Popular Video, Recording Actors, and Title Generator

One of my YouTube videos has suddenly become quite popular. I recorded some actors for some of my short video animations. My Random Title Generators can now generate more than a billion titles.

Popular Video

I haven't been paying much attention to how many views my videos on YouTube get. This week I got a note from YouTube that said I'd had over 18,000 views in the last month. I thought that must be wrong, so I logged in to check. It turned out that my video "Some Days ..." really took off starting in late February. It isn’t a new video. I posted a decade ago.

·          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXVwHaQcDQ8

As of yesterday, it had 21,860 views. It peaked at 1,083 views per day in early March and has varied from 400 to 700 per day since then. Yesterday it had 738 views and that seems to on an upward trend. There were only 32 likes and 7 dislikes. Most people didn’t watch the whole thing.

There doesn't seem to be many people who go on to watch my other videos though. I did get some people subscribe to me. I only need 931 more and I can get my videos monetized.

My Short Videos

I got a little work done on "The Desperation of the Wretched Senator." I rewatched it and made notes on changes I wanted to make to finish the project. But then I got busy recording actors for my other short videos, so this project stalled.

I recruited a couple of actors from the older filmmaker’s club to record voices for my short video projects. They recorded material for “The Sad Lady and the Hesitant Father-in-law,” “The Dread of the Daring Rocketeer,” and “Time Enough for the Anxious Social Media Manager.”

I learned a lot from the recording. Working with experienced actors like these two was much different from working with someone less experienced. The main takeaway for me is that each actor is different in how they work, and I need to be flexible in how I work with an actor.

Some actors don’t mind working on their own, while others prefer to have someone else to react to them. This is actually something I’m relearning. When I was making films in the late 90s and early 00s, I found the same thing, but since then I let it slip from my mind.

I had both actors record lines for the same character. I might get another actor to do some of the same characters. Already I’m unsure which to go with. My goal in this project is to gain experience, so I’m thinking I may as well create both versions. I don’t really need to pick one.

One issue I’ll need to cogitate on is that we changed social media manager from a man to a woman. The character is something of a wimp. I feel that it would work better if he were a man and not a woman.

One of the people from the Old Filmmaker’s club had some suggestions for “The Sad Lady and the Hesitant Father-in-law.” That got me to look at the relationship between the characters in a new way, which surprised me. It has me considering altering the dialogue a bit, which means I’d have to record new lines. I would have to redo all the lines. I did some processing of my voice, and I don’t remember exactly what I did. I may see if I can find an actor to record them.

Random Title Generator Update

I made some more revisions to my Random Title Generator. The two versions combined can now generate more than a billion titles. I'm working on some more ideas that will increase that.

Some of the titles I got while testing the code:

• Threatening the Ruthless Judge 
• The Animosity of the Soft-Hearted Burglar 
•  The Wisdom of the Damned Utility Room 
• The Executioner and the Wistful Trash Collector 
• Seeking the Excited Diamond Cutter 
• The Story of the Makeshift Container Terminal

·          https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/random-title-generator/

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Title Generator Improvements and a Writing Exercise - 2022 February 20

I did another upgrade to my random title generator and posted another writing exercise.

Random Title Generator Improvements

People have asked me to change my random title generator so you can see all the titles you've generated so far. It was only showing the last one generated. I tried several times to implement that, but without success. This week I tried again, and I got it to work.

The main problem was that the webpage uses JavaScript, and I'd never bothered to learn the JavaScript language. I just did things by trial and error as I needed them. This time I was a bit more systematic about it. The main issue was that I didn't understand how you output the results from a function to the webpage. I had copied the code to do that from an example and since it worked, I never bothered to find out how it worked. Once I found out how to do that, it came together quickly.

The method I used to create the list of titles was to concatenate each new title followed by a line break code to the front of a text string. The webpage then displays the text string. I talked to a friend of mine, who has a bit more computer programming savvy than me. He wasn’t familiar with JavaScript but did have some useful questions. He asked if there was a limit to how long a string could be in JavaScript. Some languages have a fairly small limit. I investigated to see if that could be a problem.

It turns out there is a limit to string length, which differs from one browser to another. In Firefox it is 1,073,741,822 characters and in Chrome it is 536,870,888 characters. In a sample of titles I generated, the average title length was 44 characters. That means that Firefox can have 24,403,223 titles before you hit the limit and Chrome could handle 12,201,611 titles. I estimated that if you generated a new title every 10 seconds and worked 8 hours a day with no breaks, it would take 23 years to reach the limit in Firefox and 11 ½ years to hit the limit in Chrome. I concluded that string length wasn’t likely to be an issue.

We talked about a few other potential problems that could come up with the generator when other people use it. He suggested that there wasn't much to gain by trying to fix every possible problem. He thought working on the word lists would be a better use of my time. I agree. My goal is to get up to a billion possible titles. I think I can do that.

“The Desperation of the Wretched Senator”

At our script writer’s group, we did a writing exercise based on the title “The Desperation of the Wretched Senator”. I’m wary about dealing with conspiracy theories and politics in my writing, but with a title like this, there isn’t a lot of other options. I recorded and posted the exercise on-line.

·         https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-desperation-of-the-wretched-senator 

 Blender and Computer Issues

They have released version 3 of Blender, so I wanted to upgrade to it. I got it installed OK, but it turned out that it doesn't support my graphics card. If I want to use it, I'll need to get a new graphics card. My computer doesn't work with Windows 11 either, so it may be time to get a new computer anyway. I'm not looking forward to doing that. I've spent a long time getting this one the way I want it.

I did find a post where some guy found a software work around for Blender and unsupported graphics card. I may try that.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Random Title Generator Upgrade

I created a random title generator a while back that I could use to generate ideas for writing exercises. I wasn’t happy with it, so this week I made a bunch of improvements.

 https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/random-title-generator/

In the writer’s group I joined we used a random prompt generator to come up with ideas for our writing exercise. My earlier attempt was meant to come up with a better version of that. I was not successful.

While the earlier version of my generator worked, the titles it generated were a disappointment. It worked from three word lists: a random article (i.e.: The or A), a random adjective and a random noun. It had no trouble picking random words, but the list of words I didn’t do a very good job of picking the words to use.

I began by redoing the list of nouns. I threw out the list I had and started over. First, I added a list of occupation descriptions I found on the Internet. That gave me a list of 300 words. Then, inspired by that, I added other words that describe people. I also added a few animals. I ended up with 527 words.

Next, I replaced the list of adjectives. I’m not sure where I got the initial set of adjectives. Once I had that, I added more based on the words I’d already added. That gave me 411 adjectives.

Then I worked on the list of articles. In my earlier version of the generator, I just used words like “the”, “A”, “Some” and a couple others. I had been reading some Perry Mason books recently and they inspired me to use the opening formula for those, which was “The Case of the”. I generated replacements for the word “case” and ended up with 196 words.

One problem is that these openings aren’t really articles anymore. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate word, so I just left it as that.

With these word lists, the title generator can create 42,453,012 different titles. In testing I found that it still would produce some titles that didn’t make sense. However, that was less of a problem than my earlier version.

The feedback so far has been positive. It does seem that most of the titles come across as mystery/detective stories. The problem was that when I was putting them together, my thoughts tended toward a mystery/detective story. I think I should come up with some other openings that suggest other types of stories.

The title generator had three buttons to generate the title: “Random Article”, “Random Adjective” and “Random Person”. One of the people in my writer’s group suggested that I also have a button that generated a whole new title. I added that.

I've put the generator on my website instead of being on its own like before. https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/random-title-generator/

I did a writing exercise based on a title from the updated version of the title generator: "The Tyranny of the Hungry Bookkeeper". I haven't recorded it yet.

I am open to making further changes to the generator. If you have any, please get in touch. I can send you the word lists and the html code I used if you want to create your own title generator. I may go ahead and post links to them on the generator page.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog