Bicycle Film Festival
“ The Bicycle Film Festival celebrates the bicycle in all forms and styles. If you can name it – Tall Bike Jousting, Track Bikes, BMX, Alleycats, Critical Mass, Bike Polo, Road Cycling, Mountain Biking Recumbents – we’ve probably either ridden or screened it. What better way to celebrate these lifestyles than through art, film, music and performance? We bring together all aspects of bicycling to advocate its ability to transport us in various ways. Ultimately the BFF is about having a good time. We have been fortunate enough to include the work of established artists such as Jorgen Leth, Mike Mills, Jonas Mekas, Blonde Redhead, Swoon and Michel Gondry; as well as talented newcomers as part of our programming. Many of the artists who have participated in the Bicycle Film Festival, such as the Neistat Brothers and Lucas Brunelle, are gaining more and more recognition for their work. “
—- Jeremy Willmott
Interactive Designer
LEAN MEAN FIGHTING MACHINE
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7278 5400
Address: 4-8 Rodney Street, London, N1 9JH
http://www.leanmeanfightingmachine.co.uk
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Google Chrome – Behind The Scenes « BBH Labs
Google Goggles – Use pictures to search the web
Augmented reality rig that turns you into a character in a third-person game
Really liking this idea for turning yourself into your own avatar in the real world. It’s a social experiment to see whether users have a diminished responsibility effect. But I can see this kind of tech being quite useful for future AR style integration.
Rana Rama & Bubble Bobble
You know when you suddenly get an echo of days past and something pops into your head. Well today, as I was cleaning the bathroom, that voice whispered in my ear “Rana Rama”. At first I had no idea what it was and thought it was a TV show in the same vein as The Adventure Game or some such. But a quick google and I found it. It is a game from the Atari from the 80s. Joy! The plinky plonky 8 bit track soon led my mind to another gem I used to play. So here are those two sound tracks in all their glory.
Boy’s loo at Lean Mean
If you saw my post about the girl’s loo at Lean Mean well you might be interested to learn that the girls have had their revenge. We now have these lovely pictures watching us as we wee.
Chopping up a speech into word chunks using Adobe software
If you ever need to chop up a piece of spoken word video into chunks, with single words from the speech in each video clip, then I have a great automated solution for you.
First bring your video clip into Soundbooth. Double-click the file to display the video and show its sound wave. Open the ‘Metadata’ window and click Transcribe at the bottom of the panel. Select the language of the speaker. Adjust the quality if needed. Identify speakers should be checked if there are more than one speaker. Click OK.
You’ll then have a transcription of the speech. Select each word in turn and click play to check the accuracy of the word. Double click into a word to change the word or right-click to merge words into each other if there are inaccuracies. The transcription process works best with clear speech and no noise so spend a bit of time with these settings and any noise reduction you can apply to get the best results. You can export this data to XML by using File/Export/Speech Transcription. This might be all you’d need to do as this XML can be used directly in Flash to seek streamed video to specific parts based on the ‘Name’ node, ‘Time’ node and ‘Duration’ node.
However, you may wish to take this further as I did today and actually chop the video up in a fairly automated fashion. So from Soundbooth use the File/Save As functionality to save a new version of the video with embedded XMP metadata information. In the export settings, make sure you select your preferred audio and video export settings but before you click OK to render the file make sure that ‘Include Source XMP Metadata’ is checked from the drop down menu.
Switch over to After Effects and import the video file with XMP metadata. Go to After Effects/Preferences/Media & Disk Cache and check ‘Create Layer Markers from Footage XMP Metadata’.
Create a new composition from this video file and you should now see there are layer markers labeled with the text spoken for each word in the speech.
Now we need a couple of scripts to help things along so head over to Paul Tuersley’s site to get his ‘Split at Markers’ script and Jeff Almasol’s site to get his RD Pre-Compose script. These should be saved to Applications/Adobe After Effects CS4/Scripts. Restart After Effects having saved your changes.
Go to File/Scripts/SplitAtMarkers to split that layer into chunks on the timeline. Then select the words that you’d like to render by selecting the newly chopped up timeline layer and go to File/Scripts/Rd_Pre-Compose. It’s important to name the new composition with the same name as the word and to check the ‘Trim new composition to combined layers duration’.
Once you’ve done all of this you will have lots of named compositions that can be exported using the batch renderer at whatever settings your heart desires.
DIX
**SHAME VIDEO HAS JUST BEEN TAKEN DOWN**
Really enjoyed watching this short today.DIX. A film about obsessive compulsive disorders and their treatment with a lovely bit of CG work from The Mill. Weirdly I can remember being about ten years old and having a similar compulsion although mine involved an imaginary piece of string extending from my back and it was my mission to never let the string entangle itself. Glad I grew out of that one. Would’ve been quite exhausting I reckon.
iPod nano – now with video
The biggest news of the day is the launch of a slew of new Apple music related releases. Most notable for me is the launch of the iPod nano with video. It is great to see this entry level device come with a relatively decent video camera, although it is worth noting that the device can only take video and not stills. Their website shows some decent efforts of short video clips taken with the nano and it will be great to have this ability in such a small device. It is actually quite attractive being so ultra portable and with the built in pedometer and smart radio tuner. What is sad is that Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has failed to add a camera to their iPod touch range. This will come as a blow for those who want an internet enabled device capable of accessing the app store but with the ability to shoot stills and video clips. I’m sure this comes down to a want not to cannibalize their other markets but really as the products are so different this isn’t a great excuse.