Spiffworld | Blog

YouTube is changing the way they handle people’s Channel pages (the home page for a person’s videos on YouTube). For the most part, the changes are positive, making it easier for people to view, rate, and comment on your videos in one place without having to go page to page. But they’ve made one change which is really bumming me out — they don’t allow animated .gifs as background images anymore.

This sucks because I was using an animated .gif that cycled through some of the characters in my videos. It was a very simple background but a pretty engaging one because of the animation, and now I can’t use it. That sucks.

I want to ask, “why would YouTube get rid of functionality like that”, but I’m pretty sure I know the answer — it’s either because people were abusing the feature by doing something annoying or inappropriate with animations on their page (although I doubt it), or because the new technology they’re using for the more advanced Channel page just doesn’t support animated .gifs (most likely). Lame. I’m going to write them an email complaining about it, but I don’t expect it to change soon.

Adam Savage, one of the guys from the show Mythbusters, posted this Tweet today:

Maybe the best piece of machinema art EVAR! To @jonathancoulton’s song (and my anthem) “Future Soon”: http://tinyurl.com/l5abqy. Bow down!

The tinyurl link is to my video for “The Future Soon”. That’s right, the guy from Mythbusters (who I saw at the last Jonathan Coulton concert I went to in S.F.) thinks my vid is the best EVAR! Woo!

‘Cruel, Cruel Moon’ is finally finished, thank the Lord. This one was easily my most complicated video to make (so far). I started it months ago after I’d been laid off from Adobe, figuring that I had plenty of time to enjoy the challenge of making a video with lots of little shots piled into bigger shots, all of which would go sliding on and off screen for the entire song. But once I got a new job, I was stuck with a half-finished, really complicated video I needed to finish, so I forced myself to sit in front of the computer for a couple of hours a night until I was done. And I’m glad I did, because I’m pleased with the results.

The reason this video needed to be so complicated has to do with the structure of Paul and Storm songs compared with Jonathan Coulton songs. In general, JoCo songs are like three-part plays. The first verse establishes the action, the second verse escalates the action, and the third verse wraps things up, usually with a clever twist. Not so with a typical Paul & Storm song. P&S songs usually establish the scene in the first verse then hit the punchline of the whole situation at the end of that first verse. The second verse adds a little detail but then hits the same punchline again. Same with the third verse.

You see the problem. I can animate JoCo songs more easily since they have a more traditional narrative structure. All I need to do is basically show what the song is describing, and everything will build to a satisfying conclusion. With a P&S song, the viewer already knows the ending of the story by the time the first verse is over, and I still have two more verses I need to animate. Quite a challenge.

My plan for “Cruel, Cruel Moon” was two-fold. For one, I tried to go a little Tarantino-esque by showing the ending of the story at the end of the first verse and then slipping forwards and backwards in time for the rest of the video, showing how we came to that ending from different perspectives. Secondly, I decided to use the visual technique of having split screens and panels sliding on and off screen to show things from different angles and perspectives. That way, even if the lyrics aren’t really moving forward much, I can still simulate the feeling that things are moving along by moving around the panels.

And I think it mostly worked the way I’d planned. I think I probably won’t use that visual technique too much in the future though, since it meant that each shot was composed of many smaller shots, each of which took as much time as a normal shot to put together. And the animations of panels sliding all over the place took even more time. Still, I’m glad I experimented with it this time.

I’m pretty sure that when people spam a bunch of my videos with those lame “plz dnt rd this but if u dnt post this on 10 vidz u will die” email chain letters, it’s probably actually a compliment of sorts. They see a chain letter thing, want to post it to a bunch of videos, and they post it to mine because they like my vids. However, I hate those things. Spamming those on my videos on YouTube is like spraying graffiti all over my house or something. I don’t care about the freaky clown babysitter. I don’t care about my crush falling in love with me on the next closest Friday. And I don’t care about subscribing or unsubscribing to some guy named Fred.

And here’s the sad part — once you spam me with chain mail comments like that, you’ve proven that you like doing that kind of thing, and unless I stop you you’re likely to keep doing it to me over and over. So, I gotta block you. I know, I don’t want to do it, because like I said, you’re probably just spamming my videos because you like them. But, you’re a spammer and you’ve got to be blocked. I hope you understand. And if you’re ever thinking of spamming email chain letters, please don’t. It’s really, really lame.

All you porn spammers with the moronic advertisements for your porn sites, I’ve got nothing to say to you. You’re just bots, you’re just doing your bot jobs, and it’s really your human overlords who I should be complaining about. So, you porn bots are getting banned too, although I know it won’t stop you from continuing to clog the comments with porn ads. You guys are like Internet kudzu.