Sunday, September 23, 2007

Talk About Tools - MEDIA TOOLS


There are millions of tools in the modern world. Some of my friends tools. Some people call Dalton McGuinty a tool, but that's another conversation altogether. Instead, I'll discuss the media tools I used this week. Mind you, I didn't access my PC much this week due to the rigors of university life (cooking, laundry, groceries, and all that other fun stuff). Nevertheless, here's the list.

I'll begin with my adventures in everyone's favorite social networking site, Facebook. "Facebook doesn't count as a media tool,' you may be thinking. If, in fact, you were thinking as such, you would be partially wrong. For Facebook is now the home of user-made applications, and some of these applications are media tools. Take the Graffiti application, for instance.

Graffiti
Gaffiti is a facebook-authored application that allows user to create pictures, Graffiti style. The options are very basic, which makes it user-friendly. The options are as such: save, undo, start over, line width, line opacity, and color. It's generally used for handwriting messages to friends, but this week I was a little more creative with it.

Here's a sreenshot of the application in "creation mode." Note that once a peice is saved, it can never be modified again. Not by Graffiti, anyways.



Here's 2 other peices I created. Graffiti recently included a 'playback' option, which lets you watch the peice being formed, stroke by stroke. So I filmed the playbacks, too.


Peice 1: HEY


And now, the video version.



Peice 2: Guitar

(The perspective and proportions of this peice are all wrong, I know.)



So you may be wondering what I used to capture this (somewhat blocky) video. Well, I accomplished it with the magic of...


Hypercam
Hypercam is a desktop video recording program. The version I used was a free trial of version 2. It's a handy tool for capturing video on your desktop, as there are few other programs that can do this for free. As you may have noticed, the frame rate is rather limited. It has a maximum capture rate of 10 frames/second, so fluid motion isn't acheivable. But aisde from that, it works perfectly.

Here's a collage of the toolbox functions.

Hypercam is a great tool for recording desktop games, such as Runescape. This is an old Runescape music video I made months ago.


(there probably won't be more to come)

I edited this movie using...

Windows Movie Maker

Over my high school years, I mastered this simple video editing program. It's a good program for novice video editors (especially since it's free), but it lacks much. For example, it only has one secondary audio channel, and the transitions are primitive.

Here's a layout of the program:


I've made many videos with Windows Movie Maker, but I'm more than ready to try new software, such as Final Cut. Anyways, this week I made a short film (below) from some old video clips from high school. I made it for a friend, so I apologize for any inside jokes.



Thus ends my week of media usage. Later folks.

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