Thread: Talking Douglas Fir Trees Video

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Ok it’s not exactly Halloween but it does give an example of what you can do with a couple of talking Douglas Fir Trees or Boris Skulls and an audio channel separation.

For your Holiday (Christmas) viewing pleasure Cheech and Chong’s Christmas Classic - Santa Clause and His Old Lady.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTTR4LbyLeU

Hope you enjoy!

Happy Holidays from Doug B.

Doug --
Thanks for the laugh!!! That is absolutely hysterical! Kudos to you for the creativity, time and effort it took to put that together. I'm sharing that with a few friends who I know will appreciate it as much as I did. Cheech and Chong, you can never go wrong with them... Thanks again for sharing that...fantastic!!!

Mmmm, brownies... that was hilarious - thanks for sharing!

That was great! thanks for sharing it! We just hacked our dougie and put it in a skull.

MsM

Nice work! Here's a question....

How did you get the trees to react to the sound of the voice, but not to the music mixed in the background? At some points the music was pretty loud, close to the level of the voices.

I assume that you don't have Cheech and Chong's original multi-track tape with all those elements on separate tracks?

Were the trees being fed a different audio signal than the one we were hearing?

Just curious.

DeadEnd
Glad you enjoyed!
This always cracked me up whenever I herd it and thought others would have my sense of humor and could appreciate the combination of trees with Cheech and Chong.
The live tree show was originally displayed to the family at the 2004 Christmas Day gathering and brought down the house. It took me some time to get the video generated and then more to get the idea of loading on the internet.
Please Share away, that’s why I put it up on YouTube.

We'en12amEternal
Thanks for the complement.
Never liked the brownies as they were to hard to light.
My favorite quote is “Come on Becto” and “Got them off”.


MsMeeple
Glad you liked the show.
I bought some Boris Skulls and that saved the trees from a similar fate.

HalloweenBob
Thanks for you kind words.
Technical answer will be in a second post.

Originally Posted by HalloweenBob

Nice work! Here's a question....

How did you get the trees to react to the sound of the voice, but not to the music mixed in the background? At some points the music was pretty loud, close to the level of the voices.

I assume that you don't have Cheech and Chong's original multi-track tape with all those elements on separate tracks?

Were the trees being fed a different audio signal than the one we were hearing?

Just curious.

First I don’t have access to the original multi-track music.

The audio used has very little non verbal sounds or small amounts of duration.
I find that lowering the volume sent into the trees (or skulls) you can reduce the reaction to the background sounds. If the background sounds are lower than the verbal sounds you can filter the reaction.
I first split the sound at the source and send one set to a speaker system and the second set to the trees.
I use an inline volume control on each line to the trees to lower the reaction.
I don’t expect (or want) to here the sound from the trees speaker hence the use of external amplified speakers.
On other audio where the background is higher than the verbal sounds the trees do react to the background sound.
The only option is to split the audio into 4 channel and use a computer with Dolby 5.1 or better sound card to output the sound into the 4 distinct channels.

Hope that helps.