The Blue Angel Statue

EVERY MONTH in Santa Barbara we have a thing called “First Thursday.”  During the evening of the first Thursday of the month, all of the art galleries stay open, plus some bars, restaurants, museums and government buildings have art displays.  Usually, each place has free snacks and some have free wine or wine you have to pay for.  One time, there was a lot of free wine and after a while I realized that I should not operate a motor vehicle in my condition.  I got a large fries at McDonald’s and walked around for an hour and a half.  Then I drove home on side streets to be extra safe.  A week later, I found myself still thinking about the blue angel statue that I had seen.  After a week, it could not be the alcohol talking, so I drove to the art gallery and bought the statue.

The Trailer

If you think the trailer looks amateurish, you’d be correct.  I made the trailer and have never done anything like that before.  I thought it would be a “fun” project.  It was fun and painful.  The song was made using SUNO.  The still images were made using ChatGPT.  For the video clips I used Veo 3.1.  After watching many YouTube videos and talking with Siri and Claude, I finally discovered that it was impossible for a normal person to use Veo 3.1 except by telling Google Flow that you wanted to use it.  I discovered many little things that you had to do – too many to recount here – and each video clip took between 5 and 10 tries before I would give up and decide it was good enough.  None of the video clips look like I had initially envisioned.  None.  That would be impossible using these tools.  Plus, objects would change their appearance or appear or disappear for no reason during the videos.  And the 8 second videos are a million times easier than the 16 second videos.  Sigh!  I may go back and fix little things.  In a short period of time, the technology will probably advance enough that you simply let your computer read your book and it’ll make a better trailer than you could ever do.

The Santa Barbara County Courthouse

I am a docent at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse.  Tripadvisor has declared that it is the most beautiful building in California.  They searched for the word “beautiful” in their reviews; counted them up and we had the most “beautiful”s in California.  Notre Dame in Paris and Sagrade Familia in Barcelona had more “beautiful”s, but more people go to those cities.  So, is it really fair?