vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

One Clouds

Play Quicktime version

The series continues. This time it is images of the sky taken from a weekend. Abstract, light, shadow, the bare basics of what photography once-upon-a-time-wasness. Place which as a point of view is irrelevant becoming nonplace (do your clouds really look differently to mine?). The caress of the mouse is again a stuttering moment of minor agency.

Round Square

Returning to some simple ideas, here a pair of simple sprites that shift video layers, two child movies, one of round things, the other square (or rectangular). All you can do is hide or show them, a sort of spatial montage by absence or presence of either video panes. Everyday, vernacular, ordinary. A minimal set of possible movements – mouse appear, mouse disappear.

Play Quicktime version

Blog Assessments

Dear Students,

Your blog assessments are due this Friday, however receiving by 5pm Monday should be ok (we are celebrating the Queen’s birthday after all – cue two national anthems).

To submit your assessment please send email to your teacher. The email will contain a URL which will be the blog post that provides your required contextual statement. This constitutes handing in your work.

You need to assess each of the criteria that you developed at the beginning of semester for what your blog should achieve. To assess this you need towrite about how well you’ve done each of your nominated items, and I’d also indicate how relevant you *now* think that criteria might be, and provide links to blog posts that indicate how you’ve achieved (or not) each of these.

Now, when you compiled your assessment criteria they were to address how your blog has been able to:

1. document your learning through the semester (this is not “the things I learned to do this week” but is “how I learned to do these things”), so it should help show what has changed in your learning
2. evidence of engaging and reflecting on course content (this is “I think this about this stuff”)
3. contribute to how you learn (eg, reading other blogs – evidence?, commenting – evidence? contributing to the reblog – evidence? by documenting references – evidence? by reflecting on how I do stuff and then how I might change this – evidence?)
4. demonstrate how you have taken responsibility for your learning
5. indicates what changes you’ve made through the semester.

If it isn’t meeting these (All of these were listed in the original blog assessment sheet that was used to develop to your assessment templates.)

Finally, given all of the above, you are to use your blog assessment template to rate each of the items you identified. Then nominate an overall mark for your blog. The blog assessment template should be available from your blog post (as a pdf) so that it can be downloaded.

how to make a pdf is described in miki.

Call Out

Another postgrad design student up in the ‘loft’ space I now use as a studio (and share with others) has a blog. Nurul is Malaysian and working on branding in design.

Round One

In the course of making some content for an essay, I discovered that Apple’s iPhoto lets you export a series of photos as a QuickTime movie. Well, nothing novel about that given how strongly integrated QuickTime is in all of the iLife suite. But what is seriously impressive is that the export uses some of the features of QuickTime, including some things that I didn’t know about. First of all it produces a movie with three image tracks, and a fourth track which is called “cross face”. So what seems to be happening is the images are split across two tracks (like an A and B roll in old fashioned film editing), the third track is just constant (perhaps a single colour) and the cross fade track then renders a run time dissolve between the tracks. When you play the movie you get a cross fade between each photo, but this is not rendered out.

Why is this so cool? Well, you end with a very small and network sensible QuickTime file, and by having the dissolves produced through an additional track at run time it helps makes the files small. If they were rendered out then the dissolve would have be drawn to the QuickTime file, one frame at a time (which would also slow down the export from iPhoto) which just creates much larger files. Aside from that, it is just computationally very elegant to have a run time fade track.

Play Quicktime version

So, using a series of images I collected for part of a current (vog) essay, I’ve made one small piece. I used eZedia for this one, which is very quick and easy – no programming just click and drag. Clicking the square pause/plays the movie, they are two child movies loading into the parent movie. (A child movie is a movie that resides outside of the container (parent) movie and is called in when the parent movie requests it.)

Microsoft and QT

Well, firstly Microsoft introduced those ActiveX controls so a simple embed tag no longer worked for QuickTime (and any other embedded media). Now with IE 7 on PC they’re gone and changed it again, which means you’re old content runs the risk of no longer being able to work on PC, and all new content needing to be embedded differently. Apple have documented this, and Enric has written a very elegant plug, VPIP, in for various blog systems to make this easier.