Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

As a part of my videoblogging endeavours I wanted to make a short video with no intervention. No editing or anything. There were about a dozen kids running around below my window so I shot a shot clip with the webcam. That's why the quality is so bad, my webcam can't zoom and stuff.

Peter, Jay, I know you both would like videos without intervention, but I couldn't do it. Maybe it's the tinkerer in me. I cut over ten seconds off my original clip and added music. To finish it off I added CinemaScope bars because I think they are fun. As usual the Quicktime file is a lot larger so if you can play it please get the Windows media file to save bandwidth (even though the quality of the Quicktime is better).

• Download WMV version [421KB]
• Download Quicktime version [1.70MB]

Today is the day for my first real videoblog entry. Originally I planned to spend the day finishing an article on genres in videoblogging. With videoblogging week coming to an end I thought I would fit in a video entry instead.

Earlier today an abridged version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar played out in my apartment. I was pretty lucky to be able to catch it on film. Then I spent most of the day editing the material into a complete movie. As with the last movie it was easy to get a version in WMV done [955KB]. This time I also did a version in Quicktime format [4.16MB] for the Mac users. Even though Mac users can play WMV files with either Windows Media Player for Mac or the VLC player.

As you can see the WMV version is only a quarter the size of the Quicktime version. If you have a player that can handle WMV files please download that version. I would like to save as much bandwidth as I can.

• Download WMV version [955KB]
• Download Quicktime version [4.16MB]

To continue this week's focus on videos I'm linking to another one today. As I've mentioned before I worked with music videos this semester along with six other students. The video I'm linking to here is not our ideal result — it's the version we sent to the examinator and the censor for the exam. There are some things that should be changed like stronger light in some parts, and most importantly the part where the band moves really fast completely breaks the flow. It needs to go, but we were on a deadline when making this.

So go ahead and download the video. It's a 121 megabyte Quicktime movie. It'll take a while if you don't have a fast connection. The band is Bark and the song is The City. You can get mp3's on their sound page (I'm deeplinking since they're using frames).

I feel the need to point out that I didn't have a lot to do with the practical aspects of shooting this video. We were a seven man team and you can't all be directors. Rasmus and Ole from my group took a big load in that regard. Personally my work was focused on laying out the broader lines for the production. I've gotten more interested in market communication after working on this project. When shooting I mostly rolled out cables and moved equipment. That's also something that needs to be done.

Update

I got a nice letter from the university stating that I was using too much space on the server, and thus the video is no longer available for download.

There are the natural sciences, the social sciences and then there are the humanities. Why aren't we doing human sciences? It's just as much science as the other two fields.

Today I attended a lecture by Jim Martin from the University of Sydney. It was a part of a two-day seminar on genre systems and culture, but as a measly student I can't afford to go to a seminar like this. Jim Martin was talking about his work with how to uses genres in language education in primary school. Part of the work was categorizing the different kinds of texts produced by pupils into genres.

One such genre was the “recount” — apparently a very popular genre among children. The recount is a story where you recall events that have taken place. They are the trivial monday stories like how you bumped into a friend at the grocery store. Usually we reserve these recounts to close family and friends, because — as Martin jokingly pointed out — they are quite boring. At the same time these recounts are also something that we base our social relationships on so they are important.

It had me wondering if we can consciously use this to screen potential friends and love interests. On a first date you could pay attention to recounts and if you are bored you know to move on to the next person. If only it was that easy!

You will need the SVG viewer to view the full content of this post. It's a quick and easy installation.

I dropped off the radar for a while in order to get ready for my exam. I did well and now I'm only 10 days away from having a BA in Communication. While reading up for my exam I experimented more with SVG. Specifically I have been working on an interactive model for market communication based on the one in “International markedskommunikation i en postmoderne verden” (“International Market Communication in a Post-modern World”) by Finn Frandsen et al. I've done the translation myself and any clunky wording is my fault alone.

Without further ado I present Interactive Interactive Communication! (because the model is about communication as interaction and the model itself is interactive. There's nothing like geek humour). You can click the different parts of the model to get more information.

For the technically interested: All scripting is done with javascript and the DOM. When working with SVG documents it's amazingly easy to add and remove objects because SVG is just another XML document.

Mostly I think it's neat how the sender and reciever arrows dim when one of the black lines crosses over.

Via Photomatt I found a list of reasons why English is difficult to translate. Number five on the list is:

Another difficulty for non-native English speakers is the fact that English is not a phonetic language. It is probably one of the most unphonetic languages in the world (French probably comes close to English in its lack of phoneticity).

Danish might be even more unphonetic than English so I may not be the perfect candidate to mention this. However I haven't had a problem with English not being a phonetic language, and others who have learned English mostly from reading and writing English instead of hearing it probably has it the same way.

You can extend this to a claim that those who learn English from speaking it (ie. native speakers) have more trouble with the unphoneticness. I know I've groaned on behalf of native English speakers' troubles with knew-new, know-now, their-they're, through-threw and so on.

After having finished all the written school work for this semester I always get restless. All this free time and nothing to spend it on! That's why my Sunday has been spent on trying to figure out how to use SVG. Be warned this post will probably be on the geeky side.

SVG is a format for vector graphics as the name implies. It's like Flash only fifteen million times easier to automate. Keep in mind that my experience with Flash is very limited and my experience with SVG is one evening of playing around. As my test project I wanted to dynamically take one month worth of posts and create a graph of posting times. Not very useful when you only have two months of posts where almost all are posted in the evening. It was just so I could learn. You can see the result below. You probably need the SVG plugin (Opera installation notes). The first column show how many posts were made from midnight to 4am, the second shows the number of posts between 4am and 8am and so on.

Since SVG is just another flavour of XML I should be able to create a single PHP file to handle everything from going through posts to actually creating the graph. One of the things that interested me about SVG is that you're creating a graphic by writing a text document.

The first step was to find out how to actually make these SVG graphics. Poking around let me to Adobe's SVG tutorial as well as W3Schools ditto. I was annoyed with the W3School tutorial because it doesn't go very deep. I suppose it's good as a primer, but it opens up for more questions than it answers. Most of my time was spent with the SVG Specification.

When I got the hang of how to make lines and boxes the programming bit was dead easy. I already had code that could read through posts — I just needed to sort it differently. Actually I was surprised by how easy it was. With Flash I would have had to go through more trouble. With Flash I would've had to first create the php script that read through the posts and then create a Flash file that could in some strange way interact with my PHP code. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.

Now I have a single script that can dynamically output a graph for any month I want. From start to finish I think it took me three hours to make. Not bad for a beginner I think. If you feel like it you can check out the graphs for May or June. Or the source of the script. You may use this code for anything you deem worthy.

There are of course many things I can't figure out with SVG. I would very much be able to render text without anti-alias since small text doesn't look very good. At least not on my system. The specification also has a very spiffy looking drop shadow example but my head couldn't understand it. In the end I settled for the easy version with two identical layers where the bottom one is blurred and offset.

As you can see from my code it's easy to get simple SVG done when you know a little PHP and XML. I will definately be using SVG in the future for graphs and the like.

My handcrafted primitive content management system shows it's ugly side. It turns out that I have a bug. This means that when there's only one post in the current month the front page (and the RSS feed) will only show that one post and not the 10 most recent posts. So I feel compelled to make one extra post right now.

I've mentioned Steve Garfield before and he has a new videoblog entry up. The interesting part is that he didn't make it with a video camera. He made it by connecting a series of still images. The result is not as boring as you would expect (though the video is too long for my personal taste). Included in the entry is a step by step explanation of how he did it so you can get started yourself.

I have more to write on videoblogs. There are questions to answer, points to be made and videos to link to. Eventually I will also reply to your e-mail Steve!