Week 10: Trenches II, and some final thoughts

As of 7 PM on Sunday, May 10th, this project is, at long last, complete and uploaded to the internet. You can view it here.

Thank you for your continued patronage. It’s been a very, very long week and a half since we last met, but this project is finally complete. My final strategies turned to using Blender’s built-in camera for as many different animated portions as possible instead of relying on stacking images in a video editor with transitions and the like. This turned out to, surprisingly, be a much, much faster method than simply doing everything in the video editor. Who would’ve known?

Copyright has become a small issue, as a few of the archival videos and news clippings I use are of questionable status. I believe my work falls under “transformative” in fair use law, but I’ve placed my video as unlisted just to save the potential trouble. There’s a reference to Always Sunny in there that I’m deeply, deeply proud of and which I really do not want to have to remove.

The audio mixing in much of the video is strange. I sincerely apologize and attribute this to my lack of knowledge on how to even out audio. I tried very hard on the motion graphics, and most of the production time went into that over audio mixing. The audio itself was recorded in six different sessions using all slightly different setups in the closet, which, in hindsight, was not a good idea. This should, though, still provide at least a decent viewer experience, if not a little bit frustrating at most.

There are also a few factual clarifications I have to address in the video:

• At 1:25, I describe Greyhound as carrying a “commanding majority” of early intercity bus passengers. While Greyhound did carry a significant proportion, at this point in time it was neither commanding and unlikely a majority (there were not clear numbers in any of my sources).
• At 6:44, when describing the Laidlaw acquisition, their actual cost was $650 million. The number $470 million came from purely Greyhound’s stock.
• At 11:52, “40% of counties” should be “40% of rural counties,” as the screenshot indicates. My fault for not proofreading this one.
• At 12:44, Oregon’s POINT buses were not as strongly affected by the state legislature’s failure to pass a transportation bill. TriMet, the regional operator of buses and trams in the Portland area, bore the brunt of that funding gap.

Citations will be coming in the video description as soon as I can organize them. Which, hopefully, will be within the next couple days.