Recently we took a trip to Twycross zoo, in Leicestershire. We'd never been to Twycross before, but it's a zoo that I had heard about a lot as a child, it was often mentioned on the likes of Newsround and Blue Peter back in the eighties, so it's a zoo with a lot of history behind it, and one that I've always wanted to visit.
Our visit was in mid-march, before the completion of the new 'Himalaya' visitors centre, and before the completion of the Elephant Walkway. Despite all the construction going on around us, we had a very enjoyable day, and there was still lots of animals to see and enjoy. The weather was quite cold and windy, so the all the bigger apes just wanted to lie around inside and sleep, which was a bit of a shame. But we did get to see a lot of the smaller monkeys and gibbons, along with assorted other animals.
I took at lot of photos while there, along with quite a bit of video footage, feel free to check out my Twycross Zoo set on flickr, and my video on youtube.
I posted up my first YouTube video just recently, and while I've created some videos in the past this is the first public one, which meant I had one additional thing to consider, namely I had to find some suitable music that fit the video, but most importantly I was allowed to use for "Free".
A quick search on the net for 'Free Music' will bring up a lot of results, but the vast majority tend to be "Royalty Free" music, rather than really "Free". I understand that people want to be paid for their work, that's only natural, but these days with the amount of internet videos knocking around I figured there must be some sources of really free music and sound effects.
Eventually I came across this site, Incompetech, which has a large library of music, covering many different genres, and all created by one person, Kevin MacLeod. All the music is covered by a CC license, and he's quite happy for people to use it as long as he gets credit for his work.
For this particular video, I also needed some sound effects, and again I found a lot of 'Royalty Free' sites, but eventually I discovered FreeSounds. This site also has a large and varied library of sounds, again covered by CC licenses, I haven't had a chance to fully look through the site, but I did find the sounds I needed pretty quickly.
I'm sure I'll be using both of these sites again in future video projects.
Finally, as this is a post about my experiences in creating my first YouTube video, I might as well link to it, the video itself is nothing special, and will probably only be of interest to those that know the person starring in it. But nevertheless, here it is: BigFoot Revealed.
Of course the fact that I'm using a piece of copyrighted film footage at the beginning of the video isn't lost on me.. In my defense, it's fairly short, and poor quality.. :)
