2004-05-02 - 10:27 p.m.
Fry's Electronics is definitely a paradise "Geekville," or maybe I should say "a Geekdom Kingdom." I had so much fun over there getting all of my stuff. Well, they didn't have the Hewlett Packard printer server, but I really didn't expect them to, so it was okay. I will just order it on-line. They had a bunch of generic printer servers that they were quite willing to sell me, but I was afraid to get one of them, as HP had been quite specific at how specialized this equipment had to be in order to make my particular model of Officejet all-in-one fully functional on a network accessed by both a Microsoft and a Mac computer. I'll just have to trust that; otherwise, it would have been perfectly okay to get a printer server that matched the LinkSys router in looks.
They are extremely helpful at that store and they seem to know everything. This is definitely not one of those stores that just throws anybody out into retail and they seem to treat customer service very seriously. I always come out of there very happy, my arms loaded down with all sorts of high-tech goodies. And, of course, going there always makes me want more. It is so tempting to see their "memory upgrades" or shelves and shelves filled with replacement high gigabyte hard drives, or anything else one's little computer-hungry heart desires. You could, of course, entirely build one of your own, and they have quite a huge, fascinating selection of tower cases for just that purpose. I also like it that they know where everything is, "Firewire cables, aisle 56B," or exactly what it is that you need, "to connect those, use cat-5s, aisle 9A, choose whatever color you want and length you need."
The Firewire surprised me...it looks all metalic like a cable bicycle lock, which it isn't really, but it does look heavy-duty like that. It transferred my video footage to the i-Book like a charm, and it was fun to be able to control my camera's controls (play, search, rewind, etc.) from the computer. It took me about three hours to import all the footage, gee, I nearly filled up the entire hard drive! Well, I ought to have known that three hours of video footage would take up an immense amount of harddrive space, it's not simple like text! I'm glad I had gotten the i-Book with the largest size hard drive.
I'm also very happy with the footage that I took and I was actually quite surprised that it was as good as it is, as I had felt so sick throughout the trip. I still have to take a lot more (and will certainly be severely editing down the footage that I already took in order to keep this documentary down to a reasonable length!), because of my idea that I want to have lots of interviews with the kids. The interview footage that I already took is the best part of the whole movie, so I think that idea will be a winner if I can get several students interested in being questioned and filmed further. My fantasy is that all will want to do it, and my nightmare fear is that none of them will. Well, the actuality will probably be somewhere inbetween...but I am hoping to make sure that everybody who wants to will have a chance to be in it, even if they say only a couple of words ("Chocolate World!") or are interviewed in groups rather than just one at a time. I don't want to stick to just one "talking heads" formula, which would probably become quite monotonous to watch. I'm imagining differing numbers of people, different locations around campus, and maybe catching some of them while doing something else, such as walking to class or waiting for their ride home--making it more informal and "dynamic".
I've reiterated this concept before: it's not so hard if you care about the kids and want to show them in a good light. It wasn't good enough for me to simply show a building (the Capitol building, for example) or a tour guide speaking, I wanted to show the faces of the kids as they listened, or I wanted to catch them asking a really good question or coming up with a brilliant answer. There's a lot of dynamic student interaction in the footage I shot, and, honestly, it wasn't until seeing it all together that I realized that they had been as involved as they were. I think they will come forth with some really good interviews that I need to introduce, transition, or explain the scenes, or to fill in some of the gaps (things I hadn't been able to film because of being sick in bed near the end of the trip). I'm going to be scanning and panning some still pictures, too, but I think that technique will work fine. Anyway, it's lots of fun and I wish it weren't so late on a work night. I'd love to start editing it now that I have the clips imported, but I really ought to go to bed, so that is what I will do.
Snooooze....!
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