VoiceOfEmerika

Whew!

Well, submittable anyway. There’s no audio and I could submit it that way. Luckily, Karen is going to do an audio track. Now that there is something to work with, she gets to start. It sucks to be at the end of the line with a deadline looming.

Not only is Karen at the end of the line, but she can’t even use her normal computer or her normal tools. This movie ended up being 960×540 hi-def and so far will only play on my big computer and my laptop; both are running Ubuntu which is not her native environment. Her computer can’t play the movie at all or at least could not play test versions. (Luckily, Chris at T-Minus tested an early version of the movie and though it immediately crashed his browser, was able to download and play it. -sigh-) So Karen still has her work in front of her.

I’m already feeling a little bit of a let down. For the last three weeks I been convinced I’d never get this done. I spent more than a week trying to do this at 1920×1080 - basically 1080p resolution. When I gave up on that, it still took another three or four days to get things back together at 960×540 resolution. Then there were new tools to write for renumbering and transitions. The transitions program created files that could not be made into movies. Something odd about the way ImageMagick creates a png if let to its own. (Thank Google and the nice people out there documenting their problems or that could have been a show stopper.) After all that seemed too much, it’s done. Hmmm.

A little reflection.

My number one feeling is that I’m such an amateur. I was crude in my transitions. And in general, moving pass dumping my little samples on the blog to creating something with a little cohesion was a lot harder than I thought and I felt more than a little inept.

I’ll start on next years entry in a month or two. I already have a lot of changes I want to make to my transition tool. I would like to write a whole new movie making tool because there are several ideas bouncing around in my head that I can’t do with the tools I have.

I’d love to put to movie up for you all to see, but it seems polite to wait until the festival.

Between this and Karen and I building The Kids Open Dictionary, I’m thinking it’s already been a very cool year!