Diary of Assembling a Livestream Part 2
Fast and Furious #47 happened! I would say the stream went fairly smoothly and you can watch the archive of it here.
The Good
All of the performances had captions (more on them later) including the one live performance which I thought looked and sounded quite decent!
The Bad
It seemed that at most there was about 15 people watching, which considering there were 9 artists a part of the stream makes me a little sad.
The Ugly
I'm not happy with how the transitions felt. Maybe there should have been a host person talking in between each act, but I should have made certain by watching each ending and figuring out when and which transition (e.g. swipe, burst, fade) would work best.
Putting it together
OBS was my streaming engine! The pre-show imagery was via Olivia Jack's Hydra, and David Lawson's live performance was via OBS Ninja.
Prefaces to the performance
A Land Acknowledgment
Combining some language from The Tank and other land acknowledgments I've seen, I put together some text I felt was appropriate and in my own voice as the person in my position. I myself and F&F don't have a formal relationship with any indigenous-led organizations, but I have signed Groundwater Arts' Divest to Invest pledge.
I would really like to figure out what the actions are that go with an acknowledgment, in the scope of this show.
Content Warning
A content warning felt essential, and I kept in mind what I am accustomed to seeing for movies and TV and video games to give the audience a sense of what is to come. I've seen on social media and in other streams notes about flashing lights and loud noises, so I added notes about that.
Captions
It felt critically important to have captions for this whole stream, even if it meant I had to manually set it up for each video. I knew not everyone submitting would know how to add captions...some might only know how to record themselves talking on their phone. I sent this essay since I though it would ground the urgency, and I offered to help.
For David Lawson's live performance, I put the text in a TextEdit doc, added a black highlight and set the text to be white, added a cropped window capture in OBS, and scrolled through his script as he spoke live. I think it worked OK.
How I made Kev's imperfect captions from the script
- Upload video to YouTube, make private
- Go to subtitles section of YouTube
- Click "add captions"
- Upload the transcript and select "sync timings"
- YouTube will then sync the text to the video, you can edit it to be better in YouTube or
- You can download an SRT file you can use in OBS or
- Use this website HappyScribe to "burn in" the captions to the video
In the future I'll be more clear with artists about the amount of work that goes into captions and I need to find clear guidelines on making good captions.
Assembling the next F&F
This show was programmed by emailing the ~80 people from a list I was given and inviting anyone to produce, that filled the 9 slots. I would like for the next edition to reach out to a few new artists, and find some comfortable place between these two poles:
passive, open curation <><><><><><><><><> active, 100% selective
Soliciting your feedback!
Would love any thoughts on any of this! The next F&F will be on May 4th!