Author: jbenton

mc hammer

“Make no mistake, when the president says go — look out, it’s hammer time,” Vice Adm. Timothy J. Keating said aboard the USS Constellation. “It is hammer time. We are going to make the world safer for our children and our grandchildren.”
Finally, the truth comes out: MC Hammer is behind all this. I always suspected Hammer had weapons of mass destruction in those parachute pants. If only a voice of reason — Tone Loc, for instance — could pull him aside and speak wisdom: Please Hammer, don’t hurt ’em.

txcn

I’ll be on TXCN sometime in the 4:00 hour this afternoon, talking about a story I didn’t even write. The segment will repeat throughout the evening. Glad I didn’t pick today to wear my loud brown-green-yellow plaid shirt.
FYI, posting will probably be very sporadic around here for the next week or so.

iraq plans

It’s tough to make vacation plans when, in the back of your mind, you have to keep repeating: “Well, but I might be interviewing refugees in Kuwait then.” Not certain, not even likely, but possible.

deep springs college

When I was in high school looking at colleges — twelve years ago! — I was intrigued by Deep Springs College. “Founded in 1917, the college lies in an isolated high desert valley of eastern California, about thirty miles from the nearest town. Each of its twenty-six students receive a full scholarship valued at over $50,000 per year, covering tuition, room, and board. In addition to engaging in a rigorous academic program, the all-male student body participates in self-governance and assumes substantial responsibility for the management of the college, alfalfa farm, and cattle ranch.”
I suppose it appealed to the part of me wishing to break out of my pasty-white indoor life. But then I remembered that girls are pretty nice, too, and that I was going to college to avoid manual labor, not to embrace it. I mean, this is how the college sells itself on its web site:
Students often rise before the sun. At 6:00 the dairy boys are already milking cows half asleep when the feedman gets up to do his first feed run. A farm teamer may have been in the tractor baling hay since 4:30. All of these people are especially thankful for the breakfast cook, who

sxsw movie explanation

For those of you who couldn’t attend 20×2 at SXSW, my two-minute presentation is available for download. (That’s a 3.3 meg Quicktime file. The one I used at SXSW was a 412 meg file, so there’s some loss of quality, most notably in the music.) For those unfamiliar with 20×2, read the March 5 entry below.
Enough people asked me how the movie was made that I figured I’d type it up for you nice people. The machine in question is a two-year-old PowerMac G4/466 tower, running Mac OS X 10.2.4.
– The main assembler is iMovie, Apple’s great movie-editing software. I’d never used iMovie before (or done anything video-related, really) and this project was primarily an excuse to play around with it. As of iMovie 3, photos (mistakenly, I’d argue) import as rendered movies, not as still frames (the so-called Ken Burns effect). So for a project like this your life will be much easier if you edit the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iMovie3.plist file to change the value of autoApplyPanZoomToImportedStills to false.
– The video screen captures (the opening pico stretch, the Safari browser launch shot, the spinning beach ball, and all the Google typing) were done with Snapz Pro. It’s easy to use — it reassigns command-shift-3 as its launcher. Snapz Pro costs $49, but it’s free for 30 days — time your download around your project needs! (The $13 ScreenRecord supposedly does the same thing, but I haven’t tried it out.)
– For iMovie purposes, your captures need to be in the 4:3 ratio, so you’ve got to resize the marquee to 640×480, 320×240, 160×120, or some variant thereof. (By luck I figured out that if you right-click at the same time that you resize the marquee with the left mouse button, a popup displays the current frame size — so no more guessing. I don’t know how’d you do that if you only had one mouse button. Of course, anyone with OS X should pony up the 20 bucks or so to buy a multi-button mouse — it’s worth it. I use the six-button Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Optical.)
– I used Quicktime Pro to edit down Snapz Pro’s clips. In Snapz, it’s best to grab a few extra seconds on either end of what you want; with QT Pro, it’s easy to trim off that extra time in editing. You also need QT Pro if you want to do play your movie full-screen, without any of the Aqua chrome. Finally, I also used Quicktime Pro to export the clips in .dv format, which is the camcorder codec that iMovie reads. (I don’t think you can import Quicktime movies directly into iMovie — at least you couldn’t as of iMovie 2.) So even though it costs $30, you really do need Quicktime Pro.
– The opening shot is grabbed from the OS X install of pico, the Unix text editor I remember from college. You can get to it by running Terminal.app and just typing ‘pico’ at the command line. I changed the look-and-feel to the green-on-black text and blinking cursor to evoke that old-skool computing feel.
– Getting a screen capture of the spinning beachball (OS X’s equivalent of the Windows hourglass “wait” cursor) is tough — since it only comes up when your computer is too stressed out to be running screen capture software. So the movie’s beachball is actually a shot of the demo page of No Stubs, one of the downloadable cursor sets for Mighty Mouse, Unsanity’s new cursor-replacement shareware. (For some reason, the animated GIF doesn’t activate in Win IE — perhaps it’s only on OS X.)
– The photo shots were all done in Photoshop. I kept the type, the image, and the black bar in separate layers, so they were easy to edit quickly. The photos themselves all came from Corbis, iStockPhoto, and Yahoo News. The typeface is Myriad. For the longer “Waiting for…” phrases, I messed with the type’s horizontal scaling to make them fit.
– The music is a song called “The Newborn Hippopotamus,” from a tremendous album called DJ Shadow Presents Schoolhouse Funk. It’s a limited-edition compilation of 1970s high school bands, playing some of the skronkiest funk you’ll ever hear from 16-year-olds. (Song sample here.) You can’t find the album anywhere, but you can download it from eMusic, the greatest of the legitimate MP3 download sites. (You can sign up for a free trial membership and download 50 MP3s immediately.)
– The full track is 7:08, but I edited it down in Audion. I’d originally planned a longer silent stretch at the movie’s start, which allowed me to have an audio clip about 1:30 long, ending at the start of the track’s drum solo. Unfortunately (I think), the length didn’t work out, so I tagged a part of the drum solo to make it about 1:43.
– The final sound clip (“I’m feeling lucky”) was generated as an AIFF in VoiceBox, which uses the Mac’s text-to-speech technology to “read” words into a sound file. I used the Cellos voice, with the pitch tuned up slightly.
– Once I pulled everything into iMovie, I set all of the photo frames to run for 1:15 (that’s one second and 15 frames of a, um, second second). I ended up copying and pasting the beachball clip a few times, both as a transitional space filler and to keep up the waiting theme. From there, it took just a little fine tuning. I exported the whole thing to Quicktime format, using the full DV settings. In total, it probably took me about six hours, most of them late Thursday night/early Friday morning. But a lot of that was spent searching for photos. If you (unlike me) have a clue what you’re doing ahead of time, I think you could probably produce something like this in three or four hours.
Anyway, more post-SXSW posts to come, eventually. It was great seeing everyone.