Tuesday, November 3, 2009

An actual post

Anyway, uh, I haven't been posting because nothing has been happening? Life has been sort of coasting along. I'm still trying hard to sell paintings and such but, meh. Not working out so well I guess. I don't have the money to relist my crap every day to get up higher in the searches. Which is one of the best ways to get sales on Etsy.

I really need to get my website going but I can NOT decide on a layout. I want it to be something I won't get sick of quickly and need to re-do in a few weeks because I can't stand to look at it. So that means it has to be relatively simple and versatile. I would also like it to be unique though, something no one else has, so no premade layouts or anything. I'd also like to do it myself so Josh and I can use it as a sample of web design for any future projects. All of these things together make my head asplode and I can't decide on what I want. It's so much harder when it's for yourself.

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I have also decided that I *Really* want to make making videos of my paintings my "thing," something people know about my business and might attract them to me. I want to record every painting and edit it into a neat/simple time lapse that people can watch and show their friends. I think this would be especially neat for when people get custom work from me, they can see the whole process from start to finish. The problem with this is, at the moment, there is one decent camera in the house, and that is attached to the netbook. Ideally I'd be able to record most of the paintings while broadcasting live as well so they can see the process in real time, and maybe one day I'll get not shy enough to actually talk to the chatters out loud (I'm working on it, I squeaked out a few sentences last time). I think this could also be a huge draw to my business if people can find the time to watch me paint AS I paint and make suggestions or whatever as I go. O did it for his Commisionathlon and people LOVED it. Especially the commissioners. Ok, back to the issue. The netbook cam is pretty good, but it's not very mobile. My past videos are alright, but I'd like to be able to get dynamic angles and zoom in and out for details, and that's very hard to do with the netbook. I tried it for my last recording (which has not been made into a video yet, and I'll explain why in a moment), and I had to employ the use of a flowerpot and had to sit at a weird angle to keep from blocking my own light because of the desk setup and.. ugh, It would be so much easier if I had a nice little standalone webcam. The netbook also sucks because I have to record the videos right onto it, and the raw video files are HUGE (many gigs) and there is NO good way to move that much info from the netbook to the desktop. The netbook has windows movie maker but the computer is just not powerful enough to run it efficiently. That's why I haven't produced my latest video, I am just DREADING chopping up the video into 2 gig pieces so they can fit onto our card and transferring them to the desktop, putting them back together, and then editing them. If I had a webcam I could just record onto the desktop and friggin' GO.

Lastly and probably most important, most of the day the netbook is being used by someone else and I can't record at all, which makes me not want to paint. I know that's a crappy excuse for not painting but I REALLY want to make this video thing work and I'd like to do it for EVERY painting I do. But if there's no netbook, there's no recording. Having the camera is ALSO a bonus because if I am doing more paintings just for the heck of it because I actually have a camera to record with, I will be listing on Etsy more often and have a bigger inventory, which bumps me up the search lists on Etsy.

tl;dr, I want to get a webcam so I can record my paintings and make cool videos as sort of a signature for my business.

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