Week 9: Trenches I

It’s not easy to write a blog on the pure act of editing video. Let’s try anyways.

Blender, computer graphics, and bodging

This project is due in 13 days from the time I am writing this. This is not enough time for me to make high quality animations in Blender. Therefore, we will not be doing that. Eye-testing will have to do, and the concept of “bodging” will come into play: using whatever resources I can to make a fast, cheap, but not necessarily clean solution to a problem.

A portion of my animation consisted of a chart of intercity bus ridership. It’s meant to animate in three segments: one being up to 1942, a second one up to 1944, and a third through the 1970s. There is a way to do this properly, I’m sure. But I have resolved to use my software like a caveman, so I drew the graph in Google Sheets, exported it as an SVG into Affinity Designer, and then re-exported it with all the necessary aesthetic and visual changes to make it consistent with what I wanted from it. This was then placed into Blender as separate mesh objects to represent each segment, manually animated to appear properly on screen.

It is not a pretty solution. It works (somewhat?) in animation, but what matters is that it works enough to fly decently well and that’s what matters.

Audio and video

Let me be honest: it’s not going amazingly. I have about 10 minutes of raw video footage I need to edit and mix the audio for, mainly from a trip to Sacramento last week to shoot on-location in front of the Greyhound terminal. The trip revolved around documenting development/the lack thereof in the Railyards and River Districts, just to the north of downtown Sacramento, exactly where the Greyhound station is located. This is meant to serve as a strong model for cities looking to find proper use out of intercity bus terminals: they need to be functional hubs for both transit and development alike.

This conundrum is then paired with a half-completed and inconsistent audio track recorded from my mother’s closet. I haven’t even begun to clean the audio there; I hope it won’t end up coming down to simply taking it raw and throwing it into the editor and praying it all works out.

Visually, I should be okay on the computer graphics front. I likely won’t need Blender again (phew!) for any part of this, as the second portion should be better done with images, quotes, interview clips, and the like. And following that, it should all be video filmed on-location.

With all the above being said, I am, frankly, incredibly worried for the sanctity of this project and for my own sanity.