Finally :)

I've written elsewhere here, I think, the fact that I've never named a cat or a dog... not and had it stick. Someone else has always named them. The five cats I've adopted since moving to North York were all named by other people. I don't believe in changing a pet's name, especially if they've had it a while.

I do volunteer driving for Toronto Cat Rescue. Last week I had to pick up an unnamed cat from the city's north shelter and take him to a mid-town vet, one of the ones that does charity work for Toronto Animal Services and Toronto Cat Rescue. As I was driving away with him on Sheppard Avenue, talking to him to keep him calm, I was behind a van with a licence plate that started with "ARWN". Inspired, I stuck a timely "Y" in the middle, scribbled "ARWYN" down on his papers, and started saying it to him as we drove across town.

Just a few minutes ago, I got this email from TCR.

Hi all:

Can anyone pick up a cat named Arwyn at Rosedale Moore Park Vet clinic at Mt Pleasant/St Clair and take him to a foster home at St Clair W & Bathurst? 

The foster is available all day tomorrow and the clinic hours are 9am - 6:30pm.

A carrier is needed and medical records need to go with him.

Arwyn was rescued from TAS and would love to get settled into a home environment!

 

Isn't that awesome? :)

Gary Numan and... my phone

Gary Numan was in Toronto last week and I went to see him live for the second time, again with Kaid (who, again, purchased the tickets). It was at the Phoenix Concert Theatre down on Sherbourne Street. I'm not sure how many people crowded in... 500? 1000? The place was packed. Kaid and I got there 45 minutes before the doors opened (7:30) so there was only one row of people between us and the stage.

Last time, we had VIP tickets and I actually got to meet Gary Numan briefly, shake his hand, offer the sincere fan flattery he's heard a million times, and get my copy of Exhibition autographed. I didn't have anything like that this time but there was no need to gild the lily. I've met Gary Numan and talked with him, once. No need to press my luck. :)

Things kicked off with the band Roman Remains at 8:30. They were fronted by a pretty young blonde with a terrific voice and vocal range. The songs were varied and engaging and I personally felt their set could have gone a little longer.

The next act was Big Black Delta. The thing I principally remember of this two-man effort was that the drummer really played his ass off. The other guy, who I think is solo and technically constitutes "the band", worked a board to provide his pre-cooked accompaniment. His vocals seemed to consist largely of moaning "oooo, ooo, ooo ooo" into the mic and punctuating that with lyrics that were occasionally understandable. While I enjoyed the first few numbers, they quickly took on the air of finding your own footprints in the woods, the same tree by the brook, the same stump you tripped over before. Do I even need to say I thought his set went on too long? I didn't hate the act; far from it. I just thought he was taking advantage, you know?

And then out came Gary Numan and the four musicians backing him. Wow. There were lights, but that's all they needed. They didn't need gimmicks and props to put on a show. They were the show. They came out and they played songs I've known nearly all my life. Songs I've known since university. Songs I've known for just a few years. And songs I've never heard before. And when he indicated he wanted the audience to join in on Are Friends Electric?, a thousand fans were right there. People in their 20s. People in their 50s. That was magic. :)

Now I swear, towards the end of the show, there came a moment when he caught my eye, smiled in recognition, and pointed to me. I thought I had it on video but I don't. Now maybe I'm just kidding myself, but the man was only about a dozen feet away, and I'm going to go to my grave thinking this man saw a friendly face he remembered from before in the crowd, and took a moment to let me know. :)

They played for 90 minutes. I was on my feet for over six hours end to end, but while they were up there, it honestly ameliorated the discomfort. That's how I knew for sure I was onboard. But oooh, the walk back. Because I'm cheap, I parked up in Rosedale, about a mile from the concert hall. No big deal going down. But coming back, after standing for six hours, wow... that was some fun walk, let me tell you. I got to the car at quarter to one, home a bit after one in the morning. I was convinced I'd be hard pressed to get out of bed the next day. But no, to my surprise I was just fine. Go figure.

Anyway... the phone. Last winter my carrier convinced me to trade up, so being a Samsung fan I went with the S4. At the concert, I had my two 3D Fuji cameras, the W1 and the W3. I manned the latter and Kaid the former. I got a lot of video; he took a lot of photos. Y'know, and they're 3D. But I decided to put some of the features of the S4 through their paces. One thing it can do is shoot slow motion video, at 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8 speed. Now the resolution is at best 800 x 450... but that's better than the resolution of the same feature on my S100, a dedicated camera: at best, 640 x 480; at worst, 320 x 240.

I showed the full-motion, 1920 x 1080 HD video to P-Doug on Saturday, on the phone itself, and he was surprised by the quality of it and remarked on it. It was one of those things where you don't really notice how good the quality of something is till someone else notices it, but when he did, I started noticing, too. For a camera smaller than postage stamp, with no moving parts, in the back of a phone half the thickness of my index finger, it did some fantastic work. It was dealing with light levels that literally went from twilight to sunburst in the blink of an eye and it kept up with it all. As far as the sound goes, it's mono, but it's not blown out. It's loud and muffled, but it was standing there beside the speaker, too. It actually sounds very much like I remember hearing it. I was disappointed with the audio response of my cameras at the last Numan concert. While I'm not overjoyed with what I got this time, I at least think it stands on its own.

I recorded one song pretty much end to end; one of the newer songs called The Fall. It's one I particularly enjoy. The full video was shot 1920 x 1080. I decided to do my own video in Premiere using what I got from the S4. Since the slow motion video is 800 x 450, I decided that would be my "working" resolution. What that means is I had all kinds of room to do tricks with the full HD video. I could zoom in and out with out pixelation, from 100% all the way down to about 45% (where the image becomes smaller than the field). So I could do things in post I didn't do live, like track musicians as they move. Anyway, I cut it all together. It's no hell, but when you stop and think it was all accomplished by holding up a cell phone (and then assembling it all at home), I think the results are kind of impressive. Imagine telling somebody in 1960, or even 1990, that this would be possible in their lifetime.

Here's the video. :)

The Ballad of Danny and Esmerelda

When I started goofing around with State, I started by coming up with gags based on the animal aspects of the Choo Choos characters just to have something to work with. One of the first ones played off the fact that a couple of the characters were naked. I explained it by having the female character... I forget what they called her; I eventually called her Esmerelda... wandering around that way because she was in heat, and the guy, who they called Eddie but I called Danny in my vids, not being willing or able to exercise his better judgement and not take advantage of the situation. That impression that Esmerelda's not in control and is being taken advantage of is belied by the presence of mind she shows in the last line. :)

This one actually started a whole thread of videos that kind of move through their getting to know each other, actually discover they like each other quite a bit, and then discover that the idea of them getting married isn't quite as pleasing to Esmerelda's dad, who turns out to be Danny's boss. But that all comes later. For now...

xtranormal STATE test animation - Gettysburg Address

This was one of my efforts using State, and probably the one that's gotten the most hits on my YouTube channel (5300 over 5 years or so... sigh...). Probably one of the least creative in terms of what it required of me, but in its way, maybe one of the better efforts.

There were two ways to get dialog into a State animation. One was simply to type text in, as advertised, and let the program use its licensed voice synthesis modules to create the dialog, and auto-animate the mouth movements to match the phonemes. The other way was to take recorded dialog and map it to one of the characters, and again, the program would create the mouth animation.

In this case, I was using recorded dialog. This is Sam Waterston reciting the Gettysburg Address (oddly enough, I seem to have uploaded it on the Fourth of July). Sam Waterston also provided the voice-overs for President Lincoln in the Ken Burns series The Civil War, and so is likely to sound familiar to anyone who's seen it. One of the characters in the Choo Choos set wears a top hat, and so was the obvious analog for an Abe Lincoln role.

This was made entirely within State. It was possible to have various camera angles within the same scene, and even to have characters orient themselves to different cameras, as you can see when "Lincoln" turns to address and approach this or that camera. There was no need to post-process this, at least not as I recall.

The music, incidentally, is Winston's Diary by the Eurythmics from the soundtrack of 1984, something I listened to literally hundreds of times on the bus to and from classes when I was in university.

We need to stop calling them "cowards"

I shouldn't have to preamble this, but it's a touchy issue, so I will. I don't agree or identify with the aims of the people I'll be talking about. Their methods are objectionable and repulsive. Frankly, I think they represent some of the least redeeming characteristics of our species, and they're motivated by some of its most backward, primitive attitudes.

But they're not cowards.

A coward is someone too paralyzed by fear to act. Clearly, that is not case here. On the contrary; these are people so motivated by apprehension, and anger, and hatred, that their need to act overwhelms their otherwise ordinary senses of justice, compassion, and reason. Their philosophy empowers them with the belief that if they are condemned by all their fellow creatures, that's nothing, because they will reap the praise and reward of the only being whose opinion matters.

I think we do a real disservice all around in simply throwing out the word "cowardly" to describe incidents like the hotel attack in Kabul. It mischaracterizes the motivations of the attackers and makes it less likely we'll be able to understand, and thus effectively counter, their methods. As I see it, these are people who feel themselves, their culture, and their religion (their god, if you will) as under attack by forces too wealthy and powerful to take on directly. Only indirectly can they attack us, by ducking under our formidable armour and striking us where we're soft and unprotected. Lest the temptation to reaffirm this as "cowardly" be succumbed to here, I would also remark that much of the Second World War was fought on a similar basis. When the prospect of being utterly pulverized by attempting to wage direct warfare across the English Channel stalemated the land war for four years, neither the Germans nor the Allies had any compunctions against targeting and killing civilians on the other side, from the air, and by the hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions. What feeble defence could be offered by fighters on either side to wave after waves of bombers was little more in comparison than what suicide bombers or gunmen face in armed guards. The bottom line is, I don't see how we can call people who risk their lives attacking essentially defenceless people "cowards" if we're not prepared to say the same of men who risked their lives to roast alive, from above, civilian men, women, and children indiscriminately in their hundreds of thousands in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. And I don't think we are.

I think we do better to stand up before the world and tell them these attacks are "pointless". These men give up their lives, beggar their families of their love and support, and sicken mankind with their poorly-considered bestiality to achieve nothing. Nothing changes that they could remotely consider advancing their cause or addressing their aims. All that happens is an increase in human misery for their own families and those of their victims, and a momentary release of schadenfreude in like-minded people that quickly fades. If anything, their goals are made more remote as these tactics tend to stiffen the resolve of their opponents and make them less willing to see things from their point of view or try to compromise.

So the word we should use is pointless. And we should make it clear why.

Christopher's Movie Matinee

The National Film Board, to my surprise, has a YouTube channel, and they've started posting a number of their movies and animations. One of the movies I've come across was one shot in the mid-60s called Christopher's Movie Matinee.

It's kind of a romp; a lot of college-age kids given a NFB film crew to command in the Summer of Love. It's a bit like a review I heard of Magical Mystery Tour: "they went on the road to film whatever happened. Nothing did." But I don't mean that in the negative way it's meant about MMT. This movie is edited to be self-referential. Some of it records decisions, directions, and arguments about the shots and why the kids want to make them, what they want to say, and why they want to say it, while they're being opposed by slightly older professionals who are embarrassed about having to do shots they consider unprofessional and even potentially damaging to their reputations as pros. It's almost as though they were recording the metadata to cover their own asses. In any case, they provide a revealing contrast in the attitudes across the gulf of a mere half generation, as well as that between unbridled, if unrealistic, creativity on the one hand, and experienced, if staid, practicality on the other.

There are the things you would expect, even demand, of such a film from that era... the political debates; the naive idealism; the firm belief that they can change the world. Let's give them some credit; to some extent, they did. We at least live in a world now where people are still prepared to voice their opposition instead of merely accommodating orders from above. For a person of my age, and born when I was, it's interesting to listen to the middle-aged patriotic businessman with an Australian accent on the bus berate the youngsters as unrealistic, and tell them if he had them in his old regiment for five minutes he'd completely turn them around; and to listen to the kids ask him why they ought to be expected to fight in wars and have the man practically sputter things along the line of "that's just the way it is" (at one point, he actually advises them to "conform"). He may not reach the same conclusions as them, but it's clear he's suddenly facing a question he probably hadn't genuinely considered before. But he also scores a solid point of his own when he marvels that middle class Canadian white kids could dare to compare themselves and their issues to those of American blacks in the south. Earlier there are shots of a confrontation in New City Hall between the kids and former Toronto mayor Allan Lamport, who notoriously hated Yorkville's hippies; a confrontation that frames an interesting moment in the city's history.

For me the most interesting thing is probably the least-intended. The movie serves as a long moving snapshot of various locations in Toronto in 1967. For example, one of the more notorious locations in Toronto was the Bayview Ghost. It was started with permission and the Borough of East York refused to follow through on servicing, so for nearly 30 years, this unfinished, increasing derelict, and rather dangerous low-rise (no railings on the balconies or barriers to the elevator shafts, I'm told) stood like a giant tombstone on a bluff overlooking the Bayview Extension. By the time I got to the sight in the late 90s it had been torn down and consigned to history for 15 years, an open field; now the site is covered by a small, expensive pocket subdivision. But in the film, several shots were taken in and around it. In fact, based on the view, the second, fourth and sixth shots in the movie are clearly taken from one of the apartments inside the Bayview Ghost. The Don Valley Parkway is visible in the distance, while construction goes on immediately below them on Bayview Avenue. Later one comes an extended sequence of young people dashing around the wasteland at the foot of the building, and appearing in its windows and on its balconies. It has a charm to it, and one that absolutely couldn't be reproduced today... both because the building itself is long gone, and so is the zeitgeist. There are also shots of things that are charming because they haven't changed that much, like the ones taken of the Old Mill Road bridge over the Humber River... still pretty much identical today in situ. There are other shots, mainly taken downtown, that would probably be of interest to people more attuned to the changes that have happened there over time than I am.

In any case, it's an interesting little movie with a lot to recommend it. Poignant, frank, at times unintentionally funny, it's worth a look.

R.I.P. Xtranormal State

State was a program, created by a company called Xtranormal, that permitted the user to very quickly and very simply create dialog-driven animations with simple movements and gestures using an array of pre-existing characters (my favourite set, called "Choo Choos",  was a bunch of anthropomorphic animal rockers). The company's slogan was, "If you can type, you can make movies", and that was almost literally true. It was easy to use if you simply wanted to have a talking head for your presentation, and fun to work with if you were doing conversational humour. I used it fairly extensively around 2008-2010 just to make something little things to amuse myself.

I was really shocked to read last week that Xtranormal folded up last summer. State phones home when you start it... you have to log in... and now that there's nowhere to log into, it won't start. So it's not bad enough there'll never be another version, I can't even run the one I have. That really, genuinely sucks. Even though I haven't used State in a long time, I had a lot of fun using it and the thought that I never will again is a real downer.

Below is what was probably the most ambitious project I ever undertook using Xtranormal's State animation program. Because there's no realistic way to get the program to identify different spoken voices as different characters, or even separate dialog from music, I actually had to sing the lyrics myself to make the mouth animations, and then resync them to the actual song. All the scenes were composited, along with the music, in Adobe Premiere Pro, way back in the summer of 2009. The song is Steal My Sunshine, by the "one hit wonder" Toronto band Len, and came out in the summer of 1999, a particularly contented period of my life and a year when the hits, as far as I was concerned, just didn't stop coming. I love this song, with its strange, unrelentingly idiomatic lyrics, and I loved making this little video for it.

In case you'd like to follow along, here are the lyrics...

Tim: Hey, Matt..
Matt: Yeah, Tim?
TIm: Hey you talked to Marc lately?
Matt: Uh... I haven't really talked to him, but, he looks pretty, uh, down.
Tim: He looks pretty, uh, down... Yeah, well... maybe we should cheer him up then.
Matt: What do you, uh, suppose we should do?
Tim: Well... does he like butter tarts?

I was lying on the grass on Sunday morning of last week
Indulging in my self-defeat
My mind was thugged all laced and bugged all twisted wrong and beat
A comfortable three feet deep
Now the fuzzy stare from not being there on a confusing morning weak
Impaired my tribal lunar-speak
And of course you can't become if you only say what you would have done
So I missed a million miles of fun

I know it's up for me
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Making sure I'm not in too deep
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Keeping versed and on my feet
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE

Tim: Chad... come here come here come here.
Chad: Wow... look at her!
Tim: I know!
Chad: Wow, I've never seen Sharon look so bad before.
Tim: I did once before, but this is pretty bad.
Chad: Yeah... what do you think she got up to last night?
(Tim laughs)
Tim: Well... I... Jared... I love you!

I was lying on the bench slide in the park across the street
L-a-t-e-r that week
My sticky paws were in to making straws out of big fat slurpy treats
An incredible eight foot heap
Now the funny glare to pay a gleaming tare in a staring under heat
Involved an under usual feet
And I'm not only among but I invite who I want to come
So I missed a million miles of fun

I know it's up for me
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Making sure I'm not in too deep
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Keeping versed and on my feet
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE

I know it's done for me
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Not as some and hard to see
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Keeping dumb and built to beat
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE

My Sunshine
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE

Morning exercises

Okay. So. In keeping with what I just posted, here's what I've come up with most recently. This is a collage of stuff I've done in Premiere, including some material that's come in from After Effects (in this case, the LED billboard effect and the smoke and text reveal effect at the very end). Most of it is just re-editing work to take mundane things and try to make them funny.

Let me break it down. First of all, "HLAF". As far as I know, no call letters in North America start with "H". That's a reference to Hamilton. My buddy Dig and I met there when we were kids and we were [ah, phone call from headhunter as I write this; interview for contract position next Monday... hi ho, hi ho, it's off again we go...] big into Battlezone, the Atari tank game. He was tank commander "Logan" (after Logan's Run, I think) and I was "Fox", a call sign I thought was cool. Anyway, we were Logan and Fox, and we both signed LAF in the high scores. Didn't matter whose score. We were kind of Lennon and McCartney about it. So, this is an homage to my friendship with him and our long traditions. In fact, most of the humour in these things pretty much springs from it. Dig makes a cameo at the start of the video as the station tech director, Ernie "Tiny Tubes" Bokstek. ("Bokstek" is another in-joke. Leave it at that.)

The second segment is my trying out an LED billboard effect in AE that I learned on YouTube. The sentiment, while somewhat crude, is simply meant to be ironic in its context. I actually saw it some years ago on a bumper sticker on a truck and I laughed so long I nearly had to pull over. It really swept me away. It's kind of stayed with me ever since. :)

The third bit is pure Premiere. It needs a little backgrounding. The audio comes from a bunch of my friends fooling around at the radio station one of them worked at back in high school (yes, we're talking nearly 30 years ago now). They were visiting him at work and he talked them into reading the script of a commercial for one of their clients. This is the first take... and it shows. I thought it would be funny to use it as the "whoops, wrong take" audio of a simple commercial for a small local business.

The next bit is also pure Premiere. I've had a disk of crappy little photo object since the 90s... photographic clip art, essentially... and I thought it might be funny to just throw a bunch of them up there and do a cheap "animated" commercial that made no sense, and really make the point by having someone jabber rapidly in Spanish. Anyone who understands Spanish will just be confused, but if (like me) you don't, then it comes across as the missing link... you'd "get" the message implied by the visual elements if only you could understand the man. Well, anyway, it's the kind of Pythonesque stuff Dig and Larry and I find funny.

Next is one of those station identification bumpers that often appears just before the start of a program. It's deliberately 80s style. "Here's a scene from one of our shows; here's who we are..." kind of thing. In this case, it's a scene from the animated Geronimo Stilton series. I put words of my own in the nephew character's mouth to lampshade the double entendre in the actual dialog, and then cut to the station intro. This, too, was mostly done in Premiere, although adding a heavily reworked bit of dialog in my own voice was done in Audition.

Finally is the title sequence for a fake BBC documentary... one of that unceasing string of documentary series they make about anything. Name a topic, they'll do a documentary series about it. In this case, I took video footage associated mostly with famous disasters (the exception is the merely comic effort at early flight at the beginning)... the Titanic, the Hindenburg, the embarrassing post-Sputnik launch failure of Vanguard 1... and wedded them to a smoke and text reveal effect created in After Effects. I think it's faintly convincing as the kind of thing they'd actually do.

So now that you know what to expect, here it is. :)

While I'm waiting... (and waiting, and waiting...)

One of the reasons I haven't been around here much since last summer is how soul-grinding it's been not having work and trying to find it. The fact that the world can get along nicely without you and what happens to you doesn't really matter much is probably in the back of all of our minds but this kind of thing really brings it home. I'm not utterly depressed, but I can compare this, in a way, to having cancer and trying to find a cure. I keep firing off resumes and every so often I get an interview but nothing seems to work. I found work in December that put it into remission, as it were, but only till January when they came up with what I'm pretty sure is a bullshit reason to get rid of me. Frankly, I think they were just looking for someone with the requisite skills to get them over the hump. It was pretty crushing all around. But hey, that's not really what I wanted to talk about here. Sort of just preamble.

More preamble. Jim over at On the Road recently posted an entry in which he talked about how he writes his posts as they occur to them and in fact saves them up so that he can post regularly. It also means he has something to post at times when he really has nothing to say just at the moment. I think this is brilliant. I've tended to just blather here whenever something occurs to me, and then it's crickets for weeks or months. But I do actually have some things I could be posting every couple of days or so, at least for a while. I think I'm going to give that a try.

So. Heart of the matter time. I've been a subscriber to Adobe CS/CC for about two years now. This gives me access to most of their creative programs. I've known how to use Photoshop and Illustrator more or less low-level-expertly for nearly 20 years. But there are a lot of other programs. So while I sit here waiting for the phone to ring and hoping something finally gels for me before I'm in debt I'll never get out of and I've cannibalized my retirement savings, I'm keeping myself busy by learning new things. They probably won't help in my career, but they're keeping my mind active and trained to learn new things, and that probably will be key when... if... I land the next job.

I've been fooling with Premiere on and off for about ten years, but I've gotten more involved with it in the past couple years. I like being able to make fun little videos and it's exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do back when I was a teenager. But back then, working with audio was really all my friends and I could actually do. But now, for a few dollars a month, I have abilities at my fingertips you would have needed a half-million-dollar studio to achieve just 20 years ago.

The program that's really got me enthralled at the moment is After Effects. I've been aware of it since the 90s but it's always been a mystery to me. I've never been really clear... I'm still not... about just what exactly it can do. I understand most of the other programs, what they do, and how they do it. They're reasonably straightforward and you know going in what you're going to achieve. But After Effects is almost literally like having a magic box. You reach into it and you pull out some indescribable wonder that floats in the air. If you want to see what I mean, just go to YouTube and do a search on After Effects. I promise you, you will be amazed. There seems to be no end to the visual effects you can create with it. And so, a lot of my very, very free (in every sense of the word) time lately has been taken up with following tutorials on YouTube and pulling magic right out of thin air in AE. I've been using what I can do there as a springboard to presenting ideas and things that I find funny, mostly in the form of a little fake TV station I made up. Just about all the programs I know get used to make these things... elements come in from Audition, Photoshop, Illustrator, and AE, and typically get assembled in Premiere. So just for something to do, I think I'll start presenting some of what I've come up with here every couple of days.

Cinemagraphs

This is something I just heard about yesterday, but seems to me like an idea we've all had and maybe even toyed with, but never had a formal name till now. They're called cinemagraphs, and the the idea of them is to present something that appears to be a still photograph with some minor elements of motion in it to jazz it up. For instance, a woman standing before a building, but with a lock of hair and the folds of her dress around her calves gently moving in the breeze. The effect can actually be kind of compelling.

I started looking through old things I had. The easiest way to create one, really, is to find some video you've shot where the camera was fixed and the frame didn't move, and then take one frame as your base "still" photo, and use a sequence of other frames, strategically masked, to create other frames adding subtle motion to the "still" image. I imagine I have something like that but I'll have to look.

The easiest things for me to find, though, were the long exposure images I took around New Year's of 2008 downtown. They idea was to combine them into high-speed movies with a lot of natural motion blur. They have a strong element of motion, suddenly frozen, in them when they're viewed as individual images. So I took a couple, isolated motion in some of the frames associated with them, and came up with these. One is of a man wandering through a world frozen in time; the other, a young couple chatting animatedly while the world around them simply comes to a stop, and there's nothing going on for them but one another.

FYI: creating the layers was done in Photoshop. Converting the layers in the PSD file, fairly automatically, was done using GIF Movie Gear, a program that finally makes the creation of animated PNGs feasible (what the hell is everyone else waiting for????), although Blogger doesn't seem to recognize an animated PNG as an image file... sigh... these things have only existed since the late 1990s, that's all... so below are animated GIF versions. >:/

Brief musings

Another thing I've been mulling over lately is how much things have changed. I think I was at my happiest, or at least most content, somewhere around the cusp of 2010 and 2011. Work was really getting interesting; I liked my coworkers; and we'd moved into a new location I really loved. I was taking the subway to work, not driving, and doing a lot of reading... I felt very cosmopolitan. Larry was still subletting my spare room and so there was usually company; somebody I could just walk down the hall and rap with, pretty much anytime. He's always been good company and being there he cut my rent by about 40%, which let me pay off and cut up my credit card. There were the three cats, Bonnie, Max, and Twinkle, and while Twinkle had some issues, they were, at the time, all hale and hearty. Things were good.

Then Larry mooted he would probably be getting a place of his own, and I started all that plotting and planning to buy a place. This place. Where my little "family" disappeared before my eyes in the space of a year and a half, and where I've spent much of the past year just trying to land my next job. Most of what I had, the companionship, the security, the self-worth... so much of it has just evaporated. And as far as I can tell, I didn't do anything wrong. It was all just in the numbers.

I wish I could go back. Not to change anything; the cats were going to get old and die; one job tends to be just as secure or insecure as another... but to live in the moment. Enjoy those feelings again. I have this feeling that's the high water mark. It might get better, but it's never really going to be that good again.

Beyond

I was thinking the other day that it wasn't all that long ago that once a person was gone, there was nothing left of him or her but the vague, sharded, fading memories of those who knew them. If you were very well-off, someone might have painted your portrait... once, perhaps even twice. But it's really only been in the last 150 years that solid, objective records of what a person looked and sounded like have been available after that person's death. The science has advanced. We've all seen Abe Lincoln... but what wouldn't you give to actually hear the Gettysburg Address in his own voice? Compare that with King's "I have a dream" speech a mere century later.

Now it's almost incidental. I was roaming through some of my older footage last night, looking for something appropriate to use in relation to something I'll be posting shortly, and I happened across a video I shot of Bonnie just about four years ago now. Larry, my roommate at the time, told me that Bonnie typically made a fuss calling after me in the mornings when I left for work. So, one day, I set up my camera on one of the tables in my bedroom, aimed it at Bonnie on the bed, and just let it run. This is a few seconds extracted from it, following me leaving the apartment (excuse the unmade bed... who am I kidding?). I find it a little haunting, but not overwhelming. Except maybe one vocalization a little past the half way point. It sounds so much like, "...hello?"...

Mundane things

I haven't regularly blogged for a long time. Pretty much once the wake of Bonnie's passing had subsided, the juice was sort of squeezed out. Couple with that my chronic un(der)employment since last summer and there just hasn't been much I felt like recording for myself or broadcasting. I've also slipped away from supporting other people who do this. Notably Jim over at Down the Road... though given the crowd of regulars he has, it probably hasn't affected him as much as I flatter myself it has. :) The thing is, checking the other blogs was kind of a ritual. It was a thing I did starting my day. You know, show up, start the coffee if no one else had, sit down, check a couple of strips I like to read, read the handful of blogs I find engaging, make a few comments, then get rolling as coworkers show up and start shooting the breeze. But I'm out of that world now, at least for the moment.

I guess it's a return to mundane things that will get me showing up here a little more. Talking about the little things, maybe the stuff that's encouraging while I endure this. Or contemplative.

Well, this afternoon, it's contemplative. Out of nowhere, the tune No One's Gonna Love You went through my mind. That's a lovely song but like Yellow by Coldplay, it's not one I can listen to. If you've read the blog over the past couple of years you'll know I've mentioned the song twice before; the first time in apprehension of Bonnie's then-eventual death, and more recently, just after it happened. I looked up the entries a few minutes ago and felt some of the hurt again. (And that's without even daring to listen to the song.) The love bites. I said last May that those would be what I'd miss the most... the weird thing is, just now, it hit me like a slap. I'd nearly forgotten about that aspect of things. As it turns out, when I think of Bonnie, what I find myself missing now is just how much she wanted to be next to me. How she was there on the other pillow at night. How she used to just reach out and tug my arm and insist I look her in the eye when I was paying attention to the computer for too long. I guess I don't miss the love bites so much because that's something Seth does. But neither he nor Ally are there at night. It's a strange thing for a guy who's never been married to say, but I haven't been alone at night for a very long time. From the time I turned 21 until Bonnie went into her final spiral starting right around now a year ago, there was always either Jenny or Bonnie right there, and generally Max was somewhere on the bed as well. But Ally and Seth seem to feel the bed is no place for them. I wish I could convince them otherwise. Combined with the fact that, day after day, I'm not seeing anyone but my own reflection, I guess this is the loneliest I've ever been since the last time I was the new kid in school. And there's still old age to look forward to.

Cheer up. I have nerdy technical things I'd like to talk about next while I'm waiting for the phone to ring.

The Mighty Quinn

Sometime in February… I’ll never know exactly when… I’m pretty sure we passed the point that my friend Jody’s been gone and out of my life longer than he was in it. We met online in the autumn of 1994, and he died in late spring 2004. We knew each other not quite ten years. Though we were never in the same room together, we talked nearly daily, and I got to know his father as a friend in his own right.

Jody died of cancer. It was what they call a “childhood” cancer; a soft tissue carcinoma. It started in his hip and was diagnosed in the autumn of 2002. He and his team of oncologists beat it back and by the following summer he was in remission and had a bright new lease on life.

But then there came that day in October. We were talking online, both of us at work, over ICQ, and he started complaining of a pain in his side. A familiar kind of pain. He hoped it was something digestive. I was a little concerned, of course. What I remember is leaving at lunch time to buy a 128MB USB drive… my first. While I was driving, I listened to The Mighty Quinn by Manfred Mann. It was a kind of upbeat, empowering tune, and I was hoping I’d get back and Jody’s pain would have blown over. But it hadn’t. Friends shooed him off to the doctor. You can guess the rest.

Anyway, the song has had a complicated emotional impact for me ever since. I still think it’s lovely and hopeful; a song about the coming of some strange, vague messianic figure who’ll solve all the problems just by his presence. I still want to believe in stuff like that. Who doesn’t? I still love the song, even though it’s come to be associated with some of the worst things living things have to face. Since then, three of the cats I’ve cherished have died, and my friend Georgette’s health problems finally overcame her a year ago. I thought it was appropriate to remember them too. I guess I could have also mentioned Jenny, but she died just before Jody’s initial diagnosis and I had to draw the line somewhere. Besides, I made a tribute to her when she died.

So, the piece. The piece itself here. It runs about a minute and a quarter. The initial inspiration was something Seth, the cat starring in it, did spontaneously one day last summer. I was doing something on the main computer, listening to The Mighty Quinn, and I looked up to see Seth sitting there on the couch like a human or a bear or something.  Big and furry, like an Eskimo. And Seth is a big cat. He’s 20 lbs. and may just be the largest housecat I’ve ever seen personally. A gentle giant. I quietly grabbed the S100 and videoed him for a little over a minute, before my arms started to get tired from the weird angle.

I’ve had it in my mind to do something with it for a long time, and kinetic text of the lyrics seemed like a cool idea. Recently, I’ve started learning some of the ropes in Adobe After Effects, and looking for a way to mark the occasion I mentioned at the outset of this entry, it all just seemed like time to see what I could accomplish.

The first thing I decided to do was alter the soundtrack. What you’re hearing is actually what the camera recorded that day, except that I wanted to double the chorus at the beginning. In the original version of the song, there’s a single chorus at that point, and it felt insufficient. So I opened the raw footage in Adobe Audition and carefully inserted a second chorus, then exported the new version as a WAV file. I opened the original footage in Adobe Premiere and replaced the original track with the new one, and exported the footage. This would eventually serve as the background for the kinetic text.

I imported the footage into After Effects and made a still from one frame of the video, and used that as the background for doing the kinetic text compositions. A still frame puts a lot less strain on the processors and speeds up the process. After that, it was a matter of creating new compositions for the lyrics. I had to learn a lot in order to do this, but luckily there are hundreds, literally hundreds, of tutorials on YouTube about how to do things in After Effects. How do you “scrub” the track so you can hear the music and time the animations to when words begin and end? There’s a video for that. How do you animate text along a path? There’s a video for that. How to you use a null object to control a camera view? There’s a video for that…

I started doing this on Wednesday and it took me till Friday night to complete all the kinetic text animations. There are 23 video exports showing the progress along the way, including this final cut. By last night, I had a version where I could put the original footage in as the background. That version was fine, but the text appears as though it’s superimposed… which it is, of course… but it seems divorced from the footage. The footage is handheld and it moves, because I couldn’t hold perfectly still. The kinetic text is static with regard to the inadvertent camera motions, and I wanted to see if I could make a version where it almost looks like I filmed the text at the same time I was filming Seth.

After Effects has the ability to analyse footage to create motion tracking, and then apply that to other layers, like the composite layer I made of all the text animations. It took a couple of attempts, but I got a version that tracked really well and when applied to the composite layer, made the text follow the motions of the camera (if not the slight rotations; they’re inconsequential enough I didn’t bother with that). The issue then, though, is that all the compositions were the same size as the background layer… 1280x720. So anything that moves them off-centre, like tracking camera motion in another layer, means that animations that reach the edge of their compositions suddenly seem to be cut off while on screen instead of seeming to naturally go “off stage” at the edges, and it’s highly noticeable. So I had to figure out what to do about that.

I duplicated the project so if I mucked it up, at least I’d have the original version. Then I learned how to use an expression on the composite layer’s position (specifically, “position [120, 120]”) to shift all the values of each from 120 pixels down and 120 pixels right, so the animations were much closer to the original locations in the version that doesn’t track camera motion. But I still had the issue of animations seeming to be cut off on screen. The answer there was to increase the field size for each of the two dozen or so text animations from 1280x720 to something that would give the animations more elbow room… 1500x1000. I figure no matter how far the tracking might “jerk” the composite layer in any given direction (and there are a couple of rather violent jolts in the main video), that would be enough room to keep the composite edge from ever appearing on screen. Since the centre point was constant, I hoped that would mean the composites wouldn’t appear to change position, and it turned out to be the case. After that, it was just a minor matter of tweaking a couple of video end points so elements that had left the screen didn’t seem to stop and hang around at the edges; making sure masks masked things that were at the edges of the comps, and then easing a few videos (like the one of the “pigeons”) a bit so they appeared exactly where I wanted them, and it was done.

I’m kind of proud of this. It’s no big deal, but I learned a lot; it represents something I couldn’t do but only admired in the work of others when the week started; and it was done with friends I’ve lost in mind throughout. If you’ve bothered or just happened by here, please take a couple of minutes and watch it once or twice. Then it all has meaning.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Celebrities, as humans will, die. Generally when such a person passes, I observe it with sigh and a nod; their time had come; and mark it as yet another milestone on the road we're all on... for whom the bells tolls; etc., etc.

Every once in a while, though, comes one that truly strikes me as out of joint. Wrong. Not just unfortunate, but actually a kind of a violation. That something that was due us as a society has been torn from us far too soon. Over the years I've personally felt this about John Belushi, John Lennon, River Phoenix, and Kurt Cobain. Now there's Philip Seymour Hoffman to add to the list.

The first time I saw Hoffman, he was playing the frenetic Dusty in Twister. At the time, he and I were both in our late-20s. The next time was in Magnolia, where he played a compassionate palliative care nurse. The range between these two roles was nearly was wide as the alphabet, and despite the fact I hadn't seen him in anything in three years, I immediately recognized him. I realized quickly he'd be someone to watch.

Over the years I saw him in a number of roles, but the one that captivated me, as well as the Oscars committee, was his portrayal of the lead in Capote. I left the theatre feeling almost literally as if I'd been in the presence of Truman Capote... a sensation evoked again by Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. This is the measure of the man as an actor, to me. And this is at the heart of it.

I've enjoyed the range of different characters Hoffman took on and mastered. He was truly the peer of Day-Lewis, and I don't credit many of those. So I was looking forward to another 30 years of challenging work taken on by this man. What would he show us? Who would he be? What roles would he grow into at 50? 60? 70? Well, now we'll never know. And the worst of it is, it was so needless. It wasn't cancer, or someone T-boning his car, or something like that. It was simply stupid, careless self-medicating. Same old, same old. He deserved better. So did we all, I think.

I can't be too critical. I don't know what pressures and stresses Hoffman was dealing with that all went away for a while with the press of a plunger. I just know it didn't have to be like this.

I read that not long after John Belushi was buried, there appeared a note on his grave that read, "He could have given us a lot more laughs, but noooo...!"

Ditto; or words to that effect.

That Witch I Used to Believe :)

Boy, yeah, I know I haven't been around here much in a long time. The two or three of you who actually read this thing from time to time must be wondering. Quick explanation: still unemployed... or rather, unemployed again. Maybe I'll blog about that next. But the upshot is, while I haven't really been down in the dumps majorly, I just haven't felt all that effusive.

But every now and then something comes up and I think, yeah, I should say something about that... if not for the sake of people who may, or may not, still be interested in dropping by here, then for myself to smile and nod at in future years. And so... The Witch's Catalog.

When I was a kid our school, probably like virtually every other elementary school in North America, used to hand out these monthly folded brochures of books on offer from Scholastic. Remember those? It amazes and delights me now to think back to how that used to light up the classroom. Kids would pore over them excitedly and circle the ones they wanted to read and own; compare notes, and prepare their pitch for when they got home to the parental money press. A month later, a big box would show up with the manifest, and books were handed out by the handful. Not library books, but possessions! You got to keep these. These went into your own personal library. They become totems that were carried around, became well-worn and ripped and stained, and if they were loved long and hard enough, maybe even fell apart.

I wonder if kids still get as keyed up about books these days. I sure hope so.

Naturally I long ago lost, traded, or just plain threw out the books I got that way.  As I drifted into middle age, and the internet gave us eBay, I often thought back to the books I'd particularly loved and started looking for them, and getting them back here and there. One that has a special place for me is The Witch's Catalog by Norman Bridwell (probably best known for Clifford the Big Red Dog). It's out there, but it's so rare and expensive I just balk at pressing the button. But someone scanned the pages and put them online, and snagging those was free.

The book came out about the time I was eight, so I would have been in grade two or three at the time. The book purported to be a catalog of magical objects kids could order with the form at the back. I got the book at that strange juncture in everyone's life when imagination and utter credulity are being scoured away by reality... but not quite completely yet. I was still most of a year away from having the guts to ask my mom point-blank if Santa wasn't real. It was also an age of fantastic scientific wonders, and when you're new to the world, it's hard to say for sure what's possible and what isn't (I'm still often amazed... "3D printing"?!). What I remember about the book was thinking, initially, that it was full of neat ideas, but that magic wasn't real.

...Or was it?

The thing that really fascinates me now is that over repeated readings, I actually got myself to the point that I was ready to believe. I was on the verge of accepting that this just might be possible. It didn't help that in the mid-70s, TV was full of shows about scientific gadgets that gave their owners incredible abilities, and it all seemed just around the corner. Things like invisibility cloaks and teleportation and weather control and time travel were the weekly fare of shows like The Six Million Dollar Man. So... why not magic?

I was right on the verge of ordering a handful of items and I read the order chart that instructed you to rub the thing in bat fat and stick it in a tree. I stewed on that for a while and somehow decided that no, the world really didn't work that way, and the book probably wasn't genuine after all. I have the impression I kept trying to find the right thread to pull to realize it all, but it was really a slow climb down to reality over the next several days. But I'll never forget my brush with magic. The last moment I might have believed.

One day, I'd like to find a copy of it, reasonably-priced. I don't care if it's beaten up. I just want to hold it, leaf through it again, and smile at what once seemed so plausible. But until then, let me present some of the leaves from the book, for your perusal.

P.S. The one I really wanted to get was the inexhaustible pop tap. :)

Changing of the Guard

Parliament Hill, Ottawa, summer of 2007.

Resurrection

You really just never know.

For years now I've been recording, and occasionally chronicling, the replacement of the Dundas Street (Hwy 5) bridge over Sixteen Mile Creek in Oakville. That job is done. The bridge is replaced, the park below it is open. But there were casualties: four of the six supports of an even older bridge than the one just replaced, which had stood naked beside their replacement for sixty years, finally disappeared. Only two of them were kept around for archeological interest.

A little further to the west stands a similar arrangement. Over Twelve Mile Creek (also called Bronte Creek) is another bridge that's stood since 1948, alongside the lost pillars of the bridge it replaced, itself built in 1921 (which itself replaced a remote single-lane pony truss bridge downstream dating to the 1880s, or thereabouts). It's called the Tansley Bridge to those in the know. These bridges seem to come and go in approximate pairs, so my expectation was that, with the Sixteen Mile Bridge replacement over and done with, the 1948 four-lane arrangement at Twelve Mile Creek was now for the chop. Recently I've been past there and noticed construction work, and assumed I'd called the shot.

Not exactly. When I looked it up online to see what the nature of the work was, I read that the old lost pillars of the 1921 bridge, which have stood useless for 65 years, were being repurposed. Halton Region and its civil engineers had determined that they were structurally sound enough to be refurbished and used to carry a water pipeline across the valley. Imagine!

Well, you don't have to imagine. Here are two shots I took from between the bridges, facing west; one in November, 2007, and another yesterday at the end of September, 2013.

It's a silly little thing, I know, but it makes me happy. Pillars that carried the traffic of Dundas Street through the Roaring 20s, the Depression and World War II, have survived hard times over twice as long to come out the other side with a new purpose that might just see them into the next century. Who can say?

Here's a shot, displayed by the Trafalgar Township Historical Society, of the first cars crossing the newly-built bridge in 1921. The view faces east, in the direction of Toronto.

I was out at this bridge twice in 2007, once in July and then again in November, both times with P-Doug. Here are some shots from July...

These shots in particular show the way out to the western abutment of the 1921 bridge. As you can see, no provision was made, either in 1948 or subsequently, to put any kind of barrier up at the edge of the abutment... and there's a trail down to it. I'm absolutely astonished that no distracted kid at play or teenager at a drunken get-together ever plunged off this thing in 65 years.

And below, follow-up shots from November. Nothing much had changed, of course, but with the trees bare, the view of the structures was a little more rewarding.

The bottom couple of shots show the western abutment as seen from the "new" 1948 bridge, looking to the southwest. You can see how overgrown it got over the years. The other shots show views from down in the valley looking east, and views of the pillars of the 1921 bridge as they looked for 65 years.

Now, my expectation was that these old pillars were in for it... that soon, a new pair of bridges here, each bearing three lanes, would arise like they did at Sixteen Mile Creek, and one of them would have to assume the course of the old 1921 bridge, and these pillars would have to go. Of course, as you've seen, my guess was wrong.

I wasn't out there Thursday with P-Doug. I was actually making the acquaintance of a fellow road nerd, Phil, a longtime resident of my old stomping grounds in Mississauga. He too is a fan of recording what is in deference to what was (and what may be), and we decided to go out in the field and talk shop while I followed up on a couple of sites in Halton (the other being the old Ninth Line bridge at Joshua Creek, which I may or may not blog about; we'll see). It was a strange thing to be, for once, the person who didn't have to just imagine what it was like before, but to be with someone who was in the position. Phil hadn't known about the old bridge supports or seen them when they were just abandoned to the elements... he was seeing them for the first time as I was seeing them anew: refurbished, repurposed, rededicated and spruced-up to the nines.

The views that follow show the approach to the new bridge that carries not only the pipeline, but what appears to us to be arguably a pedestrian access route across the valley. The astonishing thing here is that the views you're seeing here are the updated views of those overgrown, tangled, hopelessly lost shots of the approach to the "cliff" of the 1921 abutment, which, I believe, forms the basis of this new bridge as well.

Notice the style of the railings in the shots just above... they've gone out of their way to design railings that match the ones the original bridge here had 92 years ago. Anyone who drove along here in the 30s and 40s would recognize this bridge reborn. I couldn't tell, with the pipeline in place, if the bridge is as wide as it was way back then... it managed two lanes of traffic, just... but I'd have to say it's at least a solid approximation of what used to be there, and that in and of itself is reason to celebrate. Somebody cares, and cares that much. Imagine that.

Above, a view back up the hill, looking westward, away from Toronto. Last time I was here in summery weather, this was a sea of what strongly appeared to me to be poison ivy, although (thankfully) it probably wasn't. But I was sure sweating the idea that it was.

And finally, a shot looking east along the westbound lanes of Dundas Street. I wonder how much longer this bridge, and this view particular to it, has?