I have a special treat for everyone today. Well, "treat" may be a bit strong. But if you've ever wondered what it was like to garage sale with me, this is your lucky day. Okay, "lucky" may be a bit strong.
Okay, let's not quibble with words. You're wondering, What is Tom babbling about?" I'm babbling, I mean, talking about my first (and maybe last) Garage Sale Finds vlog.
I've been toying with the idea of creating some vlogs of my garage and estate sales adventures for a while now. I've been on the fence whether I wanted to go that direction, but thought I'd give it a shot. I've watched other garage sale vlogs and have thought, "I find better stuff than that".
My next concern was, is it legal? Of course, there are countless Youtube videos out there doing exactly this, but I was curious. From what I've read, essentially, even if you on private property, but are "asked" to enter, you may videotape. Kind of like a vampire. I didn't plan on filming any actual people, so I decided to proceed (more on that later).
So this past weekend, I took my camera with me along for the ride (or walk as the case may be). Videoing the sales was the easy part. Editing them was something else.
My first challenge was, for obvious reasons, I didn't want people's faces to be shown. There are a lot of people at garage sales these days. Not like the old days when I'd be the lone person there. Consequently, they bounce in and out of the video. I tried to point the camera to shoot at waist height, but still ended up catching a lot of people. So finding software that could blur faces was my first task. I ended up playing around with the online video editor Flixier. It wasn't terribly hard to figure out how to use, although the blurring feature is fairly clunky. It doesn't follow faces, so you have to blur out large blocks of video and move the blurring area frequently. I did my best.
Second was adding some narrative to let you know what was going on. I didn't talk too much during the actual video and I didn't feel like doing a voiceover, so I added some text explaining what I was looking at and my thoughts.
One last warning: it's long. It's 17 minutes and 36 seconds long. I'm sure there are long sections I could have edited out, but if you want the full effect of just 1 garage sale (I went to about 5 garage sales and 4 estate sales that day) it's all there. You can always double the playback speed and watch it in 8 minutes and 48 seconds.
Will I do this again? I guess it depends how much everyone enjoys the video...and if I can find some decent video editing software.
P.S. I'll follow up with a later post in more detail of the actual items I bought.
P.S.S. That's my daughter with me in the video. The garage sale force is strong with this one...
