Movies & Conversions
I’ve posted a few things that tickled my fancy over the years and they have been in a lot of formats, .mov, .flv. .wmv, even some .swf’s. So given the rise of html 5 and a more unified mp4 system, I went back and converted most of them and have reposted them on two grouped pages:
Movies & Collected Funnies 1
and
Movies & Collected Funnies 2
Most were converted using Adobe Media Encoder CC, but for some reason the codecs for the ‘borrowed’ flvs wouldn’t allow any Adobe product to import them. So I turned to Handbrake, a lovely, lovely product; worked great.
I now also need to go and clean up the galleries as they all seem to (again) be using different formats and half of them don’t seem to work. Let me know if you find anything still broken.
Excitement
So last night just before midnight a huge crash was heard. I didn’t think much except that maybe someone was dropping off a bin (at the construction site) and dropped it too fast. Then the yelling started.
I hopped up and looked out the window and there were a bunch of cars and a couple smashed into Mark’s (our neighbour) car. I immediately thought there had been an accident and that the yelling was the typical resulting violence. I grabbed some clothes and headed to the balcony. A woman with a gun on her hip was walking below me and the cars were all now sporting police cherries.
Turns out that a bunch of undercover cops were working some drug thing when some poor unfortunate schmuck of a would-be criminal chose that moment to rob the local Macs. Needless to say, a police chase ensued and the wicked ice in front of our house spelled doom for Mark’s poor car. The bad guy’s truck took out his rear end and part of our much abused light pole (2012), and one of the unmarked police suv’s finished off his front end.
Excitement indeed.
After Effects
The Adobe suite offers two tools for video composition. Premiere is the primary workhorse (and the software I have been using to date) and After Effects, which, I gather, was initially introduced to add effects after the main work was done—hence the name. Like all mature software in this fast changing age, the lines between packages has begun to blur and it seems one can do most simple projects in either Premiere or After Effects and there is no obvious (to a beginner) distinction or clear workflow; most searches conclude with a definite: it depends…
The following is my first attempt to work in After Effects. which on the surface use a very different work paradigm. The clip tests out a few of the plugins and methodologies and tries to use the AE workflow. The outcome isn’t as smooth because there are way more options to fiddle with and I am ignoring most of the fine tuning, but it looks like I will have much more fine control over animations and effects once I get the hang of it.
Also, as far as I can tell, AE allows you to import layered files from Photoshop and Illustrator. This means I can set up separate animated elements in the original .ai file rather than having to export each separate element in its own file as I did when doing the original animations in Premiere—huge time saver.
There is no audio and I fiddled to try and get a poster frame in there, so the initial screen didn’t look blank.
And getting silly with 3D…
Second Hand News
God, I love humans.
On the subject of second-hand smoke:
“Sure it’s crappy science, but look at the outcome–a smoke-free America.”
Anti-smoking activists were quick to pronounce that “Second Hand Smoke Kills.” Well, no, it doesn’t, actually. A recent article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute described the details of a study involving 76,000 women over a period of more than 10 years. The bottom-line conclusion: the study found no statistically significant causal relationship between lung cancer and exposure to passive smoke.
…
… I have to ask why anti-smoking activists don’t simply stick to the facts instead of alarming everybody with the assertion that passive smoke causes lung cancer when it clearly doesn’t.
The answer lies not in science but in culture. … “The strongest reason to avoid passive cigarette smoke is to change societal behaviour; to not live in a society where smoking is the norm.”
Well, bravo. An admirable objective. But that is social engineering [my emphasis], not medicine.
http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/essays/2014/01/15/the-myth-about-second-hand-smoke/
Of course, a lot of details are missing in this article, and no one can really believe inhaling toxic substances is good for you. Neither is pumping gas, eating sand in a public playground or eating food that has sat on the ground for more than three seconds. But that is what immune systems are for, isn’t it? I just like the fact that for all the science involved, stuff like this is always so much about ‘social engineering.’ Baaaaah, baaaaah!
Anyway, read the comments; they are a hoot.
visual id — in motion
Three variations on some video id packages
Timelapse
Mixing a bit of visual identity, video editing and timelapse. The view from my front window. An earlier version was posted on Facebook. Hopefully when my tripod arrives I can take this outside.
V2 with a better title clip but no music. A sunset this time…
And the piece de resistance: last night’s gorgeous sunset!
Oh, and happy birthday Dale. I forgive you for the leash thing! 🙂
Timelapse Tripod
I’ve been playing with some time lapse and would love to take on some hyperlapse projects so I decided to invest in a tripod with the cash Mom gave me for Xmas —Thanks Mom!
I visited the local purveyors of gear and narrowed it dow to two. One was carbon fiber with a boom and the other had a good head with quick release plate and a monopod option. In the end the light weight of the carbon fiber option won out, so I ordered it and it should be here on Thursday. Check it out:
Work, work work…
I have been cleaning up old drafts of posts that I apparently didn’t publish. Here is one dated September 15, 2012. I added some jobs based on my updated resume. At the bottom, I decided to add a few things from past careers (just in case I ever need to do that book jacket bio).
It occurs to me that I, like many others, have no idea what my job is (was). So I will attempt, here, to enumerate the many things that are, and have been, my work life at Hole’s for the past 15 (Ed. Note: now make that 16+ years in total) years or so.
Enjoy…
Hole’s & the Enjoy Centre
Graphic Designer: logos, word marks, ads, signage, signage systems, product packaging, flyers, tv ads, video graphics
Writer, Editor
Photographer, Videographer
Video editor
Web designer
Production Manager
Artistic Director
Department Manager
Publisher, Book
Publisher, Magazine
Community Relations
Communications Consultant
Business Manager
Brand Manager
PR person
Social Media expert
Marketing Manager
Visual Presentation
Researcher
Ad buyer
Transplanter
Swamper
Delivery person
Events setup
Audio system designer
Audio Technician
AV technician
Speaker repairman
CIO
IT consultant
Technology purchaser
IT support
Database programmer
Web programmer
Forensic IT investigator
IP Telephony support
Help Desk
Data Entry
Archivist
Customer service
Ecommerce manager
Interior designer
HR consultant
Mediator
Otherwhere
Note: I am generally limiting this to specific things people have paid/hired me for as a job description unlike the above list which were all in the context of a single job description. Jobs listed in roughly reverse chronological order.
Communications Consultant
Magazine Designer
Web Developer/Designer
Ebook Producer
Freelance writer
Freelance Graphic Designer
Illustrator (published!)
Book Designer
Book Production assistant
Production Manager
Newspaper Typesetter
Non Profit association board member
Night school teacher
College Instructor
Advertising salesperson
Basement construction
Department store renovations (labourer)
Stagehand
Theatre electrician
Followspot operator
Lighting Designer
Theatre carpenter
Theatre Prop Master
Costume seamster
Stage Manager
Sound Board operator
Waiter
Farm Hand
Wireline Hand (my short oilfield stint)
Straw bale truck loader (technically a swamper but a whole different skill set)
Cowpoke: chasing, branding, vaccinating and counting and counting and counting. (Also includes fence repair, bobcat driving, and truck driving.)
General Labourer in a feed mill
Fast food cook
Retail labourer
Vegetable Plant labourer
Swamper
Paperboy
And of course, the obligatory babysitter.
Can I see some ID please?
I moved on to another element that has characterized my working life these last 20 years; ink. C mentioned colour and printing the other day and I realized the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow & black) standard was a recognizable and suggestive element I could use. For those of you not in-the-know, mixing cyan, magenta and yellow gives you a muddy black, so printers add the 4th ink to sharpen up the blacks. These 4 inks are what all traditional colour printing uses. The black in the stacked bk rope is actually CMY…
Previous versions can be seen here.
Another ID-ea or Two
A few more concepts, this time sticking closer to my long-term habit of using my 3 initials. (Ignore the bad fills in the ropes; I was too lazy to do it right until I commit.)
