[Mark Suszko]

“did you notice in the reverse shots, you could see the imag screen of the performance, and it was all black and white – a clever digital artist would have roto’d Mariah on those shots as well for a convincing yet subtle detail. ”

I think a yet smarter one would have just done the main scene once, then pasted the corrected video into the other screens;-)

or at least saved the presets from the first roto job to apply to the monitor regions, there’s many ways to do this kind of thing, and I’m not saying I know for sure which one or ones were used, just going by what I think would have been most expedient. Way cheaper than painting people up in shades of gray or chromakey green…
(“measure twice, cut once”, sorta.)

I kind of like roto work, actually; it’s drudgery, but, you get the right music playing, a comfy chair and beverage, a nice tablet, you get into a zen like repetitive state after a while, and when you think to look up at the clock again, eight hours have gone by… So yeah, four minutes can be done, could be done in one day, she didn’t move all that much.

I agree about the side-set vignettes, thought hey were the best part of the production design. The parody films were lame this year.

[Mark Suszko]

You’re welcome. I had a go thru livetype an hour ago, and I found a heart shape in there in 2 minutes. You might try one of the import dialogs and bring it in thru one of the other Apple apps like Appleworks that has fonts and symbols, but I found one in livetype just by pressing on every darn thing in the menus that looked likely;-) Crack another tube, go thru it again, it’s in there, I tell you. And have I ever lied to you before?;-)

[Mark Suszko]

I would be shocked if LiveType didn’t ship with at least one set of dingbat fonts, nevertheless, you can get a CD with 1,000 truetype fonts for under 20 bucks at most any office supply store or Walmart on your way home tonight, for sure a heart shape will be in there somewhere. Import it into LiveType.

Livetype is descended from a Cg program called India, and one of India’s special features was that you could import images to make INTO fonts. This is where the “hands making letters out of clay font” came from, prbably others too. I think if you RTM on LiveType, it will tell you how you can import a heart image to turn it into a font character. Then try what I initially suggested, upthread. Let us know here if it worked for you, I’m curious now.

If I had a nickle for every time I cut corners by using my CG program as a quick and dirty paint tool, I could at least buy myself a nice lunch;-)

[Mark Suszko]

If you don;t have Motion, can you find/make the hearts from adingbats collection in LiveType and use one of the canned motion effects from withing Livetype to get whay you need?

P.S. don’t forget to add to the soudtrack the first four notes from Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’, the universal tune for “getting busy”.

[Mark Suszko]

“and usually a disappointing let-down AFTER you find out how deceptively simple
the set-up really works”

Uh, guys, the show was taped like 3-4 days ahead of broadcast, so by Occam’s Razor, she was just roto’ed in post, and everything else given a B&W color effect. There are ways to do that effect live, but none of them are as cheap as post, and nothing I saw in the footage I skimmed convinced me it was done live. The fringing around her may have been part of deliberately backlighting her to make the roto easier later, or just sloppy masking…

The real crime though is how little screen time Jessica Alba got… rrrowwwllll….

[Mark Suszko]

Figured it out: Echofire wasn’t letting go of the firewire output and was fighting the IO over it. Manually turning off Echofire’s output from it’s drop down menu one done with Photoshop freed everything back up.

[Mark Suszko]

Good luck then. At Maurice Lenell, at least you got free cookies at the end of the tour;-)

[Mark Suszko]

Well, as Emily Litella would say, “That’s very different then”;-)
I wouldn’t have gone running my mouth off so much if you’d mentioned up front that it was not so much a class as a tour.;-)

OTOH, and just because I’m in that kind of mood…

I can see and sympathize that you’re trying to find an “efficient” way to handle this job, to use a relatively non-loaded word. As someone who often writes scripts as part of my job, I’m familiar with the idea of “making it radio, then adding pictures to match it”, which is the shortcut you seem to be looking at. For a low-stakes project that has no agenda but to display something, this can give passable results, but it is not at all optimal. The best produced programming has this quality to it: you can “get it” just by looking at the images with no sound, and you can “get it” just listening to the audio with a blank screen. But you really “GET IT” when the two combine to reinforce each other. And that’s why good scripts take time and talent (and thus expense) to do.

Again, I suspect I’m getting too grand and highfalutin’ for what you want to accomplish here, and after this, I will butt out. But I have seen tour videos done using the “just write a narration, then back-fill the holes with video” method, and to get technical, they usually suck, especially if they are supposed to get you at all emotionally connected to the material. Again, if your tour is of the “here’s where the knobs are, don’t put your fingers in there” variety, feel free to ignore this post.

These guys have an interesting approach to a plant tour:

https://www.hugi.is/hahradi/bigboxes.php?box_id=51208&f_id=1000

[Mark Suszko]

“Our thought is that by recording three different Q & A’s , we should get all the Q’s and have a choice of best A’s”

You will never get ALL the best questions, just the most common. Questions are the heart of the matter. Good questions always beat a canned speech, because they create active learning, not passive reception.

This whole area is one where I get my dander up with some otherwise fine clients. Galt, I’m not saying this is you, understand. But I get a lot of jobs where someone hands me a powerpoint slide show that accompanied someone’s stand-up presentation and they say: “this will be our training video”. Almost as bad, I’m asked to record someone reading the powerpoints out loud to the camera and add the slides as cutaway, so we…can…read….them…all… to…gether….zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz The clients are contented with this, as far as they are concerned, this has met the bare minimum requirement on some piece of paper. My guess is most of these kind of tapes are shoved into a drawer once completed and never again looked at by anyone, except as punishment, like Vogon poetry readings.

I am not a trained instructional designer, but I do know empirically that this is not the way to go;-)

There is no reason to read the book aloud, at a speed assuredly slower than their silent reading speed, and present material linearly, to people who know how to read, and have at least some familiarity with the material. There is no need to tape a lecture if it ONLY covers the written material. Unless you are making a book on tape, course for the blind, or podcast to listen to in your car on long commutes. If I was a teacher, I would assign the reading, assume it WAS read, then come to class and only ask and answer questions based on it. To do less is to disrespect the audience and waste their time.

What I try to convince clients, usually without success, (because it costs more time and money, not because they aren’t sympathetic) is that the audience deserves to control their learning and self-direct it.

I think a better way to go is at least to make the PPT slides into HTML pages (an automatic feature in powerpoint) or chapters of a simple DVD so you can self-direct your way thru the material, skipping what you already grasp and concentrating more on what you don’t yet understand, all at your own pace. And putting that online makes it cheap because you don’t spend money for tape dubs or DVD’s, thus no waste, dubbing, or shipping costs, and updating is easier. And at least this way tries somewhat to imitate the question and answer Socratic learning model that the best teachers use.

In your case, I think what I might try is to add a simple multiple-choice comprehension pop quiz every couple minutes. If they choose right, the lecture continues. If they demonstrate a poor grasp by picking the wrong answer, no point in continuing ahead, so branch or loop back to an explanation of why that’s the wrong answer, or additional supportive material that the rest of the audience would be bored by, then ask the question again until they get the right answer. Yes, this is definitely more work than taping a lecture, but if it’s results and retention and a real understanding we’re after, I think this is a better way.

I’m not saying all lectures are bad. When the speaker is a world expert on a topic, it can be the worst quality presentation in the world, as long as the vital information is important enough, people will eat up every word. I had that experience once as a consumer, with a video on child discipline techniques. The production values were cringeworthy, yet I let them slide because I hungered for the material. Not every topic can work this way, though.

When you want to go beyond merely presenting a concept to actually teaching it, now you need some kind of informational give and take, Q & A, test and proof. Ideally, a live teacher does this, because it’s hard to automate this kind of thing, it’s like jazz. But I think self-directed interactivity is a good compromise when you can’t keep the live body there to talk to.

So, what do you think? Is the type of course you’re doing going to benefit from adding the interactivity? Why or why not?

See? I gotcha!;-)

[Mark Suszko]

I also find it useful to have the contracts signed by someone who actually has the authority to cut the check, instead of some intermediary. A lot of times the martinet client that has made your life purgatory is not even TGTSTC (The Guy That Signs The Check). TGTSTC is the final arbiter for every creative and financial decision, only their word is truly gospel.