From Rock to Opera to YouTube, the C/A is
a Multimedia Adventure. How do we do it?
Read on.
Since the arrival of Mela as the co-owner
of the Crystal Angel, multimedia has played
a major role in our success and our increase
in readership. Two of the most asked questions by our readers
who are interested in improving or creating
a website are:
How do you find that
music?
and
How do you create
the videos? While it is not really hard, it does take
quite a bit of time to find the right songs
and to make the pics for the Videos. I have
explained how both the Videos and Music are
created for the Crystal Angel Fashion and
Design Magazine below. The Music: I must admit, I do not know a lot about
music, but I know what I like, so I spend
countless hours searching for just the right
song to convey the feeling that each article
or story is trying to get across. Most of
my musical education came from listening
to cassettes and then CD's of my Dad and
most recently from my dear friend Eggy. I use ProjectPlaylist.com and I search for a word or theme which describes
the article I am doing. For example, I do
not know a lot about Jefferson Airplane (they
were a bit before my time) but I searched
for Love, Somebody to Love and other words
and listened to the songs. I decided that
the Jefferson Airplane song was the one that
best fit the story on that page and also
matched the graphics. I then check the list of songs on the computer
and if I do not have
the song, I download
it from EMusic.com. If that was all there was to it, it would
be a breeze, but
I still
need to do a few
more things. I then record the song using a program called
"Advanced Sound
Recorder 3.1"
making
sure the song is
in MP3 and then I
do a thing
to protect the song,
so I do not get arrested
for being a pirate
(arrggggghhhh - get
that
Parrot off my shoulder). If you are an audiophile, you will notice
little gaps (like a millisecond) here and
there in the songs. This is to make the song
not a good file to record without ruining
the ambiance of the story. After recording the song, I upload it to
my web site using
FTP and then I visit FlashFetish.com where I make a widget as can be seen at
the top of all our
pages. This further
protects
the song by making
a download nearly
impossible. Finally, I log into Amazon.com using the
password I was given by my friends who handle
all of Mela's and my business stuff and I
search for the CD cover and the link. I place
these at the top right of all the pages.
I would love to offer the songs for download
but to do that would make me break the law
and we all know that Angels do not break
the law. So there. smiles. We are working
on the ability to offer single song downloads
from Amazon.com in upcoming issues. The Videos: This is not as hard as the music, thanks
to a program I use called Swish 2.0. Swish
came on my computer and it allows me to drag
and drop pics and
effects and even edit music to fit the video. My first video was a short piece called Sanctuary, which I made for my Dad (Jargon) last February. It was a bit rough
and not all that great, now that I look back.
But it made me want to get better at it,
and over the past year we have released more
than 10 videos. I chose to have my videos in Flash, for two
reasons. First, the quality is so much better
than WMV. You can see the colors and the
movement is much more fluid than a WMV video.
The second reason is I am able to size the
Flash video to any size, which YouTube does
not allow. But YouTube does play a part. After finishing
and uploading the
video in Flash, I make
another copy in WMV
by using a converter.
I then upload the
video to the Crystal Angel YouTube page. I do this purely for marketing reasons
and always add a link from each YouTube Video
to the Flash Version on the Crystal Angel
Magazine site. The most popular Video to date is the "Like a Rock" video by Bob Seger which has enjoyed more than 7800 YouTube
views (and more than 9,000 Flash views) since
its debut in August 2007. So there you have it. The secret behind our
Music and Videos. On the next two pages you
will have a chance to view a selection of
Videos and enjoy our Music Player which includes
many of the songs we have brought to you
over the past year. We are working on offering individual song
downloads but am awaiting permission from
Amazon.com. We do ask, that if you like a
song, you visit the Artist page by clicking
on the CD cover at the top right of each
page. I hope you enjoy our hard work.
The best videos are not produced by big name
magazines like the
Crystal Angel,
but by independent
film makers like The First
Waya
Copyright 2007/2008 - TorLa Inc
This Site is an independent affiliate of
Morning Glory Industries
All Coding except where noted is owned by
TorLa or is used by permission
Telluride, Colorado 81435
Contact Us: CrystalAngelFashion@earthlink.net
Since the arrival of Mela as the co-owner
of the Crystal Angel, multimedia has played
a major role in our success and our increase
in readership. 
