a blog by Peter Leonard
Today began at 10am with a TechFee meeting which, alas, did not quite make quorum. Nevertheless, we're nearly at the end of our 9-month odyssey and should be sending out the grant letters in the next few weeks.
From TechFee I went straight to French, where our charmingly-gaulic teacher amused us with tales of the abuse hurled at French students by teachers in France. Luckily she came out of the system without the urge to inflict it on us.
I'm supposed to select a text to read by the end of the class -- I'm going to cheat and pick a French book written by a Swedish author, Inferno by August Strindberg. (Link goes to an early Swedish translation.) Strindberg's French has been described as "well-intentioned if not ultimately successful," which I think strikes a chord with my attitude towards this language.
Following French we had an entire afternoon of finalizing the design for the Summer 2006 Copenhagen Classroom brochure. This is a trifold, double-sided Adobe InDesign CS2 monster with all sorts of weird layouts that are challenging me to actually crack the manual and figure out how InDesign deals with text flow. So far I'm getting by on my circa-1988 knowledge of PageMaker 3.
After a last-minute Arne Jacobsen scan to spice up the front, I walked the CDR over to Ave Copy. Through the rain. Twice, counting the proof. Luckily my attempt to engage the (extremely nice) Pakistani owner of the establishment in a joke about the irony of him printing SIX HUNDRED DANISH FLAGS IN FULL COLOR met with a grin, rather than any other outcome.
Somewhere in the midst of back-and-forth about the brochure I got an email from our Department administrative assistant, who sent out a mysterious message that we should "check our mailboxes." Therein proved to be an embarrassingly-large fellowship for the summer, which pretty much guarantees I'll be able to spend a lot of time above the 60th parallel. The application deadline for the Summer Faroese program has been extended, interestingly enough. If the Swedish Institute doesn't end up having their teacher training on Tjörn this summer, that may be an interesting alternative.
Finally, 7pm to 1am (with a brief pause for dinner at Cedars) was spent figuring out Flash video and DOM manipulation through javascript. The result. (Click on the image thumbnails.)
A big part of the project was figuring out exactly how to maintain the correct aspect ratio for the extremely letterbox film when creating the downloadable mp4/h.264 files. The film started out in Anamorphic DVD, then was ripped to VOBs, at which point I think we're still dealing with square pixels, then converted from VOB to uncompressed AVI/WAV, then fed into Premiere (which may have put the .9/1 whammy on it.) Then I tweaked the project to be "16×9 DV", whatever that is... apparently it involves a pixel ratio of 1:2? Then another export to widescreen DV AVI, and lastly QuickTime Pro 7 took care of moving the data into the 320pixel wide iPod format. (If I had wanted to be really slick I would have kept the widescreen for the Playstation Portable, but I'm not convinced anyone actually uses those. At least for Danish crime film watching.) Embarrassingly enough, the best way to verify that I had neither squeezed the characters into Uma nor bloated them into Oprah was to fire up the original VOB and stretch the QuickTime movie on top of it in a different window, making sure the two windows matched in size if not resolution.
All this is to say, my car was the only one left in the HUB parking lot when all was said and done.
Tomorrow is a screening of this film (Nattevagten, "Nightwatch") in 35mm, which I'll experience having watched those three 2-minute clips over and over again while they were encoding...