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I didn’t take much video during my trip to London this past February, but I had enough material to create this little two-minute compilation.
I also want to share an animated gif I created to honor my Heidi, who passed away a year ago this week, featuring a few of my favorite video moments.
I finally got around to editing the videos from our September 2015 trip to Upstate New York. This movie features visits to the beautiful state parks of Letchworth and Watkins Glen, as well as a day trip to Niagara Falls.
The movie is accompanied by Neptune, the Mystic, the sublime 7th movement of Holst’s The Planets. You can view it in 1080p via the video quality settings.
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I finally got around to editing the movie of my visit to San Francisco in October of 2014. It begins with a visit to the California coast before seguing into San Francisco, accompanied by a couple of familiar San Francisco-related tunes. You can watch it in HD by changing the quality settings of the video.
Still to come: the journal from my visit to California, but first I have to finish the journal from my Eurotrip last summer. I’m falling way behind–working on publishing a book will do that to you.
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I just discovered that my previously posted Yosemite movie was banned by YouTube from being playable in almost every country in the world, including the United States. Apparently that’s what happens when you use Pink Floyd as your background music. Oh well, lesson learned; back to using classical music in all my videos. This new version features “The Unanswered Question” by Charles Ives, though apparently even classical music occasionally runs up against the long arm of the copyright police–one of my previous videos using a Holst piece is banned in Germany.
Anyway, here again is the compilation of all videos taken during my two-day visit to Yosemite National Park back in October 2014. You can view the HD version by selecting 1080p from the quality settings of the video.
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I still have to get around to writing and posting the journal for my trip to Europe this past summer. In the meantime, I have created a movie out of the videos I shot in England, Scotland, Paris, and Bruges. You can view the HD version by selecting 1080p from the quality settings of the video.
This is a compilation of the mini-videos I shot during my October 2013 trip to Mexico, highlighted by my visits to the pyramid sites of Teotihuacan, Uxmal, and Chichen Itza. Mostly absent are my stays in Merida and Cancun, as I neglected to take video in those cities.
I apologize for the jerkiness of the zooms, but the manual zoom lens of my new camera does not lend itself well to smooth zooming. I tried to smooth out some of the zooms by slowing the video down, with mixed results. This is one case where my older camera (with its auto-zoom) would have been preferable, but I wasn’t about to haul two cameras all over Mexico. 🙂
For musical accompaniment, having already used most of the other pieces from Holst’s The Planets for previous movies, I decided it was time to use Mars, The Bringer of War. I think it fits pretty well with the visions of the pyramids.
The video quality defaults to 360p, but you can increase this up to 1080p if you want to view it in higher quality.
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This video is a tour of the grounds surrounding the villa I lived in for two weeks outside of Florence, Italy in 2011. You may have already seen this if you read Part 1 of my Eurotrip journal, though the video is now much smoother thanks to youtube’s smoothing software (with the minor side effect of wacky looking text at the beginning).
The villa was over 100 years old and full of character. The view of the Tuscan countryside from the gazebo was sublime: the hills, the olive groves, the other villas; very peaceful. And on the other end of the grounds I could see Florence in the valley below—an amazing view at night. It’s not difficult to understand why someone would decide to drop everything and move to Tuscany; it’s such an easy place to fall in love with.
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This is a video montage of my August 2012 trip to Peru, including my visits to the Sacred Valley and my hike of the Inca Trail. This is the same video that appeared in my journal, so you may have already seen it, but I wanted it to have its own page in my videos section. The background music is In the Lap of the Gods by the Alan Parsons Project, which I thought was a fitting piece to accompany the visuals.
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I finally got around to compiling the little videos I shot during my 2009 Eurotrip into a movie. These were shot with my old pocket camera, so it’s not HD video quality and I didn’t have the ability to zoom in and out during shooting, but it’s still a decent companion piece to my journal.
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I stumbled across a few small videos I shot while in Croatia in November of 2011 that I forgot to include in my main Eurotrip 2011 video, so I thought I’d compile them here.
In honor of the upcoming season premiere of Game of Thrones and Dubrovnik’s connection to the show, I have scored the video with the main theme from the series.
I chose to smooth-out the video using youtube’s smoothing software, which resulted in quite wacky behavior of the title captions at the beginning, but the rest of the video is nice and smooth, so once you get past the opening captions, it’s smooth sailing—do you think I used the word ‘smooth’ enough in that last sentence? 🙂
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Michael Rappa 