Video Vednesday: Cruise Song!

For NaBloPoMo Day 4, I decided to try my first Video Vednesday, one of many new themes I introduced on NaBloPoMo Day 2. Rather than take something from the web, I wanted to see how quickly I could create my own video, and I decided on a completely ridiculous, silly little thing that Alex and I and our best friends Ginohn (Gina Mai Denn and John Cooper) do: our Cruise Song! It’s the special little song that we sing whenever we get excited about JoCo Cruise.

In case you’re not familiar, JoCo Cruise is a giant nerd convention on a boat, hosted by internet superstar Jonathan Coulton, along with comedy musicians Paul and Storm. The first cruise was in 2011, and we started singing this song then… Actually, it started before then, as a song for going to amusement parks (King’s Dominion, Six Flags, Disney, etc), but instead of “we’re going on a cruise,” the original lyrics were, “We’re gonna go on rides.” So it was easily adjusted for the first cruise, and now we sing it for all subsequent cruises (JoCo or otherwise). 🙂

I’ve mentioned JoCo Cruise on this blog here and there, but I haven’t said a lot about it yet because I have a story about it that I’ve been trying to publish for a while now. It’s taken various forms over the years, and the most recent incarnation was sent to an essay contest, so I’m sort of holding off with doing anything more with it until I hear more about that. But the short version of that story is, we went on the cruise the very first year and it completely changed our lives—resulting in us moving to California to restart our careers. We’ve gone to four of the past five JoCo Cruises and will be on the sixth one in February.

There’s a Facebook group for the cruise (of course there is), and someone else mentioned that they’ve been singing a little song to themselves in anticipation, so of course I told them about our song. But since you can’t get the sense of a song (tempo, melody, mood, etc) just from seeing the lyrics written out on social media, I thought it would be fun to record us actually singing the song.

And doing our little dance, apparently!

It also just didn’t seem the same without Gina singing it with us. I was hoping her husband John could join in too, but he was at work. I should clarify that Gina lives in Maryland (where we used to live), and we’re in Los Angeles, but through the magic of modern technology (particularly Facetime), we’re able to do this together. We’re living in The Future!!

I also decided to do this video as a learning tool. I love learning new skills, so why not. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it (I should probably also mention that the idea struck me at about 2:00 this morning), but I eventually wrapped my head around it, and used trusty old Google to help figure it out. It was surprisingly easy.

I think most computers all come with built-in cameras nowadays (my Mac certainly does), and if you open up QuickTime, you can easily choose New Movie Recording, or New Screen Recording from the File menu. I did both of those, so that my picture would appear on the Movie Recording, but I could still record the entire screen. Then I opened FaceTime and called Gina, and then recorded the session using the New Screen recording.

I’m kind of amazed it worked.

We’re also lucky that FaceTime didn’t drop the call during this whole thing, because almost as soon as we finished singing, it pooped out. I even called Gina back and it dropped the call again. Ah well. But we got what we needed, so that’s good.

It’s obviously not the most amazing video in the world (Gina says she wasn’t ready for video, but she’s gorgeous all the time anyway), and there was a small delay between our speaking and what Gina heard, so we couldn’t quite sing together. But we did our best—and even successfully modulated the second time through! You can get the sense of the song, I think, and hopefully it’s at least good for a laugh.

I hope you enjoy this first Video Vednesday!

So how do you like our silly song and dance? Do you make up any of your own songs? Are you going on JoCo Cruise? Share in the comments!