Thursday, May 28, 2009

Busy week

Haven't been able to blog much as I've been busy working on re-designing Yom's Random Stats and working a little on one of the new sites. Also, we've been short-handed on filming recently and it won't get any better as both Asti and Spyder are leaving the country soon. So I've been digging through old footage seeing what I can turn up. Should be interesting as I have come up with A LOT of bloopers/outtakes which I will compile soon enough.
Tomorrow brings the results of the first Realistic Would You Rather(R-WYR). Sure enough, Yom did eat Spam for a day. Granted he cheated a little, but he still did an admirable job. Look for that to be posted tomorrow in place of our regularly scheduled programming. It will be up over the weekend as well.

-TFAM

Saturday, May 23, 2009

New site!


I'll start off by saying thank you to Asti. He has been putting a lot of time into this website redesign. And because of the groundwork he laid, it'll be easier to redesign Yom's Random Stats as well. Now that's out of the way, the website is a major improvement over the one I knocked out with my very limited web design knowledge. It also includes a new logo. Best thing I can tell you is to go check it out. WYRDaily.Com. Also, you may have noticed in addition to WouldYouRatherDaily.Com, you can get to the site with the new shorter URL WYRDaily.Com.

-TFAM

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Upgrade Pt. 2


So as you know from reading this blog, previously I discussed my USB hub and how I was running out of room and that I needed a desktop rather than using my laptop. Well it's finally to that point. My MacBook Pro which has done all the work on the sites/video thus far is two years old now and starting to show it's age. So yesterday, I took delivery of my new 24" iMac. So far I've only been able to edit one video on it, but it goes much quicker than my laptop did. Plus I was hooking my laptop up to a 19" monitor so I have much more screen real estate to work with now too. Overall I am excited about how this will increase my productivity.
We did get a little filming done last night, but not filming on the road trip has really thrown the schedule off and I am behind in work. I'm also working on re-writing the website from scratch with Asti. I've always known it's needed work, but now I have some spare time to actually try and accomplish something. And after WYRD gets re-done, it's on to YRS, then I can work on some of the new sites I've sorely been wanting to work on. Not enough hours in the day I'm afraid.

-TFAM

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Road Trip!


Well, I'll start this off by saying, the trip didn't quite go as we planned. First off, on Thursday Asti backed out. Then we quickly got together some special guests. Saturday morning came, and one special guest backed out. So, we were left with Spyder, Bubbles, and myself. Not quite the full crew we imagined. Spyder had unfortunately been up late the previous night, and so the first half of the trip, he was sleeping. Well, we got down to In-N-Out Burger after about 4 hours of driving. And even though we brought snacks, we all mostly refrained from it...except the Red Vines...those were good and gone. So we were hungry and the food didn't last long. This was the first pic I was able to snap of the food. I think I took two breaths the entire time of eating. Just enough to survive and not have to stop eating for too long.


After we had started to head back, we were determined to knock out several Would You Rathers. That did not happen. While discussing a couple of options, I received a phone call from my brother-in-law saying my sister was in the hospital. Filming immediately got postponed and my foot got heavier. I took a 3 hour drive from where we were at and made it in 2 hours and went straight to the hospital. Fortunately she is doing much better now, so we can resume as normal. Hopefully we'll get a couple of filiming sessions going on this week to make up for the last time. And to tide you over until the next post, here's a pic of Spyder after we had to wake him up to go inside.




-TFAM

Friday, May 15, 2009

Play ball!

So Yom and I were fortunate enough to be able to score some Suite tickets to the Salt Lake Bees game. For those not in the know, it's the Triple A affiliate of the Angels. The Bees got off to early lead and maintained it for most of the game. We snacked on some burgers, churros, Chicago dogs, and red vines. Yom decided he'd use a red vine as a straw. He thought I was crazy that I was shocked about it. He said, "Haven't you ever used a red vine as a straw before?" Yes Yom, I have. When I was 8!!! I've grown up. I've moved on to drinking out of the can or a cup.
Anyway, the game got really exciting in the 9th inning. The Bees were up 5-3 in the Top of the 9th. They brought in their reliever who had a laughable 10.80ERA. Oh, but it got worse. He stayed on the whole inning surprisingly, but allowed 2 runs and had the game tied up. Time for the Bees to show what they're made of. And with a man on 1st and 2nd, Matt Brown knocked it out of the park for a 3-run homerun to win the game! It was an exciting end to a fun night.
We had already scheduled it, but we picked up the tickets for our night at the ballpark on June 26th. I'm taking the Funny Name Media crew and their spouses. Feel free to join us at the game.

-TFAM

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Widescreen!

So we recorded some video last week with the new camera. It has a widescreen recording mode and we figured we'd use it. My laptop is in a widescreen format as are my TV's, etc. So, we opened it up and wide and started using the new camera. MUCH better audio quality! No need to crank up the speakers. I'm still working on the lighting set up as it needed to be tweaked for the new camera. It's always a work in progress, but we'll get it down before too long. The first video with the new camera is up here: And it was filmed right after Yom went 0-for-7 in his arguments, so he kind of gave up on this one. You'll just have to see it.

In other news, we've finally got ourselves a Facebook fan page for Would You Rather Daily. It talks about an event we have coming up...the road trip to St. George for In-N-Out Burgers. Plenty of filming will be going on as we're loading the car up with cameras. It may end up being in my car, but I'm having braking system issues, so it may be in my wife's car. I'll tweet it on Saturday when we leave.

-TFAM

Friday, May 8, 2009

It's in the books!


The first Realistic Would You Rather(R-WYR) voting has come to a close and the results are in. 63% of you voted saying that you'd rather wear a chicken costume for an hour than Eat nothing but Spam for a day. And so with that, Yom gets to Eat nothing but Spam for a day. We will film it soon and post it on YouTube. I'm sure he's very excited for it.
Also on the to do list is filming. We will be getting together tonight to knock out some more filming. Should be fun as it usually is. And we'll be in full force getting Behind the Scenes pictures for the Flickr page.
Don't forget to check out Today's Would You Rather over the weekend too:

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Pic it up

I've always found that some of the best stuff that happens around here is what goes on behind the camera. So I've started up a Flickr page dedicated to 'Behind the Scenes' pictures. This is what edited video can't hide. Also, in this spirit, I hope to have a Behind the Scenes video up soon as well. More like a bloopers/outtakes video, but it'll show how much fun we really have while working on this website. I'll keep you posted on the video, but for now, check out the couple of pictures up on our Flickr page.

-TFAM

Monday, May 4, 2009

Upgrade



So the major thing that has been lacking in our video has to be sound quality. We improved the lighting by adding some lights which helped our video quality. And if you click the HQ link on the YouTube videos it helps out a lot. Well, without powerful speakers, the videos tend to be too quiet. Our previous filming set up consisted of a few Flip Video cameras. Hey, we're on a limited budget. Anyway, it was time for an upgrade. So, we purchased a Canon FS100 flash memory video camera with one very important feature. A mic input! This way we can get better sound quality and bring the mic just a little bit closer to us. For this we picked up an Azden ECZ-990 shotgun microphone. You can see the whole setup above. This will undoubtedly increase the quality of our videos for you. Since we film in advance, don't expect to see this in action on YouTube until probably middle of next week.

-TFAM

Friday, May 1, 2009

Work made difficult


So if you've read the About Us page on Funny Name Media's site, you know I've got two dogs that dream of stardom. Occasionally you'll hear one of them in one of the videos we're doing. Well, they let me know when I'm not paying enough attention to them too. Case in point is provided in these pictures. The pictures were taken a few weeks ago, but this isn't an uncommon experience. I'll be working, scoot back from the desk for a second to grab a paper and a dog will jump up on my lap, then onto the desk and sniff around. After I get one down, the other follows suit. As you might imagine, this slows down work just a little bit. Fortunately I've learned how to avoid it, but these little buggers will do what they can for attention. One day we'll have to put them in front of the camera. They'll be on E! before you know it.

-TFAM