videos we made were low quality (because we were using an old, worn out camcorder with a broken focus on the lens. I had figured out that the camcorder always backed up approximately 1.5 seconds after you stopped recording, just to ensure that there wasn't any static or blank tape when you started the next bit. With this knowledge, I was able to make one to half-second durations of video and pretty much simulate stop-action animation. These videos I am converting now ARE my VERY FIRST ATTEMPTS at this! Well, almost. The very first attempt I made didn't work because I was still discovering the 1.5 second thing, so that one is lost. But I redid that same exact video, which worked, and which I am now titling Horses in the Mountains.

I should remember that. I didn't give it a good title when I converted it yesterday..I called it something like "Lego - Collapsing Mountain and Horses."

Another bit of nostalgia. Shortly after I discovered my newfound ability with the camcorder, I had two of my best friends from Jr. High, Ben Weilert and Max Moe, over for an overnighter. Ben had created this comic strip in school which he called "Holy Living Man" and his head was a block of cheese. Just goes to show you how weird Ben was. Well anyway, we had them over for an overnighter and we created a video using clay (Plastacine), and a white board to caption the characters, and used Ben's storyline from his comic strip.

Well, yesterday I finally converted that whole video, along with an entire 2-hour tape's worth of other videos onto a DVD.

Therefore: I am going to now work on converting these DVDs to something like MP4, WMV...something and upload at least the animations to Youtube. Most of them are poor quality, most of them have stupid outtakes and really stupid story lines. But all of them are my originals and besides, I can do anything I want with my own stuff on Youtube, can't I?

So enjoy!

I'm going to be posting quickie intro and credits videos I made up this morning as a sort of preview to whet the appetite of my thousands of subscribers..or maybe more like five.