Dollar Store Dimwittery and the Soft Launch of the Nyteworks YouTube Channel

Wow. What a journey this has been in making this video.

After the Sonic Lost World First Play Charity Marathon, I found myself with this equipment left over, including the webcam we used to record Ian and the rest of us playing the game on the living room sofa. Naturally, I figured that I couldn’t just let it go to waste, and doing video content seemed like a good way to expand my horizons until the next time I could pull something like that together, so I figured “why not?”

I swear, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I decided to start with the video you see above, which was inspired by this three-part series I saw over on Dinosaur Dracula. It seemed like fun, and it was, once I found a dollar store with something worth buying in the first place. I was bound and determined that this would be the first video (marathon footage aside) to launch my Nyteworks YouTube Channel.

Shooting the video was the easy part, but the problem was that I had all of this dead air (the original video was about 35 minutes). I couldn’t pause it during the video, and I figured that just trimming out the dead space would be easier than stringing several different videos together. Perhaps that was a mistake.

Along with other videos I shot in the latter part of last year, I’ve been working ever since to try to get this thing done. I won’t go into all the technical details, because I don’t know them myself. Suffice to say: Nothing worked. Ever. I’ve run through numerous programs, corrupted my computer, downloaded various programs, codecs, whatchamacallits, and so on all to do a few basic things:

1) Find a program I can afford…

2) …that would actually read video files such as MP4 and QuickTime (some things I’ve shot on my iPhone, so)…

3) …and would allow me to simply “trim the fat,” so to speak…

4) …and be able to add some background music, because that’s a thing I’ve seen people do.

Doing that isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds, and the background music is probably barely audible anyway, even after I tweaked the levels to what should have been a decent volume. Oh well, I’m still new at this; hopefully I’ll get better.

Anyway, at quite literally every step of the way, something would go wrong, and I had to seek out the advice of friends on mIRC and Twitter (thanks, BeanyOne, Jeff, and seven5three!) throughout the past week just to get this thing semi-presentable. I honestly don’t think I could take two steps through this process without something new going wrong and needing to be accounted for.

But now it’s done. Is the end product worth it? Not by a long shot, I’m sure. But as I said, this is the first one I’ve done “on my own.” I have more to come that I intend to work on tomorrow, and hopefully repetition will make things easier. Who knows? Maybe someday I can actually start doing more with the videos! But for now, i just want to practice these basics until I have something a little more polished before moving forward.

That said, I hope maybe you’ll enjoy the video nonetheless, and maybe subscribe to my channel for more. Finally, thanks to Matt at Dinosaur Dracula, Brian at Review The World, and Billy from Veggienacabre, and pretty much everyone else who has ever put their face in front of a camera for the inspiration.

David Oxford

David Oxford, or “LBD ‘Nytetrayn’,” as he is sometimes also known, is a freelance writer of many varied interests who resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.

For a full list of places to find him online, click here.