I just finished up my first official broadcast on Ustream.tv. Because my SightFlex hadn’t arrived yet, I had to build my own iSight stand from an old gooseneck lamp which made drawing uncomfortable. The “lamp” was in my face, its base took up most of the desk space along with my PowerBook which left me no choice but to use a smaller sketchbook than I had planned.
When I had everything in place, I went to Ustream.tv and logged into my account to start my show. Once I was in, I was able to further adjust my webcam to the optimal position so all that my audience would see is just my sketchbook. Well… mostly.
Boy does my back hurt.
Before I started broadcasting, I loaded up Twitter and Facbook. On Twitter, I wrote that I was now broadcasting and updated my status on Facebook with pretty much the same info.
After a few technical difficulty (my fault), I was on the air and had 2 viewers! Unfortunately, I never found out who they were. Actually, throughout my broadcast, I always had 1. A 2nd would pop in and out.
I noticed, though, that everytime I added a new message about my show on Twitter, I’d get a 2nd viewer.
My observation is, someone on Twitter saw my post and clicked on the tinyurl directly to my show and for whatever reason, popped back out.
I have no idea if it was because Ustream was slow to load (I don’t know if it was), what I was drawing wasn’t interesting, what I was drawing wasn’t viewable, or by astonishing coincidence, those 2nd viewers got abducted by aliens.
That other viewer who was always watching turned out to be me. I realized that because I also had the chat window open, Ustream counted me as a viewer.
And here I was a bit nervous about what I was drawing. It was like having someone watch over my shoulder.
So what I learned from the hour was:
1. Yes, yes, content is king. Make sure what I draw is suspenseful. I’ll have to plan ahead interesting drawings.
2. Commercial radio is asobnoxious as ever. I rarely listen to it except for CBC Radio and Radio-Canada but I needed some background music.
Usually on Friday nights Radio-Canada (Espace Musique) plays cool house music but tonight it didn’t. I had to resort to CHUM-FM and 103.5. Ew. Oh those commercials are baaaaad.
3. Get an ergonomic desk.
4. Wait for a SightFlex to come in!
I began by working on the drawings for the character profiles
that I will feature on superspud.com.
I couldn’t really concentrate so I started doodling at random.
I worked on 2 more dawings, first in pencil then colouring in with an orange gel pen
Followed by an idea of how to bring some suspense into my show. too bad the only markers I had within reach were the Crayola sketching markers. They tend to show up really dark. I decided to record this and had no idea I was already recording for 17 minutes. I haven’t figured out how to delete it.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why WordPress isn’t showing my embedded video. I embed the code and it changes it t “ibed” whatever that is. So here is a boring text link.
Thanks WordPress!
[tags]Sketchy Adventures, ustream.tv, ustream, illustration[/tags]