Five Minutes of Fame is a regular event that happens at Noisebridge every third Thursday. More info about it can be found on the website link, the relevant part to this post is the last particular event where we recorded the talks.
I was approached by my friend who runs the talks to create a short intro video to the talks which would then be posted on YouTube for all the world to see. We decided on something short, but wanted to make it clear this was Noisebridge. Here’s how I got to it.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHk47KYH064
The five second intro took the bulk of the work. The rest of the filming was done by Eddie Codel. All I needed to do was create something that was recognisably Noisebridge. I started with deciding what content needed to go on it, our logo (for sure), name of the event, where it was at, who was speaking and the name of the talk seemed like just enough. No more, no less.
The theme of the event is “5″, 5 minute talks within the hour. Abbreviated the event is “5MoF” which is almost becoming a logo within itself. We decided to go with the “5″ theme for the intro and wanted to do a countdown. We started with the Noisebridge logo and cut out everything else but the centre bit. I determined what font that was used and made separate images with a countdown from 5 to 1 in the middle, combined them together and imported them into Quicktime at one frame per second. I made it a point to use the same font for all of the text throughout the clip.
The idea of having an audio countdown came up during the discussion of the intro and someone suggested a numbers station. Simple, yet delightfully creepy. I scoured the internet and found a clip of one that contained all the numbers I needed, albeit in the wrong order. Reordering them wasn’t difficult at all given I was good enough at using the basic features of Audacity. Reordering them made the sequence sound different and a bit more disjointed, a nice side effect.
Since we were using something that sounded old, it made sense to make it look old as well. I used the “aged film” filter in iMovie, decreased the exposure and the brightness while upping the contrast. Result: looking and sounding like something that’s been sitting in a warehouse for around 50 years.
REJECTED
This montage was a lot of fun to make. In every 5MoF so far there’s been a handful of bloopers but this is the only one that has been filmed so far. There were enough moments of fail to create a two minute clip out of it.
The clip was inspired by Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected and uses the same music, although the one in ours goes on for longer than his.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVPHk0vZwkU
