I realized a wonderful thing while maneuvering through airport security this past week: It greatly enhances your experience if you simply remove your belt before ever entering the airport. I packed mine in my carry-on, and never had to deal with taking it off and on every time I went through the scanners.

However, Gatwick’s security jumped a few notches on the annoyance level. Heathrow, I have figured out. But Gatwick is another story. Right when you begin to think you’ve successfully navigated their scanners without having to remove your shoes, you discover that they’ve strategically placed a special “shoe scanner” separating you from the freedom of the departures lounge.

Now imagine having to do all that at 5 am after spending a sleepless night in the “limbo” lounge.

Yea… I mostly despise flying.

For the MMC “recruitment video” project, I’d been looking everywhere online for a stock footage site with a good video of a country’s flag waving. I found a nice one, and requested a price quote 12 days ago, but never received any reply. I have a feeling it wouldn’t be cheap though…stock footage is normally pretty pricey.

So tonight, on a whim, I made a suggestion that we just animate our own flag waving, which would be even way cooler and better. If it works, we’d be able to use the animation with any flag image we choose - making it possible to easily render video of any country’s flag waving. Since Tim and I had already been messing around with Blender - open source 3d program - it wasn’t too difficult to find some info on how to model and animate a flag using the built-in cloth effects.

All that to say, we will hopefully soon have our very own flag-waving animation without having to pay a dime. Providing we manage to do it…

• There have been a lot of comings and goings over the past week! The team left, Larry and Gwynn left, then Mikell and Renee arrived, as well as Linda (short termer for one year). It is nice to have a few new faces around, but also sad that some of the others have gone. It is hard to see Larry and Gwynn’s empty house on MMC property and not expect them to be there!
• Now that the team has gone, I’m left with all the ideas for a recruitment video, and now have to put it together and make it happen. They got a lot of the research and footage gathering out of the way, so hopefully it won’t be too much trouble to put things together from there.
• The Arabic TV series I started editing - Back to the Time of Jesus - was put on hold while the team was here, so now I can resume my work on that. Some of the audio wasn’t matching up with the video we have to go with it, so it will take a bit of work to figure out where to make the edits that are needed - with my limited understanding of Arabic!

(more…)

In researching fonts for the video we’re working on, I came across this video… I love typography, so it’s funny.