These are the first tests of a new app I found for my iPhone. It produces tilt-shiftesque videos.
The free version of the app only seems to produce a 10-second clip out of about four minutes of real footage, but I think that would work for most every project, really. (I added the audio in post, as the app doesn’t record any.)
The app is called Miniatures. And this is a test at the Arkansas at Auburn gymnastics meet.
Because I didn’t take any other pictures — I was really only thinking about ways to try that video app — here is my ticket:
I wasn’t working, but I sat in the media area with The Yankee, who was covering the meet for College and Mag. Behind us was one of the first guys I worked with in commercial radio. Hadn’t spoken with him in years, but it was nice to visit with him briefly. Nice guy, still in town, still working in radio. Looked good.
Auburn trailed earlier in the meet and managed to pull things into a tie after three rotations. Arkansas is a talented team and were probably the favorites going in. But, they had a few falls on the beam and the next thing you know:
The little smiley face lets you know the score is official, Auburn won 196.325-195.650. Apparently they set an attendance record, too. Some 7,300 people watched the 15th ranked Tigers get their second victory of the season.
We went to Mellow Mushroom with a friend for pizza after the meet. I ordered the vegetarian pizza. It was delicious. I’ve never eaten a veggie pizza, but I will again.
Stayed cloudy and gray and dim all day. Never topped 55 degrees, according to the local weather station. Though it never really felt like that warm. I had a few minutes that I could have pedaled around on my bicycle, but I did not. Too cold. Presently my baseline is 52 degrees.
So I stayed inside and did other things. And I counted the minutes until dinnertime, when we could enjoy the rest of last night’s delicious gumbo. Homemade and good stuff. You should be so lucky!
Every so often you see stories about social media fatigue. On the other hand, here is a piece discussing Innovative uses for social media:
(W)e predict that in 2013 social media intelligence will become much more commonplace as businesses, government agencies and not-for-profit organisations seek to leverage this new, unparalleled wealth of information.
There’s a list. It should include things like tracking illness, moving money, wide scale gaming, collaborative art and more.
aggregation or curation is a fact of life in the digital age — just as record companies have had to learn to live with rampant downloading and sharing of music, publishers of all kinds are trying to get used to the idea that their content is no longer under their control.
… which is fine as a philosophical point. The reality is you can’t put it back in the box.
The Weather Channel’s latest reality show, and coastal Alabama’s latest taste of reality-show exposure, “Reef Wranglers” makes its premiere at 8 p.m. Central time on Tuesday, Feb. 12. It’s a limited four-episode series focusing on the adventures of the crew at Reefmaker, a business based at Walter Marine in Orange Beach.
Should be worth it for the underwater scenes. Ignore the stereotypes, if the producers allow you.
I got a newGlomerata today. Actually I have a few new ones to add to the site, so I’ll do that in the next few weeks. But this one is especially special, one of the earliest editions. Inside was this:
There are two pages of sheet music to this diddy. This book is so old that it is entirely possible that no one alive has ever heard this tune. Can’t wait to know what it sounds like.
Come play it for me?
markers — Comments Off on The historic marker series 7 Feb 13
We return again to the regular routine of documenting historic markers, found via bicycle. This is the 22th installment in the series, which means we’ve posted half of the markers in the county.
This is a notable house, and you can see the details here. Click through some of the pins on the map in the banner and explore some of the other local historic locations.
We discussed critiquing news stories in class today. How to do it, what to critique, what not to get overly zealous about. How to treat this as a constructive exercise and not as a personal reproach, and so on. The idea is that the more you watch things critically — because I make you critique them — the more you’ll see things that work and things that don’t work.
A critical eye is very important in the craft.
So we talked about television packages. I showed this story’s video package, which was still timely early in the week. It was a nice example of localizing the story when it came to the Midland standoff.
The reporter found a local police officer who has gone through the FBI negotiation training and interviewed him about what might have been taking place. It was a helpful story to a degree. There are some vagaries, which is both based on the nature of this officer not knowing every detail about what is happening hours outside of his jurisdiction and a need to speak generally for tactical reasons too. But it is nice localized story. It has some production issues and some very strange B-roll shots. It gave us something to look at.
And then I showed them this:
That is never going to get old, even as fewer and fewer students are familiar with the YouTube sensation.
And then we got started in our efforts to set up WordPress blogs. They are a sharp group of students, and I’m sure they’ll be running the Internet by the end of the semester.
I have done thy bidding, Internet, and given you many more people to add content!
Lovely, busy day otherwise. It was national signing day, and the Crimson’s sports editor was posting stuff continually to their Twitter account. That earned him follows from two of the television stations in town. Nice little reward for his work.
On the way home I stopped at Buy Buy Baby to get something off a friend’s registry. This place is full of things you didn’t know you needed if you’re raising children. Glancing at the products it is amazing any of us made it out of toddler years without these things in our homes.
The store is bright and smells of baby powder. Just add water, I suppose.
That’s an improvement, though, really. The last time I was in this store it was still a Circuit City. As I noted on Twitter, it was dank and dim and smelled of desperation then. I remember trying to test a camera of some device and the guy there was not able to put a battery into the thing.
I looked around at the deep sockets of the eyes of the few people actually in the store, realized that everyone there was touching, but no one was buying. I knew it was over.
Within a year they were all gone.
If only that one floor guy had bothered to look for a battery, things might have gone differently.
But probably not.
Anyway, in a much more pleasant environment with a thoroughly enjoyable young lady helping, I managed to find the appropriate burp cloths. They were very, very decorative. I’m sure yours were just a flat white, once upon a time.
I have a lot of things stored away to write over there. Get used to the links, I guess.
Saw this sign, the oracle of our time:
I know the owner. His son and daughter are friends. The sign has become a big fun quasi-event lately. It isn’t true until Krystal’s says it is, and all that.
When I took that picture it was halftime in the Alabama-Auburn basketball game. Alabama was leading Auburn 23-13. Halftime. In a basketball game, full of varsity, scholarship players. Presumably for both teams. (So you see why the word “Just” is important on that sign.)
In the second half Auburn went on a 36-14 run — that was all of the scoring. The final was 49-37, Auburn. Weird game. But Auburn held Alabama to its lowest point total in the 146 game series history, so there’s that.
Cloudy and in the mid-60s today. For February? You take it. We’re going to get a bit more of the chilly stuff, you can count on it, but we can also enjoy the trend toward nice spring days.
Saturday mail delivery costs the U.S. Postal Service $2.7 billion a year, and it’s a burden the cash-strapped agency is trying to shed — to the dismay of greeting card makers everywhere. Cutting Saturday delivery is a key part of USPS’ five-year plan to save $20 billion by 2015, but it is bumping up against businesses such as Hallmark that benefit from six-day mail delivery.
That story also tells you Hallmark spent $240,000 for lobbying on postal issues. I wonder what Hoops and YoYo would say about that.
Yes, there are too few really good jobs and too many people fighting for them. Yes, salaries start out quite low. Yes, the hours can be long and irregular. Yes, the industry is in a period of extreme disruption, with lots of old jobs being destroyed, and the new ones typically offer less security and require different skills.
None of that changes the core fact here. For those who are cut out for it — and that’s definitely not everyone — journalism is a uniquely rewarding, wonderful career.
Where Visual Revenue believes it can add real value is in being able to recommend specific actions within an editorial framework outlined by the organization — that is, using an algorithm to tell a newsroom when it should tweet and also what it should be tweeting. Mortensen likens these computerized suggestions to the role of a deputy editor: Someone who knows the editorial values of the paper, and can determine the best publishing strategy as a result. Except, in this case, that someone is a robot.
“We set out with this idea of empowering the editor, but not to beat him to the extent where we can automate his job,” Mortensen said. “We actually sit down with the editor in chief and ask him, ‘Give me my instructions just like you tell your deputy editors what they can and cannot do.’ Then we simply adopt those, adhere to those as strictly as possible. And if I’m brutally honest with you, of all of the editors, you’ll see that we’re the only ones that only adhere to the guidelines because we’re an algorithm not a human.”
Another upshot: Non-humans aren’t tethered to print-era concepts that have bled into an online era of publishing. A robot doesn’t care about newsroom culture or tradition; it only cares about the data.
When the machines can accurately read the traffic flow patterns at intersections, that’s when you worry about them taking over. Until then, they are just helpful.
