So my small apple-themed cookie jar actually came out looking ok, except that I didn’t get a chance to ask my teacher how to glaze a piece with a lid. She had told me that I would need to make sure the lid was on when I glazed it, and I wondered how that would work without sealing the lid shut. Answer: it doesn’t work. You can’t glaze the edges of the lid; in fact, you have to wax the edges of the lid and the rim of the jar, and you can’t use glazes that run. So I messed up on all accounts, and my lid fused to the jar itself. Sigh. However, I was just in time to wipe off all the glaze from my OTHER, larger jar (with lid), and tomorrow I will re-glaze it appropriately. At least the vase thing came out ok, although the leaves freak DD out. And the cup came out ok too — I’ve switched from using volcanic green to verdigris, a more opaque, metallic green, and that seems to be working out.

Really. You have to play it. This is so awesome.

Cred to @geoffreylong for the note.

I made this with DD for my good pal BB, since she is far away on her birthday (I still consider it the 25th until dawn, which leaves me just under the deadline for posting it on time).

Technifiling details: We shot JPG stills which I animated through QT Pro’s “Image Sequence” at 2 frames per second, sped up 200% (to become 4 frames per second), and later sped up even more in FCP to 350% (you do the math on frame rate). The resulting .mov file from QT pro was large and not a standard size, so I put it into Compressor and exported a DV-NTSC version, then imported that into FCP, changed the distortion to -12.5% (to account for the stretching that happened in Compressor) and added titles & music. But in pushing out a web version, I had interlacing problems on export. This happens a lot in FCP, I’ve found, because of default settings. To remedy the situation and cover all my bases, I (a) changed my sequence settings to “Field Dominance > None” and (b) made sure “Frame reordering” was unselected in exporting for QT conversion (only necessary for stop animation pieces where every single frame is different — for real video, you can keep frame reordering). Although to be honest, I did the QT conversion export BEFORE changing my sequence settings, so it still looked interlaced. Anyway, then I went online and read some suggestions about exporting with Compressor and changing a few settings, particularly Field Output (set to Progressive). Here’s the settings that worked for me:

File Extension: mov
Video Encoder
Format: QT
Width: 720
Height: 480
Pixel aspect ratio: default
Crop: None
Frame rate: 29.97
Frame Controls:
Retiming: Nearest Frame
Resize Filter: Linear Filter
Deinterlace Filter: Line Averaging
Adaptive Details: On
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Field Output: Progressive
Codec Type: H.264
Multi-pass: On, frame reorder: Off
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 74
Min. Spatial quality: 50
Key frame interval: 75
Temporal quality: 50
Min. temporal quality: 50
Hinted for QuickTime streaming server

Amazing how, as a dream, this existence seems to be
over in a moment, a collection of moments.
It goes so quickly it can’t be real.
The bowl on the table, the books spread out,
the lack of children, the children, the cherry blossoms,
their new buds,

the dimming light bulb and its shadows as well,
our conversations, and the music that violinist played
one day in the subway (the most beautiful Russian tune
I’ve ever heard) — where do they go? What are these
but symbols of something else?

This was supposed to be the big version of my small “clover bowl”, with brown on the inside and green on the outside. But I used volcanic green, a new glaze, for the second time, and just like the first time it was wildly unsuccessful — the glaze is just too thin and doesn’t really cover the clay. So, this too was a bust, although DD thinks it looks “very seventies.”

1. Impending marriage
It’s true, DD and I are getting hitched. But I’d like to do it quietly. In Spain. With no one there. Including family, although I love them. Many people debate this strategy, even though I promise to hold a huge celebration later. There seems to be a divide among those who think you should definitely have some form of a real wedding and extend the proverbial olive branch to relatives and friends who expect that sort of thing, and those who think you should do whatever you want. I am undecided. Thoughts?

2. Impending trip to Peru
It’s true, I’m going to rural Peru for six weeks, leaving mid-May. I was awarded a grant from an MIT entrepreneurship group to film a documentary on the use of new wireless networks in tiny villages around the Andes and Amazon (Cajamarca and Pangoa, in the northern and eastern regions). I will be doing all this in conjunction with Rural Telecom, a company run in part by my friend and former UK roommate, P. Right now I’m trying to find a Peruvian guy to accompany me and help conduct interviews, protect me from the riots, etc. Oy.

3. Impending thesis
I need to come up with a thesis topic, stat. My chosen theme is “mobility” — both sociologically and technologically. I am interested in the way societies are becoming more mobile, and how this in turn shapes the technologies we create, and vice versa. But obviously, I need to get a little more specific, and I only have a few weeks to nail down some more specific ideas because I have a paper/presentation/preliminary thesis debut due for class. Help! Ideas, please!

Literally. I made this bowl too thin, and played with one high edge too much, trying to shape it into a sort of pitcher mouth. Then I got creative and messed with all four edges, resulting in the out-turned sides. That was ok, but the real mistake was the glazing job, obviously: Kinsvale Gold sort of worked for the inside, but Volcanic Green (a new glaze we have) was a bit disastrous (or: my application of it was disastrous). I can’t wait til I know what I’m doing! But til then, let this be a lesson: ugly bowls come, ugly bowls go, but you can still eat ice cream out of them.

Extended haiku via SMS 13 April 2009, 22:33

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