Here it s the February edition of our little show supercar spin, I think this month turned out pretty good. We had a couple of small changes this month:

• The intro layout is now a short 15 seconds blast of all the upcoming news bits for this month, then it goes to the intro titles then onto the main show. This was Jays idea to make the beginning of the show more impactful, I think it works much better.
• The supercar stats or ‘Hot specs’ as I call them, are now scrolling across the bottom of the screen in a news ticker style way. This is good as in future episodes we can leave the techy stats stuff down there scrolling along and leave the main talking in the show to a more personal natural discussion.

Some good stuffs been happening behind the scenes, we were approached by a women who likes the show is really into her cars and is keen to get involved if she can as a guest presenter on the show. Were in discussion with her now on that so we’ll see if it works out as a trial.

Lastly Jay the master of Adobe editing (you can see some of his editing work here) is cooking up a new title sequence to replace the current one I made. I know he will make something pretty dam sexy and in HD and featuring a lot of supercars of course, we’ll see.

The 1st episode for 2011 is done and up for our subscribers on YouTube and iTunes!

And if your wondering why I’m a bit quiet in the episode compared to previous episodes, well it was a 33 degree’s on the day of the filming, and I was so uncomfortably hot I couldn’t concentrate!

It was also so hot I forgot to plug the proper microphone in for the 3rd take (the one you see here) that’s why the sounds a little echo’y and distant. Now I know why all proper television studios have aircon!

By the way 2700 people downloaded and watched the December episode on their iPhones/iPods last month, cool.

Note, all the official Supercar Spin articles will be on www.supercarspin.com from now on.

The December edition of Supercar Spin is now available, well to tell the truth its been up for 2 weeks now but I’ve been lazy to get to my blog. We filmed it back at the ‘Zonda’ studio again, much better sound, not so echo’y and a great drive through the Royal national park in the RS4 to get there, camera gear sliding around in the back.

You can watch the episode as usual on YouTube above (here’s a link to it in HD) or by watching and subscribing to it in iTunes below:

Supercar Spin Monthly news show on iTunes

I have finally got some realistic viewers stats working with the help of the Blubrry.com stats logging service.  This is good as we can see what sort of devices people are watching it on like iPhones, other phones and iPads and what country there from e.t.c. It seems that people arn’t watching Supercar Spin on YouTube but thousands are on iTunes on their mobile devices.

Here you can see all our episodes so far from the Pilot episode to the latest which is Dec10, the latest episode of Dec is more popular than the Nov one which is what we want to see!:

Here is an interesting one, where everyone is watching the episodes from. It’s the Asians that are gobbling up our episodes the most; I would think the reason for this is that mobile entertainment through media consumption is so popular in Asia with its mobile data the fastest and best in the world. I think everyone has better than 3G connections there so everyone is walking around watching video on demand shows and podcasts like Supercar Spin.

Note, all the official Supercar Spin articles will be on www.supercarspin.com from now on.

We just tackled episode 2, well strictly episode 4 if you include the pilot show and the Lotus Paris show special. I was just getting over my cold and we filmed it the day before the Sydney to Gong ride at mine not Brendon’s this time to better fit in with our busy schedule over that weekend. The problem with mine is its a very large room, so there is a bit of echo through the recording but its not too bad. Things we have done/improved for this episode were:

• Slightly altered the into sequence most noticeable with the longer music.
• Floating ‘supercar spin’ word and sound effects special effect in the outro.
• We both use the laptop setup just under the camera lens for a cheap autocue. Last month Brendon used he laptop ‘autocue’ and I used paper so I was looking down at the paper too much.
• For the intro and outro ‘wrap up’ sections we practiced both saying individual lines to make more interaction between us in these 2 parts.

Example Intro autocue slide

Comments so far from friends and family have been really positive on this episode with everyone saying its the best and most professional looking one so far, but I’m sure we can make it even better still with more practice. We clocked up nearly 200 watches on people iPods and iPhones through iTunes on just the first day which is really good.

Click the video below to watch, or you can watch it on YouTube in HD also, make sure you watch the HD version full screen to get the quality.

Note, all the official Supercar Spin articles will be on www.supercarspin.com from now on.

Apple approved our Supercar Spin Pilot show today so it is now up on iTunes for anyone in the world, anywhere to see.

To get to it, go to iTunes on your iPod, iPhone or computer and search for ‘supercar spin’ and it will come straight up.

Now we will gauge how popular it is on YouTube and iTunes, look at the feedback comments and viewing figures to decide wether to make another episode.

Note, all the official Supercar Spin articles will be on www.supercarspin.com from now on.

This has been a project I’ve been keen to spend my spare time on with Brendon over the past month. After looking around all the YouTube and iTunes/iPod Podcasts all around the world, I couldn’t find a good monthly news show on all the juicy bits on supercars, sports car and luxury car news that car nuts just love to know about. So I had this idea of putting together a pilot episode of a monthly news show where we sift through the month’s huge pile of Press Releases from the automotive industry, and bring the viewer just the best bits so they don’t have to.

A scene from the show talking about the price of the new Porsche 918 Spyder

Brendon was a bit hesitant to give it a go as he thought he would be bad on camera (the results show that was a false worry, he was even more natural than me I think) but I convinced him and we recorded it at his place with his lovely hand drawn picture of a Red Zonda as the background.

We felt we had got it right on the 3rd take and it was shot in one long continuous take to try and make it more natural, less edited. We were hoping for more of a feeling of two guys who are nuts about cars just talking about the latest gossip and adding their own opinions to the mix.

Brendon’s friend Martin DeMontfort www.mdillustration.com created the logo for us on his computer by hand using his graphics tablet and the final version with its tyre marks looks great! Martin hand draws a lot of the covers for the Australian MAD magazine so we knew he would do a great job at the logo. I altered the image with a Red Zonda to make it stand out more for the iTunes/iPod Podcast library featured logo.

The Logo hand drawn by Martin The iTunes/iPod Podcast logo

My friend Jay Ng (a local short film director) gave some advice on how to make the titles stand out more and other little bits of production advice through the project. The best bit of advice from him was to actually try and give it a go in the first place after I told him the original idea some months ago. Jay also came up with the all important catchy name ‘Supercar Spin’ which is much better than the working title we had ‘Supercar monthly news’ 🙂

Filming was done using my Sony HD video camera and a external miniature microphone taped to the desk in front of us and all the post-production was done in Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop like I do all my videos in now.

Overall I’m very happy with the results of the pilot show which is after all a bit of a test to see how it came out. I added a header to the video at the top of the screen to ask for comments and feedback Good OR Bad because we really want to know wether to make another episode. The video was only 2 hours on YouTube and we received our first comment which was great:

“I liked the show in my opinion it was filled with a lot of information in a small package. I hope you get enough support from the viewers to continue producing the show.

Thumbs up.”

If we get more positive feedback we will have a go at our real first episode 1. I have submitted the video to the Apple iTunes/iPod Podcast library but unlike YouTube, Apple have to watch and approve the video first for content and quality before it is approved and allowed to go up on iTunes. If it does get through it will be viewable by anyone in the world with a iPhone or iPod by just by typing in ‘Supercar Spin’ which could open up the video to 1000’s of views a day.

So enough talking about it, here is the actual show to watch (click to play).
If you want to watch it in Full HD you can view the HD version.

Please, let me know what YOU think of it?