The assignment description is:

Reimagine the scene in a road sign. What is going on outside the iconic depiction in the sign itself? Find a road sign image online or photograph it yourself. Redraw it to show the rest of the scene you imagine, and show us the before/after on your blog.

Before

After

Credit: To create the finished version I used Photoshop and Illustrator to create a mashup of my original photo plus Michael Jackson Silhouette by munchester2cool.

How To

Illustrator purists get annoyed with me for showing anyone how to use LiveTrace, but I don’t care, I think it’s a really useful alternative when you just need to get a quick and dirty vector image. I suggest you don’t rely on this technique as a crutch though, because you can make much cleaner paths by working with the Pen Tool, and it is well worth learning. Also, LiveTrace does not work well in all situations, but for this assignment it is nearly perfect.

Watching the YouTube version is your best bet; it should look good played at full screen (especially if you switch up to 720p). The QuickTime version is included for anyone who subscribes to my podcast via iTunes.

So, this tutorial should be useful for either the Reimagined Road Signs assignment or the Four Icon Challenge. Anytime you want to make an icon actually. And it covers:

• Advanced image searches using Google (to find images licensed for reuse)
• Illustrator: LiveTrace for pasted or placed pixel-based graphics, Rotate, Erase tool, working with Layers
• Photoshop: Quick Select and Magic Wand tools, Threshhold adjustment, Transform (skew) tool
• And much more!

I hope this has been useful. Your feedback on the tutorial would be awesome. Share and enjoy!

Classroom-friendly screencasts complete with captions and a full transcript are now an easy reality thanks to YouTube and Google Voice technology.

Every semester I teach three Intro to Computer Graphics classes at my local community college. I teach them back to back on the same day, which means I give the same lecture/software demonstration three times in a row. I have to make checklists to make sure I show each class the same things – it’s very easy to leave something important out and firmly believe I’ve already said it (because I said it to a previous class).

For the last two or three years I’ve been dreaming of offloading this repetitive part of my teaching duties to video. There are many advantages to screencasting these demonstrations:

• Each class will receive exactly the same information
• I won’t leave out anything because the screencasts can be scripted and recorded in advance
• Screencasts can be made available to students’ mobile devices and home computers
• Students can view, pause, rewind as many times as they need, at their own pace
• No one misses something by being embarrassed to ask me to repeat part of the demonstration
• Class and lab time can be freed up for more one-on-one attention from me
• Students become more responsible for their own learning (well, that’s the theory anyway)

But the big drawback has always been this: how to accommodate the hearing-impaired. Online video has been awfully slow to provide for this need. And captioning a DVD is such a tedious process, there’s no way I can do it efficiently, especially given the frequent need to re-record software demonstrations due to operating system and application updates.

(I know what you’re thinking: I’ve forgotten the visually impaired. No, I haven’t. I’ve had ability to provide HD screencasts, and zoom in to more clearly show a small part of the screen, for a couple of years now. That takes care of most visual issues, certainly all the ones I’ve encountered. I freely admit it won’t accommodate a blind student, but so far I have never had a blind student enroll in a graphic design / visual communications course. It may happen at some point, but then I will have the help of my campus Disability Resources office.)

Finally, this is my year. Google and YouTube have made captioning screencasts ridiculously easy. Provided you prep a script before you record, you can turn your script into captions and a transcript in one simple step.

Example screencast script (click to enlarge)

I always type out a simple two-column script for my screencasts, with what I want to say on the left, and what I want to see on the right. This works for me. Do it your own way. I don’t really worry about sticking exactly to the script. But it helps to have everything I want to do planned out, and I can refer to my script quickly if I forget what I need to do next. Use of a script cuts the number of times I use filler sounds like “um” by 99-100%.

In case you want to know the rest of my workflow:

With script in hand, I record the audio and video portion of my screencast simultaneously using iShowU HD. I have a decent USB mic, so I don’t generally have to worry about my audio quality.

Goofy but effective tip: make a title graphic and display it on screen while you introduce the purpose of the screencast. Then there is no need to edit in a title after you record. You can do the same with a credits graphic for the end of your video.

If I need to edit the video, my first choice is QuickTime Pro. I can mark in/out points around mistakes or long pauses and just cut them out. From QuickTime Pro I can just re-save as a stand-alone .mov and upload that to YouTube (I do export podcast versions as well). If I want to zoom in on a particular part of the screen or add overlay graphics I move to Final Cut Pro, where the workflow gets a tad more complex. Lately I just avoid that for efficiency’s sake, mainly because the HD version of the video allows viewers to easily see what I’m doing on screen. But if I really want the video to be clear on a smaller device, like an iPhone, editing in some zooms is the way to go. Since we have broadband Internet access on campus, I’m not sweating this too much, but I will rethink it if feedback from my students indicates I should.

But, the captions.

Here is how to do the captions: Save the voice-only part of your script as a plain text file. Edit your uploaded video on YouTube by going to the Captions and Subtitles tab. Browse for that text file, mark it as a Transcript, and upload it.

What happens? Google Voice technology reads your transcript while listening to your video, and automagically generates a caption file timed for your video. You can then download and tweak that file if you need to. But I find if I stick pretty close to my script, editing the generated captions just isn’t necessary. See for yourself in this example (click the up arrow in the lower right corner, then click CC to turn the captions on):

Or just check it out on YouTube, where you can also activate an interactive transcript.

For a more thorough how-to, scroll to the Captions by Voice Recognition section of this Mashable tutorial.

Ryanne and Verdi get their FreeVlog dolls! from laureng on Vimeo.

Jeffrey Taylor and I ambushed Ryanne and Verdi with the dolls that Cheryl and Rupert made for them, as thanks for freevlog.org ~laureng

So Ru Howe and I brainstormed an idea for an Open Source Online Video Award. Something anyone can give to anyone involved in online video. No awards shows. No voting. No approval process. No bullshit. Someone does something with online video that you think is wonderful or weird or amazing or moving? You can give them an award for it. We were thinking the only thing we’d ask is that people giving an award actually take the time to present a physical token of some sort, like a certificate or a little trophy. And that award recipients make time within a few months or a year to give out another award, so that it keeps going.

We thought we’d start it by giving an award for Outstanding Services to the Videoblogging Community and give it to Ryanne and Verdi for making Freevlog. The intention was to send it anonymously, so they wouldn’t know who’d done it, they’d just get the award. We had half-baked plans to mail the award to, say, a relative in a tiny rural town, who could post the final packages in the hopes that Ryanne and Verdi would never figure out where the award really came from. Like a Valentine from a Secret Admirer.

We enlisted Jeffrey Taylor to deliver our “trophies” at the Open Video Conference this weekend. There couldn’t be a more perfect place to give out the first Open Source Online Video Award.

Unfortunately, the anonymous part of the plan was lost in translation, and the award collaborators stand revealed. Best to just own up and take credit for the plan. It wasn’t an extraordinarily well executed plan, it didn’t have any pomp or circumstance. But it was accomplished with the characteristic authenticity – blemishes and all – that I love so much about videobloggers. Congratulations to Ryanne and Verdi on your award, such as it is, and thank you for your immeasurable services to the videoblogging community. You are appreciated. We just wanted you to know.

Of course, this video made all the hours it took to make doll hair well worth it! I’m grateful to Jeffrey for remembering to mention that my mom helped make the dolls. And if Ryanne and Verdi want a graphic to show off their award, here it is:

Indrani Kopal of Malaysiakini.tv documented the spirit of Transmission Asia-Pacific.

Last May I attended Transmission Asia-Pacific to teach video activists how to use WordPress with Show in a Box themes and plugins to distribute their video content online. Sungmi, one of the filmmakers participating, shot this video of about half of us on the bus from Jakarta to our campsite. I didn’t shoot much video there – too busy talking to people – so I’m embedding this one from the Engage Media site. If you’d like to see work by the filmmakers who attended, a few are listed here.

About the actual story

Many people are familiar with the story of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworker’s Movement in California and around the nation. But because the movement was ultimately not very successful in Arizona, you rarely hear that part of the story. So we wanted to document the local farm labor law dispute, which culminated in an effort to recall then Arizona Governor Jack Williams. As part of this effort, Cesar Chavez conducted a 21-day fast here in Phoenix, and helped inspire the local community to take action to bring about social justice.

This should really be a half hour film. The events documented took place over a ten year period, and the political issues are somewhat complex. But those planning the exhibition relegated it to eight minutes, choosing to feature a film documenting the women’s movement in Arizona more prominently, so we did what we could with the time constraints. Which means there is an awful lot going on in the footage. And unfortunately, the local news reels contained more footage airing the point of view of those in power. Watch for contrasts between the voice you’re hearing and the footage you’re seeing – I had to resort to that kind of storytelling quite a bit. I even ended up narrating the piece, while the other project got professional voiceover talent, though this was partly because I could pronounce the surnames and Spanish words correctly, while the hired talent could not.

How we made this

With the exception of recording some voice over and scanning some old news articles, this piece is created entirely from 16mm film news reels from former Phoenix news station KOOL, which used to broadcast on local channel 10. KOOL donated all their film cans and log sheets to the Arizona Historical Society Museum at Papago Park. The museum has a big climate controlled room to store this stuff, and a makeshift film chain that channels the projected footage through an ancient but serviceable video camera and out to … any deck you can connect to the camera output.

Jean’s job directing this project was to do all the research, write the narrative and provide me with important dates on which newsworthy things probably happened. And just because I summarized her job in one sentence, don’t think it was light work.

My job was to check the news logs around the relevant dates in hopes of finding related news footage. Then, as part of the Exhibits Dept. agreement with the Archives Dept., I had to clean any reels I wanted to view. After cleaning, I would watch the entire reel and log it as best I could. If I saw anything related to our story, I’d record it to Beta-SP (best quality deck we had) and later transfer that to Mini-DV as well for a digital back-up.

Jean would review the collected footage, make notes, and often revise the script in order to work some of the best footage into the project. She would also do her best to identify people appearing on the reel, especially those on the MOS B-roll shots, sometimes bringing in people she’d interviewed for oral history to see if they recognized anyone.

The script was rewritten several times, and then I’d re-edit the project. We’d still be over budget on time, so we’d tighten it up some more, reorganize, figure out what to leave out – you editors out there know the drill. The look of the subtitles is inspired by Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA.

We were on a treasure hunt together. We were armed with facts. The actual events occurred before we were born to when we were kids (1968 – 1978). Some of the original footage noted in the logs had gone missing. Sometimes we found unlogged material. It was a trip seeing how Phoenix looked back then compared to now.

Even though the end result is imperfect (you’re never finished editing, right? you just stop at some point), I’m proud that this piece is on permanent exhibition as part of Arizona’s history.

If you have any questions I’ll happily answer in the comments.

Now, here’s what this is:

In 2002 and 2003 I worked with local historian Jean Reynolds on this project for the Arizona Historical Society Museum at Papago Park. It’s part of a permanent exhibition called Desert Cities, which chronicles the development of the Phoenix metro area from the end of World War II to the present.

In its final form, the project exists as two separate videos stored on a media server at the museum, and presented on a flat screen built into a section of the museum exhibition. This piece, the intro piece, repeats on a loop to attract museum visitors over, let them know there is a video available, and give them a reason to watch it. If interested, visitors can press a button to make the main video play.

I’ll tell you more about the project in tomorrow’s post, but in case you’re curious about the appearance of the introduction:

• it’s a way to present some facts that had to be left out of the video to bring the running time down
• the colors and fonts match surrounding exhibition graphics
• there is no “old film” effect in use – all the footage is from 16mm news reels

Well guess what?! They’re here! Right here in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. They arrived Friday April 18, and have already kicked things off to a great start. On Sunday there was a pow wow at ASU. Two Navajo students from our travel group made sure our Maori friends could attend the pow wow. I didn’t get to go, but our friends were given the opportunity to perform at the pow wow after the opening ceremony. From what I hear, the pow wow community opened their hearts to our Maori friends, bestowed gifts during and after their performance, and really felt an instant connection. I wish I could have been there.

This video is from dinner after the pow wow, at the home of fellow traveler Nizhoni and her amazing chef husband Joseph. He fed us a four or five course meal that included a prickly pear cactus salad, his own version of surf and turf which included swordfish steak and buffalo burgers, and a custom dessert creation called “Chocolate Taranaki” in honor of the volcanic mountain dominating the landscape where our friends live. The meal was seriously amazing.

Between courses, our friends taught us a song. You can learn it too, here are the words:

He honore, he kororia
Maungarongo ki te whenua
Whakaro pai e
Ki nga tangata katoa
Ake ake, ake ake, amine
Te atua, te piringa, toku oranga (x2)
Toku oranga

Wendy Lewis is the woman teaching us the words to the song and what they mean. This song is an acknowledgment of ties to Parihaka, a Taranaki settlement whose two leaders drew on ancestral and Christian teachings to organize passive resistance to the colonizing army, and that is now is a manifestation of peace here on Earth.

Sorry for my crappy video & audio recording. I’m not good at both recording and experiencing moments at the same time, and I didn’t have my good mic with me either … so this is the best I and my poor little Xacti could do under the circumstances.

I shot this footage on Friday, February 15 and am just getting around to posting it. I’m so glad that with video, it’s never too late to share a beautiful day.

Tim Tams in hand, you brew up your favorite tea or coffee. Take a Tim Tam and bite off two diagonally opposite corners. Seal your lips around one corner, dunk the other corner in your hot drink, and suck the liquid up through the Tim Tam. As soon as the liquid hits your tongue, slam the Tim Tam in your mouth and savor the melty chocolaty goodness.

Repeat as often as necessary.

This video was shot and edited entirely in my Xacti HD1A camera, my new favorite method for getting video up quickly. I have not been compensated by Arnott’s, but if they ever want to pay me in Tim Tams I’ll make all the ads they want. Yum!

Comments and video responses welcome. Talk to me.

Keep it in context, too. Check out the sites I mentioned:

• 12/11/07 EpicFU: rockband tips and tricks, santacon, seesmic
• VuGoesVegan: Promo Video and Vegan “TV Dinner”, Kinda
• Mahalo Daily: Watching Footbal as a Couple

We’re over the “hump” today. We know how to say “NaVloPoMo” and we’ve got this posting-every-day thing figured out! Keep it coming everyone! Vlog on!

David Howell kept telling me (via Twitter) to shoo everyone out of the room when his video came on. Since the reality was that his video was the one getting people interested enough to have a seat and watch for awhile, I asked one of the visitors who told me she liked it to say so on camera – so that’s near the end of the clip.

It’s long, this video, I’m sorry – but I am way too exhausted to edit it further, and I’ve got PodCampAZ today – gotta spread the good word about showinabox.tv. Have a great day everybody!

NaVloPoMo!!!

Gena Haskett, Robyn Tippins and I presented an Advanced Video Lab at BlogHer today. We touched pretty briefly on video compression before splitting into small workgroups covering storyboarding, lighting on the cheap, and editing tips to help the BlogHers kick ass at videoblogging.

I promised the attendees a handout covering basic video compression settings and a brief review of three software applications that convert video from one format to another. Here it is:

I have to apologize for not adding hyperlinks to the PDF file. I thought it was more important to get the document up quickly than to bell-n-whistle it up. When I get home I will do that, and replace the PDF file – at which point this paragraph will be displayed crossed out (strikethrough).

Coming ASAP, I’ll put up some video of my cheap lighting tricks.

The biggest thing people were surprised about was that I recorded the audio live (instead of using pre-recorded audio from a CD), and that I did it in only three takes. Actually I should clarify – I did three stationary takes for the audio, then three more to get the shots where the camera is moving around the singers (and those were without audio). The natural next question from a lot of people was “what mic did you use,” or “what was your audio set-up?” So here follows a list of the equipment I used and a description of the recording set-up. (Please note, if the product link is to a seller rather than the manufacturer, it’s not because I necessarily recommend that seller. Some manufacturer sites make you select a language before entering the site, and that messes up direct linking to their product sheets.) I’ll start the list with the mic and work my way back to the camera.

• Microphone: audio-technica AT831b omnidirectional lavalier mic, wind-screen ON
• 60ft XLR cable
• XLR to mini adapter: BeachTek DXA-4 dual XLR adapter (warning, link contains flash with audio)
• Camera: Panasonic PV-GS65 3-chip mini-DV camcorder
• Cheap .5x wide angle lens attached to the camera
• good stationary tripod or poor man’s steadicam or handheld for the shots
• and of course headphones from the camera to my ears to make sure I was getting something

And the arrangement for the 3 audio takes were with the camera stationary on the tripod, and the mic run up the branches of the mesquite tree and taped there with black gaffer’s tape to hide the wire from the camera. The mic was approximately centered between the two musicians and three feet above the singer’s head.

The audio you hear of a bird was just one that happened to be nearby during recording, and it chose that moment to jam with the band. The audio of the guns going off was from the camera mic on a handheld shot. We got permission from those guys to shoot video of them. They were actually out there doing it right – practicing gun safety and cleaning up after themselves. But we weren’t finding any gangstas or marine wannabes that day, and we needed something!

If you have more questions regarding the setup or any of the shoot, ask in a comment and I will answer there. Subscribe-To-Comments is now on by default, so deactivate it if you don’t want to hear back via email.

I created five Lumiere videos between June 27 – July 22, 2007, in response to encouragement from fellow vlogger Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen. It was fun. My videos, along with those of many others, were linked to from videoblogging.info.

In August 2007, Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen and Brittany Shoot published the Lumiere Manifesto. I wish to publicly state that I disagree with most of the manifesto content, and that my Lumiere videos should not be construed as an endorsement of the manifesto. I am not interested in engaging in a conversation about the manifesto’s relative merits, or what I view as problematic. I simply wish to disassociate my work from it.

Original Post

After the last Lumiere video, I had to make one that was happy.

I created five Lumiere videos between June 27 – July 22, 2007, in response to encouragement from fellow vlogger Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen. It was fun. My videos, along with those of many others, were linked to from videoblogging.info.

In August 2007, Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen and Brittany Shoot published the Lumiere Manifesto. I wish to publicly state that I disagree with most of the manifesto content, and that my Lumiere videos should not be construed as an endorsement of the manifesto. I am not interested in engaging in a conversation about the manifesto’s relative merits, or what I view as problematic. I simply wish to disassociate my work from it.

Original Post

There is something poetic, sad, and true about this struggle. Aren’t there days when you feel like this? And in a sense, isn’t this all our lives? We struggle to keep righting ourselves, until the end. This bug is my hero.

For the record, I did not put the bug in the jar. My husband did. I think my cat had been playing with it, and then my husband, very cat-like at times, chose to continue the game in an even more cruel way. I went out to check the laundry and saw this, and the metaphoric quality punched me in the gut. Had to show you.

Thus I shot my first Lumiere video, though I’m not certain I met the rule about fixed camera. I had to hold it in my hand as there was no good place for a tripod or for setting it down. See more Lumiere videos and learn the rules at videoblogging.info/lumiere.

So here’s a silent version of Of the Earth, a short documentary of the Fresh Water Prayer to Eshu in the Ifa spiritual tradition. The prayer ceremony was shot twice: once with two stationary cameras, and the second time with a hand held camera to get closeup and motion shots. The edited result shows the actual sequence of events, but not in real-time. Rather, each action is repeated several times – time enough for a narrator to provide the words of the prayer and their translation. In silence, the result is a peaceful meditation. Enjoy.

Again, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.5 license, and you can get a 640 X 480 version over at Blip.tv. Attribution should read: “time lapse video by cheryl colan” and a link back to this post would be nice if practical. Also please note the music is licensed separately and attributed in the video.

As with previous time lapse posts, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.5 license, and you can get a 640 X 480 version over at Blip.tv. Attribution should read: “time lapse video by cheryl colan” and a link back to this post would be nice, if it is practical. Also please note the music is licensed separately and attributed in the video.

Since it rained today, I could not photograph the tree removal, so I decided to post this critter instead. Maybe it will help someone considering buying a voice recorder if they can see how it works. On the whole, I recommend this gadget! I used it to record long meeting for podcast on my neighborhood website, and it worked like a dream.

If you want one, they can be had for cheap over at Amazon, and if you buy one by clicking my Amazon link I will put any earnings back into Node101 Phoenix. It’s always great to buy direct from the maker, too, which you can do at XtremeMac’s MicroMemo page.

I bought a ten foot firewire cable and stuck my iSight camera out a window, rigged it to a tripod, and taped up the window in order to get a view of higher up the tree. There are two more of these to go, and I’m trying to figure out how I can record them to give a better view. Maybe my neighbor across the street will let me record from his house. There is no way I am taking my nice shiny new MacBook Pro outside during this stuff.

Again, this video is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, and the 640 X 480 version with attribution info is over at Blip.tv.

The video represents seven hours of recording, and I couldn’t bring myself to edit away much of it because I really enjoy watching time lapse photography. It’s very meditative.

Three more trees to go. I bought a longer firewire cable today because I want to try to get a better angle, especially for the tree with all the branches hanging over my house. It’s a real engineering problem for the guys to remove it without damaging my roof. The cool thing is, whether they drop a huge branch into my living room or just take the tree down, it’ll be caught on tape. Stay tuned.

P.S. I finally got the 640X480 version uploaded to Blip.tv, along with the attribution info. It’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial.