A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
So let's start off with the biggest and best thing of last week. My new video, which people are calling the best so far. I said in the youtube description I'd give some more details about it, like the name, the tricks, and editing it, and that'll be this week's Juggle This section. So let's go on to other things.
::
Tech.MCC, last week's meeting was an absolute FAILURE, as only me and 2 other people showed up, so I just canceled that meeting and hung out in anime club. The next meeting though should be fairly awesome, because it's the "Pirate Day" meeting. On another note, the budget of $450, is not a lot at all. It's already down at least a hundred and fifty bucks, and I haven't even bought the GPS to give away or the money to set aside for the project contest. Ah, management is fun sometimes.
::
Classes seem to be good for the most part. Two of my classes, Solid Modeling and Business 101, are going to be CAKE (at least once I get used to the mindset you need for them). Photography 1 is going to be an AWESOME course, but I'm really going to have to put a lot of work into getting my old film camera working again, learning to use it again, and finding the time and subjects to shoot each week. Art and Industry in Commerce, now that's going to be an interesting course, to say the least. It is really structured and it looks like there's going to be a lot of reading, but at least the professor doesn't seem like to much of a hardass about it.
::

Juggle This 1:
So, A Faction of One. I basically, after doing "Not Yet Famous", fizzled out with my whole filming thing, and with something up with new and interesting tricks. I'd thought I'd made and awesome video that would stand for a while, and I did. "Not Yet Famous" was an awesome video, even if the pace was really slow and more repetitive feeling than I wanted, it was still great. So I didn't really bother to think about video #15 for at least a good month, and then all of the sudden, I looked at my youtube profile and saw that it'd basically been two months since "Not Yet Famous and that I was overdue for the next one. The problem was, that in those two months I really hadn't come up with anything particularly interesting or good, as is that case during the summer when I don't have daily access to high ceilings at MCC.

So I got working and starting thinking about what kind of tricks I could do under 8 feet that would really be hard and worth filming. I came up with a few things, including a multiplex trick during a 4 ball shower that I really liked, but I was still short by a LOT of footage. So I took a trip to MCC to practice (becasue I desperately needed it. I hadn't even done 744 in months), and shoot the entire thing no matter what I get or don't get. So that's where the big 3 club string in the video came from, and a lot of other ideas that I had came from there, but because a lot of the footage was yellow props against a vanilla background, I couldn't use a lot of it. So I went back outside and recorded myself some footage of me doing 97531 and a 6x4 transition, as well as just practice in general.

Now, even after all that, I was still short by leaps and bounds, and at this point I was really starting to get into the idea that I would be competing in WJF ring intermediates at WJF5. So I took one last trip to MCC before the semester started and practiced ALL of the new 4 and 5 rings stuff I was planning to do, such as the 2up180-to-2up360, the 5 ring 744's, full reverse, and other stuff. Now, I was doing pretty well that day, and I was really feeling daring, so I started trying stuff, and I managed to do, much better than I ever did with balls, a 4 ring mills mess (qualifying it, no less). I was pumped to say the least. So I just stayed there for at least a good 2 hours just practicing rings and trying stuff. I got a few things to work, and then inspiration struck again.

So, this doesn't have to do with "A Faction of One", but it's related to the session I just had. Inspiration struck when I saw the seating of the theater I was practicing in. Now, I wanted to make myself a new WJF profile video now that I HAD decided I was competing in ring intermediates, and the old video just wasn't going to cut it. So I set up the camera and recorded an entirely new profile video that I'll have out as soon as I'm done editing it.

Back to the video. So I finally had what I felt was JUST ENOUGH footage to make the first-blush attempt at the video, and I wanted to do, if anything, avoid the slow and repetitive pace of Daft Punk from "Not Yet Famous", so I went looking through my longer media files and came across Sum41. I remembered how they recently released an album that I'd bought and how I hadn't listened to it in a while, so I listened to it again and this one track absolutely stood out and grabbed me. It was Walking Disaster. Basically, as I was halfway through the song, I was starting to picture in my head, exactly what clips would go where and how they'd match the music. Because this track was a journey. I started off slow, built up to the big beats in the first half, then a slow section, back into the main beats, and ending on a really nice calmed bit. It was absolutely great, it was cohesive, it led me around the spectrum of how a clip would feel, and there were plenty of hit points in it to attach tricks to. From that point, the video just made itself. The final version was only the 4th edit.

Juggle This 2:
So now, that the video details are out of the way, let's talk Jugglers On Juggling. So I released episode oe of the new season, and though some people liked it, it instigated a riot over on Rec.Juggling. What made this riot different and more useful than ones that had come before it was the simple fact, that instead of just bashing and giving me the standard advice of "BE MORE INTERESTING!", "KNOW YOUR TOPIC", and "BETTER AUDIO QUALITY NEEDED", people actually started giving me advice on HOW to fix the problems. THAT'S constructive criticism, my friends, and that's exactly what I've been looking for for JoJ since season 1. Someone came up with the really good idea that I considered but threw out a while ago, that I should record the podcast in audio only and just ass still pictures to make it a video cast, much like the older versions of Infected with Martin Sargent on Revision3. I realized after that idea got put into my head again, that I could use that to get rid of all the bad connecting stuff in my rants (which I couldn't do with the video versions), thus making the podcast much better in terms of production value.

A couple people, including Luke Burrage gave me the advice to setup a microphone closer to me than recording off of the camera mic. If there was one thing I wanted Luke's advice on, it was exactly the problem of fixing audio quality and making things sound nice. So I spent some money and got a decent PC mic (which is still in the mail, and that's why the second episode isn't out yet), and we'll see how the sound quality improves.

I also got a lot of feedback that was basically, "I only got one point from the first 7 minutes of the cast, and that was that you can practice by bringing props everywhere you go and practicing whenever there's a free second", and that is a good point. I went back and I did do a lot of over-explaining with that point. It's a habit that I developed over the years because I'm very bad at making small-talk, so to extend a conversation and to get my point across more clearly (because I've always had problems translating my ideas to words), I will explain it by using stories and just explain the hell out of every detail. I'll be trying to do that less in future casts.

So those were the three main things I got from the big riot after I released episode 1, and hopefully now that I know what they want and have gotten some decent feedback, I can make episode 2 actually WORTH watching. Hopefully I'll have it out on Monday of next week. Oh, and here's a link to the topic of doom from Rec.Juggling. JoJ S3x01

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150