Today’s project was to attend and report upon the Bristol launch of Gareth L. Powell’s new novel, Silversands. Publisher Chris Teague and a host of Bristol fans, not to mention many of Gareth’s family, were on hand at the splendid Shakespeare Tavern (serving ales at Bristol docks since 1777) to wish the book well. Gareth read briefly from the book, and I recorded his performance. Here it is on YouTube.
Video
P-Con GoH Speech – Nick Harkaway
The P-Con folks have uploaded a video of Nick Harkaway’s Guest of Honour speech to YouTube. They’ve done a fine job of it, which relieves me of the responsibility of processing my own footage. Nick is very funny, so do check it out. Due to YouTube upload limits it is broken into 6 parts as follows:
- Part I (including why Nick no longer does scriptwriting and talks about his new book)
- Part II (in which Nick talks about the SF v literature argument and his space opera in the style of Dylan Thomas)
- Part IV (in which Nick talks about the 100 Stories for Haiti anthology and his wife’s human rights work)
- Part V (in which Nick talks about Bletchley Park and other charity work)
- Part VI (in which Nick reads from The Gone-Away World)
- Part VII (more from The Gone-Away World)
No, I don’t know what happened to Part III.
Video Success
After much messing around with video files I have managed to get a short clip of the 1979 Hugo Award ceremony onto YouTube (and posted it to the official Hugo Award web site). Here it is.
Unfortunately it seems unlikely that the BBC will issue DVDs of the Time out of Mind series, and it would be unwise to tweak their tails by uploading more than this very short clip. However, I hope to get the rest of the material into a state where it can easily be shown privately.
However, for a little more proof that the BBC cameras were at Worldcon that year, here are a couple of very fuzzy photos. I think they are from the art show auction.
Once again many thanks to Arnold Akien for providing me with this material.
Plan for Chaos
One of the things I did while I was in Bristol for the Diana Wynne Jones Conference was interview Andy Sawyer about the new John Wyndham novel that Liverpool University Press has published. At $65.45 from Amazon I haven’t bought a copy yet, but it does sound fascinating. I’ll let Andy explain in his own words.
Finncon Report
My Finncon report is now online. That contains links to the video and photos, but if you want to go straight to the video it is here.
Introducing Motion Comics
In my report on the Bristol Comics Expo I talked a bit about a new company called Zzizzl Comix that specialized in making films from comics – not animating them, but simply using the text and artwork to create a video. Dennis Morrison has emailed to let me know that he now has a number of demos on the web site so you can now see what this is all about. Enjoy.
Australia Video Diary
That’s the last of the video online. You can see the Australia videos here. Those of you planning the attend Worldcon in Melbourne next year can get a sneak look at how convenient the con hotel (and its large bar) are to the convention center. And of you are an author, please listen to Julie Czerneda explain how much fun the southern hemisphere tour can be.
New Zealand Video Diary
Between the two conventions I did a bit of touring around New Zealand. The video from that is now online. It includes visits to the site of next year’s NZ Natcon, to Rivendell, and to the Weta Cave. More importantly, there are three very cute kittens.
Conscription Video Diary
As those of you who are on Twitter and Facebook may have noticed, I have been uploading video today. The video diary from Conscription, the 2009 New Zealand Natcon, is now available. There are a lot of great writers in New Zealand at the moment, and I’m delighted to have got to talk to some of them.
Real Wildlife Photography
I might have failed dismally to find elves in Rivendell, but Kevin has video footage of an actual genuine beaver. Cool.
Imaginales Video Online
My video diary from Imaginales 2009 is now available here. Hopefully this gives you a much better feel for the convention that just a dry report and static photos.
Bristol Video Diary
I only shot a couple of short videos at Bristol, so I’ve been able to get them online this evening. One is an interview with Barry and Dave from The Geek Syndicate; the other shows Gary Erskine sketching The Batman. You can watch them here.
Montréal in Pictures
I now have a whole lot of images of Montréal online. You can find the video diary here, and below is a link to the photo album. Please note the profusion of restaurants. Foodies are going to love Montréal.
[shashin type=”album” id=”22″ size=”medium”]
Penguins Speak Out on Global Warming
Someone here has been having way too much fun. Classic SFnal reference too. (Warning – the penguins say naughty words.)
Hat tip to Deep Sea News.
Neil & Amanda: With Added Artwork
Thanks to the generosity of Neil and Amanda, and the help of Amanda’s colleague, Beth, I have been able to add some artwork to my video diary of the Dublin reading. Now you can not only listen to Neil reading, and Amanda singing, but also view a variety of Amanda corpses. There is some very fine photography in the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book – much of it by Kyle Cassidy, who it turns out has a more direct connection to the SF community as his last LJ post saw him enthusing over getting to meet the likes of Ellen Datlow, Michael Swanwick and Greg Frost.
Anyway, the whole diary, now complete with dead Amandas, can be viewed here.
D3 Masquerade Video – The Bear
Given that I’m into doing video at the moment, I have finally got around to finishing the final piece that I shot in Denver last year. I’d been putting this one off because I had it in my head that YouTube would only allow up to 5 minutes, and this one raw was longer than that. However, doing the Neil & Amanda stuff I saw that the actual limit was 10 minutes, and anyway after editing this one was actually 4:59.
So now it is online, and I’d really like you to watch this because I’m very pleased with it. Stephen Clark’s bear is one of the most impressive costumes I have ever seen, and the video tells you a lot that won’t have been at all obvious if you only saw it on stage.
There are also several stills of the bear, including one of me having a bear hug, in my D3 masquerade photo album.
The P-Con Preview
Because I had to go to Dublin last week I figured that it would be a good idea to check out the site of P-Con, which I will be attending next month. Like any good con-runner, I was worried about how to get there, was there wi-fi, what the local environment was like and so on. Here’s the skinny.
Getting to the Central Hotel from Dublin Airport is pretty simple. The cheapest method is probably the 16a bus, but that stops everywhere and takes an hour. I’d recommend the AirLink bus which is only €10.00 for a return ticket and takes half an hour [Er, no – see below]. It can drop you at the Tourist Information Center (a big old CofI church, re-purposed) and from there it is a very short walk to the Central. Here is a map. A cab takes about the same time but is door to door. I got one on the way in because I was worried about time and it cost me €20.
Update: There has been a bit of discussion in the comments and it turns out that the service I caught was not Airlink but Aircoach. It is €7 single and €12 return, but it goes more precisely to where you need to be (i.e. the Tourist Informaton Office). Profuse apologies for the confusion, and many thanks to Mr. Lally for correcting me.
The hotel is slap in the middle of the city so there are plenty of places to eat nearby, including a restaurant across the road that has a passion for science fiction B-movies judging from their decor. There is a Starbucks not far away, and a small grocery store even closer. There are also pubs. This is Ireland, remember. The main drawback of the location is that there are some nearby clubs that play loud dance music late into the night, so I guess we’ll just have to stay up drinking.
As to the hotel itself, my room was very comfortable. It had tea and coffee making facilities but not a lot else. There is free wi-fi but the signal is quite weak where I was on the 2nd floor (3rd floor for Americans), and I suspect it may be unusable higher up. I did not try the hotel food.
Finally, to give you a feel for the place, I shot a short piece of video. I’m a little horrified at how out of breath I sound, but I had spent all morning rushing around Dublin. Here’s hoping that you find this useful.
The Power of Celebrity
Checking in with my YouTube page I discover that my videos of Amanda & Neil have generated a few dozen views each. The largest number is 44. Except for the one that Amanda put on her blog, which has a whopping 333 views, making it the most popular video I’ve done to date.
Everything on the Internet follows a power law.
Video Software Advice Wanted
As those of you who were online yesterday will already know, I now have the Neil & Amanda videos from the Who Killed Amanda Palmer reading available online. You can see the whole lot here.
But I’m not happy, because the quality of the video isn’t good. What I actually shot (I use a Flip) is excellent, but it comes as AVI files, and YouTube prefers MP4s. Besides, the compression in AVIs is dreadful, so the files would take a year and a day to upload. I have a copy of Cyberlink Power Director, which claims to do conversion and optimization for YouTube, but as you can see the results are not good.
Not being a video expert, I don’t know whether the problem is simply loss of quality through compression, or because the conversion is done badly. I can also see that YouTube now accepts high definition uploads, but the Cyberlink software doesn’t produce the required format.
So I am hoping that someone out there in the great repository of knowledge that is the blogosphere will be able to give me good advice. Do I need different software, and if so what?
Oh, and just to save you all the trouble of doing so, yes, I know, I am a complete and utter moron who would not have any of these problems if only I used a Mac, or Linux, or whatever system you happen to have a religious attachment to. I appreciate your evangelical zeal, but it doesn’t really help.
Octopus v Shark
One of the oceanography web sites that I follow has just posted a top ten of marine invertebrate videos. You can see them all here, but I’ve chosen just one to share with my tentacle-loving friends. Giant octopus v shark – who would win? Nah, not even close. Don’t watch this if you are nervous about tentacled monstrosities, or if you are fond of sharks.