Well, it seems that I've been neglecting the blog. Though not because there's nothing to report. If nothing else, I've been very busy. Most of the new ground I've been covering has been at work where we're breaking into doing instructional videos. The challenging part is to make them interesting. Going into this project, I've watched a lot of videos produced by other libraries and most of them are groan-worthy. They mean well but having been involved with community theater as I have, I found myself looking at the screen and thinking "no, no, don't do that!"

After an extended campaign I finally got us some editing software that had creative potential and started working with it. So far I've only scratched the surface on the cool things I can do. Here you can see my first experiment with a green screen and an inimation filter.

Then we had a brainstorming session with a handfull of librarian and they came up with the idea of me shooting them giving afirmative answers. Then we got a few of our student employees to pose common student question for the camera. Since this was off the cuff, we didn't give much thought to planning questions that matched the answers we already had. When it came time to edit the video together, I was lucky in that I was able to find reasonalble connections between all the questions and answers. Also, it was a matter of finding something appropriate to put behind the librarians since we shot them all in front of the green screen. I was able to do that will all but one of the librarian since by chance she happened to be wearing a green shirt the day we did this unplanned shoot and it totally freaked out the chroma key filter. You learn a dozen things every day. In any case, here's what we came out with in the end.