Stare With Your Ears

Please enjoy The Mind Reader, from an episode of Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz.

Just slip on your headphones, click the play button, and stare with your ears.

Creative Ways to Pick Your NCAA Bracket

Even though the tournament is already down to the final 16 teams, I have created a short list of five ways you can choose the teams for your bracket next year. The list comes courtesy of an exercise I tried from Caffeine for the Creative Mind, a fun little book loaded with funny, enjoyable challenges to help get your brain jump-started.

Intended mainly for folks in ad agencies, anyone can find an exercise in the book to help get a short jolt of mental caffeine. Don’t pay thousands of dollars for seminars on how to be creative at work. Spend less than $20.00 and buy this book. And listen to Ken Nordine recordings while you’re working with it.

Five Ways to Pick Winners in the NCAA Bracket

1) Which team mascots would taste the best if caught, killed, and flame-broiled in a barbecue?

2) Which shools have the highest ratio of ugly, 1970s-constructed buildings to older, traditional collegiate-looking buildings (this might require some reasearch)?  Pick those teams to win.

3)  Which school mascots best complete this sentence:  “Honey, the ___________________ just called.  They’re in the middle of romance right now and will be late for dinner tonight.”

4) Pick any American celebrity.  Find out the city where he or she was born.  Pick the schools in this order:  within a 20 mile radius of that city, then 50 miles out, 100 miles out, and 200 miles out.

5) The Dave Barry approach:  Which school mascot would be the best name for a rock band that completes this:  “The Unnatural ______________.”

Hope your team wins.

World Builder: Beautiful. Wonderful. Sad.

From time to time I like to share videos I think exemplify the highest quality in production values.  Today, I’m happy to share World Builder, by Bruce Branit.  It took one day to shoot and two years to make.

It will take you nine minutes to watch.

Enjoy. And share.

(h/t:  American Digest)

Returning to My Bread-and-Butter Skill

I’ve spent the last two months on a contract technical writing gig, something brought me back to the skill that put me on this path to begin with.  My job was to coordinate the development of, and edit for clarity, a massive implementation guide for a major healthcare software company.

We developed an outline for the book, then the subject matter experts sent me their content.  I pasted it in, sent out a draft every day, got feedback, pasted more stuff in, sent out the next draft, wash, rinse, repeat.  Every Friday morning we held a long meeting to discuss the week’s work, clarify a few things, then start the whole process over again on Monday.

All told, the guide now stands at nearly 200 pages.  And there’s still one more chapter to complete.

Technical writing was (still is, apparently) my bread-and-butter skill, the basis for nearly every other skill I’ve developed since I landed my first tech writing  job in 1991 after spending five years as an English teacher (and five years prior to that in broadcasting).

Returning to it is like riding a bicycle.  It’s just harder to put baseball cards in the spokes.

“Hope That It’s Enough For Now”

The production quality of this short piece is breathtaking and hypnotic, and the use of Joe Henry’s music is astounding.

It’s TCM’s memorial to the extraordinary people we lost this year.

Back at It

Indeed, as the poet said, “blogging hath peaks and valleys / And n’er a meadow view’d.”

The exact source of that quote is questionable, mainly because I just made it up as an excuse to show that this particular blog has been trapped in a valley for so long.  Let’s see if we can’t bring it back up to a peak.  And since this is also being viewed on LinkedIn, I’ll have a reason not to make myself look foolish (yeah. . .good luck with that).

A Video Sample

It helps to keep a blog updated.  So this is just a short (relatively so) post to show off a commercial I made for a contest back in the spring.

Some context:  the contest was sponsored by Warner Bros. and the producers of the feature film Watchmen, based on the groundbreaking graphic novel from the 1980s.  The film was directed by Zack Snyder, who also made 300.

One of the characters is Adrian Veidt, an industrialist whose company makes perfume, hair spray, toys, athletic shoes, and also runs an airline.  The task was to pick one of the products, download the graphics and assets provided, and build a commercial.

Mine was for the perfume Nostalgia.

I enhanced the perfume ball asset using Adobe AfterEffects, recorded the voice-over and assembled the music bed with Adobe Audition, and comped the entire piece with Adobe Premiere.

I didn’t get selected, but I did have fun doing it.  And showing it off, too.

The Services

This blog’s subhead is “Voice – Video – Cheese Toasties,”  the specialties of Radio Face.  Let’s us take a few seconds and delve deeper into each.

Voice - Voice-over narrations for videos, commercials, live corporate events – other services include audio editing and creating background music clips.  Check out The Sampler for more.

Video - small-scale production and post-production for streaming webcasts, multimedia, instructional design and online tutorials, incorporating closed captioning and voice-over narration (sense a pattern here?)

Cheese Toasties - Good for lunch.

Want to find out more?  Use the link at the right to get in touch.

The Sampler

Want to know what I’ve been doing?  Give a listen to my sampler (opens in a new window that takes you to box.net – a great place for file storage).

Welcome to the World of Radio Face

Hi.  If you’re here, you’ve probably come from my profile on Linkedin.  If not, you’re probably here completely by accident (unless, of course, you were bored out of your gourd and did some kind of search combining the words “radio” and “face,” which is probably not the truth. . .but we can pretend it is, okay?).

Here’s where you’ll find all the exciting news about what’s happening at Radio Face Productions.  Well, I’ll at least try to make it sound exciting.  I hope to make this a practical and fun place to visit.  I’ll let you know what I’m working on, whom I’m working with, and why anybody would want to hire a guy whose company has a name that should belong to a Dick Tracy villian.