Tag Archives: Youtube

Jun 16 2020

The editors are children

Screen Shot 2020-06-16 at 3.01.40 PM

The other day, I wondered aloud why writing is so bad these days. My young adult son scoffed and informed me that he went to school with some of the staff at the news outlet that posted the story above. He didn’t view these fellow students as the best or brightest, obviously.

My sister, a media professional, informed me that these days, editors (and program directors) are more interested in how many hits an item gets on YouTube or Twitter than how well written or researched an item might be.

Considering the power our nation gives the media, it is scary how low the bar is set for those who write, edit, and direct what the rest of us consume.

Oh, and look out for the back Nissan.

Here’s another one:

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That’s from a site with a big budget, but again, there’s not much editing going on.

Nov 30 2019

My video is reaching students!

NASA nebula

A still shot from NASA

Way back I took classes in “podcasting” and “movie-maker.” Afterward, I came home and practiced what we’d learned in class. I made three videos, which are a lot closer to Powerpoint presentations, if the truth be told. Anyway, one of them has had a bit of success—”A Brief History of Science Fiction.” This video was designed with a few still images, mostly screen shots from NASA such as the one I featured on this post, and two audio tracks. We’d been warned in class about using commercial music, so I downloaded a freebie track that I thought sounded dramatic. The second audio track is my voice, reading story boards, in my rather strong Southern U.S. accent. I did write the story boards, based upon my study of the science fiction genre, my training in English literature, and what of that matched up with the still images that I managed to acquire at the time.

Science fiction is an ever changing literary and film genre (with more than a dash of animation) so my video is already a bit dated. Still, I was most gratified when reading a very valid complaint about the loud musical soundtrack. The complainant stated that my little YouTube video was required for class. Gosh darn! My Brief History of Science Fiction is required by a teacher (somewhere?) for a class (in something?) I’m flattered. Really.

If you don’t mind hearing that awful musical track, head over to YouTube and see A Brief History of Science Fiction. While you are there, the link to my “book trailer” for The Gift Horse is still live also.

Jun 20 2016

Air Force One is Down— review and commentary

I was watching Netflix with hubby, and I saw a British mini-series entitled “Alistair McLean’s Air Force One is Down” as an available title, so we spent a couple of evenings with it. Although this film ended up as a recommendation for me because it has Linda Hamilton (of Terminator and Beauty and the Beast fame,) I chose it because it was supposed to be based on a novel by Alistair McLean. He was a favorite writer of mine when I was in my teens and 20s, and yes, I am fully aware that I am dating myself by mentioning that.

Oh, my gosh, how wonderful were those reads. He wrote twenty something novels, several of which were the basis for films (including The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, and Breakheart Pass.) My intro to his work was actually his only sequel (Force 10 from Navarone) but it was stood alone well enough that I wanted to read more from the author.

Alas, hubby and I were disappointed by this film. The cinematography, special effects, score, and cast were all pretty good. The problems were, for the most part, in the writing. In part, plot devices that worked in novels in the 50s and 60s just do not work now. For instance, the dastardly villain has captured our hero and his two compatriots. He places the hero character in a deadly situation, and the hero’s two sidekicks are locked into a pit that rapidly fills with water. Of course, the hero manages a super human feat and the all of them survive. Nowadays, the villain would shoot the hero and his sidekicks and be done with it. This doesn’t happen just once in the two part story; it happens over and over. As hubby said, “This thing has major plot holes.” And it does.

After we finished watching the entire film (at my insistence, as hubby would have bailed during part 1) I looked up the novel. According to that scholarly resource Wikipedia, McLean did not write the novel. Instead, he sketched out some plots for a series of novels which bear his name, but other authors wrote the books. In this case, John Denis is the author of the book that the mini-series is supposed to be based upon.

So… the film is sorta interesting, but I really can’t recommend very highly.

Feb 10 2012

A Brief History of Science Fiction, and why a good title is so important.

My Youtube Channel has three videos on it, and I created them for marketing purposes, but mostly because I had taken a class in MovieMaker, and I wanted to practice what I learned. As a Mac user, I made them with iMovie, but the programs are similar.

First, I made a video for my then recently published Trinity on Tylos. That title, although I like it, hasn’t been a winner for me. Some people think it is about religion, due to the first word, and it certainly isn’t. I guess I could have titled the book “Love Triangle in Outer Space” but that has even less of a ring to it. Anyway, after five years, the video has only about 500 views. My second video was for my debut novel, The Gift Horse, and since I didn’t have any nifty space images from NASA to use, I spent about $10 on stock images. While The Gift Horse has sold far better than my second novel, the video lags behind.

My third video was my first attempt at three channel video making: In addition to a music track, I recorded myself reading a script. Then I had to put the video together. For me, that was an arduous task, perhaps because so much time had gone by since I took the class. However, this third video needed a title, and I gave the matter about fifteen seconds of thought and used “A Brief History of Science Fiction.” In my mind this is lazy; I obviously adapted the title of Stephen Hawking’s brilliant work, A Brief History of Time. The title proved to be much more successful than the ones I chose for my books, because this video has been viewed over five thousand times. Of course its success may be because it is a bit more ambitious.

I wanted to be succinct, but I also wanted to incorporate much of what I have learned during years of studying literature, as well as my interest in science fiction, and I spent a bit of time on the script. A few months ago, I noticed that my video was cited in an online article on the history of science fiction. I was impressed that anyone would watch the video enough times to be able to quote it.

For anyone who is interested, here is the script, which is close to the recording. I think I skipped a few sentences in order to match the voiceover with the music track, but it is close.

I love science fiction, in print and on the screen. Here is my very brief history of the genre.:

 • Many literary scholars name Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel.

 • Some of Nathanial Hawthorne’s short stories have science fiction thems, especially those which deal with the problems associated with man interfering with nature. The Birthmark, Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, and Rappaccini’s Daughter all share that cautionary message.

 • British author H. G. Wells and French author Jules Verne gave us turn of the century classics including The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth & Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.

 •Edgar Rice Burroughs produced fantasy and adventure, but his Martian settings help form the under-pinings of later space operas.

 During the first half of the twentieth century, several new magazines became the most important venue for scientific fiction writiers. Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction provided the publishing forum for such writers as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. This period is considered to be the beginning of the Golden Age of science fiction.

 While those authors were producing science based fiction, the less than scientific stories seemed more apt to become the basis for Hollywood “B” movies, and such stories as “The Blob” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still” terrified movie audiences during the decade of the 1950’s.

 Despite some serious efforts in the movie world, it took a television show to bring science fiction into the mainstream. Although it lacked a movie sized budget, Star Trek made travel through space seem more plausible than ever before. The govenment run space program of the 1960’s no doubt helped lend some plausibility to the journeys of the Enterprise, but Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s futuristic vision entranced a generation.

 While science fiction began to flourish on the screen, in print, it became increasingly channeled into separate genres, with “hard” and “soft” science fiction being the over-arching labels. Works which kept science and the scientific method at the forefront became known as hard science fiction, but stories which concentrated on the human reaction to advancing technology became known as soft science fiction.

 In the following decade, George Lucas kicked space opera into box office bucks with Star Wars. Authur C. Clarke’s 2001 A Space Odyssey and the book based upon it exemplfy the integration of the best of hard and soft science fiction, while the Battlestar Galactica, followed the more popular trend of space operas making the move to the small screen.

 In the past two decades, many of the box office champions have owed much to science fiction. Print publishers have not been able to replicate the success of the movie studios, but science fiction contines to thrive, especially with smaller presses. My own novel, Trinity on Tylos, owes quite a lot to the great writers who created the genre known as science fiction.