Monday, May 23, 2016

May 23, 2016

 I accepted the library job this morning. It is going to make the next few months of my life much more stressful than I was planning on but I am also incredibly lucky to have a job before graduating. It's a good problem to have. I might reconsider that in the coming months but hopefully I can keep it in mind when the stress starts peaking.

I spoke with the school librarian at the beginning of the day and then spent the rest of my morning scanning old yearbooks at the copier. I took a break for lunch and then went back to the copier for at least another two hours. My feet got tired of standing there but after however many hours I got all twenty yearbooks scanned. Technically twenty-one because I scanned one year twice (because there were two copies of the book and I wasn't paying attention).

I had enough time at the end of the day to figure out the quotes I wanted for the slideshow for the retiring sixth grade teacher. I was also able to make the slides featuring those quotes. So it was a productive day.

The PR lady was back from being sick so I was able to volunteer after work. She had another volunteer there working on something so I sat at the next cubicle over and worked on the flyer map. Probably due to that separation, because we weren't able to get distracted by other things, I was able to finish the map. We decided not to draw actual routes on the map so I just had four different layers. One with all the locations on it and then three more based on where the businesses are located around town. The project ended up being a little more convoluted than I would have liked because Google Maps didn't work the way I thought it should, but I got it done and I am fairly happy with the results.

Tonight I worked on the slideshow. I added in the quote slides plus one more with the teacher's name. I also added in the music. That took awhile to not only choose the songs but also pick the order and then tweak them to get the transitions correct. And speaking of tweaking, I spent hours tweaking things. I went back and had to adjust some of the pans/zooms on the background rain video for each slide so it matched up with the slide it was behind, because most of them were off slightly. I then went through and added a short black slide in between each regular slide to create a fade-in and fade-out. You can usually do this by dragging the corner of the slide over, and I used that method on a few of the slides but on the ones with the rain background I was having trouble getting the pictures and the rain to fade at the same time. The illusion is that the pictures are on a window and it is raining outside. It kind of ruined that illusion when either the pictures or the rain faded too early. Adding a black slide in between made the whole thing fade into and out of the black slide so I didn't have to worry about mistimed fades.

When it was finally ready I rendered it. Almost twice because I noticed something about five minutes into the first render and canceled it so I could make some changes. When I watched the final video I noticed a few slides that still have some pan/zoom issues with the background but I imagine most people probably won't notice them. Hopefully. We'll see if it bugs me enough to try and fix it tomorrow. Hopefully not.


Now I'm going to go to bed.

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