Video - PhotoTrice

Almost Famous

Listen to blog post

Almost Famous

The movie Almost Famous resonates with me because it captures something about the 1960’s Rock music scene that’s close to my experience of the times. In particular the rather tame analog marketing used to sell music in the 60’s has blossomed into the digital online hype of today. The aim was the same then as now. Find the right product; create the right pitch, step on the marketing elevator and ride to the top. Simple or so it seems.

Posting My Work

Here is where marketing gets personal. About three years ago I got interested in motion graphics as a way to make slideshows of my photos. Since then I’ve made more than thirty short videos. Most are posted on YouTube where they failed to reach an audience. Not much of a surprise. All combined they have less than a thousand views.

Finding Pinterest

In the middle of 2019 I discovered Pinterest. As a photographer the visual content there is very appealing. It didn’t take long to create several collections of photographs which generate a few hundred to a few thousand impressions a week.

Pinterest is an odd duck when it comes to standard content format which is vertical rather than horizontal. This is perfect for mobile users who don’t want to rotate their phones. Original content not produced in vertical format pretty much gets ignored.

When I posted links to some of my HD YouTube videos they got 40-50 views each. After reworking them from HD 1920×1080 to 1080×1920 and posting directly on Pinterest they immediately began getting multiple thousands of impressions.

Finding Success and Failure

On Christmas Eve I posted a 30 second animated New Years video which immediately took off. Within three weeks it had more than 150K impressions, 41K video views and hundreds of web site link clicks. I was absolutely shocked. Even after New Years it kept getting one or two thousand impressions a day.

That’s when I decided to post another video for Chinese New Year but it had a flaw so I deleted it. Unfortunately I actually deleted the wrong New Years video and lost my big success. In a panic I re-posted but the deed was done.

Well at least I was Almost Famous. Better luck next time.

Texas for the New Century

I’ve been living in Texas off and on since 1980 and exclusively since 1989. I guess you could say the place has grown on me some. Texas for the new century is a land of opportunity. People here are invariably optimistic friendly and deeply committed to making the state better tomorrow than it is today. There is room here for anyone willing to seize the moment.

This project started out as a convenient way to learn how to build reusable information widgets. It was a fun exercise and hopefully I’ll be able to use the components in another project.

Inner Space

This is an experimental motion graphics portrait created using several composited still images and a custom sound effects track. It is rather dark and perhaps sinister in tone and was intended to be so.

The original photos were made several years ago at the request of the subject. They were to document injuries sustained during his arrest. He had been released from jail hours beforehand. The gentleman alleged excessive use of force by the police. The police alleged heroin possession. They were probably both right.

In the end I think I was able to capture something of the persona of the man and undercurrents of his personality.