Magic book

For this animation I tried to bring one of my favourite books to life, Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier. Once again, I found out the hard way that controlling the lighting conditions is one of the most difficult aspects of stop motion animation. That’s why I normally record at night.

And here a post-script for those using iStopMotion and who are struggling to connect their camera properly to their Mac. The following advice from Boinx Software allowed me to connect my Canon 40D with live preview:

  1. Connect your camera to the computer with an appropriate USB cable. (Power your camera by AC power if possible. If you do use a battery, make sure it is fully charged. If you use AC power, remove the battery.) – For me the USB cable was fine.
  2. Close any other applications that might connect to your camera.
  3. Open Image Capture, select your camera, then in pop up area in lower-left select Connection camera opens: No application.
  4. Make sure Dropbox is not a client of the camera.
  5. If you have anti-virus software, white-list iStopMotion so that it may access your camera.
  6. Set the Mode Dial to Manual (M). – Note that this doesn’t affect your White Balance setting, so you should also set your White Balance dial to a manual setting to ensure consistent exposures.
  7. Set Auto Power Off to Off.
  8. Set Auto rotate to Off.
  9. Set lens to Manual Focus and disable Image Stabilization.
  10. You may need to remove the CF/SD memory card. – I removed my CF card just in case.
  11. Set live view Exposure Simulation to On. – I couldn’t find this setting on my camera.
  12. Set Release shutter without card to ON or Enable. – I couldn’t find this setting on my camera.
  13. To use the Live View functionality you have to force iStopMotion to ignore the white list. To do this, open iStopMotion, click on iStopMotion at the top left corner of your screen, then press and hold the Option button on your keyboard and you’ll see that Preferences option will change to Debug Preferences, which you need click. In the opened window check the option “Ignore Whitelisting for Digital Still Cameras” and then restart iStopMotion.

Good design thinking

img_1716designtabletennis

The other day I couldn’t help noticing this low-maintenance, virtually indestructible table tennis table along The Goods Line in Sydney’s inner suburb of Ultimo. Now that’s an example of good design thinking. I know this facility is not meant for pro players, but I still would have changed one thing: the colour of the table. Yellow isn’t ideal considering balls are usually white.

I recall in my middle school I spent many hours playing table tennis at equally indestructible tables, though they made of stone instead of metal. And those tables are still there – over 25 years later!

 

Barefoot pose

I created my 8th animation, my first animated GIF, to enter the Digital Public Library of America‘s international October 2016 GIF ME UP competition. The image I chose to manipulate is titled barefoot pose, a photo from around 1910 which I thought lends itself quite well to be animated. I love looking at old images, trying to imagine the photo in colour, what life would have been like back then, how the photo might have come about, and of course who the people in the pictures might have been. I can imagine the chap in this picture would have had a good sense of humour and wouldn’t have minded this adaptation. I used Photoshop Elements and Keynote to create the GIF.

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Mastery in education

  • Oct 01, 2016
  • /
  • Blog

Our education system has been fundamentally broken for many decades, ever since schools were established, actually. It is disheartening to see that nothing has changed since I went to school. And there are additional challenges schools, teachers and students are facing today. Sal Khan explains just how the system is broken and how applying the concept of mastery would make education so much more worthwhile.

 

The times they are a-changin’

I recall lining up at sporting events trying (and sometimes succeeding) to get autographs of sports stars. Fast forward 30 years, and the selfie has clearly replaced the autograph.

Jaqueline from the Brazilian volleyball team celebrates a victory with fans.
Jaqueline from the Brazilian volleyball team celebrates a victory with fans.

Dream car

I recently discovered that electric car maker Tesla set up shop on Sydney Martin Place. Beautiful vehicles indeed. It seems like the future is arriving, slowly but surely. I’m not so sure that all transportation will be electric by the year 2030, but we’re moving in the right direction, albeit painfully slowly. All we need now is for these cars to become affordable and for electricity to be generated by means other than burning coal, as is sadly still the case in most of Australia.

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Resources for learning Spanish

 This post contains some great resources for learning Spanish.

 

SpanishDict

SpanishDict is an incredibly versatile dictionary website, with mobile apps also available.

It features a very fast translation engine, many handy sections on grammar, sets of flashcards for building your vocabulary, and – my favourite – a verb conjugation engine.

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