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joe crawford. sign my guestbook

Unfrozen Caveman Web Video

Do I hate and fear web video. Yes. Mostly.

Unfrozen Caveman Web Developer
Phil Hartman as the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer on SNL in the early 1990s. A slickster who claimed modern technology scares him.

The first time I encountered video for the web I was capturing and processing videos of video gameplay down to postage-stamp size. This was for Jamison/Gold, a web agency in Marina Del Rey I worked for in the late 1990s. JG did websites for videogames. We worked with developers like Sony Computer Entertainment, Midway Games, and NAMCO. I worked as a “web integrator.” I worked with designers and producers would do usually do the playthroughs of games. Many of the games were on PlayStations. Captured footage would be processed into as few megabytes of video as possible, in as many formats as were necessary. I remember outputting video formats and sometimes zipping them up so that people who clicked on a webpage could download the file, then play it.

Processing video, converting it, downsampling it, outputting multiple sizes of formats: it was a lot of work. When I upload a video to YouTube, these are all things that must be done, and are being done for me. YouTube tells me to expect my video in 5 minutes, and with my knowledge of web tooling I am duly impressed and feel happy not to have to do any manual processing of video.

YouTube does exist now. And I don’t have to think about that old abysmal experience of web video. Of AVI files embedded in ZIP files that I would download to my Macintosh which then would not play and so then I’d have to download a CODEC and install it and restart my machine. IT WAS ABYSMAL. On the production side of things. On the consumption side of things. I’m not even bringing up RealPlayer and the inevitable need to update that software.

The time I was tasked with capturing and processing video of a speech from Mario-creator Shigeru Miyamoto at a game development banquet I didn’t mind. That made it worthwhile.

Dancing Baby
That’s not long after the era of the Dancing Baby, a bit of web folklore notable enough to have a Wikipedia page. That video is kind of brilliant, but also kind of insipid, and if you were on the internet of the time you probably got sick of downloading it and being told how cool it was. It was apex of video on The Internet. The way video was distributed was as BIG OL’ FILES attached to emails. Maybe you used your free webspace from Earthlink and put it there and then gave it out.
Video is ubiquitous. We share videos regularly and without thinking of how it works.

It’s great! Useful. Fast. We carry it in our pocket.

I remember being thinking Vine was brilliantly funny. Creators used short segments of video to entertain and joke and it was wonderful. Snapchat made some sense to me at the time: sharing video that disappears and messaging pals. Even then, I knew it really wasn’t for me. I really do prefer permanence. My ex used Marco Polo to carry out asynchronous personal conversations. Skype used to be that. I don’t think I even remember Skype. FaceTime calls “just work.” FaceTime birthday calls are terrific. And with the pandemic came: Zoom. And Tik-Tok has so much cultural power the Congress considers banning it outright.

I have loved animation and cartoons since before I can remember. I love tv and film. But my tech-phobia and bad experiences with crashing programs has been the hot stove that burned me. I was taught to fear and loathe doing anything related to programming or operations for video.

It was movies that inspired my move back to California. In the 1990s I was inspired by the visual effects of things like Jurassic Park and thought “I need to go be involved with that.” I went to the Virginia Festival of American Film two years in a row and got very inspired. y I moved to Los Angeles from Charlottesville in the 1990s to “go do something with movies.” There I took classes and seminars at places like UCLA Extension for movies, movie-making, movie-marketing and such. I enjoyed all those classes, but it was multimedia and HTML that ended up inspiring me and I got into making web pages and quit my job working as a respiratory therapist.

30 or so years later, I put up a new CSS Battle video yesterday on YouTube. And the video processing was once again handled for me. It’s not fancy, it’s in fact somewhat boring except for using OBS to put my face, some titles, and screen on the video. But I’ve been thinking about ways to use video creatively. I’ve added overlays over video of me bodysurfing using Procreate Dreams and that’s been great for scratching this new itch to create video.

I have no idea what this all adds up to. I suppose it’s to express my vague intention to create more web video.

Thanks for reading!

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