Replies To Danielle's Journal and Video Logs

[RonTheLogician]

Hey Dani,

The other day I caught up with your vlogs through D460. I was especially amused by D456, titled Being super silly, wherein you used digital camera software which let you play with dynamic FX ("special effects") in creative ways. It's something NEW and I think your long-time fans will get a KICK out of it - even if they no longer check out every one of your vlog postings.

Personally, the first shot of you - with an arrow through your lovely head - was a source of nostalgia to me. Even before you were born, I was a computer graphics pro. One day, I got the job of creating interesting images to demo the abilities of a new, cutting-edge, high-resolution electronic display. One of the images was a set of STATIC headshots, which I decorated with animated graffiti - including one poor fellow whose head landed up pierced by an arrow! In those days, unless you had a QUARTER-MILLION DOLLARS (x2 in 2014 dollars) to buy a Quantel Paintbox (WAY beyond our budget!), you had to do what I did - write your own software to get the job done! And now, low-cost, mass-market software running on a humble PC can recognize your head, including where your eyes and mouth sit, and annotate your image on the fly. Credit the awesome progress in making digital hardware many thousands of times more cost-effective, just over your own short lifetime.

Again, I encourage you to invest in something like the $250 green-screen kit I described earlier, which would let you use a static or dynamic background (there's plenty of copyright-free imagery within the Wikimedia Commons), to make even ordinary vlog shoots more interesting. Visit the Congo jungle, a frigid arctic igloo (beware of "pokies"!), the pyramids of Egypt, a sailing ship full of horny pirates, the Eiffel Tower, a camel caravan in the sands of Arabia, the Battle of Waterloo, a Venitian canal gondola, King Kong's up-facing palm (or prick), the Houses of Parliament, a human mouth, a crater on the moon, Cerne Abbas (home to the biggest porn art in the world), a dangerous big-city slum, the back of a housefly, Disneyland - or even Disneyworld (you FINALLY get to go!) - all from the comfort of your home studio!