The version for the festival was hi-def, it was a lot of bother to build and well over six hundred megabytes. I did make a few DVDs for my family, Tra-la. What you see here is in my standard 720×480 flv file format.

Without too much ado, I give you Unstuck…

Music:
Wanderlust
by ZikWeb and No Sushi

Sound Effects:
Train sound
by Cognito Perceptu

Clock sound
by cynical

Sound design:
by Karen Fasimpaur

Title Image:
Clock photo by Kevin Hamilton of Canada

I was not certain my entry would warrant inclusion. I have to say I was pretty excited to see my name among the list of this year’s entries.

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!

I have written a couple of new programs for this project. One was a tool for renumbering a folder full of images and the other a tool for doing transitions.

Renumbering

I’ve wanted this for a while for the sake of neatness, but it was a requirement for this project. I am combining a number of different projects into a single movie. The tool that builds the movies needs a folder of image files ordered sequentially. In order create my meta-movie I need to renumber everything before I combine them.

A somewhat obvious spark was that I could reverse the image order while renumbering. It was just a couple of line of code for a whole new view on a movie.

Transitions

I never really planned on writing a tool for this, but I found myself doing a transition from the command line one file at a time last night and the absurdity was not lost on me. I stopped and wrote a transition tool this morning.

Immediately, I imagined two transitions, the a to b transition and the a to b to c transition where b is something like an image of all black or white. Standard stuff– a straight linear interpolation from a to b or a to b to c.

Just about the time this was done, I realized I could achieve another little dream of mine and transition from one of my regular movies to a painted one. Another half-hour or so of work and it was done.

Creativity

I took a walk after it was all working and my mind was a bit of a whir. I had another little spark. Instead of using a simple linear interpolation, what about some kind of a curve? Maybe a log function? Maybe something really strange?

Instead of a gradual blending, you could do a slow blending that snapped to a quick finish or you could even do a sort of whaa-whaa thing where it started blending then retreats a bit and then finishes.

All this thinking did little to slow the whirring in my brain…

It really struck me then how important it is for one’s creativity to think beyond the tools you have. I suspect it is easier for me because I build tools. My experience suggests that most people are skilled at working with the tools they have and moving beyond that is difficult and possibly a waste of energy.

If for no other reason than creativity, I think kids should be taught to build tools. I doubt it matters terribly what kind of tools: programming, spreadsheets, a lever to lift something heavy. The point of it being that a tool is meant to do the job more than once, therefore it’s worth putting a little thought into it. And once you start thinking that way, spark, spark, spark.

whir, whir, whir…

Because there is not a lot of time, I’m reworking stuff you’ve all seen before into more of a feature length movie. Not only is time short already, but they want the movie as a Quicktime and they would prefer it in hi-def (1920×1080).

I had a lot of cool ideas that would require a lot of programming that will have to wait to next year. It has taken more time than I thought just to get Quicktime at 1920×1080 working. Several times I was ready to give up and roll the whole thing over to next year. Certainly, if it weren’t for the internet and all the great people who have written how-to guides, I would have.

I have a rough sketch of the movie on paper and in my head. My computer is humming away, churning out a bit of this and a bit of that and will be for the next week.

We were staying at Mountain Shadows Getaway in Portal AZ. This movie was shot in the car port at the guest house. There were amazing thunderstorms the entire time we were there. We were so busy I only set the camera up once, but I couldn’t be happier with the result.

It seems a little silly to write several posts when I’m building several movies from the same source. So… I’ll be adding new ones to this post over the next few days,

This one is a zoom to the lower left-hand corner. Nice but not especially better. I’m working on a painted movie that I think will be lovely.

I confess I’m a little in love with these movies with an oil paint filter applied to each frame.

Instead… as you can see for yourself, everything is hard and crisp.

This is a blend of a hundred frames each five seconds apart. I’m left to mull the results and the difference from my expected outcome. Which reminds me of a great talk I just listened to:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought
Monday, February 4, 02008

http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/ (I hesitate to deep link directly to the audio–you can find it.)

There is really quite a lot to think about in this talk. Hints as to my inability to predict the outcome of this photo abound.

So, why did this photo fail? I believe the fact that the plants tend to a center position is the answer. Well, that and the huge number of images I blended. I am going to try this again blending just a few frames. The fact I used so many images seems to just have reinforced the strength of the norm and washed out the movement.

I am sure you guessed that the tripod fell over. And yes, that’s me with the look of horror you just can’t make out. Arrggg! My camera has a telescoping lens and it’s bent and stuck now. (No, I’m not going to show you a picture.) It’s off to the repair shop for this little one.

And what did I learn? Wind is not to be ignored. Until now, I gave very little consideration to placing the tripod. If it stood, I figured close enough. Not anymore. Yes, all very obvious in retrospect. More so, because the wind was the entire point of the picture. I had planned to contrast the solidness of the landscape with the movement of the plants in the wind.