Castpost is a new service that hosts audio and video files for use with blogs and other web sites. It is in alpha testing now, and is free during testing. Better yet, alpha testers get a free one year subscription once the site goes live. Run, don’t walk, over there and sign up for a free (for now) account.

I just signed up tonight and am beginning to put the site through its paces. I uploaded some very old video I renamed 3 Short Films from the Vault. It’s comprised of two test films I made when preparing to make Bride of Gibster, my first more or less full length film, and the beginning of another film that never got made. The first test film is some animation I was practicing in preparation for a scene in Bride. The animation in the later film was much more detailed and included dialog (I’ll try to post that scene later). It’s amazing (at least to me) what we got done back in 1991, without the use of a computer. The second test film is a bunch of random photos I shot to learn how to film still photos. I was shooting these photos on a TV Tray with the JVC video camera on a tripod pointing straight down. I used this exercise to figure out the lighting, timing and distances. You can easily do something much better and more complex in minutes using Photo Story or any of a hundred other programs today on a computer, but it was a lot harder in 1991. A lot harder.

The last film runs about a minute, but it is my favorite, only because it features my mom and you can hear my sister laughing in the background while I filmed her. My initial plan was to film mom sleeping for an hour or so and then superimpose some silly photos and music that would approximate imaginary dreams she was having, but she woke up. When she figured out that we were trying to film her, she was very careful not to sleep in plain sight anymore.

Here’s that old video from the early 90s, served by Castpost.