5:35 minutes – This video is about the similarities I and Lindsey Sterling, the YouTube superstar and dubstep violinist, have in common. And the conclusions aren’t good. Sorry fans. The list includes: eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive workaholic behavior, focused hyper creativity, fear of intimacy, and probably more. The only thing we don’t have in common is a net worth of 16 million US dollars. That’s right. I don’t have that much money.
If this video makes you angry, perhaps you suffer from the same cognitive dissonance that I and Lindsey Sterling do. Pretending that success and recognition make every disorder better. Not necessarily. The most successful scientists and engineers who I worked for succeeded in business because of their neurosis and obsessive-compulsive behavior. That’s right. Lindsey Sterling traded one symptom for a more sanitized and popular disorder. The results is a lousy family life or other sacrifices.
USED for components
JPEG STILLS
awards dress.jpg
dance-w-stars.jpg
dws2.jpg
dwts_22.jpg
lindsey1.jpg
on-stage-mini.jpg
stars.jpg
2019 – endgame_of_thrones_war_of_music_360p.mp4
compulsion-hungry-enough.png
curative-therapy overlay.png
dubstep wiki
eating-hungry-enough.png
hungry-enough.xcf
Poiret-One.zip
purple-curtain-wallpaper.jpg
self-esteem-hungry-enough.png
self-esteem-YT-hungry-enough.png
Sen-ExtraBold.zip
subscribers to youtube by year.odt
TradeGothicLTStd-BdCn20.otf
y2mate.com – silly_symphony_the_grasshopper_and_the_ants_Tl0iRVFRvEk_240p.mp4
youtube-ani-logo.mp4
YouTube-Logo-696×373.jpg
1-LINDSEY-AWARD.mp4
2-LINDSEY-AWARD.mp4
3-LINDSEY.mp4
4-LINDSEY.mp4
5-LINDSEY.mp4
6-LINDSEY.mp4
6 milllion $$$
7-LINDSEY.mp4
8-LINDSEY.mp4
9-LINDSEY.mp4
10-LINDSEY.mp4
11-LINDSEY.mp4
16m-NETWORTH.png
aerohead-overlooking-the-ocean.mp3
alte-din-1451-mittelschrift.zip
amazing-stutter.mp3
arena-lindsey.mp4
Bisou_-_10_-_Bad_Flower.mp3
Bisou_-_10_-_Bad_Flower-clip.mp3
covered-up.xcf
dance-clip-1.mp4
dizzy-log-2.mp4
Donna Summers Love to love you baby.mp3
Donna Summers Love to love you baby-intro.mp3
Donna Summers-moan.mp3
drown-rats.mp3
grasshopper+ant-clip.osp
Grasshopper+ant clip.mp4
grasshopper-intro.mp4
heavy-rain-daniel_simon.mp3
hungry-dog-clip.mp4
Lindsey Addiction-preview.mp4
Lindsey anorexic.mp3
Lindsey modesty happiness.mp4
Lindsey-modesty-happiness.osp
Lindsey-modesty-happiness-excerpts.mp3
Lindsey-modesty-happiness-excerpts-normalized.mp3
lindsey_stirling_super-singleness.mp3
self-esteem-on-looks-amazing.mp3
Shaolin_Dub_-_04_-_Awake.mp3
skirt-modesty.jpg
The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper_-_Project_Gutenberg_etext_19994.jpg
throbbing-lindsey.osp
y2mate.com – face_to_face_with_lindsey_stirling_SaztimXwiDw_360p.mp4
y2mate.com – lucretia_mac_evil_-oJdslYB0a4.mp3
Youtube – 20047.mp4
Youtube title sequence.mp4
MUSIC
waves by maliciou | https://soundcloud.com/maliciou
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US
You are free to use Overlooking The Ocean music track (even for commercial purposes), but you must include the following in your video description (copy & paste):
Overlooking The Ocean by AERØHEAD | https://soundcloud.com/aerohead
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US
You are free to use Mystic Fuse music track (even for commercial purposes), but you must include the following in your video description (copy & paste):
Mystic Fuse by Relic Music | https://soundcloud.com/relic-music
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US
3:03 minutes – This gentle 1995 poem is embedded in noise and confusing dystopia. It’s symbolic of my childhood warfare theater. It’s the emblematic burial of all my fragile, tender, and intimate emotion. It was my childhood strategy to survive suffering, injustice, and totalitarian dictatorship. The strategy never left me. Neither did the mental war of hyper-vigilance.
This recent video poem and my last, The Rusty Cart, both contain the keyword “Gone” as a prominent word.
I became naturally cold and distant, content to live in my own world. I built emotional walls so others didn’t approach me or know how to talk to me.
Poem
The Kind Nudge
for imaginary childhood companions.
When the wind whispers your prized name, the playful wispy sound slides smooth into my elements.
An echo resonating warmth from your dancing flame.
An affectionate flicker softening my robust mask.
Silly searching still for the clever luster of your enchanting treasures
Locked forever but never from splendid imagination through daydreaming power.
Defiantly dancing closer and closer.
Passing into viewed unity.
Pedestrians at the crossroads.
The hidden wondrous sacred ground, undefended, unrestricted.
Tiptoeing in awe.
Marveling at our inner senses peaking.
“Separate but together, together but separate.”
The paradox of intimacy and autonomy … at rest.
Gone our frightened jangled jitters.
We smile.
Basking in comfortable friendly silence.
CREDIT: Dark Knight by Serge Narcissoff | https://soundcloud.com/sergenarcissoff
serge-narcissoff-dark-knight.mp3
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US
See the puny heart spin
Rollin’ in the gutter.
Clatter, clank, such a din.
Makes one wonder where it’s been.
Is it such a hellish sin
to love another?
Gimme work, gimme money
that’ll cure all ills, honey.
Drown in demon distractions!
Satiate with surface satisfactions!
Transform the sky, gray to sunny.
March ’em, dance ’em. Ain’t it funny.
Peering down a tunnel dark
Life a wild hopeless lark.
More noise, more lights.
Soak the senses in delights.
Cover up, bury deep
Screaming feelings that won’t sleep.
Yank the stabbings from the heart.
Cram them in a rusty cart,
And roll them off to hell!
There they’ll burn, smashed and broke.
Melt and simmer, smoldering joke.
Still we drink the caustic smoke.
Breathe it in. Expand the lung.
Corrupted crawling fetid dung.
Devours the insides to the outsides.
Powdered nothing.
Only sobbing song.
Hear it echo.
Fading. Faded. Gone.
Second take switched voice to Amy- British-English.
Commentary: The word “hell” breaks the cadence or rhyming rhythm. It’s similar to breaking the invisible grid in graphic design. It calls attention to an idea because it seems out of place. This is emphasis without a pointing finger. So it was a subconscious decision — and serendipitous strategy.
OPEN SOURCE ASSETS
SOUNDS
Machine_sound-Marianne_Gagnon-88253407.mp3
Cutlery Clank-SoundBible.com-1591059093.mp3
Record Static-SoundBible.com-306727640.mp3
2:32 minutes – Inspiration is from personal 2019 emails – and a poem written in 1991. The Girdle is about the rivalry between mother and daughter. Primarily the envy of the mother.
THE GIRDLE
Competitive Mama.
in memory of the girdle.
Thank you for birthing this beautiful babe.
Standing smiling smooth.
teeth square and straight.
tall and thin.
stomach smooth and flat.
She really must never eat.
Mama, looks at her lap and can’t find her feet.
Ah, those magnificent thick locks
so were yours before thinning
… and greyed.
Such a charming wig.
so wonderfully displayed.
Poor mother what transpired
Do you hate a lovely appearance gorgeous
Under an evil breath,
“Just once let her arrive shabby, unkempt, and enormous.”
But then — they might say,
“Like mother like daughter.”
Wouldn’t that – be nice?
TEARE 1990
Assets and Elements
MP4 videos
makeup – 12720.mp4
Girl – 6515.mp4
Rose – 8508.mp4
Girl – 16397.mp4
Background – 3025.mp4
Boxing – 20118.mp4
Boxing – 20113.mp4
humpback_whale_breach_360p.mp4
ocean.mp4
MP3 audio
Crisp_Ocean_Waves-Mike_Koenig-1486046376.mp3
oceanwave.mp3
Wave Crashing At Beach.mp3
ocean53.mp3
Still images
blue-whale.jpg
Voiceover
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Music from https://filmmusic.io:
“The Show Must Be Go” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
1:45 minutes – This short video’s goal was an advertisement for a digital download about the slowness of WooCommerce plugin. But in the end, I didn’t use it. Instead it became revelatory of two paradoxical aspects of my life. One is the tenacity of the snail – and the second is the desire for fast-paced creative production. Prolific unfettered output. Unchained from the plow.
18 seconds – Walt Disney Pictures is an American film studio. They’re the producer of live-action feature films and are based in Burbank, California. Walt Disney Pictures is regarded as one of Hollywood’s Big Five film studios. Films produced by Pixar Animation Studios are also released under this brand. Dizzy Pictures has no affiliation with either of these corporate entities.
The lettering of the Walt Disney logotype is very similar to a font called Waltograph, which is a free-for-personal-use typeface designed by Justin Callaghan.
Typo Slab Regular freeware font is used for the “PICTURES” type.
Everything seemed cohesively unrelated during the “build” – is that chaos? Until – at the very end – I dedicated the work to my Mom. Then it all made sense to me. She was a 1960s work-at-home Mom with two little kids. She married an unpredictable raging scientist and narcissist. She was the unwilling victim of domestic violence. She chose never speaking about the bullying or violence. Silenced by intimidation and weakness. But to her credit, she survived marriage but could never escape mortal death. My child-mind thought I could protect her from death. But I was wrong. She died at 82 from complications related to age.
What a horrible way to live. Cowering and manipulating each other. Walking on eggshells.
Don’t Call Me Dear is a poem written and self-published in print during the early 1990s. The original piece was biographical and about a guy (me). I was divorced at the time. To mask my vulnerability, I switched the gender to female – a common creative-writing trick. Often in my writings, the female character represents my creative inner self.
The goal of lo-fi video poetry is working with no costs. Severe self-imposed limitations for productivity and creativity. New ideas emerge. Serendipity helps. The goal is finishing and moving on to the subsequent project. There’s no perfectionist fine tuning after final output. Acquired learning only translates forward to new projects. Not to reworking past flaws. The flaws are part of the prolific process.
In hindsight, there are things I’d do differently. But that’s not a disciplined option to stay on course. Quality is sacrificed – but successive projects improve and gain new skills. Future achievement grows from adaptive practice. You acquire new habits and skills.
The Poem
Ashamed, almost terrified she listened.
Panic swept her frozen face.
With whirling mind she thought,
Don’t say those words.
Please, please don’t make me say it to you.
In a flash, she recalled every hurt and pain received under the umbrella of love.
Searing tears still smoking in her tender heart.
“Can I believe you?”
“Can I trust you?”
It still stings so deep
You reopened all my old wounds.
Do you understand the real me?
The fire smoulders now.
Bits of ash flutter off in the breeze.
The pungent smell of burnt memories spin slowly in the billowing smoke.
Tomorrow is gone but yesterdays feelings live on.
Will they ever sleep?
They toss and turn.
Dancing insomniacs.
Moulding dreams haunted by fears without meaning.
Don’t call me Dear
Salvaged Letter
I then salvaged a piece of a 2017 letter I wrote to a “terminally-gifted,” 17-year-old girl. She’s a brilliant friend of Levi, my son. I asked her to pose any question to me. What would she choose? The question she asked, “How do boys think?” That response was a 1-page letter my son Levi later delivered to her. I excerpted a few lines for this project as a voice test sample. In the end, it fit adding the excerpt to this piece.
Testing Robot Voice Talent from Amazon
There are four contenders racing to capture market share in Artificial Intelligence (AI) text-to-voice and voice recognition. Those are:
Microsoft
Apple
Amazon
IBM
Each has different goals and features and are incorporating these into the programming language called Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML). Learn more about SSML
To generate two voice-over tracks, I used the online text-to-speech synthesizer on Amazon Polly. A sign-up is required. Then you access a development tool that processes up to 3,000 characters. They charged me $1 via PayPal. You can listen to the text-to-speech results before download as an MP3 file. It feels like a live environment compared to other cumbersome techniques.
Amazon Polly – Not free but almost. It’s so cheap.
This production method was infinitely better than the clunky workaround using SpeechKit WordPress plugin. Before, I couldn’t preview nor place timed gaps between sentences. Very cumbersome. That’s how I produced my first two very-novice and mechanical robot-voiced videos, Last Rocket and Sanctum Nova Muerte. Still, they were better than even older alternatives.
Converting Talent-less Text-to-Voice
The first text-to-voice track built for this lofi project is an Amazon-Polly Kendra conversion of the letter excerpt. The second MP3 is the same text read by Matthew.
The Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) is used with a standard Application Programming Interface (API). SSML is used to control the volume, pitch, rate, and pronunciation of synthesized speech. Using SSML, I coded variable-length pauses without slicing or splicing the tracks into pieces to insert silent gaps. This was a big step forward for productivity. Ideally, and eventually, future voices will switch/change during output instead of editing in a production audio editor. But not yet. There’s a provision for specifying preferred voice in SSML code – but it doesn’t work yet. You choose one voice in the Amazon Polly dashboard – not in the SSML code. That’s it. One vice per track. Oh, well. Soon. Maybe?
I combined the two MP3 tracks (voices) and edited using Audacity on a Linux operating system. My computer is built from scrap, secondhand, used parts purchased on Ebay for under a few hundred dollars. That price tag includes three LED back-lit monitors. That is cheaper than hiring professional voice talent.
Polly Voice Track Output Examples
Here are the sample MP3 Kendra and Mathew voice tracks and then the composite follows:
Kendra solo track above
Mathew solo track above
Above: Composite of two tracks in Audacity.
Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software available for Windows, macOS/OS X and Linux operating systems.
Free Audacity digital audio editor.
Another female voice track.
I then proccessed the 21-line poem Don’t Call Me Dear using speech synthesis techniques – but with Polly’s Salli voice. Here I added more effects – besides breaks or gaps. I used breath duration, whispered, and break time settings in the SSML code. That 1-minute and 17-second code example is below. It’s downloaded from Amazon’s dashboard.
Since there are 21 lines in the poem, it takes about the same number of still images to create a slideshow. Each line gives some clue how to communicate feelings and ideas. I rename and number the downloaded images for automatic sorting when dropped into OpenShot video editor.
Free OpenShot video editor dashboard.
I used Google Image Search and creative-commons to locate qualified large images. They were not resized or optimized for speed after download. They are processed in free PhotoFilmStrip software on Linux to match the duration of the final voice track.
Free PhotoFilmStrip dashboard.
Video Compression saves time during upload and page loads.
After the composite video is output from OpenShot video editor, the MP4 video weighs 383MB. It’s optimized using HandBrake software for translation to web optimization and conversion to M4V format.
HandBrake changes the file size to 48MB. This is important for an 8-times faster upload to my YouTube channel. It only took about 10 minutes uploading.
21 lines = 21 images.
Then off searching the Internet to harvest open-source image based on keywords. A lot like hunting for the right driftwood washed up on sandy shores.
Ashamed, almost terrified she listened.
Panic swept her frozen face.
With whirling mind she thought,
Don’t say those words.
Please, please don’t make me say it to you.
In a flash, she recalled every hurt and pain received under the umbrella of love.
Searing tears still smoking in her tender heart.
Can I believe you?
Can I trust you?
It still stings so deep
You reopened all my old wounds.
Do you understand the real me?
The fire smoulders now.
Bits of ash flutter off in the breeze.
The pungent smell of burnt memories spin slowly in the billowing smoke.
Tomorrow is gone but yesterdays feelings live on.
Will they ever sleep?
They toss and turn.
Dancing insomniacs.
Moulding dreams haunted by fears without meaning.
Don’t call me Dear.
Several extra images were discovered and added for a total of 27 images. Some were later deleted and substituted.
What is Stock Video?
Stock Videos are videos that are about 60 sec made for commercial purposes. These videos are sold on photo stock websites for commercial purposes. Usually they are used on TV, Internet advertising, or for interface design. We hunt for the freebies or promotional giveaways.
9:02 minutes – In August 2015, I had a flashback while sleeping. I heard my son’s, Levi (17), quick heavy footfall outside our bedroom. I screamed out in terror thinking my father was in the house. It was disconcerting to everyone. I didn’t know what it meant. It was the beginning of an awakening. The Lord brings all things to our remembrance – both good and evil.
Optimal minimalism is a performance enhancement method. It includes such techniques and skills as:
Deconstruction. Only what’s necessary.
Identifying why you might fail before you start.
Selection based on Pareto’s 80/20 determination of results.
Core learning. The Core Knowledge approach prizes content across the disciplines, bucking a trend toward a narrower, skills-based approach to learning. Learn only what’s necessary.
Sequencing using the opposite order of best practices.
Self-imposed limitations.
Focus on removal: Remove things first instead of add things.
Clarity and Mystery – opposites arouse curiosity.
Useful mystery – just enough information reduction.
Prolific optimized minimalism: Getting rid of excess.
3:57 minutes – Last Rocket is my first rudimentary video production. Very primitive and fundamental. Unsophisticated. But you have to start somewhere. The dialog was excerpted from a short story I wrote with the same title.
I used the SpeechKit plugin for WordPress. Very primitive but works for longer story text than poems. I converted the voice twice. Once with a male Australian voice and the second with female British voice. Then chopped them both all up and rebuilt it. Very difficult and tedious. Speech tools improved and production is easier now with gaps, stops, breaths, etc.
