Back to back interviews are exhausting

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: March 12, 2010

Wednesday I’ve been filming the FabLab managers in Groningen for my documentary during the FabTafel held there. It is a 6-weekly gathering of the local FabLab-community to talk about all things related to FabLab. It was a perfect opportunity for me to interview the managers in one go.

FabLab Groningen is a new Lab, officially opening end of this month. It houses in an building called Het Paleis (The Palace). A wonderful building filled with beginning entrepreneurs and artists located in an area of the city that is still under construction. An inspiring and creative surrounding and a perfect location for a FabLab.

I have now loads of interview material that I have to go through. It will be a challenge to keep the documentary short :)

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FabLab Stories

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: March 9, 2010

Two weeks ago I went to the FabLab in Utrecht and recorded stories by the people working there during that day.

I collected six stories in total, enough to showcase stuff in the documentary. You can watch them all on the FabLabChannel @ 23video. Note that only one of them is in English, the rest in Dutch without subtitles (will follow!).

The one below is my favorite. It’s the story from a guy that came into the Lab for the very first time. He’s a college teacher (arts) and therefore works almost all the time when the Lab is open. Now, it was a school holiday and he arranged something for the kids so he could come here. He draws beautiful patterns by hand and this time he scanned the pattern into Corel Draw and printed it in plywood.

It came out almost perfect. How’s that for a first time visit!

(the video below is in Dutch and doesn’t have subtitles, yet)

FabLab Stories: drawing patterns (Dutch) from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

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Fresh lick of ‘paint’ for this space

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: March 4, 2010

A chore long overdue, upgrading Wordpress on this site, combined with an enduring cold turned out to be a good reason to redesign this site.

Today I came across Olle’s site and he uses the Thematic theme framework. I loved the simpleness. After upgrading I installed this theme and added my personal touch to it, resulting in what you see now.

The colorbar is a variation on the colours I used for my new business site: elminewijnia.eu. A while back I wrote about letting go of the name Skallagrigg for my company name and migrate my online business-face elsewhere. And so I did. The .eu-domain is now a mostly static, bilingual site where I describe my services, showcase some of my work and tell more about me. So if you’re still wondering what I do for a living, you know where to go.

This will remain my blog. Indefinitely :)

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How 2D art can become 3D

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: March 1, 2010

Watch Kustaa Saksi tell about how he transformed one of his illustrations into a 3D object (in de second half of the video)

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A story on open innovation and FabLab

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: February 23, 2010

Joris van Tubergen talks on open innovation and FabLab from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

The robot was created by Edwin Dertien: http://edwindertien.nl/
More on the robot in English: http://hackaday.com/2009/02/20/flatpack-walker/
Recorded at ProtoSpace: http://protospace.nl

____
I created this as part of the longer documentary that I’m working on. One of the decisions I have to make is whether I ask the Dutch speaking people I will interview to tell their story in English. I’m not a fan of that, because you get language-poorer stories than when people would be talking in their native tongue.

So the consequence is that I need subtitles when I do the interviews in Dutch, since I want to show it to an international public.

This article by Andrew Balis convinced me that it could be done properly in Final Cut.

My workflow:
1. I exported the audio-file of the clips I chose at a 60% pace and used that to transcribe the story. Slowing the audio down was crucial since it gave me more time to write while listening and stop the file every now and then without having to rewind all the time.

2. Then I translated the text into English.

3. I created two subtitle templates for 1 and 2 lines, according to the above mentioned article.

4. I copied the text per (part of a) sentence in a text-overlay using the template, listening carefully to match the English text with the spoken content.

A lot of work, but since this clip is 2m21 it didn’t take as much time as I thought it would before I started.

If you have any feedback on the subtitles, like pace, size, or the translation itself, please let me know! It is very important to me that it works for most people.

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Experimenting with stop-motion

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: February 22, 2010

It’s been on my list for a while now, to experiment with stop-motion. Creating a viral for SHiFT using Lego is the perfect excuse to work a tad late. 73 pictures each displayed for 3 frames long. Here’s the result.

SHiFT 2010: DIY from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

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Compromising is hard yet rewarding

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: February 17, 2010

At last I managed to publish part of the interview with Lilia I did in May last year. As I explained back then, there were some technical problems, especially with the sound, that makes the material less attractive for use.

On and off I’ve been working on a solution, but without a result so far. Weird things happened while remarrying the separately edited audiostream with the videostream.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to compromise and just use the material as is and start pushing out snippets of the four interviews I have so far (it’s only the first two that have the sound issue, by the way).

As much as I hate to have published this snippet (although, snippet … it’s 7:30 minutes) with an annoying hum, I’m very happy to be able to start showing you some of the material. So without further ado I encourage you to read about and watch part of the interview with Lilia on my In Full Flow project-blog. Happy viewing :)

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Yammering without a company

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: February 16, 2010

You may have heard of Yammer:

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’ (source)

I would describe Yammer as the in-house Twitter for companies, with more than 140 characters allowed.

Since I don’t work for an organization or company I haven’t had the chance to experiment with it. You can only form a network when using a valid company email address, meaning all with the same domain-name. This is to prevent ’strangers’ to get into the network.

However, last week my co-worker Joitske suggested for me to take part in an initiative by her and Christian to join the ‘non-existing organization for independent consultants net4dev.org’. By assigning people an email address using that domain we can now exchange more in depth about work, without having to worry clients (or family) ‘listening in’ to what you’re saying.

We’re only using it for a week and it needs more members (interested?), but I can see this can grow into a great networking tool for us independent workers.

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Backchannels and stuff

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: February 11, 2010

A little while back I wrote about backchannels:

I’ve been missing something at Reboot ever since Jaiku and Twitter were introduced: the real backchannel conversations.

Today two things crossed my interaction stream on backchannels:
1. Joitske’s blogpost on backchannels and she embedded this:

2. Jere sent me a message that Twirc is now open for beta testing. As a response on my earlier blogpost he showed me this tool by a friend of his and it looked simple, yet promising. Sign up for an invite if you’re interested.

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Creating a Fab Lab documentary for SHiFT

By Elmine Wijnia | Published: February 10, 2010

My goal in the next two months is to create a documentary on the Dutch Fab Lab scene, which will be shown in some form at SHiFT in April. It is a bit of a wild idea, but it’s an excellent way for me to practice my skills on creating a slightly longer film involving other people.

The general idea:
3 or 4 stories on powerful examples of products created within the Labs, told by the labmanagers in NL, alternated with stories from ‘open day’ visitors at ProtoSpace explaining and showing what they’re working on.

Extra material I can use:
- I already wrote an introduction for the workshop Siert, Ton and I suggested for the pre-workshop day at SHiFT. I can use it as a storyline for the beginning of the documentary (voice-over);
- Some labs take pictures of the things created in the Labs, I can use those stills to show examples.

I’m wondering: would you be interested in watching this documentary? What would you like to discover about Fab Lab? What would you want to know from the Fab Lab users?

Would love to hear some feedback :)

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  • About this blog


    This is my personal blog which I started in 2003. At first it was called Communigations, a variation on Communicative Investigations. The blog transformed itself more into a personal investigation than being a blog on communication and therefore needed a new name.

    As a fencer, the name of this blog reflects how I write my thoughts into coherent stories, fence them off from all the sidepaths and rapidly go back and forth, covering various topics that interest me.

    Read more about me or about my work at elminewijnia.eu

    Get in touch with me and find me online.