The Guinness World Record Art Project
Where Thousands of Questions Get Answered

I’m just finishing up editing the video questions from Monday to Wednesday and hope to answer them all (that’s 120 questions) tonight, because tomorrow, I reconnect with my sponsors to see about a 2nd week for the Wheel Questions Video Blitz. However, today is another day recording questions, both by video and in writing. This will be the 6th day of question collecting (or, 8 days since the project started), and since it’s a weekend in Harvard Square, I expect a ton of traffic, enough to put me on track to collect 1,000 questions in 7 days. My friend Gabe is coming out to assist.

I’ve gone through some changes in how I approach reaching out to people. I started out leaving myself out of the questions entirely. But I realized that every question is asked in the context of meeting me, and leaving that context out feels weird. So I’ve been engaging everyone directly and including that interaction on the recording.

I have the patter down pretty well now. Unfortunately, in Harvard Square, I’m trying so hard to encourage people to raise their voices to compete with the bells, the cars, the honking, and chatter, that some vocal quality is lost. You know what I mean. When you have to shout, it’s hard to make your voice sound poetic.

So I’m concerned now that I sound fakey or repetitive on the recordings, asking people for their name and question, or with an all-to-hearty Thank You at the end. Since I’m standing a lot closer to the camera, I sound loud no matter what i do. Today I’ll make an attempt to both raise my voice (as an example to follow) but also sound more genuine.

I’m pleased to say that the HP Envy with Windows 7 is a stable platform. I have lugged the laptop all around Somerville and Cambridge, using the one-button “sleep” over 100 times in a single day, with no problems, and plenty of battery life. And I’m loving using the Canon FS200 camera, too. I’ve been turning it completely off between recordings to save power, and there’s never been a time that I’ve lost a shot because I pressed “record” and the Canon needed 1-5 seconds to warm up.

That being said, Corel VideoStudio 12 has apparently decided to crash whenever I do a save. But the saves create complete and correct files, so I guess I can live with that.

OK, off to ask questions now and answer them tonight. Wish me luck! See the last entry and Wheel Questions: Complete for all the recent video I have put up.