Consider it a minor miracle I got this one finished today. And it’s not even blocked in Korea!
Tag Archive: tom zakrajsek
I think I’m getting the hang of this. A video so long I had to really clip my seconds and when I realized I’d left a segment out it stayed out to keep it under 15 minutes, and I was done with all the editing in only three and a half hours.
I’ve watched various segments of Ice Diaries on YouTube in the past, though never any of the episodes through(the last one especially I could never face up to), but after reading some of the comments on the ONTD_skating during a watching party they held a few days ago, I found my curiousity piqued, and watched through the first episode yesterday on YouTube. It’s been so long I hadn’t even known the whole series actually isn’t up anymore; the user account that uploaded the whole thing is now gone, and only the first three episodes, uploaded by someone else, remain. Watching it now, five years later when two of the girls are now retired and the other two are surprisingly still in it, one having become a pretty big name in the twilight of her career, it’s a lot more illuminating than it seemed back when it first aired.
I came up with this idea back in January, when I was looking at the YouTube tennis reports done by people with webcams, and though it might be useful to have a similar thing to report on figure skating. Since I don’t have a webcam, but do have a microphone, I decided to attempt a YouTube weekly news report with stock footage for visuals. It seemed a lot to do however at the most hectic time of the season, so I decided to brainstorm a few months and then start, arbitrarily, the Monday after the Caps finished their season, which I figured at the time would be well into the off season. Instead, of course, it turned out to be only a week into it, but I found a certain poeticness in that, and in starting the day after my birthday.
So yesterday, after a week of gathering news while not even being certain until Wednesday night I’d even be putting it to use, I labored for hours and hours, reacting with dismay to the high pitch and low volume of my own voice, snipping seconds away to squeeze the video down to 15 minutes, and then proudly uploaded-and promptly saw my video subjected to copyright claims by SBS and a Japanese TV station and blocked worldwide. This morning, disgruntled, I replaced all SBS and Japanese TV footage and uploaded again-and saw it subjected to a claim by SBS again anyway, as well as lgl_tf1, which I don’t recognize. It would be nice if I was told which clips had offended. In any case, it is still blocked in much of Asia, most unfortunately Japan, and I can’t embed it, but at this point I’ll live with it. So, I proudly, and tiredly, present, my first ever episode of This Week in Figure Skating.
