Education

Ok so first you have to win some festival awards or at least be an official selection. Then you have to be on Windows. That said here's a very cool application that will make the creation of festival laurels for your movie's poster, DVD box, etc very simple.

EZLeaves is a FREE application that allows to quickly and easily generate custom festival laurel leave images. Features include:

• Choose from four different laurel leave styles
• Use any system-defined font
• Export to JPG or BMP
• Define up to 10 lines of custom text
• Full control over the height and font settings of each
  line, or you can use one font and color for all lines

EZLeaves runs on Windows and requires at least 1024x768 desktop resolution. For more information, visit this site:

Over the past two weeks I attended several medical conventions as an exhibitor.

First was the SAGES meeting, discussed in my previous post. Last week was a combined meeting of surgical program directors and coordinators, held in Toronto. The unique aspect of the exhibits at this meeting were the uses of multimedia technology aimed at surgical education.

First, of course, the Cine-Med display featured our latest books and our online video libraries, and a demo of our forthcoming Multimedia Atlas of Surgery. At this meeting, the most popular items were the books. Particularly a book about improving communication techniques for surgeons. The ACGME has mandated that surgical education serve one or more of six core competencies, including communication and professionalism. This book covers these two competencies. Click here if you want to see more:

http://cine-med.com/index.php?nav=books&id=COM100

Once in a while, we get a post on the Business and Marketing forum here on the COW asking advice for education. For example, should I go to college, film school, Full Sail, or just buy some gear when I graduate high school and start working.

Each of these options has its merits and pitfalls, and everyone's experience is unique. And there have been successes and disappointments all around.

Here is a snippet of my experience.

In the Spring of my Sophomore year at the University of Hartford, a graduate student named Chuck called a meeting for interested students. He was proposing that for the first time, a weekly newscast be broadcast on campus. This was 1992. Prior to 1992, there was no cable tv on campus, but a system had just been installed and the campus tv studio received a modulator for campus channel 2.

We came up with the clever name STN - Student Television Network, producing the weekly Channel 2 News.

But this was April, so school would soon be out for the summer. My Summer internship in 1992, amazingly enough, was news intern for the Midday News at WCVB in Boston. Serendipity strikes again!

I think time has passed enough that I can share a story from my teaching experience. A funny story (now) of when circumstances stopped being a coincidence, and, even from the outside looking in, seemed to have the hand of God involved.

OK, so here goes. A few years back I was teaching at ACA. One of my former students asked if I would teach him in what was called an Independent Study, a one-on-one course of a unique curriculum not offered in a normal class. The assignment was simple, take the entire semester (14 weeks) and create 1 3D/2D animated video 30 seconds to 1 minute long. I requested that by the end of this project I wanted to be blown away by the result, this piece alone should be strong enough for them to get a job.

As the semester progressed, the student presented storyboards, rough sketches, and screen shots, and we discussed possible directions for the piece. The student even discussed with me how their grandmother would handcraft puppets to be mixed in with CG animated parts of the video.

As anyone who has read my blog knows, Cine-Med creates medical education programs using video, the web, Flash and medical expertise. Project management is as much a part of my job as any multimedia technique.

Multimedia has come to mean video, audio, graphics combined into a user interface, in order to effect a user experience, be it for learning, marketing or a combination.

However let us not forget that text and images = multimedia. Thus, multimedia may in fact = books.

In 2004 we decided to start publishing books. Our first project, Advanced Trauma operative Management, actually began as a video.

In 1999 we began collaborating with a well known trauma surgeon in Hartford. his initial need was for a 15 minute educational video to present at a national medical meeting. So we shot some trauma surgery, edited and narrated, and shot a variety of trauma room, helicopter and hospital b-roll and interviews. We also shot 2 cameras during a mock car accident, from arrival of EMS, to using the Jaws of Life to "remove the car from the victim" and moving the immobilized victim to a helicopter in a nearby field.

This is something i wrote in another forum about "Phenomenon" apple's new compositor.

it's sad. i trouble shoot fcp daily...actually..a lot more than that. they do such a sh*t job of making apps. really they do. I have NO faith in any major app they release with the spotty work they have done since i got into their proapps

fcp 4.5 was THE most stable fcp ever, 5.0 went down the hole, 5.1 showed a resemblance of coming back to ok, and to say that i've been happy with fcs2 and all that has happened around that is an overstatement.

I run fcp in a few worlds. I have a boot drive for it running in tiger and it's pretty good in a hard core THis is an editing system environment.

So I have set my sites on jobs when I graduate. It's pretty clear I'm not going to be inducted to the orphanage as their newest lead compositor straight out of college, not that it hurts to dream mind you, but it certainly hurts to expect such things. So I've been focusing on a much more realistic vacancy: Roto Artist.

In this day and age many pundits criticize the public for not sacrificing certain aspects of their lives for the preservation of life as we understand it. Pundits also criticize the government for not asking people to help constrict the world's voracious appetite for all things that keep us comfy and cozy. Oil, water, food, medicine, natural resources, energy and all of the natural driving forces of these times for some of which we have a finite supply. Since I am now joining the "punditry" by writing here and pretending I know something about something, I'd like to shout out my concerns and criticisms and ask for sacrifice.

ok, so as I stated previously, I am working with the RED a lot recently and though I'm exhausted after a 20 hour day I just had to talk about how pissed I am.

See here is why I love film. when you shoot your mag, you tape it off in say red tape or ape that says exposed etc. and some loader sees that and says "hey this was shot" not to mention you pick up a 5lbs (is that the right weight?) mag and you know your holding a TON of money in your hands of painstakingly exposed film. You don't f@#$ up and tossed a used mag back on a camera and say WOOP i lost the shot.

So what happened tonight? Well we are in THE most crucial shots of the night, the nightclub our heroes have visited is falling apart, we shoot a slow mow 2k sequence, which requires a card swap. I grab that card, go DL it, Bring it back. it was very quick as it was 1 2k 60fps sequence, so it took all of 35 seconds to dl the card.

Ok, so I supose I should start one of these with an introduction to my self, and though I will be talking about me whenever i'm talking here and my experiences, we all had to start some where, and the start is where we are at. So lets begin shall we?

First off, if you have issues with bad grammar and possibly bad spelling, than I recommend you leave asap, as I am good at neither.

Secondly, I want to thank you for reading the following, and any subsequent entries. If it wasn't for the COW, and the readers at the COW, I wouldn't be the person I am now. So thanks! Ok lets begin shall we?