Last week Lee, of Common Craft, posted a wonderful video of Terry Gilliam (Monty Python) explaining his work flow.

This inspired me to make something for the 40th edition of the fencing tournament my club organizes in 2 weeks time. Here’s the result of my weekend project:

I held the black wooden instrument in my hands, took a deep breath, blew on the reed and to everyone’s surprise I produced a sound. Not half bad for a first time. Hardly anyone manages that! It looked like a perfect match.

So I took lessons and joined the local youth orchestra. Only two other girls played oboe in my village back then, I was the youngest. We all played in the same wind orchestra.

I managed to learn the basics rather quickly. First in Emmen, since there was no teacher at the local music school. Later the three of us took lessons with a wonderful lady that came to our village and who often arranged for group lessons.

I loved playing together, but I never cared much for practicing. When the two older girls left after graduating high school, I was the only one left in the village to play oboe. It diminished my love for playing and practicing even further, but my teacher accepted it and made lessons a fun half hour by playing challenging duets together.

When I was about sixteen I was selected to become the first oboist in a regional orchestra, the Drents Jeugdorkest. Three years I played there. I even managed to keep playing there the first year I was at university. Once a month on Saturday I would travel to remote places in the province Drenthe to rehearse and give concerts with this wonderful group of people. In the end it was the only practice I got every month and I couldn’t keep up with the level of the group. I said goodbye to the orchestra after a summer tour in Rostock.

Only two times after that, during summer projects abroad when I filled a gap in my parent’s orchestra as a second oboist, I rehearsed and played. For the last, six?, years my oboe was just lying around the house, untouched.

Two weeks ago I started practicing again for a reunion concert by that youth orchestra I have such warm memories of. While practicing I noticed that the joy I once had in playing oboe, died since the last time I picked up the instrument. Last week I decided that this reunion concert would be the last one with my oboe. I’m done with it and will sell the oboe my parents gave to me. I’ll pass it on to someone who loves and needs it.

With a very loud concert I payed a worthy tribute to myself and my oboe. A pair you will never see again on stage. My sore lips are proof of my effort. After 22 years I’m done with it and I’m looking forward to challenge myself and start learning something else for the next 20 odd years.

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

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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.

As a first step in doing something else with skallagrigg.net, I’m building a new business-site, where I can present myself in context of work. One of the things I’m aiming for is having the site in both Dutch and English. My business-site has been only in Dutch so far, but since I frequently travel around Europe, I’d like people with no knowledge of Dutch to know as well what it is that I do for a living.

Luckily, Stephanie Booth blogged a little while ago about the plugin WPML, to make Wordpress multilingual, and today I tested it. The plugin works like a charm. However, the theme I chose for my new site isn’t supplied with multilingual code and therefore I learnt how to localize the text in a theme today.

The things I’ve learnt about Wordpress over the years

(about the number in the title)

Today I went skiing with friend Patrick and his son of 4 in Andermatt. Nothing spectacular, just checking whether I still can since my first skiing holiday in February.

(about the number in the title)

I’ve learned to work with Adobe Premiere back at university in ‘98-’99, but a decade later it’s hard to remember most of what I learned about pro-editing. So when I first opened Final Cut, I was overwhelmed with all the different windows, filters, settings and everything else.

To make the learning path within the programme more manageable, I think of the next thing that I would like to discover and think of a small video I could produce, to learn how to do that. So yesterday I thought of a thing to film which I could speed up. And speeding a clip up or slowing it down appears to be soooo easy

Learning in tiny chunks, or taking baby steps. It’s the only way to progress

(about the number in the title)

The other day I was reflecting on why I’m not that good at drawing and came to the conclusion that at some point in time I stopped drawing, and thus stopped practicing. At my school it wasn’t taught beyond the age of 16. Drawing classes only continued for the exceptional talented kids on our school, who wanted to get into artschools. Since I wasn’t one of them, I stopped drawing.

Only now I realize that being able to translate ideas into visual stuff is important to me. I’m good with words and language, but sometimes a drawing is the only thing to explain what is going on inside my head. Question is, can I convince myself that sucking at drawing (and others being so much better at it) shouldn’t discourage me of doing it?

(practice, practice, practice(although I’m not headed for pro-status on this))

(about the number in the title)

I spent a considerable amount of time on writing down a schedule yesterday, with lots and lots of excercises. I hope I have enough variation in serious practice and play. Hey, I even incorporate music and the Wii into it .

Whatever happens next week, it will be a learning experience for me. Let’s hope that the kids will learn something as well those days (and that it was fun to learn that) .