Rancho Ontelaunee Theater        3:09 Video Clip:  Bart Arrives

     Bart, arrived at his new home with us (located, at that time, just outside of the Montgomery County, Pennsylvania borough of Schwenksville, at about half past noon on April 22, 1999.  He was just a few days short of his second birthday.  My first horse, Natam, had died at this location nearly six months earlier, following an apparent major rupture of a torn heart valve.  On the day following Natam's death, to ease the distress of Natam's pasture buddy (the llama, Allys), a second llama (named Beaker), who happened to be a younger, full brother to Ally's, joined our family.

      For nearly two full years prior to this time, Bart's life had been one of mainly existing in the "solitary confinement" of a box stall.  Immediately prior to the time that this video had been made, Bart had been lucky to have even one hour of turnout during each, daily twenty-four hour period.  And, even then, he never was allowed to mix and interrelate with any other animals.  His brief turnouts were confined to a small riding ring, with not so much as a single blade of grass for grazing.

      The obvious questions, at the time of Bart's arrival, concerned how he would react to such an extreme reversal in his permitted lifestyle, how he would behave toward the two llamas and how best to prepare the animals for this transition.  The general consensus from the various "experts" at the training and sales stable, where Bart was purchased, was that the horse should be put into a separate stall, next to the llamas' stall, for three days, so that they could get to know each other better, before being turned out together.

      But, our general consensus, once Bart had arrived, was to modify the stall confinement time, somewhat, from the suggested three days to approximately three minutes.  And, the entire video, from which this three minute clip was edited, was photographed in less than half an hour.

      One final note for round pen training experts, like John Lyons, Monte Roberts, Dan Sumerel and so many others:  EAT YOUR HEARTS OUT, GANG.  Bart's gonna' show you his superiod method of schooling TWO at the same time, simply by "DOIN' WHAT COMES NATUR'LY" !!

The MEDIUM SCREEN video is not as high in frame rate and resolution as the large screen selection.   This results from keeping the video data size to about one half that of the large screen version, in hopes of making it practicable for "pre-loading" with computer-internet configurations that are not as fast as high speed broadband, which is recommended for the LARGE SCREEN selection.
If you happen to be interested in technical information about the aspect ratio and grainy appearance of the large screen version of this particular video clip, you can read details about this, below.

VIDEO TECHNICAL NOTE:    The original video, for these two clips was recorded as a wecomed "surprise" by a personal friend (whose voice can be heard, during parts of the video), using a home model, VHS camcorder.  The original, itself, had a very grainy appearance, when played back on a nineteen inch, or larger, TV monitor/receiver.  And, of course, once the video was converted from analog to digital, for editing, its quality was further diminished by the alteration of the aspect ratio and the compression of the video for use on the web site.  This condition seems to be most noticeable in the rendering of the green pasture images.

Meanwhile, the change in aspect ratio was done because of accidental circumstance, not for the expressed purpose of creating a movie theater widescreen look, but rather to get rid of some distracting titles, that had been recorded on the bottom third of the image.  During the shooting, my friend did not push whatever button, on his camera, would have removed some ugly, white lettering in the bottom third of the picture, showing the date and time.  So, during the editing, each selected video scene was cropped to eliminate that bottom section, then stretched vertically, back to a standard 4 by 3 aspect ratio that would fill the screen, but resulted in all the animals and objects appearing to be very, very tall and skinny.  And, once the final editing was completed, with the addition of music and a few transition effects to these visually distored scenes, the whole thing was stretched to a wider screen aspect ratio, during the conversion of the feature to the QuickTime format, for use on the web site.  That horizontal stretch, of course, returned the animals, trees, etc. to their more normal appearance.    (A possible note of interest for movie trivia buffs, is that early "CinemaScope" used to work somewhat the same way, with camera lenses that "squeezed" the image sideways, during the filming, and special projector lenses to stretch the picture back out to the theatre wide screen sizes.   We don't know if it still works that way.)