YouTube videos

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out how to make videos to revive the Charley Project’s YouTube channel, which belongs to Sean Munger but hasn’t been updated in years. I have a microphone and some film-making software. For that matter, I’ve got a video camera too, but I don’t want to use that. If I sit in front of the camera, well, obviously they will see me and be distracted from the subject at hand, namely the missing person in particular. The video is not supposed to be about me.

I actually like Sean’s videos quite a bit. They’re not complicated and get their point across. I’d like to make some like them. It seems like it would be just a matter of making the narration and aligning it with photos of the missing person. You’d think this would be very easy — they’re so simple, and obviously people considerably less intelligent than me have made YouTube videos — but I’m struggling with it.

It might be like the hair-braiding thing, which I was hopeless at but kept trying for weeks until it suddenly clicked and now I can make like eight different kinds of braids. That’s what I’m hoping anyway.

Any tips would be appreciated.

Two Smithsonian Magazine articles of note

There are two Smithsonian Magazine articles — one from a few days ago, one from 2013 — that may be of some interest to my readers.

The older one is about a Russian family of four that fled into the taiga to escape Communist persecution and wound up staying there, completely isolated from the rest of mankind, for 40-odd years. The parents had two additional children during this time period. Some geologists discovered them in the 1970s. Long story short, the mother had died by then, three of the four children died relatively soon after their discovery, the father lived into the 1980s, and the single remaining daughter returned to the taiga. I’m not sure if she is still alive, but she would be 72 now if she is. There is a book about the case.

The other is about how melting glaciers are exposing artifacts and dead bodies which were previously trapped in the ice. Some of the bodies are ancient, hundreds or thousands of years old, but others are relatively recent. One find, for example, dates from 1952.

Select It Sunday: Bryce Laspisa

This week’s person, chosen by Julie, is Bryce David Laspisa. The 19-year-old Sierra College student was driving from Castaic, California to visit his family in Laguna Niguel. The journey isn’t that long, a little less than a hundred miles, but Bryce never made it. This was in 2013.

The family has a Facebook page about his disappearance. He’s missing under strange circumstances. But he would stand out in a crowd: he’s got blazing red hair and a distinctive tattoo on his arm.