Desultory Thoughts

Heather and I were watching the Olympics tonight and we were slightly annoyed by the camera angles that NBC was choosing to shoot during the men’s speed skating relay. The relay is a TEAM sport, yet for half of the race NBC showed close-ups of Appolo Anton Ohno. That’s why I’m looking forward to the future of TV [whynot.net, 2003] where we’ll be allowed to direct our own show and choose our own camera angles; which already exist but will be more wide-spread in the future. There might be times where I want to watch the best skater on the team closely, but tonight was not the night.

I guess I might still be upset from Sunday’s disappointing semi-final men’s event [video.google.com] when Apollo got greedy and tried to pass into first place (even though he just needed to be in the top three to qualify for finals) and ended up falling and not moving on. I wanted to see him skate in the finals and his greed ruined it for me; and for him, of course. Maybe it was just the pressure to repeat [video.google.com].

  

Several posts ago I mentioned my theme opener, specifically the music that my brother Dave wrote for it.  I posted it on Google Video the other day for all to see.  Here it is.

  

When I saw this video [mblog.lib.umich.edu] I immediately thought of the future-based movie, “Minority Report”. This monitor responds to touch, but unlike a normal tablet PC or other touch-screen monitor, this monitor reacts differently depending on how it is touched. I’m looking forward to seeing this in the mainstream. The holdup for now is that it isn’t supported natively by any OS, so it is only used in custom applications/systems.

  

I wasn’t exactly happy with the look of the way video was posted on my site with the tool I was using before. So I got looking around and found another plugin for WordPress called VideoBloggerPlugin. I gave it a shot and I really liked it, but it posted the entire comments on the right side underneath the video. And it was center aligned with no way to get rid of it or even reformat it to right align. I’ll have to research it a little further when I have more time. Perhaps I’m missing something. For now I’ll stick with my current solution [rossgerbasi.com].

  

I recently finished the Special Olympics Utah General Orientation video that I’ve been working on for the past month. I had been waiting on the voice-over audio that was done by Doug Jardine. I finally received that from the Training Coordinator of Special Olympics Utah, Rochelle Deeter, the last week of December.

I’m pleased with the final product. I filmed all the footage over the last year. The was probably the hard part of all this. I edit video with Adobe Premier and add text effects with Adobe After Effects. The staff at Special Olympics were pleased and I had reports from the CEO that he shared the video with Special Olympics Inc in Washington D.C. and they liked it, too.

The funny thing is when the CEO of Special Olympics Utah complimented me on my work by saying that this video was every bit as good as the previous video that had been done by a TV Studio. The problem with that comment is that I had seen the old video and I didn’t think it was that good. It had PowerPoint style text screens and the video was kind of dull. I’m sure that when it was made it was probably top notch, but I think mine was a lot better! One thing that did come out of our conversation was my decision to charge more in the future. I give them a discount because they’re my favorite charity, but I don’t think I continue to discount my prices as much as I do. I’m glad he brought it up, but I’m sure he didn’t expect me to apply it to him. Oh well. I’ve gotta make a living, right?