My "Sit Ubu Sit"

If you have been following this blog, you know that I was a victim of Reduction in Force back in January. My experience over the first month of unemployment was one of frustration and hopelessness in terms of finding another engineering job anytime soon.

In parallel to job search, I decided to start a business. I'll get into the details of what I'm trying to accomplish later, but for now, I will say that it involves video. Today, I went down to the Arizona Corporation Commission and applied to form Cactus Wren Video Productions, LLC.

After lunch, I went out to the desert and filmed a bunch of footage of saguaro cacti as well as some of cactus wrens. From that trip, I managed to get the still photo I plan to use for my web site header, as well as the leader/trailer for the video that will eventually go on the Cactus Wren web site and other places.

I plan to start a video podcast in the near future. That effort will also be produced by Cactus Wren.

I decided to post the video trailer here to show it off a bit. The version I uploaded is in Quciktime format. for whatever reason, the resolution doesn't translate very well from post-production into Quicktime. I'm quickly learning that I don't care for quicktime format. When I produce a video in flash format, it looks great--better resolution, larger viewing window, and smaller file size. When I do the video podcast, I intend to post it in flash format.

Here it is--what do you think?




Incidentally, the birds you hear are not the birds in the clip. Unfortunately, it was quite windy this afternoon. Despite the fact that the birds were active (as you can see), all you could hear on the sound track is the roar of the wind against the camera's microphone. I cut the audio from a clip I shot last week and attached it to this one, giving the same effect as what I heard in the field, only sans the wind.