Hello everyone!
Some of you might have looked at this video, noticed its runtime, and thought
“Wait, it’s not November yet. Surely this can’t be a video from Technology Connections”
and yet, it is!
But, a typical video of mine it is not.
This is more of an announcement for a new project that I’m working on over on my second channel Technology Connextras.
That’s right, I have a second channel where I talk about stuff and don’t prepare for anything.
Except that’s about to change.
Well, the talking about stuff won’t change, but the amount of preparation will at least marginally increase.
I received a request from one of my patrons who is blind.
And it was really thought provoking.
Those of us who work in a visual medium, like I do, tend to throw audio pretty far to the side.
Now you all probably knew that about me,
I’ve never exactly been thrilled with my audio setup here in the studio,
and, uh, more than a few times I’ve forgotten to run the de-esser.
Sssssssssorry about that.
But that’s not really the issue I’m tackling here.
For those of us that feature whatsits and doodads, when we talk about how they work and what you do with them
we are often talking about them while they do their thing.
And yep, that’s how I’ve been doing it forever.
All of my B-roll shooting has been done thinking essentially not-at-all about capturing the sound of the device I’m featuring.
In fact, I typically listen to podcasts while I’m getting B-roll so much of what my camera manages to record is completely unusable.
Now to give myself the tiniest bit of credit, there have been a few times in many of my videos where I thought
“this would be good to let people hear” and I’ll shut up for about a quarter of a second,
but still that’s not exactly great.
This entire time I’ve been thinking about device and other mechanical sounds
as adding something to the video experience but nothing of critical importance.
But there are many people among us to whom the audio is the only experience,
and wow that must be irritating.
So, I’m gonna fix that!
I’ve been working through my old B-roll to see what’s got usable audio and what I could feature in this new video format.
And yes, I will still be making these as videos.
I think this series can be enjoyable to those who are sighted as well,
and so I’ve decided to call the series Sights and Sounds.
Now I don’t think every video topic of mine will be worthy of its own Sights and Sounds companion,
and indeed as I’ve been going through my back catalog I think the majority are not.
But for those that are, we’ll revisit them.
And part of that revisiting will be cleaner audio recordings along with new footage.
There’s a lot of stuff from my archive that frankly has terrible audio of its own,
largely from before I had this studio space, so I’ll just get some more.
And when appropriate, I’ll try my hand at descriptive audio so that those who need it can follow along.
Going forward I plan to make this part of my general video production,
and will upload a Sights and Sounds companion along with the main feature.
Again, that won’t always happen - many of my topics don’t really feature specific devices.
But when they do, I’ll do a better job at documenting what they’re like without my commentary, explanations, mood swings, et cetera.
I’ll be revisiting my old topics rather sporadically.
I think it’s fair to say that right now I’ll be treating this as something like a side-project,
so stuff will appear up there when I have some more idle time.
I mean, if you haven’t figured it out by now I don’t exactly have a production schedule and so,
yeah...
But I’m excited about this!
I think it’s very worthwhile to document the things I feature in a more chill and accessible fashion,
and I hope that you find it worthwhile as well.
The first video in the series should be up right now and you can click on it right there.
Or find it in the description.
While you’re there you could also subscribe if you like so you see the new ones as they appear.
As always, my sincerest gratitude goes to all my amazing Patrons,
not only for their support, but for great ideas like this.
And thank you very much for watching.