Only took me only two days, which I’m pretty proud of. Turns out that I already know how to do all this stuff. I already had all the audio editing and video encoding software, music mixing experience, radio editing experience, and know-how from encoding movies for torrents, even back to originally making StarCraft vocal effects (Mom and Dad, my life in middle school was not wasted). I had the camera and tripod although the relatively recent addition of a wireless trigger certainly helped. I did have to download a new stop-motion editor, but honestly it’s just a glorified slideshow viewer with powers of copy & paste. Had the skills to do it all along.
And I did it. Just came up with the idea and did it. Took me 40 hours from the first shot to uploading it to YouTube — did that because it gets a lot more viewers than Vimeo, even though Vimeo is far more awesome. That time includes sleeping, too. It’s only a little over a minute but that minute took an hour and change to shoot. It took more than eight hours to record and position and add effects to all the vocals — the peep and the Pteranodon. There was the small matter of finding appropriate music, and then finding a decently clean copy of said music. Many more spent figuring out why my encoder was spitting out error messages like “Virtualdub program failure — out-of-bounds memory access (access violation) occurred in module [anyoldthing.dll] while encoding [some random frame that’s never consistent].” Opened up the computer, blew away a bunch of dust, and now she’s never run better. Lesson learned.
How I made it is sort of interesting to me, but I’m sort of done with it now. Set it aside, Orin. What I’m now more interested in is what you all think of it. Questions I want answered: what amused you? Should I make more of them? Most importantly, I need more ideas for how to get rid of the five boxes of Peeps I got for a discount after Easter — last Easter. Seriously. I shouldn’t eat them. I should kill them.