Disney -- Big Entertainment, Bigger Rip-Off

Walt Disney World is a great family place for entertainment. It has good rides, provides a fun atmosphere, brings back memories of youth and is, perhaps, the biggest rip-off I have ever seen.

What happens when you go to Walt Disney World? You have fun, that's a given... but you also spend a lot of money. My wife and I purchased a five day "Park Hopper" pass, which means you can go to one or all of the Disney parks in one day, if you so desire. We never did that, but we did visit three of their parks.

Besides the tickets costing around $500 for the five day pass, and besides a hot dog and french fries costing $6.95, the incredible costs of international food at Epcot and the huge cost of souveniers (one cheaply-made T-shirt cost $30), the folks at Disney decided that since they provide parking, they should charge you for that, too.

I don't mind paying for parking. I believe that $5.00 per day would have been reasonable. They wanted $12.00 per day... or an additional $60 for those of us who chose to stay outside of the Disney resorts -- and those of us who did it this way were many.

I did some quick calculations and found that a family of four spending five days at the park, paying for tickets, meals, souveniers and snacks in the park, rental car and hotel would spend in excess of $2,000 for a five day vacation here. I think that is a bit much, and probably outside the budget of many families.

You know... the thing that bothered me most was not the prices inside the park or even the prices for the ticket, but that $12.00 parking charge. I go back far enough to remember when parking was free... now, they have found a new way to get more of your green into their pockets.

Okay, enough complaining. Of the parks we visited, I found Epcot to be the least entertaining and the most walking. Admittedly, this is a park that is more suited for adults (I heard more than one youngster complaining about having to be at this park rather than having fun at the Magic Kingdon, the water parks or one of the other fun-locations). I did go on several rides, but couldn't find the one I really wanted to try. Soaring was a ride that interested me, but I followed their maps and no matter how hard I tried, Icouldn't find it.

In any event, here I am standing in front of the dancing fountains with the geodesic dome in the background. You have to admit, there are a huge number of great photo ops in the Park. You just have to wait until you find a clear spot before you shoot -- and, depending on the day, that clear spot may never come.

Being a video guy I thought I would find Disney Hollywood Studios interesting, and there were parts that were. This picture is from the Indiana Jones presentation. As you can see I didn't shoot Indiana's stunt double, or the other actors and actions that the show contained, but I got, instead, pictures of the technical items that interested me.

This camera dolly and another item not pictured here, a rather large crane, were two things that I put on my wish list for the coming year. I won't get them, but I sure liked they way they worked. I had to see the show a second time because the first time through all I did was look at the equipment and how they did the special effects. The second time I watched it for the entertainment value, and it was done very well. I highly recommend it should any of you go there while it is still playing.

While Disney parks were interesting, I probably wouldn't go there again anytime in the near future. My favorite time was visiting the beach -- a one hour drive from Disney will land you on Alan Sheppard Beach in Cocoa Beach, Florida, which is right down the road from the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral.

The water was rough while we were there, and I freely admit I got "The Liver" beat out of me by the crashing waves. Red Flags were posted on the beaches indicating that there was a severe danger of rip tides, but I ignored them and went in anyway. I have to admit, the surf was really rough, though.

When not at Disney or the beach I was enjoying a couple of other favorite activities, like enjoying a good cigar on the veranda of the Condo, or having a drink with some good food at one of the local eateries (the picture on the right was taken at the Sail Fish Marina Restaurant on Singer Island, Palm Beach, Florida. Hey, good times, good drink, good food and a good smoke -- what more do you want on your vacation? No, wait a minute. Don't answer that! I probably don't want to know.

Welcome New Podcasting Class

Well, here we are in the fall of 2008, and a brand new podcasting class is about to get under way. To all of the students, I hope you enjoy your class this semester. You'll learn how to blog, audio and video podcast. Of course that also means you must learn some rudimentary audio and video editing, and you're not going to get those easy programs like iVideo and iTunes or garage band, but you're going to use Photoshop, Final Cut Pro for video editing and Soundtrack Pro for audio editing. Most importantly, though, lets have some fun this semester.

Audio Site: My Podcast

Thanks to Seth, there is a new site where you can post audio. It's mypodcast.com, and while it is a rather slow site, and you MUST use their recorder to get your MP3 audio into the correct format for them, it is definitely a place where you can post your own audios. Check out my audios uploaded there: http://ronsaudio.mypodcast.com/

Importance of Music in Video

How important is music to your video production? Take a look at the piece in the video window above. It is taken from our Pennsylvania Adventures program which aired in the 90s. The first sequence is an action sequence with an inappropriate audio track, and the second is with its original track. You will see the dramatic difference in the overeall impact of the production. The lesson to be learned here -- your audio track can make a good video great, and can make a great video lousey! Do not overlook the importance of audio in your video production.

Creating Music for you Video Production

In the past if you wanted to create music for your video production you needed huge multi-track studios and, depending on the type of sound you were looking for, up to an orchestra-full of musicians. Today you can do most of it right at home on your computer, or, if you have some musical talent, on a midi system tied in to your computer.

Take a listen to these two examples. The first one (on the left) is the Pennsylvania Adventures theme, which was written by Jeff Grunden and used on our syndicated Pennsylvania Adventures: Penn’s Woods & Cities television show that aired in the 90s. A computer wasn’t used here, but a midi system was. One musician was used for all of the parts. There were a total of 12 separate musical tracks, played on a Yamaha keyboard, recorded into a midi recorder, and then played back through a tone generator. It was opening and background music for the show and the neatest part about it is we could change the melody line’s instrumentation whenever we wanted to. For example, we would use brass when we did war-related items, a fife for colonial stories, harmonica for country stories, etc. Give it a listen and remember, there was only one musician who played all of the parts for the song.

The next piece (on the right) is from a Children’s program, Professor Migooch’s Now You Know Video Show. The music was composed and recorded by Mike Mancini, and he used a computer. So, you are going to hear the instrumentation produced by a computer, and we simply added a microphone for the vocals.

The point of this whole thing is, you don’t need a full orchestra to use music in your video piece. You can do it yourself at home on your computer.

A New Video Series

A new series I'm going to produce through my company, SpinelliMedia, is "The World of the Unbelievable," which I have written produced, directed and, although not included here, I host the series as well. The sequence you see above is an edited version of the open, and then a brief moment from the interior of the show. It had to be added way down from the original to get it into the maximum permissible megabytes for blogger. The title of this particular show is "Phil," and is the story of an old woman who sees her son just before she, too, crosses over to the other side. She didn't know, however, that her son had died a couple of months prior to the incident portrayed here. While the World of the Unbelievable is made up of many stories that are strictly fictional in nature, this particular story is based on a true incident -- one that occurred as my grandmother died. I am planning to produce four or five stories in total and, hopefully, air them prior to Halloween, 2008. Note to the video blogging class who will see this post, I am going to include a link to my company web site, but it is under construction right now. The old web site is still up, but is filled with things that do not work, some of the wall paper is now down and there are a lot of other problems with it. When the new site is up you will see some additional videos there. The link is: http://www.spinellimedia.com, and it should be up within a week of this posts' date.

New Television Series

While in Maine this year I decided that I would make a new television series entitled "In Search of the Ultimate Lobster." The idea came while tearing apart one of the delicious denizens in a quaint little restaurant outside of Bar Harbor. Then I decided to write and produce a series entitled "In Search of the Ultimate Clam Chowder," which would be either a followup series to the one about the lobster or one to run simultaneously. Then I decided I would probably get entirely too fat -- even more so than now -- so I decided against the series. I'm fortunate in that I can come up with the idea for a new series, but I can also produce and direct the series, too. I not only wanted to write, produce and direct the lobster and chowder series, but wanted to star in them too. No one would watch it, but I'd be very, very happy eating my way through New England.