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Using the debatable editing resource Adobe Premiere 6.5, me and a friend (picture left) composited a short 8 minute presentation piece due for a company recruitment screening tomorrow evening, nothing of any real interest to those not applying (or to those who are), this film functions as a witty induction on the topic of "dealing with customers" (to quote Randal from Kevin Smith's Clerks: "This job would be alright if it weren't for the fucking customers").

A simple task? (interaction between staff and customer comprised of long takes so editing images would take less time and the soundtrack, far from needing a Godardian makeover, included a voice-over and mildly manipulated "on location" sound, which in hindsight, was poorly captured in the first place) Three problems attempted to thwart our efforts...

Problem #1: VRO is an extension I am none-too-familiar with and after finalising a small DVD (capacity just under 3Gb) that fits nicely in the central groove of your DVD-ROM drive, I copied the files over to my main hard drive so as to claim faster access and not be reliant on secondary or external sources. The VRO file plays in Windows Media Player but in order to convert it to AVI, I would recommend using FlaskMPEG (http://flaskmpeg.sourceforge.net/), unfortunately for us, the original source material was in poor shape meaning through multiple converts, no matter how high the bitrate, the inevitable output file looked like a blown up Youtube video, not exactly what you're looking for when the content of the piece discusses quality of service ("here staff, watch a pirated video on customer relations").

Problem #2: Adobe Premiere on Microsoft Vista tends to crash a fair amount, never forget the cardinal rule of editing: save after almost every move!

Problem #3: Always separate footage into manageable chunks rather than working with one long capture, when you use basic transitions, there's nothing more irritating than having the footage before or after a shot appear no matter how many times you edit it out, unfortunately, in this case, one shot simply couldn't employ our consistent method of emphasising ellipsis through cross dissolve so we had to settle for a hard cut, which up to this point had signified 'real-time' within a sequence.

I've tried installing two versions of Avid but both are not supported by Vista and going for a more elementary editing suite, Windows Movie Maker decided to show footage upside-down!
Still, the day was good practice considering I've never really edited anything at home before (never had a machine powerful enough to do the job until now), oh! and I would definitely recommend NOT using those small DVD camcorders (the discs are about 4" in diameter), the results are appalling.

Earthquake In Kent!!

From the BBC News website:

"An earthquake has shaken parts of Kent, damaging buildings and disrupting electricity supplies.

Homes in five streets in Folkestone had to be evacuated because of structural damage including cracked walls and fallen chimneys.

The tremor measuring 4.3 on the Richter scale struck at 0819 BST and experts said its epicentre was a few miles off the coast in the English Channel.

One woman was taken to hospital with a neck injury."

I had departed for Chessington at 7.35am so was on a train moving directly toward the area supposedly worse effected and yet, I didn't notice a thing! I guess it's difficult to differentiate a seismic shake from a seemingly unstable set of carriages traveling near top speed, that, and my sense of balance would've been distorted by the high-pitched sine waves infiltrating my earlobes (i.e. my music). When I arrived back at the apartment, where our peculiar landing light, which works only during a power cut and never when we actually need it (coming home from a drinking session, trying to find the keyhole? Near impossible), my flatmate informed me that about 35 minutes after I had left, he was sat in the living room watching television when the reality-shifting tremor engaged him a twenty second process of disorientation, existentialism, fear and finally, realisation in the form of a news channel confirming his experience. The other member of this trio managed to sleep through it all and had only awoken about 10 minutes before I arrived home at around 7pm (student life, easy for some). Is this the beginning of the end? Surely, my joke about the end of days can't be coming true (I'm only 25, have five years left and this atheist sure as shit ain't going to die through an "act of god", the irony!).

In other news, I won a shark!

Learning Japanese, I Really Think So!

Why did I have to choose one of the most complex languages to eradicate my monolingual irritation? Well, it was purely by chance that I should be standing in Waterstones with a spare £20 and happened upon the language section offering me a multitude of dialects. The choice has always been between Russian, Polish, Japanese or Chinese (Mandarin), mainly because these are four places I've always wanted to visit but also because I know next to nothing of their vocabulary beyond hearing poetic recitals from films. Japanese happened to come about through a simple process of blind point and purchase meaning, through discipline, I should now pursue so as to profit from my investment.

Have you seen the amount of syllables involved in a sentence, though?? Christ, always good to start with the basics, 1- 10 should suffice for this week:

1. ichi (ee-chee)

2. ni (nee)

3. san (sahn)

4. yon (yohn)

5. go (goh)

6. roku (roh-koo)

7. nana (nah-nah)

8. hachi (hah-chee)

9. kyū (kyoo)

10. jū (jooo)

South Stoke #1

Somewhere in South Stoke lies a world separate from existence.