Glen Allan | Video Archive

Here You’ll find all of the video projects I’ve made over the years. For the most part they have been integrated into Keynote presentations to take advantage of adding context, plus with the oldest being much smaller videos, containing them made sense.

The page is broken into sections with descriptions & context for each. Go with me on a journey through my exploration in video editing and all of the other arts that are needed to accomplish it!

The sections are not chronological, instead broken into themes and styles that categorize most effectively.

Gallery of Works | 1990’s - 2000’s

When putting together my portfolio, I had a lot of old straggler videos from three decades of work, and instead of having them all be really small videos that are from the 90s through the 2000s that, at full size, are just not going to be the best quality, I decided to create an entire presentation for every one of them and put it all into this one video.

This presentation was created using a combination of Keynote, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, ocenaudio, QuickTime. I designed this whole setup for context and the story behind each of these pieces of video work. This is your introduction, one of my most recent and one of the most complicated and in-depth video editing projects I've ever done.

This video is the culmination of every skill I’ve built in every creative discipline I’ve put time to. It sits first on this page because of the timeline of the videos being presented within it. However, it is the most recent project in real world time.

Glen Allan | Gallery of Works | 1990's - 2010's

Pan’s Chaos

Here is my first attempt to seriously push Keynote hard and discover what it was really capable of. Understanding how to chain animation actions together opened up a world of possibilities, including building elements in and out.

With this I seriously leveled up my game in both timing and flow, but also how efficiently one can play with animation options without eating production time.

The Chaos System

These are all keynote projects specifically connected to the Chaos System. A number of advanced animation and motion graphics setups, plus a fun one at the end.

These represent a much more matured skillset and understanding of chaining and timing animations.

The Chaos System | Signal Flowchart Omega

GPT 0Ω (Zero-Omega)

GPT-0Ω is a custom GPT that I've built as a tool to help people build custom GPTs. The design of the logo is reflective of the logo for The Chaos System and for this website because I borrowed the idea from it. I combined a zero character with an omega symbol and the circuitry as well with the understanding of starting at the beginning, moving to the end. Many would think of that as alpha and omega, but I like the idea of using a different turn of phrase.

The GPT itself is still under development. I'm working on building out its core understanding of how to help people build GPTs, but it's looking to be quite a powerful helper for when you want your own custom GPT.

BASSBOSS

I used to work for a company called BASSBOSS. At one point, on my own time, I was getting to know Keynote. I had heard somewhere that it had a pretty big potential to be useful for things like motion graphics, but without the same kind of deep tedium and learning curve required to deal with programs such as Motion or After Effects. I took the opportunity to work with some of the data that I had regarding subwoofers at BASSBOSS, and put together a presentation using the data.

With this, the first video in this section, I learned a lot about how to work Keynote, how to time things, how to draw attention to certain bits of information, how to affect the flow of the information to make it stay engaging, keep the person interested, not bored, and move them through a relatively decent amount of information without it being overwhelming. Now, obviously, these text animations come in faster than anyone could fully comprehend without pausing the video, but it was more a proof of concept than it was designed to be a final product.

The next three videos are me also exercising an ability that I have to translate technical information into visual information in order to make it much more understandable to people who are at the lay level. The company founder wasn't always the best at communicating the concepts that he had as effectively as desired with words alone, and the assistance of visuals, I think, really lent a lot of value to the presentations. This technical series helped immensely to educate both customers and the curious public regarding BASSBOSS subs, and how these technologies work industrywide in general.

The last two videos in this section were designed as slide decks to be presented to people such as Guitar Center, Musician's Friend, & Sweetwater, as BASSBOSS was seeking to expand its retail presence with the assistance of other larger companies who had the kind of reach we were looking for to get our products out into the greater audio community. These are two variations with slight differences designed to impress upon these industry leaders in the audio world of the value proposition that BASSBOSS has and how it approaches things from a technical level and the real-world capabilities that are simply unmatched in the industry otherwise. I'm pretty sure that these presentations made a major impact and moved BASSBOSS into a much better position that it has remained in since.

BASSBOSS | How to Best Distribute Your Equipment Load on A 20 Amp Circuit

BASSBOSS | Power Requirements For Your BASSBOSS System

BASSBOSS | Subs and Tops for A 20 Amp Circuit

BlackMagic ATEM

The content in these playlists are created using the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO. Using a piece of software on the iPad, an app called MixEffect, written by the awesome developer Adam Tao. What I've learned using Keynote through a number of previous projects I realized I could create transition overlays for super source videos for live video production.

Using a combination of different bits of hardware including a Blackmagic hyperdeck and a couple of Raspberry Pis, along with some software on the Pis called PlayoutBee, which made the Raspberry Pis appear to be a hyperdeck to the ATEM using MixEffect and an Elgato Stream Deck. I was able to build and edit macros that were controlling keynote animations as video overlays or transitions between the in and out points of video sources.

On the hyperdeck, it uses a dual HDMI key and fill channel approach, which takes up two HDMI ports on the ATEM. On the Raspberry Pi, it uses a luma channel and only takes up one. I think you'll see that in both cases, the result is very nice. This was my first attempt at this, and I haven't, due to life, had a chance to get back to developing the process more, but I still have all the equipment and I do plan on fully developing this, and in fact using it for my own YouTube channel.

The second video is an example of how to take a bunch of keynote animations and kind of push them in different directions that you wouldn't normally think of when you're creating presentations to give you very interesting ways of bringing video in and out of a production that you're doing. It's all being done on a Raspberry Pi with a few elements from the hyperdeck as well. And again, this is all triggered using a Stream Deck and MixEffect using an iPad to control the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO. It's a powerful combination of things, and I think an extremely professional-looking approach. And again, I look very forward to developing everything I understand about this in the future much further than I have.

One of the key elements that is, I think, underappreciated about what you can accomplish when you bring the right tools together, that you can create, which on the back end is actually a very complicated and technical feat of networking and multi-device communication, and yet this can be put in the hands of pretty much literally anyone with one stream deck and nothing else, and they will have full control over super source transitions, video inputs, lighting, the whole show, just by pushing buttons. That's exactly the kind of system I enjoy building and figuring out.

ATEM SuperSource MixEffect Macro Overlay Demo

Facebook Marketplace

My life over the last three or four years has had a lot of serious downs and a lot of struggles, and so I've needed to sell some equipment. I was using Facebook Marketplace to do this, and I figured, you know, in order to draw some attention, I might as well make my videos using Keynote and information about those products. So I put together this information deck, whatever you want to call it, regarding the Otherworld Computing ThunderBay Flex 8 and two different versions of it in order to see if I could uh capture some attention.

In reality, people on Facebook Marketplace don't expect to see polished videos of this sort that look like they were professionally designed by a agency or something. You'll even see in one of them, I add in a little bit saying that I'm just a normal person. But I thought it made sense to show these. I have done it for some other pieces of equipment that I sold, but I kept those ones more rudimentary as part of the experiment to see what would actually grab attention and what wouldn't. And these are the ones that I thought were worthy of putting up as a part of my portfolio and collection.

OWC ThunderBay Flex | FB Marketplace Listing - Wide

OWC ThunderBay Flex | FB Marketplace Listing - 2 Variations | Square

Experimental Videos

Some of my videos are more experimental than others, and these all fit into that category. These were opportunities I found to create videos that looped for an entire hour and put them up on YouTube. Everything in these has original audio. Most of it is static and highly grating unless you're interested in altered states, which can be achieved through long-term staring at things like white noise (static), and listening to static. It can take you into what are effectively psychedelic states.

The other non-static-based videos in this were created in Logic using Apple loops. One, a more basic set of loops that runs for an hour, and another was some of the most favorite music I have madem, with a little Easter egg hidden in the middle of the hour on one of them.

Maybe take a cursory look at them. You're certainly not obligated to watch the entire hour or listen to the entire hour of any of these, but I wanted to present them because I am an experimenter and I like publishing strange things, as you may have noticed from the first video presented on this webpage.

Operation Noise Toaster

Operation Noise Toaster was a monthly noise-based / experimental sound event put on by me and a few others running the audio system called The Chaos System, a system which I had acquired before I worked at BASSBOSS, from them (it likely helped lead to me working for them later).

It consists of four ZV18 subwoofers that are capable of going down to 23 hertz, 21 hertz in pairs. At one show, we even recorded levels of 150 decibels at which I believe was a very low frequency.

Since this show was about experimentation by definition, I decided to develop an entire system and technique for editing the shows and the performances, in effect becoming a part of the post-production in more than just simply a presentational way. Everything was done on an iPad using Lumafusion and Affinity Designer. I only had one camera, which was my iPhone. And for most of the shows, it was static. And in order to bring movement into the videos, I learned and progressed in my knowledge of how to use luma and chroma keying plus keyframes and replication of the video track, along with blending effects to create highly dynamic and layered, very effective videos that, at least in my opinion, I think lent themselves very well to the genre and what we were trying to produce.

The event was very community-driven and focused. Everything was based on donations and volunteerism. I never had an interest in profit. I wanted to be able to bring to the local community a sound system that you generally never have access to unless you're a well known band playing in a stadium or a very expensive club, so they could hear themselves at the highest quality levels possible with the lowest frequencies and highest fidelity. This is a result of that experiment. You'll see as you move through the videos and through the shows. how the editing gets progressively more interesting and technically proficient, partly due to, at some point I decided to buy a camera head for a tripod to mount to where I was recording all of the sound and follow artists if they were moving to bring more dynamism to the videos, but also just more of a discovery of how moving lights added a lot to where you could chroma and luma key things to separate out different affected layers to create the outcome you were looking for. It's a pretty interesting process and a pretty interesting result.

Something else to point out as well, the audio in these videos is not simply line-level outs coming from the different instruments that the artists were playing. A part of the philosophy that I built in building the system was to grab a stereo mic from Røde, the NT4, which was capable of withstanding 140dB of sound pressure, and blending in the live sound captured from those speakers into the audio that was then put into these videos. I think it brings a very different feel and some sense of what it was like to actually be at these shows.

The experience is intense. Your eyeballs vibrate. Your voice modulates. The air feels like it's physical, like a liquid you're existing in. The bass knocks out ceiling tiles. At many venues, you will inevitably have the cops called while car alarms a block away are going off. It was a bit difficult to find venues where the system could really be put to its full potential. There's just something unbelievably special about how BASSBOSS builds subs. And that's not to say the high end from their systems is not that great. No, it's also incredibly amazing.

So take a watch and take a listen. Headphones are best unless you happen to have a very nice sound system with a big subwoofer. I hope I did a good job of representing what these artists and performers were trying to convey using an unbelievably good system and some outside-of-the-box editing paradigms.

Operation Noise Toaster 18 | Full Show - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 19 | Full Show - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 20 | Full Show - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 21 | Full Show - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 22 | Full Show - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 18 | Act 02 Majestic Dubs - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 19 | Act 04 Majestic Dubs & Ed Skymall - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 20 | Act 02 Octaveplex - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 20 | Act 03 Solypsis - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 20 | Act 05 Ed Skymall - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 21 | Act 01 Kawaii Robot Shark - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 21 | Act 02 Clown Doll vs Parker Weston - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 21 | Act 03 Casual Alien - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 21 | Act 05 Jam on Toast - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 22 | Act 02 Anthony Obr - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 22 | Act 03 ifandonlyif - 4K

Operation Noise Toaster 22 | Act 04 Eons - 4K

Misc

For this section, we're veering into slightly different territory. The first video does still take advantage of Keynote as the way to present the information. It was put together for one of the most important people in my life to help her out with a Kickstarter campaign for her amazing jewelry. The original video had a limitation of, I believe, a minute, so it was kind of rushed. So I retimed the entire thing, and it's now three and a half minutes long, a little bit better.

The second video is a documenting of the end of an era at the arts collective, The Firehouse that I lived at in downtown Phoenix, where we had to get rid of the shopping cart pirate ship, literally a pirate ship made out of shopping carts collected from one of the yearly events called the Idiotarod, which is a drunken shopping cart journey throughout downtown while collecting different trinkets and... Accomplishing tasks. What this shows is the process of removing the pirate ship from the firehouse property and putting it onto a lot in the middle of the city with some interesting edits. A simple little video, but I thought it fun to add on to show part of my process.

And the final one is actually pretty recent. It just had nowhere else to go. This, along with what you've already heard, is an example of me learning how to take sound effects and attach them to every single moment in a keynote presentation to give the movement more of a feel of dynamism. The pinnacle of this was achieved in the very first video that you saw and showed up in a couple of other videos throughout this process as well.

Let's call this section a nice little palate cleanser and a bit of fun.

Comedy Series

This final section shows two different series that I was a part of creating back in the early aughts. These were early days for me using newer-ish video editing and audio editing software. I believe these were made using iMovie and Garage Band, which was super easy, but did have some limitations, although the transition effects were quite nice (in respect to iMovie). At this point, I already did have extensive understanding of the whole Adobe suite, so graphic design was no problem for me there. The rest of it is understanding, as always, how to edit, timing, and, you know, sound effects, music, etc.

All music in these, as far as I know, was created in GarageBand, my favorite of which in the episode of Doc Sterno called 'Fear Itself' is a song called "Don't Fear the Chihuahua', an original written and sung by yours truly. Doc Sterno was a play on the advice column trope, an irreverent comedic take written by Pete Patrisko, partnering with me as the audio and video editor. Both of us took part in set production and location and all that fun stuff. At the time, actually, the New Times of Phoenix gave my podcast a best of for best vidcast of the year.

The other video called Time Morons was four of us, again, Pete Patrisco, writing, puppeteering, doing set design and voiceovers and voices. Next is the brother and sister combo of Neil and Dena Johnson, both doing puppeteering and voices and set design and production. Finishing up is me doing exclusively post-production, audio and video editing. Plus this also was on the same podcast network. It is a bizarre story of time travel and amputation. Again, irreverent, comedic, and absurd.

These are a throwback, and I'm putting them at the end to kind of cap off a journey through everything that I've done with video and all of the different skills necessary to bring video. So, I hope you've enjoyed this section of the website. Please check out the other parts.