Video : a brief history of DIY bridge hammocks

[Mustardman]

Great video, and I will admit I've always been intrigued with bridges.

However, unless you find a way to make a bridge with the cavernous elbow and shoulder room of my warbonnet, I don't think I'll be converting any time soon

[LostCause]

Check out all the views and posts on this one thread (just on the day of posting I might add)... All this attention should tell you somethin' Grizz.

Awesome documentary of the bridge and it's evolution on this forum.

[GrizzlyAdams]

thanks everybody for the kind words. Shug--a labor of love---no kidding. The other love in my life has been getting annoyed with me working on this into the wee hours of the night. I'm glad it's done, and I hoped to do a little education for the mildy curious along the way, as well as tickle the memory of those that have been on this ride with me.

RamblinRev, I wasn't trying to keep everything in chronological order. In the case of your sequence I needed a lead photo that was relatively solid around the place where the title comes in for the transition, and the picture with the bear was perfect. Such are the concerns of the video editor....

Mustardman---you have only one hammock or wish to limit yourself to only one??? You've not been 'round here long enough.... (I've got a Blackbird too and was taking my afternoon naps in it over the Thanksgiving holiday. It's my favorite gathered end hammock and has a place in my hammock harem for sure.

now if I could just be funny like shug....

Grizz

[turk]

Wow ... I am almost speechless.
So much would I wish to convey in a single response, might not be possible.

First off, your video was amazing.

I cannot even summarize my thoughts, but I will try and break it down into blocks of comments and questions.

You presented such a volume of information in such a short period. The formatting was perfect. Was this part of pre-planning? Did you go out on the shoot with some ideas on how you wanted to format the video presentation, or did you just shoot volumes of footage and rely on editing to craft the feel and flow of the video?

Secondly, I think you have fantastic, and very scholarly screen presence. Your delivery was impecably smooth. Your citations on specific references, names, dates, everything was delivered so CLEAN!! How did you do it? Did you script anything before hand? Was it mostly off the cuff? Or was it tedious and careful editing technique. I again cannot stress enough how fantastic the delivery was. SO MUCH INFORMATION! As someone from your audience that truly is a newbie where the bridge hammock is concerned, I felt you conveyed everything extremely professionally and with immense precision. And yet as a newbie, I did not feel at any point the information was 'too advanced' for someone totally new to the subject to absorb, or make a comprehensive connection with the material. Truly brilliant job.

Lastly I must ask about video itself. What format did you upload in? The quality of video playback for youtube is incredible. (POST EDIT) - I came back here to edit after reading your posts under the video editing thread. One thing I wanted to ask was if frame rate you shoot the original in has an impact on the quality or is it a result of re-encoding directly to .flv ?
My hat is off to you sir. It is only my humble opinion, but I believe that was the best video submission of HF I have yet had the pleasure to view.
I certainly hope it is not the last we will see from you.

Was a real pleasure.

[Shug]

thanks everybody for the kind words. Shug--a labor of love---no kidding. The other love in my life has been getting annoyed with me working on this into the wee hours of the night. I'm glad it's done, and I hoped to do a little education for the mildy curious along the way, as well as tickle the memory of those that have been on this ride with me.
now if I could just be funny like shug.... Grizz

If only I could do math ... or even count all my fingers and toes..........

[Ramblinrev]

grizz... I was not referring to the photo montage. That was immaterial. I was referring to the evolution of the variations of the bridge. Your development of the DMB was a significant step in the evolution of what followed later or so it seems to me. Just wondered if there was a reason you did not mention that in the narrative. The use of my photos were fine. I am pleased you decided to use them.

[slowhike]

I must say Grizz, you have been a great contributor here on HF! Keep up the good work... please!!!

[fin]

Excellent video, Grizz!

[JayS]

Let me chime in with a simple "ditto" of all the above comments. Excellent in all respects. Got me thinkin'... I have some extra ripstop... and a couple of replacement poles... hmmmm.

[GrizzlyAdams]

turk-
I appreciate your enthusiasm! As with most things I do (including sewing projects) what I start out intending to do changes along the way, I hope for the better, but usually after seeing how something I tried didn't quite come out the way I'd planned.

For this project my original idea was to do a time-line of bridge hammock photos, with voice-over description of some kind. I went so far as to assemble lots of photos and put them in the time order, but realized most people don't really care about chronology. The organization would be better with a strong topical flavor, which it now has.

I'll say up front that it is very rare that I can step up to the camera and rattle off the stuff I want to say in a shot that I'm happy with. I learned this with the vintage hammock introduction. I bet I did that 5 times before I got through it all without me doing something screwy. So I thought that what I could do for the bridge documentary would be to write out what I wanted to say. So I did that for what turned out to be about 2/3 of the topical "chapters". I recorded myself reading this script and jammed it up against the photos...and it was pretty boring. The reading intonations just didn't do it. So in this "script production" phase I pretty much figured out the content of what I wanted to say and had that on paper.

I thought about the project some more and realized it needed an honest-to-goodness bridge hammock in the video, something I could point to and make move around and illustrate some of the things I wanted to say. So me, the camera, the tripod, the hammock, and the script headed to the park for some shooting. As I imagined would happen, it would take 2-3 trys for a given segment till I got it all out more or less correctly. Not memorizing! Just getting it all out without too many pauses.

Once home and onto a video editor I thought about some more material I wanted to include, but the real kicker was that the closing segment I did I had my hat on backwards! Perhaps no-one but me would notice that, but dang it, that hat was on backwards (I'd just come off a segment where I had taken it off, and evidently put it back on backwards).

So I had to go back out, where I redid that segment and added some more. Then when I got it home I pretty much just needed to go to all the takes for a given segment, find the last one on the tape, and capture that. From there it was trimming things and do the kind of detail things that take enormous amounts of time in video/audio editing.

On the delivery, thanks. Standing up in front of people and lecturing is something I do rather a lot of---and I don't get multiple takes for that---but I almost always have a computer projector there with text and figures (and equations!) I can talk to, and that helps a lot. I could have done this with fewer takes I'm sure if I'd had an assistant on the other side of the camera holding up a display board with a list of the points I wanted to make. I have a lot of experience taking complex technical material and trying to make it accessible to a room full of people who've never seen it before. I do think out ahead what are the salient points to make that carry the message without getting bogged down in the detail. Higher education comes to hammocking.

One reason the video is comparatively clean is that everything is shot "still" from a tripod. Me and the hammock are the only things moving in the field of view, and the image compression seems to be smart enough then to fix the background image that isn't moving, and use its bandwidth on mostly that what is moving. I'm not terribly up on the different recording formats and rates. I used something standard on my camcorder (but it is a camcorder and not a pocket camera---that would make a difference I'm sure), and did the encoding to flash on my own computer, mostly so that I could experiment with compression settings to see the impact on the imagery, and also to get the file size down before sending to youtube.

I tried to format the display size so that youtube would give a "high resolution" option, but that seems to be under their control, and none of the three videos I put up were so blessed.

I like this video stuff, and look forward to doing some more. [after I make another quilt!]
And am definitely looking forward to more Adventures with Turk!

RamblinRev--sorry I mis-understood your question. I wanted this video to be balanced in contributions from the various contributors, and thought I'd already covered enough of my own stuff. So talking about the DMB was an easy thing to leave out...to do it justice I'd want to tape the thing morphing from one form to another. The seam alone would take a couple of minutes to tape and explain. Maybe someday I'll make a video just on the DMB.

Grizz