Blake Heal and Peter Cote, used a Canon Eos 5D camera to make a rich and interesting video for client Levi’s. One thing that makes this video different is that they didn’t use the Canon 5D camera for its video capabilities, but to produce stills.

2,770 still frames were created, which spanned hundreds of miles of the United States. In the Walk Across America – Behind the Scenes video, they explain who this champagne effort was produced on a beer budget.

The video is comprised of actual still photographs that were taken during a 14 day trip across country. It features model Michael Johnson in a simple pair of Levi’s jeans and plain t-shirt,moving quickly in stop motion, time-lapse photography of him passing nmerous landmarks on his way cross country.

By the time you are reading this, the video should have been viewed by over 1 million people, making it one of the most cost-effective and just plain effective marketing tools that Levi’s has had.

With customer created content, viral video and other alternative marketing and advertising,  one can only wonder where the future might be for both advertising and for entrepreneurial individuals, such as the one’s who put together this video.

Since my usual response is to tell people they would have better luck paying the rent if they took up welding, I often wonder why so many people do contact me to ask my opinion. I begin to chat with this fellow. He seemed like a nice guy, with a somewhat decent head on his shoulders and it actually turned out that he had done some character work at his prior job, working for Nickelodeon or more significantly the Nick online part of the Nickelodeon 12 headed beast.

He seemed to know a little bit about me, after all My life is somewhat of an open book on this here internet thingy, (a fact I hope I won’t regret in years to come). The conversation turned around to agents and auditions and so forth and he commented that it was odd that I hadn’t done v.o. for “Nick”

I mentioned how being in San Francisco I hadn’t had much opportunity to audition for anything. And then I brought up “Go Bananas”. Go Bananas is an interactive online Nick.com toon. You can find them at http://www.nick.com/buzz/webisodes/gobananas/index.jhtml

About 12 years ago I got contracted by a local Bay Area audio producer/ musician to do voices for a project called Go Bananas. There’s 13 episodes, with each one being about 5 minutes long or so. And each episode has an interactive component that is a game; such as a variation on “Whack a Mole” or the classic “Concentration”. There’s around 20 male characters spread across the 13 episodes, with several of them being the regulars.  I perform the voices for all of the male characters in all 13 episodes. Tony Simiano, the main character, is a talk show host. I created his voice as a cross between David Spade and a young Dennis Miller and tried to infuse him with the spirit of both of those guys, along with a little bit of Johnny Carson, to keep him grounded. Milo, the Orchestra leader, is a bit of a take on Ringo Star. The other characters were based on various people I know, stereotypes from television and film, etc.

When I mentioned all of this to the fellow I was talking to, who had worked for Nick, he drew somewhat quiet. He was quite familiar with Go Bananas, but was pretty sure that nobody at Nick had any idea I was behind the voices. If anyone there had ever cared, it would seem perhaps at best short lived. I suppose us voice actors are a dime a dozen.

But Go Bananas has been a consistently popular part of Nick.com for the past 10 years and nobody at Nick knows who the heck I am, nor do they know who anybody else is who worked on this project? Does anyone care?

For whatever reasons, the producers didn’t list any real credits at the end of each episode, simply concluding with a long list of fake funny names like “Ben Dover”.  While at first I realize it was cute, I now realize that this one little action may have cost me a considerable amount of work. How many people had viewed these toons over the past ten years, besides the folks at Nick? Had my name been anywhere, it is quite conceivable I may have been considered for other work. An while they have already had a nice 10+ year run of using my hard work, the payment for said services was rather weak in comparison. On top of that, no credits?

This project was done long before there were any internet work agreements with the unions, so they’ve had a top property for ten years for a song. Apparently my characters get fan mail and fan e-mail and while they haven’t been turned into friends of Barbie, are beloved by at least some children (and perhaps adults) worldwide.

So folks at Nick. Hi, I’m here. I’m J.S. Gilbert and I am the one who came up with these voices and breathed life into your characters. So please, for the love of Pete, send me some auditions for some other stuff. A guy’s gotta eat. And maybe you can remember I’m the guy doing those voices on Go Bananas.

Standing at the microphone at the historic Zoetrope Studios.

       In the middle of San Francisco’s North Beach district is a rather unique building. Besides it having been built right smack in the middle of the 1906 earthquake and being one of the narrowest office buildings you might ever see, this 7 or 8 story building belongs to Francis Ford Coppola and is the home of a most unique recording/ post studio, which is where you will now find Jim McKee and his company Earwax.

The first of several rooms in the studio.

The studio is through an unmarked door in this restaurant kitchen.

               You actually get to the studio by walking through the kitchen of a restaurant. In what may have been a speakeasy at one time, with it’s dark walnut walls and saloon overtones, we find what was once known as Zoetrope Studios. According to Jim, despite it still being used for a lot of Coppola’s projects, the studio doesn’t really have a name anymore. They just call it the studio. It is here that much of the ADR, dubbing, Foley and v.o. sessions for movies like the Godfather and Apocalypse Now took place. In fact, the day before my session, Martin Sheen was there recording a little dialog for some sort of sound sweetening to the original soundtrack. The day I was there, the actual film masters for Apocalypse Now were sitting right behind me as we recorded. Cables and other gear lay about in empty Sophia wine boxes, the wine from Coppola’s Napa winery.

This photograph in the lobby shows the construction in 1906.

      Working with Producer, Christopher St. John, we put together 8 radio scripts for client Stanford Hospital as part of a co-promotion they are conducting with the San Francisco 49ers.

But it seems as though everyone these days is trying to become a voice actor. Most will never make a nickel, but will leave a sizable donation with one or more of the many, many individuals out there who are happy to teach you the “business”.

This little video in no way is meant to represent any particular school, teacher, guru, gatekeeper or v.o. god or goddess in particular.

Play: Music Video shot entirely with an iPhone

Accousticalsurfaces.com

For those of you looking to upgrade project studios or home studios or are looking to build or retrofit studio space, www.acousticsurfaces.com is a treasure trove of information and products for almost any situation. From sound absorbing foam and acoustical ceiling tile to soundproof windows and doors, along with some of the best advice and instructions in the industry. Visit their site and click on acoustics 101 or soundproofing tips and you’ll see tons of juicy information. Even if you’re not looking to build a studio and just want a better understanding of sound theory, you’ll find a visit here well worthwhile.

Translator

Translator is a cross platform application – comes in Universal Binary Mac OSX Version 5.9 and Windows Vista/XP-compatible Version 2.9 flavors, and can translate practically every professional format, from Giga3/GigaStudio, EXS24, Kontakt, Reason NN-XT, SFZ, SoundFont, SampleCell, Kurzweil, Ensoniq, Akai, Emu, Roland, and many more. This enables musicians to use practically any sound for their sampler, no matter what format it is in.

Translator Windows 2.9 has a huge destination format list, mostly encompassing all the source formats. Translator Mac’s current destination list includes EXS24, Kontakt, Structure, Independence, HALion, Reason NN-XT, SampleTank, SFZ, Roland MV8000 and Fantom, Alesis Fusion, Korg Triton, and Battery 1. More formats are coming. visit www.chickensys.com $149

Nikon D 90 Camera

While I’m partial to the Canon 5d Mark II camera, perhaps more than partly due to the fact that all of my old Canon SLR lenses work with it, there’s no denying that the Nikon D 90 at 1/3 the price of Canon’s (Nikon is uder $1,000) is one heck of a camera. It has over 12 megapixel resolution for shootig stills. (Okay, Canon is 3 times more expensive, but has almost twice the resolution) The Niklon shoots video in 720 24p native. (alright the Canon shoots at 720 24p or 1080i – but remember the Nikon is under $1,000) Take a trip out to www.nikondmovie.com and you can see quite a few examples of video that has been shot with this camera. You can see how popular this camera has become with videographers by the sheer volume of 3rd party add-ons now available for it. And if $1,000 is too much for you, there’s a slightly lower end flavor of Nikon, the D5000, which goes for under $750. WHile you’re at it, if you’d like to see some of the video that the Canon can crank out, visit: http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=2667. You can also find plenty of examples of video from both cameras on Youtube.

Free G

Sonalksis, maker of numerous high quality audio plug-ins has one that it completely free, called FreeG. Visit http://www.sonalksis.com/index.php?section_id=14, fill out a little form and it’s yours. The Sonalksis FreeG is an intuitive tool that can be used for a variety of applications to increase the control and flexibility of the signal flow in the insert chain of the host. To make the workflow and the overview of the signal processing easier, FreeG provides extended, customizable metering features and settings.

Micport pro.

More and more of my work seems to involve production, audio or video. Yes, I do own some pricy little gadgets, but sitting down and writing a blog about $4,000 microphones or $8,000 video upsamplers didn’t seem to make much sense. So instead, I’m going to talk about some of the very practical and relatively inexpensive great buys I’ve found in the past year or so.

It is about as simple as it gets. At one end, there is a connector for a microphone cable. One the other end is a little port that you hook a USB cable into it. This goes into your computer and you aleft with a very small and useful phantom powered mic pre, that works with just about any microphone on the market. I have yet to find any software aside from Protools that won’t work with it and it works well under just about every flavor of Windows you can toss at it as well as most of the Mac OS’s.

MicPort Pro Microphone Interface

It’s about the size of a cigar. On the back end is a single button that engages phantom power and in the middle are two dials. One is for gain and the other for headphone volume. Yes, there is a very cute little 1/8″ headphone connector built into this puppy.

I ran some relatively unbiased tests with a make v.o., female v.o. doing some relatively staright ahead commercial copy. I then ran a couple of tests with them singing. I used a Neumann U87 and the Micport pro for test A. The other tests swapped out some fairly well known high-end mic-pre’s, along with an Apogee Rosetta to handle getting everything into the computer. The results were that while all of the engineers polled seemed to hear differences among the various mic-pre’s, nobody cold pick the Micport pro out. It offered a very transparent and high quality sound. And the street price for the Micport Pro, $150. The other amps we used were an Aphex 230, Milennia ST-1, John Hardy M-1 and an Avalon 737. None of the recordings used any eq or compression tweaks.

For more info visit www.centrance.com/products/mp/

The Mic Thing

Another item that most audio recording professionals will love is called the Mic Thing. SE elctronics came out with an item called the Reflexion filter, but the folks at SM Pro Audio have come out with a larger and in my opinion better product. This is straight from SM Pro’s site “The Mic Thing is a portable multi-purpose acoustic treatment panel suitable for minimizing room artifacts and improving separation during microphone recording sessions. Great for a range of applications including helping to control room ambience, minimizing spill from instrument amplifiers, or even creating temporary control rooms the Mic Thing is certainly one handy thing!” I simply couldn’t describe it any better

www.smproaudio.com/produkte.html When I bought mine, it came with a very good quality stand thrown in for around $250, with the shipping. One hint, replace the washers that come with this with some good quality washers. (I used plastic ones)The 2 side wings otherwise will have difficulty staying in position.

For home recording studios it will help as part of an overall approach to keeping you noise fllor at a low and managable level. I use one in my main room when we have to do ADR or dubbing and it not only keeps out the computer noise, but cuts down on transients sounds and bounce back. It’s not a sound booth. It can however be employed along with other measures to help create a clean environment for recording.

DXA-6A Phantom powered XLR adapter

Beachtek XLR Adapter

For around $300 or so, you can have two channels of either passive or phantom powered XLR inputs into pretty much any camcorder out there. You’ll never get caught short trying to match great sound to your great video. Clean and quiet, Beachtek also has several other flavors both higher and lower prized if you require more bells and whistles or simply don’t think you’ll need phantom power. For more info visit www.beachtek.com These adapters are also carried by most of the usual suspects online and some brick and mortar.

While not exactly a gadget, these guys have and use them well. Retouchup.com is an insanely inexpensive photo retouching service. How insanely inexpensive? $2.50 will get you blemish removal and for $5 they’ll get rid of braces. For $10 they’ll give your photo the once over making it good enough to put in most any high quality magazine. Once you sign up, there is an easy path for getting your digital pix to them. They are quick and stand behind their work. www.retouchup.com

Alex, I’ll take”New job classifications that people will pay way too much money to someone to do” for 400 dollars please.

And so we now have the title of  Online Reputation Mangement or Manager

Do I actually have an online reputation and if so, do I need to worry about it? Apparently the answer is yes, yes and a resounding yes!

If you happen to be named John McCain for example, it could be a blessing and yet again it might be a curse. Apparently it all depends on whether you’re trying to rent an apartment in Berkeley.   Or say your name happens to be John Wayne Gacey. Only you’re not THE John Wayne Gacey.

If your name is Michael Schwartz, your long lost pals from high school may not have an easy time hooking back up with you after 30 years, but then again, that one night stand from back in 1983 looking for child support might not have such an easy time of finding you either. 

Of course this is all about personal reputations, where you could live or die by the post or comment you offhandedly made in 2005, but still keeps popping up on the search engines. And if you ARE trying to build up some sort of internet presence, you certainly don’t want your positive efforts to be mistakenly applied to somebody else with the same name. On the flip side, if you’re Joe Smith, an avid Redskins fan and some other Joe Smith just happens to get caught on video exposing himself at a Redskins game, you’d probably prefer that people didn’t think it was you.

Of course, even on a personal level it can go much deeper than this. The vast amounts of information one can find on almost anyone these days with just a few mouse clicks is amazing. You may have had people flaming you or saying terrible things about you online and not even know it. Semi-anonymous posts may say very deflamatory things. If you are an avid blogger, play around on FaceBook or MySpace, etc. it might even be possible for someone to figure out your itinerary. And even if your name is a fairly common one, someone might not be sure that something stupid can be attributed to you, but why take the chance.

Unlike that phoney threat that followed you throughout school about something going on your permanent record, the internet is a huge depository for all sorts of information. In fact, it’s said that more information will be created in 2010 than in all history up until then. And much of that information can be attributed to the internet.

It can affect you getting into the right school, getting a job or perhaps even finding a mate.

Beyond all of this personal sense of branding, the whole world of online reputation management for business large and small, products and services, everything we consume, talk about and think about it is affected by how it is being perceived on the internet.

Recently I had a small town shop keeper tell me that her busness was down and directly attributed to a negative comment left by someone in Yelp. She was in week 6 of trying to undo the damage. 6 weeks is long enough for a business to go broke in some places.

I’m lucky enough to have the name J.S. Gilbert, and apparently among the small gaggle of J.S Gilbert’s in this world I tend to take top position. I wonder if either the Dr. J.S. Gilbert or leading Vulcanologist, J.S. Gilbert have ever had somebody contact them mistaking them for an advertising guy or voiceover talent. It’s pretty doubtful, just as I’ve never had anyone call me and ask me to come and identify some igneous rock or consult on the proper way to treat ovarian cysts. There is however one J.S. Gilbert that pops up from time to time who may get mistaken for me. He’s a youngster and apparently only uses the “J.S.” for his bylines in some small newspaper.  It could be worse, he could be a mass murderer. Since he’s only been a “J.S.” for a few years, it would be nice of him to drop the moniker, since I’ve been writing since the dawn of time. However, he refuses. I’ll just have to figure out a way to get the bill collectors on his scent instead of mine and that should do the trick.

Since this blog hasn’t been very handy in giving you any concrete information, I’ll give you a bunch of links to get some more information and actually see how you’re doing in the online rep game.

First stop is the Google Grader. It’s a seperate part of Brand Yourself, whihc offers an 8 day free trial. Even if you don’t go for their subscription services, there’s tons of interesting and useful information  http://brand-yourself.com/features/google

There’s BackType at http://www.backtype.com/ This site will run revelance on any URL as it pertains to Twitter and other social media.

Also www.Trackur.com, which is predominantly a paid site that starts around $15 a month, but does have a free version.

For $1 per month, Brands Eye will help the little guy find out who is saying what, although the packages go up an I’m guessing the $1 doesn’t get you that much. You can check them out at http://www.brandseye.com/brandseye-blogger;jsessionid=6F90A9E0BBD8904518187B441482D35B.sybaris_jboss

KeoTag allows you to check in a number of places on keywords, names, etc. http://keotag.com/

Here’s something called Reputation Monitor. http://www.strategicprofits.com/tools/reputation-monitor/

And remember, if you can’t say anything nice, somebody will no doubt find it on the internet and hold it against you forever.