all the tweets that wouldn’t fit

under the boardwalk

Sun, 10 May 2009 17:29:24 -0400

Today I placed my first geocache, cleverly hidden somewhere in the great outdoors.
Where? N 41° 40.931 W 71° 18.062, to be (relatively) exact. (Not a huge mystery - the video shows all.)
You can find out more about the great sport of geocaching at geocaching.com.
I’m a newbie, but I plan on heading out to Prudence Island soon to place a half-dozen or so caches – the first, to my knowledge, on the island! Woohoo!
I cranked out the music for the video using Omnisphere, which I just picked up a week or two ago. A great tool, and lots of fun.

– Randy

depth of field

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:00:43 -0500

Eager to get the real posts rolling, I offer this nugget from the archives, recorded in March of 2008.
It’s from the first outing I made with my Letus 35mm adapter, which allows one to use lenses made for 35mm cameras with HD video cameras. This makes possible a much shallower depth of field than can usually be achieved with the fixed lens on the HD camera; the video explores the expressive latitude this grants.
It is my intention to use haikutweeter as a forum for my own work, including music, and avoid appropriating the copyrighted work of others. When originally edited, this video was meant as an exercise for my private appreciation only, and utilized a wonderful piano improvisation by Keith Jarrett from his album Staircase, Hourglass, Sundial, Sand.
It’s one thing to borrow music in your own home for private use; it’s another thing altogether to plunk it out in public, like this. In the next few weeks, as I begin to post other work, I’ll re-edit or remove this post altogether; in the meanwhile - Mr. Jarrett, mea culpa, my apologies, and I offer, at the very least, this copyright notice:
Music ©1976 Keith Jarrett - All rights reserved
Please investigate Keith Jarrett’s extensive body of sublime work - the Köln Concert, the Carnegie Hall Concert (which I had the astonishing good fortune of attending), the Sun Bear Concerts - all treasures that will earn their standing as life-long companions.
– Randy

the mysterious disappearing placeholder

Sat, 7 Feb 2009 18:51:07 -0500

Hey! You must be an early adopter, or something.
This post is just a placeholder, and will vanish shortly, once I get my act together. The non-video of Emma and my studio is the first throwaway result of getting the production chain together with my sparkly new Sony HDR-SR11 HD Handycam. It’s an extremely cool little beast – much easier to haul around than my pro rig with the 35mm lens adapter – but the AVCHD codec it uses threw my usual video habits right off their kibble.
I’m a long-time Final Cut Studio maven, but it turns out that Adobe CS4’s Premier Pro handles the alien AVCHD codec like a champ, without having to transcode in order to edit. It even preserves the Dolby 5.1 Surround audio the little guy records, which is a big plus.
You won’t find that audio here, though, as the web conversion process mixes it down to stereo. (At least for now!) Nor will you find the QuickTime playback controls scuzzing up my nice web page. I’m counting on people being able to figure out that they can click the movie to stop playback, double-click to resume playing, and double-click again if they want to see it more than once. (Not very likely, given this particular opus.)
Oh, c’mon, get used to it! It’s not that hard.