Day 1: "Born This Way" by Lady Gaga

What better way to start this off than with a Lady Gaga anthem? All hail Mother Monster! For this video I took inspiration from the HBO commercial for Gaga's concert, as well as her Grammy performance. It's my own little arrangement.

So Day 1 was off to a rocky start.  Despite battling a fever, stomach bug, and possibly broken toe (?!), I forged ahead with making this video. The show must go on! That's part of this process.  When you have a gig, it doesn't matter if you're sick (usually). You perform. And now I have a nightly gig.

Another part of this process is going to be figuring out the logistics of recording videos. ...I am not good at this.  So much goes into it, including camera placement, lighting, sound quality, etc.  I spent about an hour running around my apartment with my laptop just trying to figure out where I could put it down that would be the right height for recording.  Several stacked cardboard boxes later...I was in business.  Lighting I decided I couldn't be bothered with today.  For sound, I wanted to use an external microphone. However, the mic needed to rest on a tabletop and there was not one to be had at the level I needed, so you can see the mic and pop filter bopping along with me as I attempt to hold it and sing at the same time. Note to self: buy mic stand to suspend mic from. Buy a new mic if this one doesn't work with a stand.

My next issue was the audio and video. They seem to be lined up at the beginning, but then they gradually drift apart.  I recorded this in one take, audio and video at the same time...I guess there was a battle for memory on my computer and my mic won. I guess that's the more important piece, but it makes the video look bad, and I don't know how to fix it. And speaking of video not looking great, the video looked one way when I played it with my webcam's software, and then had a completely different brightness and contrast when I played it in Windows Media Player, which is what the uploaded video would look like, I'd assume. I can't win.  But hey, I have 99 more days to get it right. (Update: After tweaking the bitrate for audio and video and playing with brightness/contrast it looks slightly better than it did before. Maybe there's hope!)

The redeeming part of this process came when I uploaded the video to YouTube.  Before I put any information about the song down, it came up with suggested tags. Two of these were "diva" and "african american." YouTube, this could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship...<3

Please send me your comments not just on the singing, but tips on how to make these videos work! I'm definitely not an A/V expert and can use all the help I can get!!! (And keep the song requests coming!) Thanks for watching!