Four days to go

It's officially crunch time.

I had my last shoot at the stand in Arima earlier this week. I needed to get those general establishing shots as well as a few specific shots for the opening sequence of the video. Those images have been added to my flickr set.

Update on Multimedia:

My audio track is finally finished. I shouldn't be surprised, but it look me about twice as long as the audio track for the Gina Maingot Essay took. This time, I've worked with layering multiple sounds at a time, so it's an overall much more complicated piece than the last one. I had to layer (and blend as best as possible) tracks from interviews with about 7 different drivers (all outside with differently sounding ambient noises of engines and so forth), a general ambient track for some auditory continuity throughout (a plain engine running), my own voice, as well as different specific sounds associated with Maxis. Structurally, it's just about the way I explained in my last post, although I modified the plan a bit each time I thought I was "finished" to make it flow more. I would post a link to the track here, but I think it'll be more fun to wait to post it until I've layered my images on top. In it's place, here are a few screen shots of the working process in Audacity.
This is about the first third of the track. Each short clip is a separate sound clip, so the track plays from left to right, piling each clip on top of one another at the appropriate time. You adjust the volume level that each clip is played relative to one another by adjusting the amplitude (height) of the clip. So, for example, the clip fourth from the top starts relatively loud, then fades to be much quieter for a while, gets louder at a few points, then stays almost inaudible for the rest of the duration of the track, except for near the very end. I've actually had quite a bit of fun getting acquainted with Audacity this semester. It's a lot more user-friendly than I was expected, and it is very powerful in its capabilities, especially for a free program.
Now I'm on the step of finishing processing and re-sizing all of my images for soundslides and then importing them into soundslides. Then I'll just have to adjust the timing and transitions of each image as it relates to the soundtrack, and I'll be done! Here's another screenshot of that process.


Here, the timing of the mp3 audio track that I just imported is noted towards the bottom of the track. There are thumbnails of all the photos that have been imported so far, in the order that they appear, in the body of the screen. At the bottom, you can drag the image markers to determine when each slide appears and when it switches to the next slide (there are other, more precise ways to do this, by going into the "Slide Info" tab but this way works, too). Transitions and slide movement are controlled in the "Movement" subsection within the "Slide Info" tab.

Printed photographs:

I made my selection of 18 photographs to print for the show, re-sized them all for 8"x12" and walked over to a newly opened photo printing place a few blocks from our apartments with a thumb drive and a Linx card. Unfortunately, the test print was the worst looking photo print I've ever seen. The sky was an artificial hypersaturated crayon blue, the entire imagine was low resolution, the reds tended towards an orange hue, the image itself was warped (the white border around the image -- since they had to print on larger paper and then cut down) was even at the bottom but uneven on the top edge, and worst of all, the printer left physically scratched in track marks across the entire photograph on several areas of the image. They were, however, friendly enough to not charge me for that test print when I ran out of that place as fast as I could. I've found another printing place, though, and will be heading over there tomorrow morning before my weekly meeting with Mark Lyndersay. I spoke to the folks at Photo World in St. James, this afternoon, and they'll be able to print my 18 photographs at 8"x12" in time for me to pick them up after I meet with Mark.

So that's where I'm at. I'm trying to finish my "first draft" of the final multimedia piece tonight so I can hear Mark Lyndersay's feedback on it at tomorrow's meeting and then still have time this weekend for revisions, but realistically, it's probably going to take me another day to finish it.