When I was building this blog I came across an interesting problem. I wanted to include some of my video projects as Youtube clips but noticed that the default embed code that Youtube offers isn't valid xhtml.

Youtube offers something like this:

<object width="425" height="350">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM"></param>
    <param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
    <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM" 
        type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
        wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed>
</object>

After a bit of playing around, I found that what I really needed was something more like this:

<object data="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM" 
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
    width="425" height="350">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM"/>
</object>

The next hurdle was RSS; Valid RSS doesn't allow <embed> tags at all. I removed them from the output of my RSS generator but I still wanted to show some sort of preview of the missing Youtube embed. Thankfully, Youtube offers a default preview image for all uploaded videos and so given iJ6JjzfZ2PM as an example video id, the image would be:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/iJ6JjzfZ2PM/default.jpg

That image comes out something like this:


The preview image for a Youtube clip.

So with all that sorted, now I can have my Youtube and my validation

Just uploaded another video to Youtube. This one was a video I made back in high school with Tyson Dudley, Ryan Lindberg, and Andrew Thompson. We had to show random shots of around the school with something to link all of the shots together. We chose a burglar (played by Ryan) as our link.

Making this video was a heap of fun because it was the first video we got to make, having just started in Film & TV (the high school subject). Shooting was done over a few afternoons before we moved into editing. None of us had really used Premiere before so we learnt a heap while putting together Burglar.

The first cut ended up being a lot longer than we were allowed so we had to cut a few scenes to make it fit.

After a few viewings of the final edit we noticed a few things we missed initially. One problem I managed to fix was a continuity issue when Ryan steals the drill from the ITD department. In one shot the drill was green but in the next shot it was yellow. After a while of tinkering with the drill colour, I got the drills to both be yellow enough for most people not to notice that they are completely different drills.

There are two other goofs that people have noticed: Ryan isn't wearing his mask when he is being chased with the drill, and Ryan's reflection can be seen in the window when Fernando bursts out of the office doors.

I think we did a pretty good job considering it was our first project

I just uploaded a quick teaser I made a few years ago for a Kings College Conclusion. I was asked to make a quick video to share around the colleges at UQ that would advertise the tropicana themed party.

The clip didn't take that long to make, mostly because a fair chunk of the work was already done. The wyvern was recycled from the Kings Tonight intro and most of the girls in the background are just the same person duplicated with a few colour changed here and there .

Just uploaded The Watcher to Youtube. The Watcher was a project for a subject at uni that I did back in 2004. The point of the assignment was to make a short film that contained all three of first, second, and third person.

Our initial ideas for this project just seemed to be lacking something (most often the thing missing was a good idea ). One such idea involved a dog trying to give a human a bath. I don't remember the details very well but I remember that that idea was cut pretty quickly.

Eventually we came to the idea of the guy being stalked. This gave us an excuse to have third person (normal shots), and first person (the stalker point of view) but we still had to think of something for the second person. After watching Malcolm in the Middle, I think, we got the idea to have the main character address the audience directly which would give us the second person perspective that we needed. We added the last part as a kind of joke ending. A problem we faced with the last shot was that Nigel (the guy) is a lot taller than Di (the stalker) and we were shooting in a tight hallway so we didn't have a lot of room to move back. We tried to use forced perspective but it didn't really work out. I didn't see that as a big problem so we moved onto editing and took our cut to the preliminary critique.

The pre-crit version of the film was in colour and Theo (the lecturer) suggested we convert it to grayscale, so we did. I think the loss of colour added the final touch that we needed and it was ready to submit. We got a high distinction for the project.

I just uploaded Wacky Day at Uni to Youtube. Wacky Day was a film I made with Nigel McBryde and Brett Holton for a university project back in 2002. The assignment required us to make a minute film that showed the audience something ridiculous so we chose to have random stuff happen to some guy while he was at uni one day. Enjoy.

Most of the ideas we threw around in our initial brainstorming ended up in the final cut of the film. We basically just wanted to play around with some compositing so we thought of some simple things we could do with that in mind. After a few technique tests we settled on having a reappearance of a stand-up comic character we used in an earlier video as the first ridiculous happening. We also wanted to have some live action compositing so we decided that Nigel would be hiding behind a light pole and peer out, cartoon style. For our third crazy occurrence we chose to have a giant Lego man walking around the uni campus.

I think our video came together nicely in the end and I think the lecturer and tutors agreed; We got a high distinction for the project