A new video, about an afternoon taking a break from math to bake with friends. No math allowed! Right?

Gonna talk about the process of creating this video, but first, the people.

Gwen Fisher is a mathematical artist whose work I’ve known for many years. Every time it’s something new: a new technique for creating woven beadwork (along with a math paper that generalizes the technique), or new fractal beadwork (along with a theory of what path the thread needs to take), and years ago when I posted about some beadwork hyperbolic planes I made, Gwen was the first to send me an email saying she’d tried my instructions, and then followed up with some new hyperbolic variations of her own that were well beyond anything I had the skill to create. After that, we finally ran into each other at one conference, and then another conference, and then I found out I’d just moved 10 minutes from her house, and the rest is history!

When Gwen introduced me to her sister Ruth I was surprised to find I was already a fan of her work as well: she was the Ruth in Sweets by Ruth! I like my coffee to taste like coffee and my chocolate to taste like chocolate, the perfect combo of which I’d found in Ruth’s brownies at Red Rock Coffee (please don’t stalk me), so I thought it a fairly strange coincidence. When we pitched the idea of making mathematical gingerbread shapes to her, she knew exactly what we needed: a sturdy dough that wouldn’t change shape too much while baking, while still being delicious, and would we like it to come in a number of bright happy colors that would suit themselves to being filmed? Yes, yes we would! And besides all those perks, switching from the gingerbread idea to shortbread allowed the most amazing edible pun.

I can’t remember when I first met Andrea Hawksley. She’s another person where I came into contact with her or her work many years ago, and have done so again repeatedly until it reached a tipping point. It could have been 6 years ago at MIT in the context of mathematical origami or computational geometry, or maybe it was at one of her mathematical dance workshops, or when I read one of her papers. I knew we were destined to be friends a couple years ago at a recreational math conference when I saw her casually and informally leading a group of people in cutting slits in extra conference flyers and slotting them together with icosahedral symmetry. That’s when I found out I’d moved not far from her as well!

I make mathematical art for a living, but I also like to do it for fun, and in the past couple years I’ve met up with Gwen, Andrea, and sometimes others, to have fun figuring out new technique for creating new math art, or see a visiting colleague’s latest work, or, in this case, to try out some mathematical baking. Except I had a new camera to try out, so I finally broke the casual just-for-funness by filming for a video.

That was over a month ago, and I’ve been working on this video since! Well, along with other things. But this video presented a lot of new challenges for me.

First, I usually start with a complete concept for a video, spend weeks on the script, then film and edit to that script. Many vloggers are extremely good at filming hours of footage of unpredictable things as they happen, then remembering and pulling out good moments to turn into a coherent story, perhaps framed and pulled together by footage of themselves talking face-on to a camera.

Sorting through hours of footage and pulling out anything resembling a story is not a skill I have developed, and if making this video taught me nothing else it is greater respect for those who do so on a weekly basis. I pulled out the best footage and sound clips I’d managed to get (working with a new camera, some stuff came out horribly), re-arranged events to follow more of an arc from less-mathy to more-mathy, and ended up with an edit that had no story and would only really be fun to watch for people who recognize an aperiodic tiling or truncated icosahedron when they see one. So I did what I do best: I created a story and wrote a script.

This is a trick taken from vloggers. Narrate about your day, cutting in actual footage of it. But I don’t “vlog,” my story was invented, and I wasn’t especially interested in following the standard format of talking to a camera. Could I do the frame story in my second-person notebook style? The notebook makes things personal, hands-on, as if you could be drawing this stuff yourself. It’s badly-drawn visual representations of things, not the things themselves, letting your imagination do the work. Would it make any sense to try to integrate that with real footage of real things?

Doing it in standard vlog style, except replacing talking-head with notebook, turned out much too jarring. I needed something more natural, something that helps your brain make the connections between what’s going on in notebook world and real world. Thus, I decided to try out real footage overlaid and framed by notebook-happenings. Then, there’s notebook footage, real footage, vocal narration, and real dialogue, and if I wanted to sometimes do fake narration over real footage, I had to make it super clear what was narration and what was real time, clear yet not jarring. For this reason, whenever there’s a switch from narration to real-world sound, there’s usually a cut from notebook to footage, or from footage to notebook. Sometimes real footage is paired with narration, so when switching back to the actual sound I can cut to footage-in-notebook view, which gives your brain all the cues it needs to make the transition seem right. Then, real-life and notebook-land is brought even closer together by sometimes popping up a quick notebook person to say something that’s clearly being said by a real person in the real footage, and it happens so quick that you don’t have time to worry whether it’s a transition to a different thing before you know it’s not.

All this was done carefully and consciously, so you can imagine why it took me a month!

Then, there’s the sound itself. I’d been worried about how the narration and natural sounds would work together, but as soon as I tried layering some stuff I realized I’d had a stroke of luck: my new camera records sound in 5.1, which turned out to be perfect, because it makes it really clear what is narration (mono, artificial) and what is from the footage (all around, like in real life). I knew I could take advantage of this, layering real noises on top of narration without the listener having any trouble keeping track of which is which. Still, the initial introduction of real-sound after narration was a bit jarring, and so I introduced the real noises by purposely mingling them with the narration, fake narration-me yelling about the broken color symmetry along with real-me, which connected the two sound stories right at the beginning and makes all the natural sound make sense and feel connected later.

Maybe you can see why one of my pet peeves is when people say I am naturally great at video editing and have some genius talent, which is both untrue and denies the hard work I put in. The truth is that I spend a lot of time identifying problems (lack of story, inaccessible to non-mathy people), studying what other people have done to fix them (frame story, narrating over footage), trying those things out and identifying problems with that (frame story is in wrong style, now add in rough transitions, things are worse than before), then trying out fixes for that (connect frame story to real footage by every means I can think of: overlay video, overlay sound, switch so quickly you don’t even notice), see what works, iterate. Even after years of doing this for a living, sometimes it still takes me a month to figure out a new problem.

Hopefully what you notice in the end is not the editing at all but the actual things we were making and the awesomeness of the people with whom I had the pleasure of making edible mathematical art. A lot of the frame story is made up (we went in with the full intention of making mathematical cookies, but that’s not a story, and is hard to sympathize with if you’re “not a math person”). The ending, however, is mostly true: after hours of patience, Walter took his chance to gobble up some of our best work.

If I weren’t staring at my feet, I wouldn’t have noticed.

Arched across wet pavement.

For a confused moment I look straight up, an even gray.

Lower, a rainbow strong enough to cast that reflection, my reward for walking in the rain, and as I stare and cross the bridge a second rainbow stealths its way above the first. They arch from end of town to end, and all of us over the babbling highway. The zeroth rainbow is left behind in the driveway.

I walk with head turned over shoulder, considering colors. I catch a passing biker’s eye in time for a split-second smile; I ponder how the experience of rainbows is ubiquitous enough that one split-second smile says everything two strangers in the rain have to say to one another.

Out of the rain, it takes longer.

I wonder if people in cars see it.

I am suspicious that violet cannot possibly be real.

It pops out against dark clouds, as if it were the same dark gray except for happening to be a color, as if all that’s a color about it is something sensed invisibly and overlaid on my perception. Being true doesn’t make it any less true.

The rainbow fades, the colors remain. I’ve always liked walking in the rain. When the air isn’t so empty.

Cars stop early for me, my weather-enhanced right of way.

My charcoal pants look blue; the overcast pushed it down from the sky.

The rain drips the trees into the road.

The sidewalk is something deep and rich—but gray is supposed to be drab and colorless and the sidewalk is so vibrant, so I have no word. I recognize that I’ve reached town by the yellow-painted curb.

Shops crowd out clouds’ shade with their own shadows.

It’s sharp footsteps and dripping gutters vs. smooth-whoosh cars.

During the return trip the earth rises, the sky sets; hills roll indigo through that tunnel.

At my mailbox the rain stains envelopes addressed “dear neighbor,” “valued customer,” “resident.” Something is fractured into its component parts. I focus on dodging snails as they explore the very gray sidewalk.

Back in 2011 I’d just gotten my first real job and realized that I now had the supernatural ability to acquire a thing when I wanted a thing, using an unfamiliar sort of magic called “money.”

I used my new power to buy a guitar on craigslist. Next step: learn to play it.

In the two months after buying the thing, I wrote probably a dozen practice songs, designed to take advantage of exactly the skills I had. I made them real songs with lyrics to amuse myself, and because singing distracts from the pain of practice, and to give incentive to play well, and because composing is in my nature.

And then, comfortable enough in my amateur skills to add “guitar” to my arsenal, I slowed down and used the guitar only for things I actually wanted to use it for, like when I have a sudden need for a song about a snail for a video, or something.

Yesterday I suddenly remembered the existence of these old practice songs, and that having gone unplayed for the past two years I was at risk of forgetting them forever. Most had never been recorded, or even heard by another human being.

I got three remembered and recorded before my unpracticed fingers started complaining. I figured I might as well share them. I’d pile you with warnings and apologies, but they are what they are, and they exist, so here.

“I’ll Be Here” is a song sung by mathematics personified. I gave an impromptu performance of it on a boat once. It’s got a very simple guitar part that involves mostly open strings. The only hard part was the little high melody that comes in sometimes. The long held note forces me to work hard and get the guitar “solo” right, because if I stumble or pause I’ll run out of breath.

The lyrics are me amusing myself with double meanings. Poor mathematics gets so much hate, despite being the most beautiful and reliable thing in existence.

Keep your ears out for inversions.

Lyrics:

I’m tired. I’m tired. I’m tired of solving your problems!
You use me. Do you need me? Do you want me at all?
The way you look at me, like I’m something foul,
yet you keep coming back to me.
I’ll be here, you know I’ll be here, I’ll always be here.

Sometimes you forget me, but I don’t mind so much.
You don’t understand me, but that’s ok,
I don’t expect you to. I can be… difficult.
Will you keep coming back to me?
I’m tired, but I’ll still be waiting.

Why won’t you smile at me? Do you really hate me so?
Is something wrong with me? Some day will you not come home?
I’ll be here, you know I’ll be here, I’ll always be here.

I’ll be here, believe me! I’m trying so hard to please you.
You might never love me. I still have hope. But…
I’m tired, I’m tired, I’m tired.

“Because I” starts super easy to play (the G is tuned down to Gb) and then, once I was comfortable with that, I started filling in more notes. The hardest part of guitar for me is all that finding-a-chord stuff you do in your left hand, getting the fingers down properly and firmly. But once they’re there on a good set of notes, you can just pluck strings and it’s like cheating. That’s what the B section does.

The important part is the chord AED# that hangs in the air after the word “I.” The point of getting a guitar wasn’t to jam out on tunes, it was to have another tool for expressing the things where words fail. Those three notes say so much more than the words ever could.

If you got to this blog post fast enough, you may be the first person besides myself to have ever heard this song.

Lyrics:

I hate to say goodbye. Don’t you hate to say goodbye?
I’d like to tell you one last time
That I…

I should be moving on. You would want me to move on.
But I don’t want to let you go
Because I…

Through the years you’ve been by my side and I
Never told you, I Never told you

I’d give anything just to have you back
I’d give anything
I’d give anything

I guess I have to let you go. I don’t want to let you go.
There’s things that I can’t change.
I…

“The Puzzle Song” is where I’m starting to try and take advantage of some of my pianist skills, like the ability to use the fingers on a single hand independently to play rhythms like 2 against 3, to bring out a melody and make me sound better at guitar than I really am. It’s another one where you might be the second person ever to hear it.

The coffee table in front of the couch where I sat writing has a bowl full of puzzles on it, including some great 2-piece Hanayama puzzles. Seeing them and connecting that to the intertwining rhythms of the guitar part, I wrote a song from the perspective of one puzzle piece, to its counterpart.

It makes fun of some of the awful cliches of unhealthy relationships, except this time actually sung from one actual object to another, two things that were quite literally made for each other. It amuses me.

There’s a sock, and a shoe.
One is me, one is you.
And I need you! I know it’s silly, but I need you.

There’s a lock, and a key.
One is you, one is me.
And I need you! I know it’s silly but I need you.

Without you I feel broken.
When you’re not here, I feel incomplete!

Two parts so intertwined,
I need you and you need me!
Yeah, you need me!
Yeah, you need me!

There’s a you, and a me.
There’s an us. Together we…
Together we, together we
Together we can be complete.

That’s all for now! When I have time, I’ll record some of the others.

Like most of my stuff, these are Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike. Maybe they’ll come in useful for someone.

Sometimes I start with a simple thought on Twitter, decide to take it to the next level, and before I know it things have gone entirely out of hand and I’ve gone from a simple tweet about missing NY bagels to a fully produced bagel love song posted on SoundCloud in a matter of hours.

This time, it started with some simple microwave advice. I ended up live-tweeting while I made a video in 2 hours, and I figured I should get it all formatted in a post before it disappears into the unsearchable depths of twitter forever. Might as well add some further details on what went on too, if you’re interested in a thorough case-study of how one might go about making a weird video. Yes, let’s get way too in-depth! It will mirror the unreasonable nature of the art itself!

This is the tweet that started it all:

Microwave with grace and flow: use cooking times like 66, 88, and 2:22 instead of clumsily grasping for the shallow 0 of apparent roundness.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Of course, the creative process started before then. It didn’t even start with me microwaving something, but with putting leftovers in the fridge and thinking that I would microwave them later. It is important that I was thinking about microwaving, and not actually microwaving, because when what came to mind was the actual physical process of pressing buttons rather than the food I was putting in the fridge and would presumably want to eat, I realized there was something there. Somehow pushing buttons on a microwave was not just a chore but something worth thinking about, and maybe even worth doing well.

I’d been microwaving using repeated-digit times for a while, but hadn’t thought about how this might relate to other people’s microwave experiences. Twitter is my go-to place to get instant feedback from many people on simple things. My first draft was something like:

Life Hack: use cooking times like :66, :88, and 2:22. Never press 0.

It sounds so much like a tweet. Simple, direct, overplayed. It unartfully communicates a way to press digits, while the prohibition against 0 makes me feel all “don’t tell me what to do!”

What I’d really wanted to communicate was how interesting it is that many people like nice round times, that cooking times on packages are rounded, how because of that we bring that want for roundness to something where it does not apply, something that has a completely different sort of roundness we can find in the flow of our movements.

Flow, yes! Time to ramp up the ridiculousness. There’s plenty of room within a tweet to impart some useful information while couching it in artful flair. This is how I strive to communicate: make the communication itself as enjoyable as possible while being sure that all the information you want to communicate is recoverable. The only way I can manage to edit my more informative videos down to manageable length is to cut every word that does not serve at least those two purposes (and hopefully more). This paragraph could be cut in half with good editing, but in the case of blog posts about videos about pressing microwave buttons it’s all or nothing, I’m afraid.

So if I’m going to tweet about how to press microwave buttons as if it mattered, it would be more fun to pretend it mattered. Glorify it. Make it an almost religious act. Yes, it’s not about efficiency, it’s about flow! 111 feels so good, even where 66 would do! And so came the final version. As soon as I posted it, I decided that as long as I was making pressing buttons sound like an important zen activity, might as well follow up with more instructions.

Microwave with grace and flow: use cooking times like 66, 88, and 2:22 instead of clumsily grasping for the shallow 0 of apparent roundness.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Place your hand steadily on the microwave keypad with your forefinger on 1 and thumb on "start." Press 111start in one elegant motion.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

As you complete the gesture with your thumb pushing off start, let your hand leap away and inhale deeply. Consider the joy of modern living.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

This final set of tweets communicates a more efficient button-pressing workflow, suggestions on how to implement and enjoy that workflow, implications of our human tendency to ignore our habits, and that I realize it’s all ridiculous and doesn’t matter but am enjoying myself anyway and invite you to join in the fun.

We haven’t even gotten to the video part yet, but as I have not seen many long posts on the art of tweet composition I thought some of you might find the above useful.

Now! As I tweeted those tweets, I was reminded of the most recent video on my second secret channel, in which I take instructions for flattening a tube of toothpaste to a ridiculous extreme. I saw the potential for a similar video.

But no, I wasn’t interested in spending energy on such a video. The toothpaste video took me four long days. If I were going to spend that kind of time on a video right now, I know exactly which other videos I would like to make first.

So I did some other stuff, while the thought nagged at me. I tried to ignore it. Those three tweets, meanwhile, were generating a ton of great replies with people’s agreement, alternate methods, using primes or favourite constants or using oft-neglected buttons like 7 and 9 so that they don’t feel bad (I blame Randall Munroe for creating a subset of the population who spend some of their human capacity for empathy feeling sorry for a button), so basically I was constantly reminded of it.

It’s been so long since I posted a video. Maybe I could make it really quick. Maybe I could make it tonight. It could literally just be a zen ramble real-time guided microwave meditation that I bet I could knock out in an hour. I already had three tweets worth of script written, and the rest would come instantly… maybe add a little hint of creepiness in there just for fun… hmmm! It has been a long time, hasn’t it! I might forget how to make videos altogether, if I don’t get in a quick practice session. Yessss.

By 11pm, I’d convinced myself this was probably a good idea.

Been so long since I've posted a video. Who wants to play a game called "how fast can Vi make a weird video about how to microwave"?

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

People were interested in playing. My original goal was to finish by midnight. Under an hour!

Starting with those tweets, I'm going to try to be exporting by midnight. GOGOGO

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Emily Eifler suggested I live-tweet the event. I’d never livetweeted anything before! Sure, why not!

It took 15 minutes to set up the shot, which involved coming up with the entire concept. I knew I didn’t have much time, and I thought it would be funny (for me at least) to have the visuals literally be someone staring at a microwave as it counts down. Simple and easy. But what’s in the microwave? I don’t have time for that! Imply something creepy and make sure the shot doesn’t include the microwave window. Showing the keypad is important, but in confined space with no editing how do I show my face? And if I back up the camera to include my face then not only can you not see the keypad clearly but you will see the microwave window, or the rest of my apartment, revealing more of my life and things than I am interested in having the internet see, not to mention the composition was terrible.

The only thing funnier than a real-time video of someone watching a microwave count down would probably be a real-time video of a closeup of the keypad. Literally watching a clock count down. This is the sort of daring art stuff I do just because I can. Yes, I can make a closeup of a microwave timer counting down, and people will watch it. My life is awesome. Strongly considering doing a longer followup along this vein. In fact, because it goes so well with this story and I cannot resist taking things to ridiculous extremes, and also because I have the emotional/financial luxury of not caring if I lose every single one of my subscribers, I’m going to do exactly that right now.

Ok, that was NUTS.

See, just because I make fun of the creation process of something doesn’t mean it isn’t art. And we learn surprising things when we indulge in projects that seem too simple to be worth our time. I don’t know if anyone will actually enjoy watching a video of me counting down from 9:99 to End, but for me, standing there in the dark behind the camera counting down into the mic, it was quite an experience. Definitely one worth having. So before we get back to the other video, let’s tangent a bit about this thing I just made.

I chose 9:99 because it sounds like a super legit big time to count down from, yet is not a real time, yet it still works on a microwave, still counts, feels more like 10 than 10:40, and I want people to have a small but worthwhile “aha” when they realize that counting down from 99, which they’re used to, is weird in this situation.

In the first few seconds I realized one second is not a lot of time in which to say a three digit number and I’m eventually going to need to breathe. Merely keeping up took all my attention at first; good diction exercise! I decided every ten seconds was a good amount of time to take a breath. Once I got into the flow enough to think more, I noticed that breathing after 0 put emphasis on 9, appropriate since we were in the 9s, and decided that in the 8s I’d breathe before 8 instead.

I amused myself for a few minutes with this scheme, but once it becomes a pattern that’s boring. I tried changing when the breath is, making it every 11 instead of every 10, to emphasize repeated digits. Then that got boring, which meant I had to amuse myself.

Creating boring situations and then trying to amuse myself within them is my absolute favourite hobby and valuable life skill. Nothing too crazy happened and I still don’t expect it to be interesting for anyone to actually watch, but I did get to try giving different arcs, flows, to the numbers, surprised myself by discovering how much of how we count is in the inflections, the “counting style” way of speaking.

I tried to go back to a simple robotic speech for the dramatic under-a-minute countdown, and somehow in context, after all that, it sounded lost and sad. I went with it.

Including parts where I’d had to do things over, I’d been standing around counting down for nearly 20 minutes. It was fast-paced and intense and physically demanding. If you don’t believe me, I dare you to try it, as loud and exuberantly as I did. I’m sure it’s great at parties.

I was in a zone, I was acting, improvising. I don’t know how much was part of the “story” I was weaving into the countdown and how much was real, but I felt slightly emotional, and a little shaken, when it reached the end. Ah, I can’t even count down with a microwave without throwing myself into my art! Ha. I bare myself to the world by posting this microwave video.

Anyway, back to the live-tweeting of the first video.

I had a hypothesis that with a little rubbing alcohol the greasy keypad might actually be reflective enough to show a bit of reflection. There’s something creepily voyeuristic about watching someone’s reflection. I already had the beginning of the script from the tweets, and I filled it out quickly. Zen microwave, breathing exercises to fill the time, stop. But instead of just demonstrating one possible zen time, why not two? It’s natural for it to not be done and have to put it back in for another 33 seconds, a good time to be familiar with.

I started typing “looks like it’s not done yet” after the first microwavation. But wait, what’s not done yet? Instead of a boring standard microwave sentence, this could be a funny/creepy reveal. Timing wise, it was the perfect place to do it. Start normalweird, reveal creepyweird 2/3 the way through. Same pattern I used in the toothpaste video. Finished the sentence as “looks like it’s not dead yet” and added a bit of creep to the second shorter set of breathing exercises.

Odd how typing out these few paragraphs on my script-writing thought process probably took longer than writing the script itself. I was using forms that already existed and ideas I knew well. The point was not to say something new or insightful. The point was to be fast.

The shot was set, the script gave me simple acting instructions, I slapped on some lipstick and mascara to help the reflection visibility, and was ready to film!

step 2: autofocus, look away from camera, and hope for the best

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

I’d never filmed something before where I cared about specifics but couldn’t see what the camera was capturing while I filmed. If I had a mirror, I might have been able to see if my reflection was properly in the shot while I faced away. As it was, I looked at the camera while putting my hand where my face would be. Seemed to work. Start filming. Press buttons and realize…

step3: realize microwave countdown timer isn't in shot, but is most interesting thing to watch in video. oh god. struggle with new shot.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Yep, I was focusing on capturing the buttons, but once I was filming and saw the timer counting down I knew I wanted that in the shot. Unfortunately there was no way to get both the start button and the timer in the shot without widening it to the point where you see stuff I don’t want you to see. I’m moving so fast to try to finish by midnight that I don’t have time to type spaces between “step” and number anymore.

..sacrifice start button due to time constraints.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Re-set my shot and went for it! Actual filming only took a couple minutes, as it was in real time.

step4: transfer footage to computer. Hope it came out. Realize mic was not attached to camera. Start recording sound effects.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

I had no idea if the footage was good, but it was 11:30, no time to do anything but transfer it to the computer and work with it. Unfortunately I didn’t have a mic on the camera. I’m so used to only recording visuals for my videos that I didn’t even think of it. I decided I’d just record the sounds I needed using the mic I had all set up at my computer, and edit it in.

On the bright side, as long as I was going to have to record and add sound effects, might as well record and add some extra stuff, that wasn’t in the original take. Hmmm, what other sounds could be added? Maybe some thumps, as if something’s really in there, to foreshadow the “looks like it’s not dead yet.” So, if you like the thumps, forgetting the mic was serendipitous.

step5: untangle mic cable so that it can reach microwave.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

step6: fridge comes on while recording mic. Turn it off. Remember to turn it back on later, Vi! First round of recording has ringing. bugfix

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Fridge is a recurring problem. I’ve strongly considered just always ordering out, always ordering perfect portions, and unplugging the beast altogether. I may yet do this.

step7: second round of sound effects came out clean. Open up Premier. Try to remember where I copied the footage to.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

I had manually held up the mic to save time, but there was a ringing in the recording that I guessed was caused by my hand vibrations. Re-recording with a proper stand setup fixed the problem, but took precious time. At least it was enough time for the files to transfer from the camera!

step8: narrate while watching video. import words. Time to edit sound. OH NO TIIIIME

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Made a few last edits to the script. Usually I make narration the driving force, lining up the video with the natural timing of my words. But this was a real-time video, so I hit play on the thing and tried to line up the narration with what I saw. No time to put thought into how I want to say things, no time to try again and get things lined up better– it was recorded, edited, exported from audacity and imported into premier within minutes. (I’ve done that process quite a lot). Even so, at this point midnight was out of the question, what with so much sound editing to be done. I set my sights on 1am.

step9: narration lined up with visuals. But I missed the midnight deadline. And I still have to add the sound effects, so I DEFINITELY LOSE

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Now the real time consumer: sound effects! My usual sound-first approach means I often import a single audio track and stick with it. Now, in order to get all the microwave sound effects in, and lined up with the video, I had a cumbersome pile of audio tracks.

step10: add mono tracks

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

step11: satisfaction that the "close microwave door" sound effect overlaid on "close microwave door" footage comes together convincingly

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

step12: editing in microwave sound effects took longer than expected. You, my friends, will know that "microwave running" is a 3-second loop

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

I’ve done a bit of adding sound effects to things, but never from scratch, from absolute silence, on a real-time supposedly-live video like this. It was a good exercise.

And after adding those thumps, I thought some creepy breathing was needed.

step13: record creepy breathing. Try to make it creepier by making it stereo with echo on just one ear. Effect is cool. Will use again.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Honestly, the discovery of the one-ear echo trick may be the most useful result of this exercise. Hear it alone here.

I’d recorded the breathing while watching the video, and as it wasn’t very complicated, I got it in and lined up quickly.

Seeing as 2hours is now the goal, I think I have time to add music.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Actually, I've got an entire 20 minutes. That's enough time to write and record something really great.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

I have a lot of practice making videos by this point, but nothing like the experience I have with music. Producing quick unpolished recordings of improvised songs with improvised harmonies is not a very in-demand skill set, but I consider myself an expert.

A defining characteristic of expertise is that not only can you do a thing, but you know exactly how long it will take. I knew that 15 minutes would be enough to record some simple pleasant background thing (3 minutes each for 3 voices), edit and mess with the balance and add echo and stuff (4 minutes), and export, import, line-up, done (2 minutes). No technical difficulties, no testing out things and seeing what works, just do my thing.

Which meant that with 20 minutes I could relax and consider my game plan, make the voices something special, something that really adds to the video, is unique and essential to the video, something that truly belongs to this video and no other (a pet peeve of mine is when videos slap on random background music). The rhythm of button pushing is compared to Beethoven’s 5th in the narration, so that’s an obvious place to start. Put the rhythm of all sorts of nice key presses into the vocals, quote Beethoven a little…. Fun, but subtle, and with 20 full minutes I was sure I could do better.

Hmm, something that adds to the video… well, the content of the video is basically the narration, so maybe they could actually add to the video. Yes, they start innocent, just as the video itself does, and they don’t become creepy in tone (unlike in the toothpaste video for example), but rather become off-putting by interfering where we are not used to background music interfering, responding to the narration itself, and yet still a layer apart, commenting but presumably unseen and unheard by the narrator.

A nice device. Would love to find opportunity to use again and really do it right. Yes, forget what I said about the one-ear echo thing; this is the best idea to come out of this exercise.

So I recorded the vocals while watching the video and responding to things. The result is imperfect and if I had more time I would have had the responses scripted, funnier, organized to not accidentally overlap with each other or the narration, etc. Like, after the narrator mentions her sister, one voice says “you don’t have a sister” but in the end it’s really hard to make out.

Anyway, that brings us to 12:59!

step14: watch hopefully-final video with improvised 3-part harmony bg music on top.

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

The result was representative of the intention and work put into it, I think! Success!

step15: export

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

Finally done, I took a look at the replies I’d been getting. Many people concerned about my fridge.

step16: turn fridge back on

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

And that was that! The video finished exporting, I uploaded it to YouTube:

…and then, having fulfilled my promise to my twitter followers, I took a moment to reflect.

So my creative process is basically 1. have uninteresting idea 2. run with it 3. run, run, faster! 4. IT'S RIGHT BEHIND YOU 5. RUUUUUUUUUNNN

— Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) January 13, 2014

While writing the rest of this post, the 9:99 microwave video was exporting. I just watched it for the first time. I didn’t think I’d actually watch all the way through, but you know what? I like it. I don’t expect anyone else to like it, but I truly do.

Probably just runner’s high.

Short story: I wrote a song to Pat Rothfuss‘s lyrics for the super-fun charity event Wordbuilders.

Long story: I’ve got two favourite charity events. The Project for Awesome is a whirlwind crazy fun two days of the YouTube community banding together to decrease world-suck. Worldbuilders, by contrast, is a long-haul event with fun-crazy spread over an entire two months.

I started following Worldbuilders four years ago, because I was following Pat’s blog, because Pat wrote The Name of the Wind, which I’d already read twice at that point.

Some people get warm fuzzies from knowing their donation will help bring families out of poverty. Some people get warm fuzzies from imagining all the awesome stuff they might win. Personally, I get my biggest warmest fuzzies just from the atmosphere of books, books, more books, blog posts about new books, old books, books I might like, books other people like, special books, series of books, piles and piles of books. Oh, and their authors, too. So. It’s fun to follow.

This year Pat ramped up the fun by adding “acts of whimsy,” where when certain goals are met a person (such as other authors I am a fan of) will do a whimsical thing (FANTASY AUTHORS ARE ALL INSANE). Needless to say, having been a fan of Pat’s for years, I was super excited when he contacted me about doing something and now we are bestest friends. You can read his side of the story in his blog post about the song.

About the song: As soon as I heard the name, I knew it was The One. The sound, the rhythm, the creepy undertones, all wrapped up in a single word destined for music. Pat told me it was a duet for two female voices, and that it was sung in a circle. Perfect!

I could imagine that the first time through it was simple, a folk song everyone knew and could sing, but with each repetition a given pair of singers might make it increasingly complex, showing off their individual skill and creativity. I wanted it to have the unsettling changes in meter appropriate for a song called Knackerman. I wanted it to be interesting to listen to, despite being for just two a cappella voices. What I ended up with was fairly difficult to sing, especially when trying to record one voice with all its weird timings and no second voice to listen to and work from. The stomps and claps not only add a bit of percussion, but are essential for keeping time through the meter changes. Note the heart-beat stomps during “give me your heart” :D

I know what fans of TNotW who have already read Pat’s blog post are wondering: How could I possibly give up the chance to have Tinker Tanner? I don’t know! The heart wants what the heart wants.

Anyway, while I actually did this for fun, the story is that I’m doing it for charity, so if you like it, maybe buy someone a goat or something.

Edit: it is now on SoundCloud, where you can download it.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for peer-to-peer file sharing, and to celebrate, I’ve made another batch of my videos available as Torrents, including the Thanksgiving Dinner series I made last year (torrent|YouTube). If it’s not Thanksgiving where you are, maybe it is snowing and you’d like to revisit last year’s series on folding paper snowflakes, also space-time! You can find all the new torrents on my Torrents page.

This year I have been reminded repeatedly, in multiple ways, how important free peer-to-peer file sharing is. Yesterday my website went down without explanation because the hosting service I am paying for had technical difficulties, but the torrents of my videos still worked. YouTube changes the conditions surrounding their hosting service on a whim, for both those using it for free and those paying for it with ads, but torrents have no unique host or platform that can control how you see them. YouTube can decide to suddenly start showing advertisements before my videos, without notification (this happened earlier this year), but when you download one of my torrents I know you will get exactly my video and nothing else. No signing up for other services. No “featured video” thumbnails promising to teach you how to get girls’ numbers. No extra compression, degradation of quality, unexplained age restrictions, bogus copyright claims, “This video is not available right now,” etc. Just my video, on your computer, the way it was meant to be seen.

In a world where anyone reading this is probably already paying for internet access, paying for hardware, and probably also paying for other hardware that gets that internet access to your hardware, it concerns me how prevalent the idea is that it is good and right for people to accept an internet full of advertisements and alternate agendas in exchange for services as basic as hosting or transferring information.

I do not accept that.

I bought a computer and pay a monthly cable bill. I should not need to use an ad-covered site to communicate with my friends.

I bought a computer and pay a monthly cable bill. I should not need to use an ad-covered site to let people see content that I myself create and own.

And I don’t! So, thank you BitTorrent. Thank you for letting people who like my stuff download my stuff from each other using things they’ve already paid for. Also, thank you RSS for letting people get my posts without having to expose themselves to my frighteningly-yellow website and its faulty hosting.

And now, a note on the Thanksgiving videos, since I get a lot of questions about them.

I did not, in fact, eat any of the math food I created for the videos. Filming the series took over a week, and items went in and out of the fridge, sat out for hours, etc. The potatoes mostly dried out, and so did the bread spheres, so they were easy to deal with. The gelatinous cranberry cylinder got moldy pretty quickly. Throughout the series I replaced blackberries, covered up mold spots with mint leaves, etc.

The turkduckenen-duckenen was the saddest part. I had little expectation that I would be able to pull off a seven-bird binary-stuffed extravaganza, but I managed to debone and assemble all the birds and after sitting in the oven for ten hours it came out perfectly cooked and smelling delicious. Unfortunately filming the creation of it involved many hours of setting up shots and deboning on the counter under warm lights, and leaving uncooked poultry sitting out for hours is a great way to get sick, so I had to trash the whole thing. Still, I think helping teach hundreds of thousands of people about binary tree traversal is a more worthy end to a bird’s life than being eaten.

I made a video, again. After that three-part not-logarithms series I thought it only fair to set the record straight as to my true inner feelings about logarithms, and decided I might as well explain all of elementary algebra while I was at it.

Download via torrent or watch on YouTube.

The choice between having to use Google+ and never commenting on YouTube again is laughably easy for me. I invested so much into my YouTube channel, and they’re taking that investment and threatening to throw it away if I don’t also start investing in Google+. No thank you Google, but you’ve already made me regret investing so much into you the first time. Do you really think I’m going to do it again?

Google was so good at being Google! Why did they decide they want to become FacebookTV? I don’t know, but here’s some problems with the G+/YouTube integration, assuming you know the basics already:

+ Google is trying to re-animate a failed platform by leeching off of a successful one, despite that the failed platform failed because it is bad, and more users are not going to make it less bad

+ Google’s publicized selling point was “comments just got better” while in actuality they managed to take what we all thought was the lowest of the low and actually make it worse (this is a significant accomplishment that leaves me in awe)

+ YouTube has long known their comment section is awful, and out of many possible improvements, the easiest solution is NOT integrating an entire social network. Using comments as an excuse for the integration is dishonest, and would still be dishonest even if the new system wasn’t a failure

+ The integration system is designed for the common casual new user, with integration causing horrible problems for people with multiple channels and preexisting personal G+ accounts/pages, who, being people who have already invested in these products, you’d think Google would at least pretend to care about

+ Making huge forced changes to a platform is problematic for people whose livelihood depends on certain things being a certain way. I would not recommend making YouTube or Google+ a large part of your business, and these changes should be scaring away anyone who was considering investing in the platform. Google’s recent untrustworthiness is certainly what got me getting this old website back up and running, and why I decided blogging is better than vlogging right now

+ This is part of an ongoing trend of Google exerting more control over what information their users see, so that they can optimize for having the user see things that make Google money.

Google’s products used to augment humanity with beautiful tools that helped us get the information we wanted to see. That was the superiority of Google search, Google reader, gmail with its excellent spam filter, and YouTube, which allowed you to subscribe to any individual who might want to post videos. Empowering humanity to efficiently search for and find information, and then to choose what information they consume, is not just a noble goal, but turned out to be a wildly successful thing that people want.

Making things people want is good business. Tricking people into using things they don’t want with a bait-and-switch is not good business.

Now a Google search shows me a full page of promoted, local, and social results–I have to scroll down to see actual search results. Google decided to drop Reader altogether. YouTube inflates subscriber numbers during signups while choosing which videos will actually show up, with a malicious algorithm that includes both total time a user spends on the site (promoting videos that suck you into watching things you don’t really like but are easily distracted by) and revenue gained (this means that by not having ads on your videos you miss out on both the ad money and on having your stuff displayed to many of your own subscribers). You can still “subscribe,” but YouTube changed the definition of the word in the same way Facebook changed the definition of “friend.”

YouTube used to be designed to help you find what you were looking for. Now, it’s designed to keep you looking.

Google used to be about being in control of what you see. Now, “you’re in control of how you’re seen”

Now even discussion is curated by Google, rewarding those who talk often, and promoting hateful inflammatory comments because they provoke responses. Taking all the collected data and computational power of Google and using it to optimally encourage people to watch advertisements and argue with each other is, in this author’s opinion, brazenly unethical. We can only hope that everything that’s happened in the last year has been unintentional and that Larry Page will have some sort of epiphany, pull out before the transformation is complete, and start putting the company’s energy into doing good things again, as in a heartwarming vampire holiday tale.

As for me, I’ll continue posting on my own RSS-enabled site and making my videos available as torrents, and maybe I’ll follow in the footsteps of the many other prominent YouTubers who are moving discussion of their videos off YouTube.

There’s a lot more to say about how this is part of a bigger picture involving various related companies and industries, but I think I’ll stick to the comments integration thing this time.

I don’t feel visuals, the way I do words and music, and while I’m used to what people pay attention to in my more standard forms, I’m still surprised by the way people seem to be skilled at ignoring sound as background noise. Especially in my last video it is the sound and words that are important, the sound created with perfect intention, but apparently the visuals are distracting so I’ll point out some of the details to you and then you can try listening for them, if that’s your kind of thing.

I knew I wanted music for the last section, to say the dark things there are no words for, which means I needed music for the first section for consistency. The fast melody is inspired by the rhythm of teethbrushing. I wanted a cheap background-musicky feel, the kind of happy little thing often stuck on to videos, that being both the right thing to introduce the PSA and also very easy for me to improvise melodies and harmonies for. I sang along while listening to the narration, intentionally doing things like slow happy rising chords during “I extend my hand and invite you to join me in the civilized world,” holding on a major chord during “You do not have to worry about any thing and life is beautiful.” Back to the fast toothpaste melody when back to the old way of squeezing toothpaste, and when we recall “Life is Beautiful,” and add “also Meaningless,” we recall the held major chord and move to a minor one.

Coming back to toothpaste after the first false ending, the melody returns, with a more muted closed vowel sound. During “My thought are pure, my thoughts are minty fresh” the two voices hold a perfect fifth, vibratoless and clean, the vowel relaxing from an “ooh” into a neutral “ah”, a mouth going zombie-slack.

Moving into the last section, it begins with a single note, then a perfect fifth added above. This should be very consonant, but even with the first note there is a dissonance: not the note itself, but in that the key has shifted up a quarter tone. This section is incompatible with the last. The fifth establishes the new key, and from there we can add its own dissonances.

This is the sort of music that makes sense to me, every note exactly where it should be, unlike the arbitrary niceness of the intro toothpaste melody. It is not an accident that that high pure note comes radiating down from the heavens just as I say the word “shining,” held, this fragile note itself both a comfort and weakness, the only higher note coming in a half-step above it, the high screaming dissonance on the word “voiceless,” a dissonance that cannot be resolved, we can only let it fade away, replaced by the howling of wolves.

I’m actually surprised no one’s mentioned the wolf-howl-inspired vocals; I thought it was maybe a bit too heavy handed. A low tentative howl transitions us in, then more voices join, one after another, free independent creatures that care not for fitting into consonant triads, and yet together create a perfect pack. “Oooh” is the vowel of the howl. Then there’s the choice of how to say the words: “howl” could have been performed loud and howling, but that would be too much release too soon. How much more effective to say a word like “howl” softly, between clenched teeth! How much more contrast between that dark closed howl and the loud open vowels of the word “wide”! There’s an arc to that paragraph, starting shut and opening wide and landing in a bitter heap. The music does the same: the howling “ooh” opens up into “aah” during “open ourselves wide,” slides into a recognizable triad for the duration of “escaping,” then collapses with a 7th in the base, and a darker more dissonant note below that, too quiet to hear unless you know it is down there, waiting.

A non-math video, via torrent or on my second secret channel on YouTube

I’ve been surprised to find that many people do not know this simple trick, and it is a useful enough part of my life that I’ve thought before of making a quick second-channel video about it. But as always, I’d rather be working on unique Vi-ish works of art than doing pure instructional/informational videos, so I didn’t consider it strongly.

My thoughts strayed back to it occasionally as they do to all my potential video ideas, adding details: like, since I’m going to have to demonstrate squeezing toothpaste until tubes are almost finished anyway, I could have fun with it, squeeze it all out over the counter. Still not interesting enough, though. Another time I thought back to it, well, maybe I could squeeze it out into patterns or art or something. Meh, maybe, if I’m bored some weekend with nothing else to work on.

And then I woke up in the middle of the night last weekend and realized: of course! Just add existentialism to it!

By sunrise I’d written a draft and ordered supplies, and then I fell back asleep. It ended up being a solid two-weekend project, extra time because I am not a very strong painter. Part of me wanted to practice more, do more takes, to get the art how I envision it, but the video—however flawed—serves its purpose: one more step along my path to creating weirder things.

Oh, also, before you start squeezing toothpaste all over your tile, the part about toothpaste being good for cleaning grout is a total lie made for pacing reasons.