One of my core values for The Dock is that everything about it should be visual, creative, multimedia… it’s just the way my brain works!  So expect plenty more video presentations, Dock adventures, and general mucking around with a camcorder…

Until now all the Dock videos have been posted on Vimeo in lovely High Definition, or close to it, but this afternoon I’ve uploaded lower-quality versions of them to YouTube as well – you can check them out on this channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/thedockchurch

In case that difference means nowt to you, I’ll explain:  Vimeo seems to exist for people who have lovingly spent hours, days, or even weeks hand-crafting their videos into little slices of multimedia perfection – just go to their homepage (www.vimeo.com), select one of their recommended videos at random, and marvel at (a) how much creativity is out there and (b) how much time people have on their hands…

YouTube on the other hand is the world’s repository for 14-year-olds to upload shaky mobile-phone videos of their friends tripping over or doing something embarrassing, accompanied by lots of “FAIL!! LOL!!!”-type comments that make you despair for the future of grammar.  So it can be a scary place to be, but it reaches a hugely wider audience than Vimeo (and it’s also handy if you don’t have a very good internet connection; as the videos are lower in quality they download much faster).

So I reckon it’s good to upload The Dock videos to both sites and  you can click on whichever suits; the main ‘Videos’ link from the homepage will always lead to Vimeo, as it’s top-quality and a lovely place to be, but anyone browsing YouTube should be able to find us as well.  It’s high time the TQ had a bit more of a profile on  YouTube after all – when I searched for videos with the words ‘Titanic Quarter’, I only got 77 results – pretty much the lowest return you could ever get on YouTube!  (to put that into perspective, a search for ‘plastic bag’ returns 18,100 results.  Yep, it’s a strange world.)

While I’m on the subject of YouTube, if you want to waste an afternoon checking out all the videos that appear under the search term ‘Titanic’, a weird and wonderful day can be had.

…there’s a video of a man who made a replica model of the Titanic completely out of matchsticks… (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SdrXiTHaUk)

…there’s a version of the Titanic movie in 5 seconds… (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuSdU8tbcHY)

…there’s a Lego Titanic (which seems an attempt to make a genuinely heartfelt movie of the Titanic tragedy – using Lego men)… (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEK-31eSUOU)

…and of course there are loads of clips, excerpts and wonderfully illegal copies of all the different Titanic movies – the big James Cameron one from 1997, the old black-and-white ones, and even ‘Raise The Titanic’ – a big flop in the 1980’s which seemed to be always on Saturday afternoon TV when I were a lad.  Does this bring back memories for anyone else?

But the prize for the weirdest and wonderfullest video has to go to the guy who, using clips and shots from other Leo DiCaprio movies, has made a spoof trailer for ‘Titanic 2’ – suggesting that Jack, cryogenically frozen in the Atlantic on the night Titanic sank, is revived in the 21st Century to become the centre of a government manhunt…  It’s absolutely hilarious – though it’s slightly depressing to scroll down the comments on its YouTube page and realise that lots of people have taken it for real, and want to know how soon the movie’s coming out….  We’re doomed…