Up until this point in time, I have only created one “screencast” video tutorial on this blog. I have really been meaning to create some more of these type of tutorial videos, because they not only help me in my ability to communicate effectively and teach effectively, but they might actually be interesting to some of the few people who read this little weblog.

This post then, we will consider a step in the right direction, but not by any means achievement of this goal. Namely, I mean that this 2nd Rotoscoping Video Tutorial that follows is exceedingly rough, rambly, random, unrehearsed, raw, borderline-reprehensible, and reeking of underflowed thought-speech-buffer. If you have 30 spare minutes of your time, however, you can get a 1st person experience of not only one of the many things that I have been up to of late, but some information about what rotoscoping is, and how a novice student performs one of the things essential to feature film visual effects.
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Over the summer since I graduated, it seems like I have been in somewhat of a creative mire, not really working on anything satisfying. Instead I have been taking a lot of pictures, and learning some new techniques, perhaps resulting in another project at some point in the future.

One technique that I’ve been working on quite a bit is Timelapse photography. A little more than a year ago in New Media Studies, I built an intervalometer out of a 555 timer IC and a transistor to do the switching, and a few other resistors and capacitors to control time interval of how fast it triggers the shutter of whatever digital SLR you are using it with (I have a Canon 350d / Rebel XT). I got caught up in other things and never really used it, … until this summer. Following are a couple of the better results. (more after the break)

With this one I decided I would shoot an epic wide-angle timelapse of the light-patterns reflected through the trees on a windy night onto this billboard. Unfortunately, some guy got in my shot.

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This sprinkler timelapse was shot a while previous. I used a flash to illuminated the sprinklers and the grass, but of course the sprinklers stopped sprinkling before I wanted them to, so I had to do something to give it an exciting ending… the only thing I had handy was my face.

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After 4 years living in Olympia, I am moving away. I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Media studies and film/video animation photography and music technology from the Evergreen State College in Spring 2008. Now in about 10 days I am driving my car, containing all of my possessions south to Berkley California, where I will store my things and board my dad’s sailboat, and whenupon we shall depart southward, with the destination of Mexico.

As the picture above indicates, I have not been sailing in a while. So long ago it was that I do not remember it. If the suffering of motion sickness and the terror of waves and of being on a boat does not consume me first, perhaps I will adopt the safety measure of a tether, as I had when a toddler.

After my quarterlife crisis comes to a state of calm, I will embark upon a mission to find residence in the bay area, and employment.

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I first heard Elsiane after discovering them on the Secret Music Box blog back in February 2008. I was immediately surprised and intrigued, and was soon infatuated with their unique sound, reminiscent of Trip-hop, with the organic addition of real drums, and beautiful, emotional, and complex vocal melodies that weaves through the arrangement of the music and gives it a life of its own.

I had the good fortune to see them live in Seattle on September 13th. They were opening for Delerium, and sadly played without video projections, and for only the short period of 28 minutes, however their show was amazing. Here is the 3rd song they played, “Mend”.

Elsiane – Seattle, 2008 – 03 Mend from Jed Smith on Vimeo.

You can download the full show in 720p MP4-AVC, or see the other songs from this show on vimeo.

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The following is a brief and spontaneous foray into the realm of cloudscape photography.

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Due to the inevitable migration of my sleep schedule during times without large quantities of obligation, I happened to be awake at about 7am one morning. I felt like going for a walk, for it had just stopped raining. The rain was the first in a couple of months. The sun was just rising behind some clouds, and the light looked quite pleasant. Armed with my Chinese macro extension tube, I took pictures of leaves and water droplets, and other inane subject matter. Brilliant.

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It’s not as though I give my email address out frequently or without discretion. In fact, I’ve attempted to maintain a relatively low-profile on the internet, and be quite careful with the email address that I actually use. After a certain period of time, however, I guess the spammers inevitably get their hands on it somehow. A search of google reveals the likely culprits: An automated script at Ourmedia.org that, before they instigated usernames, to set old accounts to have the username be the same as the email address registered, and 2). An indiscriminate bittorrent tracker that indexes torrent from private trackers, even if the torrents are so old as to no longer registered. It’s about time to wave good bye to dlibat at gmail, dear friends.”

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I had the good fortune to have the best 4th of July evar. I always wondered what was missing from my 4th of July celebration experience, and it turned out the answer was . . . very large explosives. By a stroke of luck I was able to help set up the 2008 fireworks finale portion of the Freedom Fair show in Tacoma, mentioned here.

The hardest part of the job was the setup, which took two days. We were working on a barge just near Glacier Northwest Concrete in Tacoma. Pyrotechnics work is not as glamorous as it might seem, it consisting mostly of shoveling sand, stringing squib wire, and loading mortars in tubes in the right order. I had altogether too much fun doing even this, however.
And, some photographic evidence of the fireworks show itself. Officially, I got to wear a fireman’s suite and be on “fire duty,” which was supposed to consist of running around with a fire extinguisher and putting out flames that might threaten fuses that might launch the wrong shells at the wrong time, however, because 3 other people were already doing that, I ran around with cameras instead.

Also, if you are into pictures of me, and captions, check out Dave Cramton’s pictures.

Doing work with fellow film geeks, of course we ended up making a video glorifying the 10″ fireworks shell, creating a somewhat silly loading tube ceremony. This ended up being an intro to the other footage of the fireworks show, and the aftermath, that I shot.

2008 Tacoma Fireworks from badur on Vimeo.

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