I can't believe I'm pretty much caught up on my O Bar video queue save for the last Saturday's Valentine's Day event. I fully intend to clear that queue before the next time we go to O Bar so I can make minor tweaks to my upload process - primarily adding the videos to the playlist at point of upload (even while the video is private) instead of waiting for when I actually edit them. This is a small change but it means one less thing to update when I sit down to edit, so it could be a good thing. Or it might mess up my YouTube playlist since a bunch of private videos will get linked before I make them public - I'll see how things go once it's time for a new batch. But that'll only happen once I get the current batch bagged, tagged, and processed, as it were.
In our early O Bar days, I'd only take a few photos of different numbers and then call it a night. But when the queens started thanking me for taking photos and showing them what they looked like on stage, things started to progress from there. For a time, I tried taking video clips with my point-and-shoot camera, but I was severely limited by storage capacity at the time or worse - battery life. So sometimes there'd be clips and sometimes I'd save up battery life to record a full number...and then possibly not have enough battery life for the end of the night.
It wasn't until I shifted to flagship phone models that I began to be able to take videos of more than one performance in the night alongside my many, many photos. This began the novelty of uploading things to YouTube and slowly building the channel. I was still limited by storage capacity and battery life initially - power banks weren't quite as common then. But it would break my heart when queens would ask if I had recorded a particular number and it would turn out that I hadn't.
Fast-forward to today and I now record every single performance during an O Bar night. I never want to have to deal with the performers finding out that I hadn't recorded a number they did or just missing out on a great number just because I didn't have my camera up. I still take a thousand or so photos while the videos are recording and I make sure that I have enough space on my phone to capture everything. All that, and a fully-charged power bank to keep my phone alive throughout the night. Otherwise, I wouldn't make it past the first set without my phone dying on me.
The average O Bar night has over 20 performances while event nights have more like 30 numbers. They can be anywhere from 2 minutes long to maybe 15 for larger productions or more complicated medleys. How I manage to keep my arm up during the whole show is a bit of a mystery to me as well. Maybe it's a combination of practice, yoga, and sheer stubbornness commitment to our O Bar family. That and my tendency to still take over a thousand photos in a night - but as high as 3- to 5-thousand during big event nights.
More than one friend has suggested that I get a gimbal for my phone to make my filming efforts "easier", but I don't think it will. For one, I'm very dynamic with my zoom changes since I'm constantly trying to get everyone in frame but focusing when it's just one performer on stage. I don't think I'd benefit from any sort of auto-tracking feature since I want to be able to respond quickly when the focus shifts on stage between different performers and not just one. Plus there's how I'm also taking a thousand or so photos during the video recording. I have a very particular use case, I guess. I haven't even been able to make good use of the monopod I got for shooting because it still felt weird to try to shoot around it.
But enough of that for now. I wanna get started on those videos!
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