Arts

• unDraw - A constantly updated collection of beautiful svg images that you can use completely free and without attribution. From Web Developer Monthly 💻🚀December 2019
• hacker news comments on 33 Amazing Sites with Beautiful Free Icon Sets.

From the book "How Plays Work by David Edgar, near the end of the preface, he writes of Friedrick Schiller, back in 1788, writing to a friend about what we might call the 'right vs left' discontinuation:

The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination… It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in – at the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with the others. On the other hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason – so it seems to me – relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass… You complain of your unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.

That quote is attributed, in the footnotes, to -- Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, pp. 88-9

In a nutshell, I think that this is something to which I have been guilty more frequently than not: throwing away ideas as they transpire, rather than letting them percolate and intertwine with subsequent ideas and thoughts.

Admiralty Park, North Shore, Bermuda, Christmas Day

Side tracked again. Adafruit has some laser cut acrylic parts it uses with some kits. I was initially under the impression that laser cutters were expensive beasts. Well, like many things, prices have come down to what hobbiests can handle. While looking at stuff at Inventables, I noticed they have a desktop laser cutter / engraver system from Full Spectrum Laser.

I was side tracked onto laser cutters when someone in a forum was mentioning they, too, used a laser cutter for plastic parts for a DIY pan tilt mount for a time lapse photographs. In that forum article, they mentioned another manufacturer: Epilog Zing. They are pricier, but do the same thing.

For raw materials, any glass shop will have various types of acrylic on hand. For specialty items, someone pointed out that LaserBits has a variety of raw materials.

Inventables has LED Edge Strips for lighting acrylic etched signs. Super Bright LEDS has a variety of LED lights.

Lacking a machine to do stuff? Out source it: Ponoko is a place to etch/engrave/cut/print whatever you want.

Up to this point, I've been using Adobe Premiere Pro for editing video files. But I've wanted to do some mixed animation and video for a while. Adobe After Effects can do some special effects, but after having searched around for alternate tools, Blender seems to neatly integrate video editing with animation capabilities in a more flexible manner, for a lot less money.

The positive aspect of Adobe Premiere Pro is that is seamlessly works with Panasonic's P2 originated files. Blender, on the other hand, almost handles things, but not quite. I was surprised that Blender with directly work with the DVCPRO MXF video files. No problems there.

On the other hand, Blender doesn't recognize the MXF wrapped audio files. Since Blender already knows how to deal wit the MXF wrapper on the video side of things, I wonder how much work would be required to make it familiar with the MXF audio file wrapper.

In case there is extra decoding work, I came across an open source utility for dealing with MXF metadata: Advanced Authoring Format. This library may be of use for decoding MXF metadata.

But since I don't have time to look into it directly, I needed an alternate work around. As I work on Windows, I think there are various Windows utilities around for dealing with the issue from a GUI perspective. But changing into directories, clicking on files, choosing conversion methods, and making the conversion seems to be too much like work. I like command line stuff.

The program FFmpeg fits the bill quite nicely. But it needs to be wrapped up in a batch job in order to process a bunch of files automatically. I could try something in Windows PowerTools, but since I have a Linux background, I have cygwin installed on my computer. It provides a wide variety of linux tools and allows them to be run in a Windows environment.

The first of the following two lines: 1) lists one file per line, 2) pipes the list to awk, which 3) formats a command with ffmpeg to convert the .mxf audio file to a .wav file, and 4) outputs to a command file. The second line then executes the command.

ls -1 | awk '{print "ffmpeg -i " $1 " " $1".wav" }' > file.sh
sh file.sh

ffmpeg needs to be somewhere in the path for this to work. Running the command effectively doubles the amount of space required for keeping the audio files available.

The .wav file can now be loaded into Blender for use along side the video file.

Blender caught my eye the other day when performing research on how to handle camera tracking for adding special effects to video presentations. Before performing this level of siophistication, I first needed to learn about the animation aspects.

A friend was telling me about some significant psychic talismans, one of which is the Merkaba. Looking a little further into it, Ka Gold Jewelry has this to say:

The Merkaba with Prana Sphere ... represents the energetic field that surrounds the human body while activating the Merkaba. The sphere represents the female and the straight lines of the Merkaba represent the male. Combined together, the Merkaba inside the sphere represents a perfect balance.

The Merkaba assists us in our spiritual growth and connects us to our higher self. It enables us to feel unconditional love, thus healing ourselves as well as others. The Merkaba gives us the possibility of creating any kind of harmonious reality we desire.

Another jewelry site representing the Merkaba is Cosmic Jewels. They say our life force (Prana) was significantly reduced 13,000 years ago, approximately when the poles of the earth reversed. They say that training can help recover some of the sensitivities and mental abilities lost during that period.

The Merkaba is a nice simple symbol to render as a first time attempt. I used an internal light source to represent the inner spirit channeling the Prana energy:

A number of years ago, I read Tom Robbins "Jitterbug Perfume". As the title conveys, the major plot element revolves the scent/smell/aroma of perfume, or rather, the artistry of composing a perfume. In looking back on that sentence, I see I use the word 'composing'. And in a way, there is a musical element to perfume composition.

In doing some additional reading on perfumes, in recent history, there was a notable perfumer named William Arthur Poucher. He devoted much of his life to perfumes. And exceptionally, rather than hiding the secrets of perfumery, he wrote a three volume set of books involving perfumery: "The Production, Manufacture, and Application of Perfumes". In the second volume, he refers to another perfumer by the name of Piesse, who actually arranged a core gamut of odours according to a musical scale. As a side note, the ninth edition is the one which has the best information. The 10th edition is much edited and changed, and has lost much of the excellent content of the 9th edition.

Moving on, in perfumery, the contributory elements of a perfume are known as:

• The base note: characteristic lasting note of any fragrance
• The middle note: compounds which emerge during the middle of a perfume's dispersion process
• Top notes: the compounds which are initially perceived, and which disperse the soonest due to be the lighter molecules

So, much like a symphony, well composed perfumes present a rich and delightful experience to the senses.

Well, I suppose, in many cases anyway.

The sensory experience was highlighted in an article entitled ScentAir Brings Fragrance to the Front Lines in the American Express Departures magazine. The article discusses how an organization called ScentAir helps train soldiers in battlefield conditions. As smell is one of the senses, by fragrancing such training scenarios, realism is enhanced. The article goes on to discuss the base/middle/top note compositions of battlefield smells and sensations.

A reference to someone who read the article, but more importantly, has lived it: South China Sea: Eau De...War Zone!.

From the final line in the article: "We recall scents with up to 65% accuracy after a year but recall visual cues with less than 50% accuracy after a few months."

Ever wonder how people create vibrant looking pictures and scenes? The mixing of pleasing colour combinations is one aspect of good artistry. In digitally reproduced images, there is another aspect.

Our eyes can perceive scenes in a human form of high definition. But when our eyes look at digitally rendered scenes, non colour corrected scenes can appear flat and un-appealing.

To overcome the limitations of low resolution devices, techniques have been developed to trick the eye (and associated visual interpretations) to perceiving scene pleasantness. Much science has gone into understanding the why's and wherefore's of this. One starting site with links to a wealth of information is Cinematic Color.

The lead off paper on that site, Cinematic Color: From Your Monitor to the Big Screen provides a good over view. Buried in the middle of that paper is a innocuous chart with a single curve on it. The curve is commonly referred to as the S-curve of colour grading.

In essence, you want to make sure that there are lots of details in the darker areas, and lots of detail in the bright areas. (blowing out the high-lights is a no-no, but even this rule is can be broken in artistically pleasing ways) Anyway, this curve sacrifices the mid-tones. But the sacrifice seems to make all things right.

I havn't been writing much in the last while. I should have been. The least I could have done is keep a diary of what I've been doing. Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

My excuse has been that I've spent quite a bit of time doing two things: designing, tuning, and running lighting for two recent shows at Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society (BMDS), and then when not lighting, doing videos of the shows.

November and December were taken up with designing the lighting for BMDS' annual Panto at City Hall. This year we had a visiting director put on his work called Robin Hood.

For January and February, we had a local-up and-coming director put on a terrific production of Dad's Army. Dad's Army was a regular series on BBC TV, and was popular with the local crowd. We really didn't need to do any advertising, the show sold itself. After pre-sale tickets to patrons, cast and crew, there were only 9% of the tickets remaining for the general public. I'm not sure if this is a first for the theatre, but we ended up running an extra three nights. Tickets for those nights were sold out within 90 minutes.

I ended up shooting some video over several nights of Dad's Army as a keep sake with my new Panasonic HVX-200A. With that footage, plus a bunch of pre-production footage, I have a bunch of editing to do. Lots of editing.

Our next show is called 'A String of Pearls', with lighting design by one of my mentors. I get to take some time off and catch up on stuff I havn't been doing. Hopefully the updates here will now be more frequent as I catch up on my reading and projects.

I need to take a break when I can as I've been requested to design lights for this year's Panto. The script has been written by the local actress, writer, director Carol Birch. It is loosely based upon the story of Firebird and promises to be challenging from a lighting perspective... I guess me complaining that lighting for recent shows has been too easy, so she going to let me try out some new concepts. Our lighting inventory has been expanded with additional colour changers and moving fixtures, so we should be able to try out a more technically oriented show.

Saturday didn't start off so well. I was going to ride my pedal bike into town for the day. That was not to be. On getting on my bike, I find that it had flat. Rather than fixing the flat right then, I put it off till Sunday, and drove my car into town. This turned out to be fortuitous, as the theatre was having 'cleaning day', and I was able to pick up a few pieces of furniture to haul home. However on the way back in, I decided to take the 'scenic route' down to Flatts and back. It was such a nice day for a drive. My car didn't think so. It decided to konk out a little ways back from Flatts on Middle Road. I spent an hour or two sitting in the grass waiting for the tow truck to arrive. In waiting, I noticed that there weren't too many, if any, 20 year Toyota's still around. Most of the drivers had spiffy new cars. So being without transportation made it a bit difficult to make it to a party I supposed to go to. Continue reading "The Geek Side of Lighting" »

BMDS has a new production opening up on August 30, 2007. We have another imported directory for this one, Suzann McLean. The Sisterhood is a "farce about cultural elitism and the triumph of true love over snobbery. One of Molière.s most popular comedies." The play has been modernized and is set in a chic 1980's salon. I'm assisting Doug Parker on this one. We had our first production meeting with the director earlier this month. Continue reading "The Sisterhood ("Les Femmes Savantes")" »