Snowflake Challenge #4

[eller]

This is Snowflake Challenge #4, "In your own space, create some goals." Sure. I have some personal goals for 2021 (beyond the professional ones, which I'm not going to talk about here)! None of these plans are new, precisely, but it's the first time I compile them like this.

- Raise my online chess rating by at least 150 points. That one is going to be hard because I'm already at a level where the progress of gaining playing strength goes sloooooooowly, but hey, I'm still stuck at home, so it's not as if I'd ever get a better opportunity to do some ambitious training. Also, once tournaments start again, I want to raise my real-life rating... As soon as I get the opportunity.

- Survive Chocolate Box. XD I'm still a bit nervous about that - but haven't deleted my signup. I'm being very brave, ahahahaha! Also, there are at least two prompts I desperately want to write whether I match to the prompters in question or not.

- Find a way to make shadow theater videos that don't look too crappy. (My first attempts were too horrible to show anywhere.)

- Get myself a new Celtic harp so I can play again. Also: play the piano more often. I've neglected my music a bit, but I miss it.

- Do proper High German (and maybe also English) translations of some folk songs that are originally in Platt (Low German) - I know no one cares, but hey, I feel someone should do it.

- Render at least one of my stories from my project-thingy as a coherent comic. If that fails: at least do more proper illustrations.

Comments

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

So, that case, the camera is probably fixated on the grain of the fabric in ways the human eye can adjust for. I've seen film taken back in the the day of backlit shadow puppets, just with the natural firelight, so you 'just' need your postmodern equipment to be as good as a camera with its aperture wide open but not slowing the rate of capture.

This is outside my expertise, since I learned insofar as I did with video and it has different artifacts.

You may need to use less light, like too little light for an audience and see if you equipment adjusts for that and stops hating your scrim. Have you tried cheesecloth? (It's possible that you may need a grey cloth, or even something less intuitive. I'm wondering what sort of screen the example I was seeing used.)

Sounds like you've got enough camera equipment, it's knowledge and maybe the right tissue. Test any curtains or large scarves you might have access to and can hang without damaging the fabric.

[eller]

Grey cloth sounds like an interesting idea, thanks! :D I'll try that next! So far, I've tried all kinds of paper, and white and slightly-off-white bedsheets, but maybe this is even calling for color. (I don't have mono colored scarves or curtains. I could try a t-shirt in a frame...)

Less light... Tried that, but it didn't work. In that case, the laptop records only blobs, or sometimes doesn't record any shadows at all. I tried taking photos of the same setup (with a DSLR, not the laptop), and the shadows were visible. I suspect it may have something to do with the processing algorithms and not the camera itself, but, uh, I haven't yet tried hacking my own laptop camera. ;)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Can your DSLR do video? (I've got an old digital camera and that's the most I know about the 21st century in this field) But yeah, if the camera can see the shadow and your laptop's camera can't, you've got an equation whose programmer isn't nearly as clever as the programmer thought.

Now that I understand your parameters better, I'll see if I can't shake my 'cloud' of creatives for more ideas.

Best of luck in experiments to Convention on the Internet!

[eller]

Thank you so, SOOOOOO much for your expertise! :D I'm totally clueless when it comes to filming. It's simply not something I've had to deal with before, so I'm approaching the problem with guesswork and trial-and-error.

My DSLR is one of the older ones, and it can theoretically do video (in 30 second segments), but uses some kind of weird compression algorithm I can't switch off, so the quality is horrible.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Happy to use my inexperience on this matter!

Try using the DSLR video on the same puppetry as the laptop's camera, and take a still photo. That should be useful info to figure out where the overly smart is in the laptop.

I'm wondering if this is going to be like the old CRT conversions. (PAL and NSTC, might have the latter letter tossed)

(This is a little akin to my musical theater friends' parents perplexed no one could teach me to sing. I've got the wind, which is what they usually have problems with.)

[eller]

Yeah, I guess it's just going to take more experimentation with the setup, and always direct comparison of the cameras to mayyyybe finally figure out how to solve this. XD I wish I could just... re-program my laptop. Or somehow get access to the pre-processed images. They have to be somewhere....