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This little ditty is a play on the Volkswagen "Squares" commercial. It was developed as part of our requirement to demonstrate our ability to utilize streaming media and produce digitized works, including sound, pictures, and motion pictures.
Please let me know what you think. It may be best to download from the Arches links as my server currently resides on BellSouth.net at home, which is throttled to 128k up-stream (meaning your downloads could take a few minutes even on broadband connections).
The first step was to find a camcorder to take pictures with. Amazingly, all the equipment you could ever want can be checked out for free at the Media Services Office on the second floor of Aderhold Hall. I checked out a Canon ZR-40 mini-DV camcorder and a firewire cable to transfer images to my computer after snapping them.
The nice thing about this camcorder is that it can snap photos as well as moving images, and I snapped a combination of photos and moving images to put together this movie.
With camera in hand and some blank tapes purchased from Wal-Mart, it was now time to explore the world for anything and everything circular and digitize them. Once I had all my images captured, it was time to upload them to the computer.
I accomplished this task using a firewire cable as my Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop comes with a 1394 firewire port built-in. Unfortunately, I had no software for capturing the movies from the camera to the desktop so had to spend some time searching the Internet for the appropriate software. After a couple of duds, I settled on Pure Motion's Edit Studio to do the job. I was fairly impressed with the quality of the application, though, I will say this: SAVE your work before compiling the movie! After making my first cut as a quick-time movie, I then attempted a regular mpeg-1 movie and the software crashed and burned and I lost all my editing work.
The movie was made by taking some 30 or so separate captured *.avi files and lining them all up one after the other sequentially and reducing their durations to about one second each. Every time you add a new movie to the timeline, you get both a movie and an audio, so if you don't want the original audio, you have to break the link between audio and movie, then delete the audio. Needless, to say, I didn't want the original audio so these were all tossed out.
Once I had my sequences all lined up, it was time to produce some cool sound track for the movie. This weekend was one of those where I had all the inspiration I could want, but sorely lacked the mechanical skills to pull it out of my head for a recording. With laptop sitting on piano and repeatedly playing the movie over and over and the camera now focused on the keyboard, I began improvising with anything that came to my head while watching the movie. Unfortunately, a lot of really cool pieces didn't make the cut because of my fumbling fingers. After four hours of playing and taping and trying out various takes, I finally settled on a score, which is hopefully interesting enough to overlook the couple of hesitations in it. I think the way I played it and the it came out when combined with the video definitely gives it some sort of synergy that otherwise isn't there in the two components independently.
Once I had my score isolated and added to the project, it was time to fine-tune the whole thing by adjusting the individual lengths of each segment to fall at a logical place in the score so that the whole thing jived. Here's the end result; a quick-time movie and mpeg movie suitable for Microsoft Media player (among others).
Again, definitely save your work before trying to compile the movie, as I lost my layout when attempting to build a higher definition version in mpeg format, probably most likely due to my attempt to play the quick-time movie in the background while it compiled (Doh!).
For those interested, here is the original score and video (i.e. me playing at the piano) as well as an alternate score.
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