The Ear Exam Video: Why Less Than 40 Mins of Video Took 4 Days to Complete

Ohhhhhhh this video.  I was really excited to do it, because I love doing role plays.  This video didn't want to made though, and so it sabotaged everything electrical that it could.

The first to succumb to the Ear Exam's vendetta was my blow dryer.  I was using it, everything was fine.  I shut it off to get a drink, came back, and found its soul had left its body, never to return.  I can't prove the video had anything to do with this...I just know it in my heart  :P

Next were the dinning room lights.  In my blog entry http://heatherfeatherasmr.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-room-where-i-film-medical-roleplays.html you can see the lighting fixture I have (Haha, one of the lights is out in the picture).  Two lights had been out for a few days, so I drove to the store to replace the bulbs.  I picked up a two pack, drove home, flipped the switch to quickly verify which to bulbs were out---and the rest blew out.  And this was me:  http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view7/3892988/braveheart-betrayal-o.gif

The last casualty in all of this was my poor poor laptop.  I honestly have no idea what happened.  It was working, then it blue screened of death me.  I am going to have a tech savvy friend look to see if it can be salvaged, but until then, I am using a borrowed laptop that is slow as syrup and has a wonky space bar---soeverythingItypelookslikethis.  http://www.gurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/standing-in-the-rain-gif.gif

Okay, onto filming.  I had to film this bad boy 3 times.  The first time, my camera decided, "Meh.  I don't feel like seeing you in any way but radioactive orange."  The second time I was actually really pleased with how it went.  Everything felt fluid to me, I was optimistic about it, I started to edit----and found that a pervasive buzzing had corrupted the audio.  I have no idea what made it happen.  I tried to get rid of it in Audacity, but diminishing the buzzing would have ruined the other sounds as well.  SO at 1:30am I did the third take.  It felt pretty good, I popped it on the computer, and saw that I had been trolled by rebellious eye brow hair.

See it?!  Gaaaaaah.  Little things like that drive me crazy. >_<

Now we're at editing. I had filmed sounds for this video days in advance.  The parts where I am in your ears, Lara's moments, the walking, the sound effects---those were recorded separately   I hadn't realized how much work was going to go into layering the sounds.   I know compared to people who make brilliant soundscapes (ASMRByDesign for instance) my sound layering is a walk in the park.  To me though, layering is a slow process.  Advanced ASMRtists will probably scoff when they see this, but this is what I worked on for some 8 hours (video editing included):

Every little line you see is a cut or a piece of audio I added to the video.

Because I am using a HD camera now, the rendering time is longer than it would be otherwise.  The upload time to Youtube is WAAAAAY longer than that.  It took 5-6 hours to upload to the tube today.  I was so channeling Ron Burgundy by the end.  The video and I were not on speaking terms.  http://media.tumblr.com/99f0a2bc2219f5856a11ad5808ac936e/tumblr_inline_mlaxphJ5l01qz4rgp.gif

There you have my tale of woe.  Now here's the awesome thing about making ASMR videos:  as soon as people said that it helped them, all of the angst and frustration I had toward this video melted away.  The reception of a video always puts things in perspective.  If you helped one person sleep, relax, tingle, or smile,  you did your job.  I can't speak for everyone, but I know that many content creators (myself included) know what it's like to not be able to wind down and shut off---so when we succeed in aiding others in doing that, it feels pretty damn good.  Not even my agent of chaos eyebrow hair could ruin that feeling.  :P
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