The reason I wont do this, this time is that I feel I wouldn’t be able to develop and present it as I would like to turn out to be. When we visited Latvia I worked a lot asides visiting so many beautiful places. The feeling of not completing my writing on this time of travel isn’t bad though I’m more happy that a few people will be able to let the pictures tell the story.

Thanks to my wonderful girlfriend Ieva for showing me everyything we saw and putting up with me, constantly stopping to take pictures

The flight

Jani

Liepaja – living

Liepaja – graveyard

badass Mikkel

the beach

riga open air museum

wired up

Long Island Icetea

up there

Dzels Vilks





worlds apart

lock n’ love

pidgeon!

art museum

backyard

window

river

milda

custom balcony

the road

the fallen

sunlight

“What do you want to take it for?”

I responded, that I didn’t want to use it for some kind of abusive manual and that it’s just something you don’t see every day. I though skipped out on the fact, that I thought it looked very nice also because of the snow, his luminescent clothes and the night time.

He agreed and kept on working, I think I didn’t bother him a lot and quickly moved on after three shots.

Furthermore I’ve also discovered photography as a tool for giving away very very personal things. I’ve been taking some self portraits recently and I don’t know if I ever want to show them to anybody else, than the person they were made for.

Actually this is one of the special parts about these pictures, they are not made for building my portfolio or for a paid job, even though I am a little proud of some of them.

To make the self portrait part a little easier, I today bought a Canon RC-6 for remote triggering my camera:

So the bottom line is, that I feel that I am developing in the matters of photography. I am more daring to ask or just shoot people and try to make them comfortable with it. Also to make photography a more personal thing, I still want to try everything and improve my skills as wide and as deep as possible, but I will try to keep it on a more consistent path, when I find some parts that I enjoy more than others.

The fire didn’t hurt anybody as far as I know, but some of the flats are not safe for inhabiting them. My place is fine and I’m cleaning out the smoke and I have to do a lot of laundry.

I’m alright and managed to grab external HDD, computer and camera, so here are the pictures

emergency exit sign

 When people use your app for the first time, they should intuitively grasp the most important features. The design work doesn’t stop at the first use, though.

Google just doped their designers again and went all in on their new Android Design page. This probably comes as a reaction to the inconsistency of Android Apps and is trying to teach the App devs som common guidelines.

I’ll have a lot of fun with the very shallow DOF at low f-stop values and in general try to get as much out of my first “digital” prime (no zoom) lens as possible.

On twitter, a couple of messages (often the same) sprouts up by multiple people. What could be going on here, is that a bot with some random people-stock pictures is tweeting all their pre-defined news messages over and over again, none of them responds when you tweet at them, neither the @nyndesigns account. I assume these are blind bot accounts, because they tweet the same messages over and over again, trying to over-over-advertise for the posts and services of nyndesigns.com

The funny thing is, that Nyndesigns advertists with a message like:

Professional web consultation services @nyndesigns Windsor, Ontario, Canada

Which does not add up with their behaviour on social media at all.

ground rules they are breaking:

1. Be available for questions and correspondence
2. Don’t repeat yourself
3. Be authentic

Below you see the confusing different amounts of likes on their facebook page:

Here’s a potential list of Nyndesigns potential fake twitter accounts:

• https://twitter.com/#!/denahall8
• https://twitter.com/#!/katherinejtaylo
• https://twitter.com/#!/EliseBynum
• https://twitter.com/#!/katherinejtaylo
• https://twitter.com/#!/AllieHofer
• https://twitter.com/#!/DavidRCastillo
• https://twitter.com/#!/SarahCWoo
• https://twitter.com/#!/haroldiglesia14
• https://twitter.com/#!/calvinscholl12
• https://twitter.com/#!/JuanMckeon
• https://twitter.com/#!/edithccole
• https://twitter.com/#!/sarahgraha
• https://twitter.com/#!/NathanEGrable
• https://twitter.com/#!/kathleenbryan14
• https://twitter.com/#!/williamallen12
• https://twitter.com/#!/lorikthomas
• https://twitter.com/#!/johnnymoylan12
• https://twitter.com/#!/ryanuryan
• https://twitter.com/#!/charlesboard12

and many more, able to be found on: https://twitter.com/#!/search/@nyndesigns

UPDATE: I just filed a spam report on twitter.com about this matter, including the information above.

Apart from that I’ve taken a couple of long exposure pictures the last nights:

What will transb.in be?

It will be an online interface for easily translating texts and adding annotations. EDIT: The website will not auto-translate anything, the users will be able to translate texts.

Why is it called transb.in?

Basically, because there are many “pastebins” for code out there like pastebin.com, but this one is going to show texts side by side, in their original language and the one they are translated to.

Who needs this?

First of all, I do. I think it’s much more pleasant if the texts you are trying to understand in a foreign language appear side by side (original/translation) so you can pick up some of the twists in the authors original version. Thinking from poems or songs, over speeches to any kind of written material, people may not be able to understand without a translation.

Second of all, it may be a help for anybody who translates texts, for wikis, documentations, tutorials or different material.

Why will this be better?

It will be better, because the method of displaying texts is much more natural for people who want to compare the translation to the content of the untouched text. Also annotations within the texts (like in MS Office or Open/Libre Office) will aid the user in understanding the meaning a lot better than only the interpretation of the primary translator.

On top of that, users will have the option of translating the text into another language and make it accessible for even more people, adding to the list of available languages, like on Wikipedia/Wikiquote, etc.

 When will this go live?

When it’s done.

Let’s go to Australia, like… tomorrow! I want to live like this!

(Thereby meaning being free to travel spontainiously)

Me:

Yes, me too! Why do you think I picked a job where I can work anywhere? I could work, sitting on a fucking kangaroo!

(Thereby not insulting the bouncy little fellas)

What I want to say with this is, that I am very happy about, that my profession is rarely requiring physical presence. Photography does, but the main part of my daily life, coding, does not. This is great and I have worked on coding projects in plains, trains, cars and several flats, houses, bars and on boats

My optimal working conditions are almost everywhere I can bring headphones and can gain internet access, the bigger the bandwidth the better, but 3G or EDGE has also served well already.

Bottom line: Since I can work a lot of places on this planet, I would like to do that more. Keep travelling, visit cities and countries and still be reachable for my clients.

Mikkel was making a lot of food

Like this caviar, rucola salad, shrimps and oisters

or this deer with potatoes and mushroom sauce

not to forget the caramel cone with vanilla daim and marshmellow cholocate icecream.
Afterwards we had Latvia’s national champaign, irish whiskey and cigars.

The pictures are all instagrammed by Mikkel, the chef himself. He has done an amazing job and we all suited up for this occasion.

Thanks to Mikkel, Adina and Ieva for a very nice evening

1000 Thanks to Ragno from MeRox Studio for this perfect sponsoring gift before leaving the continent for a while!

PS: expect some video footage!

PPS: the cool t-shirt is from my mom

At the moment everybody at NoMA is in a rush, because it’s the last week of our third semester exam. Everybody is still working as much as they can to create something stunning and to look back on this as a great experience, from which they learned a lot. Every semester has their task, which stretches from their first online portfolio until a individual multimedia production of their choice. All this can be incredible interesting and you can choose to empower causes you believe in. The first snow has also fallen in Kolding and it doesn’t nearly look as pretty as the previous year, maybe I’ll get some cool shots of it later (need more snow).

So, my point being, that everybody on my semester is confronted with separation, from family, new or old friends and the rest of us. Some will remain in an area, but be pretty occupied by their internships. It will be great to face new and old challenges and come back to NoMA for the exams, before we all scatter across the globe.

The past three weeks I’ve partly dedicated to writing my twitter clone ROARER and today from 08:00 until 11:00 I will be online there. Join everybody who reads this and can spare the time plus the people at my university in trying it out in that time!

Key features

• Login without password, just type your nickname
• see the notification and click it when new roars arrive
• scroll down to see older roars, page automatically extended

Launch Catapult

Key Features

• name and mail gets saved to database
• email address validated before sign up button appears
• all output can be customized throuh backend

To Do:

• add functionality for sending mails

No matter how many authorities or mentors you meet in your life, they all have an opinion what you should do with your time or energy or the ways you should choose to do that. They’re blessed with ignorance, if they don’t know, that their opinion might only be good for very few of their audience.

This morning

For me, getting up at 3 something, eating breakfast and going to work (walking 0.75 meters to my computer) was about figuring out what the solution for that feature was I couldn’t quite get working yesterday evening.

Being happy

What this is about is not solving a problem, but to feel good. Listening to my coding tracklist on grooveshark, coding and learning something new, once again. Learning is a vital part of my day. Whenever I take some time for anything not challanging, I know that I soon will return to something that will teach me something.

Then why are you babbling here?

Because writing teaches me. Teaching teaches me too and that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy writing tutorials. I’ve decided to write more spontaneous entries, even though some of them might not be long or great. They’re a status update on a personal blog, why not.

So what was it about?

Find what you like/love to do and do it as much as you can. You will not get tired of that, you’ll be on auto-refuel on a motivation pipeline and you’ll grow from all the positive experience.

I hereby want to invite everybody to try ROARER my tiny twitter clone with the people at NoMA. I will publish a URL Friday morning, so everybody can participate and keep everybody updated through facebook and twitter.

So, what have I actually done for my NoMA specialisation?

Roarer and Launch Catapult my two little AJAX tech demos are called.
Launch Catapult is ready for productive use and already running at vollzeitblogger.de. Functionality for sending out emails for the friendly people signing up, will not be a big hassle to write.
Roarer is a little more difficult, because it craves a lot more injections into the DOM and it’s more of a demonstration how to do different things, how deep you can go into the DOM to exchange tiny values and when it might be better to reload a larger area.

After documenting the source code some more, adding features and cleaning it up, it will be published, both ROARER (which I could turn into a little Tutorial actually) and the Launch Catapult.

Off book is a series of short documentaries of specific topics, which further understanding and analyses our culture at a very current state.  The two videos I’d like to show here, are about the power of videogames and also hacking culture.

Off Book: Video Games

This video shows very greatly, that video games undeniably are culture. The variety and the ways you can interact with them are unique and outstanding.

Off Book: Hacking Art & Culture with F.A.T. Lab

This one is about how F.A.T. Lab has been trying to come up with projects that ride the wave of todays media making processes and how to question monopolies.

There are some more videos on PBS arts vimeo channel and I can also recommend them, because they are interesting peeks into other worlds.

New blog?!

Yeah, new blog, but don’t worry This will remain
I’m going to make a blog about blogging (yay ) and it will be entirely in German.
It will be called Vollzeitblogger.de and I will spill all I’ve learned from blogging here and there and basically be a startup guide, improvement camp and pro tip place for aspiring bloggers.

On the page you see a little script I wrote with CodeIgniter and jQuery today. The source will probably be published once it is mature enough. It saves email adresses and names right now, later on you’ll be able to bulk email people when your project is taking off.

But what about your specialisation?

Yeah, I thought you’d ask that. I’m still working on my twitter clone ROARER and I’ll get as far as I can for the exhibition friday next week. Everybody will be able to participate, because it will be accessible for everybody at that point.

Wait, you’re doing more?

Yeah, I’m currently working on making a pastebin for translations and writing a WordPress theme. The pastebin will show original text and translation side by side. Functionality for annotations and revisions will be added later on. I feel that I’ve really lacked a tool like this, especially for showing song texts beyond the language they were written in or working on multilingual blog posts.

PS: My portfolio just reached pagerank one, yay!

Modestep – Sunlight

Skrillex – Kill Everybody

Skrillex – Rock n Roll (Will Take You to the Mountain)

Im not “cool”. I’m a normal person who decided to make music. I never sought out to be anything. I just made songs on my laptop. BUT I appreciate every bit of support you all give me more than you know. Like I said. At this point, my music means more than what it “means to me” It means what it “means to us”.

Skrillex on facebook

Adele – Rolling in The Deep Dubstep remix

Your turn, recommend something!

picture: dandy logo

So there is this great new social network… Waaait, that’s so not the point about Diaspora. Remember all the discussions about how facebook saves all your data and google plus connects everything you do on google plus to your search queries? Yeah? Don’t like it?

Now that’s where Diaspora comes along. First of all Diaspora is not one single website where you can sign up. It’s a network of connected servers, which results in Diaspora.
Diaspora is like a street system compared to a go cart park. Now, the metaphor at the current time is a little bad, because the go cart parks like facebook and google plus have millions of users, while Diaspora is fairly small at the moment, but let’s go and change that later.
Like when choosing a provider for your email or your webhost, you now have a chance to decide where you want your social profile to be hosted. There’s a list at podupti.me where you can choose your “home pod” (pod = server on the Diaspora network, you’ll be able to connect with everybody, even if they’re not on your home pod).

Why join?

• to ensure your data stay with you and only the people you share them with
• to easily publish updates to twitter and facebook at the same time, if you want to
• to meet new and interesting people
• to invite your current friends from facebook or twitter
• to feel free

Join Now

after that be sure to
find me on Diaspora*

When joined I recommend you add tags for topics you’re interested in and update your status with a message like:

Hey everyone, I’m kinda #newhere. I’m interested in #photography, #webdesign, #design, #PHP, #JavaScript, #jQuery, #Wordpress, #drupal and #git.

Computer programming is tremendous fun. Like music, it is a skill that derives from an unknown blend of innate talent and constant practice. Like drawing, it can be shaped to a variety of ends – commercial, artistic, and pure entertainment. Programmers have a well-deserved reputation for working long hours, but are rarely credited with being driven by creative fevers. Programmers talk about software development on weekends, vacations, and over meals not because they lack imagination, but because their imagination reveals worlds that others cannot see.

from: Larry O’Brien and Bruce Eckel in Thinking in C#

Introduction

As the leading quote, this objective shall for me use principles that naturally further clean code and to split tasks for easy and fast cooperation and maintenance. To code is not that special nowadays as it was before, but to have a high standard and make your software understandable for others is a progressive trend through social coding and sites like github.com, jsfiddle.net or cloud9.com.
Creativity is important for every programmer. To lead this creativity into the right channels, without hindering the workflow, there are architectural guidelines like MVC. It’s short for Model-View-Controller, which I will explain at a later time.
The user is by now used to, that pages are updated on the fly. New messages on facebook or google+ are shown immediately with red tags on the symbol, corresponding to the type of event. On twitter the timeline shows when and how many new tweets have been published since you’ve loaded the page. These features are realized through AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). In plain English it means that some of the content of a website is exchanged through JavaScript. This makes the communication between server and client asynchronous and often aids better user interaction.

Model View Controller

Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case.

-Francis Glassborow

The MVC architecture divides a program in three different units, that interact with each other in a specific way. These conventions are in the beginning sometimes seen as a little annoying, but I personally swiftly got used to them and appreciate this way of development. One of the most popular MVC frameworks, Ruby on Rails, runs on twitter.com.

Model

The Model is the part of the program dealing with data storage, reading and writing data to a database. This can be both table based or document based like Google’s BigTable or the CouchDB.

View

A View generates visible output for the user. It’s used to display information and also elements for interaction with the rest of the program.

Controller

As the name already states, the Controller controls the program. A Controller tells the Model which data to get or to write and the Views which to display.

AJAX

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML has majorly influenced the way complex online interfaces are built to aid the user in interacting, achieving goals faster and decreasing loading processes.
Retrieving data when needed, instead of re-generating and re-transferring results with every click, saves both bandwidth and time. Since the development time of a software project usually is significantly smaller than the hours spent using it, it makes perfect sense investing time for development to save time and money on use.
AJAX prevents us from hammering the refresh button, when we’re waiting for an email to arrive and using a webmail interface or show us which users are visiting the websites we are maintaining in realtime (smartly used in piwik).

Used frameworks

The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less.

-David Emery

jQuery

It’s the biggest state of the art JavaScript framework today, that is why it is often required by firms and through hundreds of tutorials and a great documentation, very easy to learn.

CodeIgniter

As jQuery, CodeIgniter is quite famous. The framework is developed by EllisLab, but everybody can contribute, fix bugs or add features through github. As it simplifies a lot of everyday tasks for developers and provides a strong and clean structure through the MVC architecture it has built a solid reputation through the past years.

Famous Use Cases

For me, the two most incredible use-cases of AJAX are the operations you either can’t or don’t want to do on the client side, therefore the data is either processed on the server side or just gotten from a database, with checking for authentication and so on.
You could say: AJAX is only for those, who have too much traffic, they only save bandwidth with it. I beg to differ. It can also significantly increase the usability on your website. Waiting is boring and will scare your users away, so you try to give them updates and notifications as quickly and as uncomplicated as possible. The way to do that is AJAX.

Twitter

Twitter has quite elegant use of AJAX all over their page. The most obvious may be the new tweets button. When a new tweet appears in a timeline or in search of a tag, there is a little button on top of the page, that indicates when new tweets have been published.

Why not just put them in there? Because users might not like it. Scrolling output is for running processes on Linux machines, that only geeks handle for monitoring.

What else is handled through AJAX, is user profiles. When you scroll through a list, your own timeline or a tag and click somebodies username, the profile is loaded in the right sidebar. Now, let’s say we have a list of ~100 people and 20 of them have tweeted recently, no profiles are loaded at first. When you click a username, the profile page of the according user appears, showing the recent 3 tweets. By using AJAX you save database (or cache) queries for 60 tweets, statistics for followers, following, amount of tweets and listings for 20. This already sounds like a good deal, right?

Facebook

You may have noticed, that the small red squares show up when you have new messages, notifications or invitations to events on facebook. I’ll not go deeper into this, because this is very similar to twitters, just that the updates are put in a small drop-down box, instead of being pushed into the main content area.

What I think is more interesting is, that when you reach the bottom of a timeline, new content is loaded automatically.

By chopping the informations displayed into smaller chunks and loading them along the way your benefits by using it are:
- less processing time on the server
- less bandwidth consumption
- less rendering time, because less information has to be processed by your browser

MVC

The Model View Controller architecture is used in the aspiring Ruby On Rails framework, which is used by for example Google, Twitter, amazon.com, Yahoo! and BBC. One of the most common PHP frameworks in that category is CodeIgniter which is used to power modelportalen.dk.
If we look at the projects, their services are not the most simple to provide. The characteristics they share are heavy workload, the user expect them to have a high uptime and without errors at any given time. Also neither the maintenance nor the development of the above mentioned is a one-man show.

How does MVC contribute to a collaborative development process?

MVC does more than splitting the jobs into three parts. Current version control systems do more than just to check if a file has been changed. It automatically merges the newest lines together, and only if one line has the same line changed in two different ways, manual work has actually to be done.
With an MVC architecture you would naturally divide your workload into two teams. The web designers / frontend developers would work on the Views, where the developers would stick to the controllers and models. Of course, many others are possible and complex projects require more planning, but it’s already easier and faster, than to hardcode output or write an extensive backend system for placing elements.
Wordpress, in contrast, is a fully featured CMS, so the comparison might sound a little misplaced, but adding functionality to a website that is powered by WordPress usually happens through plugins and modifying the functions.php file within the theme folder. This offers a lot less flexibility to development team, than the above mentioned division.

AJAX login example

To start without combining the MVC and AJAX right away, this is a simple login form test in AJAX.

index.html

		AJAX login form

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.5.1.min.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="js/ajaxlogin.js"></script>
</pre>
<form id="login_form" method="post">
User: <input id="username" type="text" />

Password: <input id="password" type="password" />

<input type="submit" value="Login" /></form>
<pre>

The only AJAX specific thing here, is the empty div at the bottom of the page and of course the included script files. The status div will be used to insert the information that the script gives back upon a users login attempt.
ajaxlogin.js

 jQuery(document).ready(function(){
	$('#login_form').submit(function(){
		var unameval = $('#username').val();
		var pwval = $('#password').val();
		$.post('backend.php', { username: unameval, password: pwval },
		function(data){
			$('#status p').html(data);
		});
		return false;
	});
});

This is a straight forward post request, which returns the targeted scripts output and inserts it into the paragraph in the div with the id status. The return false prevents the submit button from actually doing something, because the JavaScript handles it already.

backend.php

<?php
$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

if ($username == 'Zuka' && $password == 'sukinsins'){
	print'Like a boss';
}
else {
	print'Y U FAIL AT LOGIN?';
}

Here we see a contrast to an MVC attempt, as this just is a dummy php file doing the checking, it’s okay to user print and echo, which you would not do in an MVC application, you would load a View.

How does AJAX change the work of a programmer?

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

-Brian Kernigan

AJAX changes the way of writing a web project and takes it to a little higher level. First of all, you have to make a decision if your project should be usable without JavaScript enabled (web crawlers usually don’t interpret JavaScript). That means that information should be available through alternative hard links, when JavaScript is not used.
Second, you have to keep elements on the same page very modular and easily accessible in the DOM. That sometimes means more encapsulating elements and also writing scripts that only output specific parts of the page, the ones that either are loaded later on or refreshed in page during a visit.
Third, you will write a whole lot JavaScript more than usual and have to take into account that you may need to re-write some parts of the JavaScript upon style changes, to keep the project consistent.
Furthermore you may have to make some changes and process some of the JavaScript through PHP to use variables, constants or other server-side scripting features in your client-side code.
An important thing to remember is to decide if content should be exchanged or refreshed seamlessly or if it should be clarified that something has changed on the site. Loading graphics can be essential to show the uneducated user, that something actually is happening. This can prevent confusion because the communication with the server is visualized. Also error messages upon fail are essential for AJAX powered pages:

How does MVC change the work of a programmer?

This is more up to the programmer how he/she adapts it. Also how extensively the division into the three parts is undertaken. Basically you CAN make some calculations on output in the View, but you shouldn’t. Also you should not make a Controller output Data directly, around a View, but make it a variable in a View. Data should be ready for display when they leave the Controller.
The really big advantage of working with MVC is the teamwork. The requirements to the individual parts can be very specific, so misunderstandings can be minimized.
When pulling off a project with, for example, a designer and a developer, the designer can send his requirements for the pages in a list and the developer makes sure these data sets are included when the View is loaded, so it can be ordered and styled in the output. This way the two can work both on what they’re best at.

Conclusion

Both using a solid architecture and enhancing user experience through faster interaction is something you have to take care of, to create competitive web projects.
In the paper above I’ve pointed out what is so helpful about the technologies mentioned and why I use them.

Sources

• common sense (whatever that might refer to in our times)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller
• http://codeigniter.com
• http://jquery.com
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
• http://twitter.com
• http://facebook.com

To calm everybody down, it’s not true It’s just that right now the plugins and web services can’t access the new way of getting the data yet. As soon as the developers of the plugin you’re using or the analytic service of your choice have updated the responsible code, everything will be back to normal. Nothing has changed with the pagerank itself, just the way software can access it.

For more information: http://searchengineland.com/oh-no-what-happened-to-my-pagerank-95929

Here is a list of things I’d like to do during these weeks:

1. (WordPress) code my first Plugin
2. (WordPress) code an awesome theme, public domain
3. (Drupal) write a module or fix bugs in some
4. (CodeIgniter/Active Records) create pastebin-like service (for translations)
5. (Diaspora) make improvements to the user interface
6. (social media) set goals and reach them with 2-3 facebook pages and 2-3 twitter accounts
7. (nothing) Not doing any of this, handing in a finished project and working on my firm instead
8. (video) make some motion graphics (maybe mixed with some real footage)
9. (music) finish writing my first album, teaming up with people for vocals and music and produce it
10. (photography) make some awesome online presentation web-code

• a little long term photo project, nothing fancy, but still a personal project, I’d like to do
• updating my portfolio, changing informational hierarchy, summing things up for people without much time on their hands, presenting my most interesting cases
• running more twitter accounts, I’ll probably be partly in charge of 1-2 more (social media geekery)
• write tutorial about my Adobe After Effects + Adobe Premiere Workflow like I used it in my last video
• shoot worlds larget catwalk as a photographer
• portrait shooting coming up
• compile and submit some playlists (music is a social thing, you know?)

To lift this post a little to a visual level, here’s a screenshot of my MacOS desktop right now. Picture was shot on the way to Latvia and the nice time and date display is made with geek tool

Uldis Janpavlis: Regress
You know the feeling when everything seems to move into the wrong direction? Me too.

Grétar Gunnarson: For the love of music
The quality of this video, combined with the great timing to the music struck me. It’s a nice portrait of the main character and the love for music is very believable for me.

Eduards Balodis: Dream Believe Achieve
In this I primarily want to point out the effects and the concept. It just works. The timing, the perfect coexistence of video footage and visual effects.

Ilze Freifalte: Spirit of green grass
This video won the spirit award and also for me it’s some kind of pure positive energy. Creative, barefoot, lighthearted, without worries.

Morten Juul Møller: Nobody gets me
This is the video that personally made me laugh the most. It may seem a little more strange, when you don’t know the main characters affinity to hard electronic music.

Rasmus Jennings: Problems?
First world problems? There are websites about them, internet memes and everybody is kind of fed up with people whining about nothing, right? This video puts exactly that on the stage and reminds us, that it’s not so bad after all.

Max Nyby: We
A humorous approach on a shizophrenic main character and his daily struggle with the voice in his head. The back and forth between the two is very interesting and I could not help laughing about the incredible voiceover.

Thanks to everybody who was in this with us. Everybody made this possible.

My cards fresh out the press. Thanks to the friendly printing people at my academy!

Oh guess what, I’ve also started a facebook page, so if you want some more awesomeness in your facebook stream, like me!

The other video shoots were not going that smoothly, but delivered good footage in the end and they also were a lot of fun.
The most advanced light setup had Kenneth, with a silhouette flashing lamp, a dark room that first gets lit up when the second actor enters the room. For the lamps used a bunch of thanks to Ragno/Mette from MeRox Studio.

To sum up the shoots I was involved in:
- jumped into one that lasted half the night with very experimental lightning and from these hours only a time-lapse of by passing cars was used.
- played the evil nature polluting guy, wearing my top hat + voice over in Adinas video
- handled lightning and camera angles at Kenneths primary shoot
- played the shizophrenic guy in Tronds video
- played a freezing guy and a guy that gets stroked and scratched in Tanitas video

Thanks to my girlfriend without whom this project would not have risen at all, also thanks to everybody who supported me, gave me input and tought me about the used software, without this had never been possible.

Finally yesterday the NoMA film festival was hosted and I want to thank everybody who made it possible, helped out, made print-material and helped others to finish their videos. It was a blast.

So after all the talking, here my video is:

Shooting Interviews

shooting two people -> equal headroom, equal lookspace

choose interesting background, out of focus

Talking to camera-> direct, reporter
Talking slightly off camera -> indirect

Make the interviewed feel comfortable, ask easy questions until they are.

If questions are extracted from footage, ask them to incorporate the question.

Editing:

3 way colour correction:

- make sure fleshtones look natural unless desired otherwise by context

audio gain:
- control volume

adjust speed
- slow motion (intensify moments)

Tips on storyboarding:

note camera movement and sketch objects/characters
think about POV, perspective, blur

Vocabulary of today:

• POV = point of view
• DOF = depth of field

Hi everybody, I just shortly want to share the information we got during the lecture with David Fratto today. It’s essential for your production so just be sure to master:

• WB = White Balance
• exposure / iris
• manual focus
• audio levels

camera recording settings:

• resolution: 1920x1080px
• framerate:
• format: AVCHD

output settings:

• resolution: 1080x720px
• export to: 5000kbps video, 256kbps

Vocabulary learned today:

• S/N = Signal Noise ratio
• (mini)jack (usual headphone stick)
• XLR (big microphone cable)
• tripod
• lightstand
• hard light
• bounce light / diffusion
• dolly shot = sliding camera
• zebra patterns (80% IRE)
• exposure
• shutter speed
• scanning rate
• Iris/aperture

Recommendations for further reading:
dvinfo.net community for digital production
Doug Jensens vimeo channel

Oh! I forgot:
creative commons music you can find here for free for non-commercial projects: jamendo.com
for sound effects under the same conditions check freesound.org

The next two weeks are going to catapult me far out of my comfort and far in to the video zone. I’m looking forward to intense learning and presentable results.
Besides my studies I’m working on my early retirement in Mexico with tequila beer and Pinjanas full of Apple hardware. I’ve made a business card, so potential clients, co-workers and employers can contact me, after a meeting.

Now, a little something about its design. The colours used are the same as on my current portfolio, the front shows my name, phone, email and URL. The back holds a very compressed description of the roles I like to play, like photographer, web design- and developer and on top of that SEO and social media geek.
Surely you people knowing PHP or some similar language have noticed the little hints on this like the curvy brackets and the double ampersands.

The hierarchy from top to bottom on the front:

space for notes by me or the client, increasing individuality and interaction to memorize me better

contact details, minimal

my name with a very large contrast, so it still is significant, without being on top

The hierarchy from top to bottom on the back:

SEO and social media on top of

WEB

wich I develop and design

oh and I’m a photograper (out of the brackets)

What do you guys think?