The Crow Video and What Happened to it and What Happened After

            This one is a little difficult to talk about because…well… for one thing it isn’t available on YouTube anymore; apparently taken down for violating some copyright law that may or may not have fallen under Fair Use, (some companies are a little ignorant as to how that works).  It’s actually a really big shame because nothing about it really went wrong outside of one disagreement concerning how Korsgaard worded one sentence that I took offence at and one odd instance where the picture turned brownish red for some reason, (I believe it may have been a lighting trick that I was attempting that went wrong).  Aside from that, however, everything went great.  The lighting was appropriate, given the subject matter, the writing was good, Korsgaard gave a good performance, the editing went so smoothly thanks to my switching to Adobe Premiere Pro and I say that it was easily the best video of the three and is probably a contender for the best video that I have made period.  And because of this it really is a shame that people can no longer view it.

            However, after it was complete I more or less decided to stop making videos for Korsgaard, mostly due to personal and creative disagreements I was having with the guy and we had a full blown falling out not long after for reasons I don’t care to discuss here.  It is worth noting, however, that he did write an article on his site and made a webcam video explaining why the videos had stopped coming.  His explanation is full of…half-truths at best, (three sides of an argument and all that), and I never dignified it with a response and have no intention to do so outside of what I’m saying here.

            Since then, he has made attempts to make video reviews on his own, and…well…they’re not very good.  In total he came out with two within a couple of weeks of one another, one being kind of mediocre and another that’s just fascinatingly bad and is almost worth watching because of it.  Around the same time he attempted to create what I can only imagine was supposed to be his answer to Griffeth Galaxy Productions; an organization called Sardonic Media Group that he formed back in late March and even made a Facebook page for it and apparently recorded an intro video as well…only not to post said video and the Facebook page has been inactive since late March.  This was apparently due to an issue with YouTube’s copyright policies which has apparently driven him to abandon his venture into the video medium all together.  Still, his website appears to still going strong, he continues to write articles and his intended writing carrier seems to be going forward so more power to him.

            And that’s the story of my video collaborations with Korsgaard.  The whole thing may not have ended well and the ripple effects of our falling out would be felt well into the New Year but on the whole the making of these three videos was an education experience for me and I would take these lessons with me into my making of GGP videos.  Although some of them may have been a bit more…ill-advised then others.  We’ll get more into that next time.  Until then, please follow the site, subscribe to us on YouTube, Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

Dredd 3D Video

           

            Holy mother of God….this video…so many bad memories….yet so close to being perfect yet so far.

Ok, if you guys bothered to watch it, you may have noticed a huge problem right off the bat; the video quality was terrible.  The first mistake we made was filming this in front of a window during the daylight and because of this the lighting was constantly inconsistent.  But the main reason the quality was poor was something a little more…technical.  Remember in the last post how I mentioned that for some reason the edited movie clips for Expendables 2 kept corrupting on me as I was in the middle of editing?  Well it was even worse here.  When I finally finished editing I couldn’t render the damn thing because the edited movie footage corrupted AS THE VIDEO RENDERED!  As a result I had to go and delete large portions of the video so I could render a smaller part of it, before reloading it and having to do it all over again with a later part of the video and then had to edit the individual parts together and it somehow drastically reduced the video quality.  Don’t ask me how or why because I honestly don’t know.  It also didn’t help that around the same time I was having a lot of personal issues and it ended up delaying the filming and recording of this video by an entire week.  Because of these problems, two new lessons were ground into my head.  The first was to never film in front of a window during the daylight as it messes with the lighting.  And the second was to stop using Windows Live Movie Maker.  Within the next few weeks I switched over to Adobe Premiere Pro and haven’t looked back.

But on a more positive note, this one was a radical improvement over the Expendables 2 video.  For one thing, Korsgaard actually wrote out a script for the review giving me some idea how it would go.  Granted I had to rewrite half the damn thing, (something I almost gave myself a cowriter credit for), but it was a lot more than what I had to work with then the last vid.  And obviously his performance here is a lot better.  It was just a massive shame that technical problems brought it down.

The Expendables 2 Video

            Although technically not part of Griffeth Galaxy Productions, I felt the need to put the Korsgaard’s Commentary videos that I was a part of on this site and to talk about them because in a lot of ways these videos and other failed collaborations we had more or less spawned GGP. 

             As you can see, the first video I had anything to do with that found its way to the web was Korsgaard’s Review of Expendables 2.  I had actually been toying with the idea of doing videos for a while, more or less stopped by a lack of a decent camera and over the course of the 2012 summer the two of us had discussed various ideas concerning it extensively.  Sadly, none of them have, as of yet come to pass and when I finally got a working camera and a basic grasp of Windows Live Movie Maker I somehow got drafted into making this video, (still not sure how it happened).

            To put it kindly, the video is a bit of a mess with more problems than I care to count.  Some of the problems were Korsgaard’s fault.  Some were my fault.  Some were just technical problems I had with the editing equipment.  For example, I clearly had no idea how to frame a shot or how to properly light him, (something that is still a bit of a challenge for me today I am sad to admit), and probably should have made him done more takes as there is a clear lack of energy in his performance.  There was also some problems with Windows Live Movie Maker, (you may have noticed a clear delay in between the live footage and the voiceovers), as a lot of the movie footage kept corrupting before I could finish editing, causing me to make a more rushed second version in order to meet the deadline that Korsgaard wanted.

            But in all honesty, as much blame can be put on Korsgaard.  The guy insisted that we record everything a few hours after seeing the movie, with no script resulting in the vast majority of it being made up on the fly, insisted that the video be out Sunday night of that weekend and only showed up to record the voiceovers needed that afternoon.  And because of all of this, the result was something….less than perfect.  Still, when all was said and done it wasn’t bad for a first effort on either of our parts and I quickly learned what to do and what not to do when approaching these videos.  The ultimate lesson that I took away from this video was that the writing and filming should be done on different days and that I had to have a written script from Korsgaard a day in advance so I could decide what should be live and voiceover and what needed rewriting; something that, believe it or not, would be shockingly hard to do and continued to be a problem up until I decided that I no longer wished to help him with his videos.  But more on that another time.  Until then, thanks for tuning in, reading my ramblings on what I should have done better and please subscribe to us on YouTube, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and follow us here on blogger.

Trey Griffeth