Fun, profit, whatever

Two video gigs materialized today. One for next week and one for three weeks from now. That’s the good news. The bad news, which doesn’t mitigate the good news so much as make it more interesting, is that in order to execute the gigs to my satisfaction, I’m going to have to spend almost as much on additional equipment as the gigs will pay.

Almost … as in, not quite … as in, I’m being paid to buy video equipment. Sweet.

To those who might wonder how I can have acquired so much equipment already and still need more, I should point out that I’ve been building a video studio and the gigs at hand are outdoor gigs. “Run and gun,” as we say. (The videography equivalent of what my still photo newspaper colleagues and I used to call “flick and fly.”) For these gigs, a real video tripod with spikey feet will be required, as will a backup battery. Also — and this is the best part — a steadicam. I’d been hoping for a good excuse to buy a steadicam and now all that remains is for me to achieve some level of proficiency with it in the time between its arrival on Tuesday and the annual Scottish Games Parade next Friday. That will be where the rubber meets the road and where my rig meets the bagpipes. May the road rise up to meet me and the wind be always at my back.

Open Minds tauts itself as “the CNN of UFOs” and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree. They now own/host the International UFO Congress, arguably the largest and most prestigious such event on the planet, and publish the self-referentially named Open Minds, one of those esoteric glossies you find in profusion in the Barnes and Noble magazine section. Up until recently, their weekly radio program was hosted by Huffington Post writer Alejandro Rojas, but Rojas has moved on and now Open Minds produces a weekly online video program it calls “Spacing Out!”

Only two broadcasts old as of last week, the program is still rather “beta,” thus still evolving, and for the time being openly soliciting contributions from viewers. “What the hell,” I thought, “How many actor/ufologist/videographers can there be on this playing field? I’ll give it a shot.” Long story short, my two-minute question (or some portion thereof, embedded here) about China’s People’s Daily will be included in Broadcast #3 which should be posted tomorrow. There’s no money involved and almost no fame possible, but it’s nice to be accepted by other members of the family.