Thursday, December 17, 2015

PROGRESS REPORT

I have now solved the last little technical problem with videotaping and posting my lectures.  I wanted to start and stop the camcorder by remote control with my IPhone, but it seems that I bought the only Canon model with which I cannot do that.  However, Microsoft Movie Maker, which I have downloaded, allows me to edit out the beginning and end of a video so that I am not seen walking around to the camera and turning it on and off.

Now I must face the prospect of actually filming a lecture.  I find this curiously daunting, because it is really weird to stand up and speak to nobody at all.  Even a one person audience would help, but there are things one really cannot ask one's spouse to do, and this seems to me to be one of them.  So at some point, I shall put on a nice sweater, make sure my beard is trimmed, gather my books and notes, and deliver Ideological Critique: Lecture One.  My plan is to start posting the lectures, one a week, next January some time.  I imagine I will give a dozen or fifteen lectures in all, uplolading each one in turn to YouTube.  [The Best Buy Geek Squad expert who has been helping me says that it takes two or three times as long to upload a video as the video runs, which means that I shall start the process and go off somewhere while it slowly immortalizes me.]

I feel a little like Ted Williams arranging to have himself cryogenically frozen at his death.  I mean, barring some cybercatastrophe, these videos will long survive my inevitable demise.  Is this what film actors experience when they watch movies they made forty years earlier?

3 comments:

  1. Dr. Wolff,
    May God bless you so that you live forever! Wow, what a great 2016 New Year's present this is for YouTube viewers: in January, people may not only view your most handsome face, Dr. Wolff, but now they can listen to your most handsome voice! I wish you success on all of your present and future video lectures.

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  2. Thank you, Michael. The face is definitely not handsome [!!] and the voice is what it is, but I hope the ideas will enchant.

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  3. Why not assemble a studio audience? From some of your earlier posts, it sounded like there were some people in the area who were interested in attending the lectures when you were talking about having them at UNC, so maybe you could find out who a few of those people are and invite them over? Sort of like NPR's tiny desk concerts: http://www.npr.org/series/tiny-desk-concerts/

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