The critics for Spotters are in. And they are, to be honoust, very positive. We already had the great reactions from the 'audience' who all got it and in some cases were stumped for words. But the national media is also very positive, in some cases even more positive about us than about some of the bigger shows that get all the media attention.
The last weeks a have been working on the Spotters-project by Judith Hofland for the Oerol-festival on the beautiful island of Terschelling.
Spotters is an audio-tour through the village, woods and dunes of Terschelling-West about watching and being watched. I am working on the software connecting the network-camera's confronting the visitors with themselves in video and print.
Besides of being robbed of 50 (of the 400) metres of cable running through the forest and the small obstacles that come with being on a small island all is coming along nicely.
The software is as good as being done, the try-out today went well and everyone is in a good mood. Arnoud is upstairs finishing the sound-edit and i am planning the last changes to the setup tomorrow. The people who were patient enough to hang around for the delayed start (not our fault) of the try-out were enthousiastic and most of them got the underlying story lines and the theme. The were both surprised and intimidated by the confrontation with themselves. And almost no-one got lost this time. The software works (almost) perfectly and the 400 metres of network- and powercables are still holding up strong.
This afternoon i even had the time to go on the 50 minute tour myself. Strangely enough i hadn't heared it in weeks, in which a lot of changes were made to the story. But all for the better i found out. The story has some really nice subtle lines and sound effects. It got me questioning the reality of it all and my trust in the little girl i was hearing. It even gave me some nice insights for my graduation (which happens to be centered around the same theme).
It might be a bit too late, but if you happen to find yourself at the Oerol-festival, go see (or is that hear and experience) Spotters!
Did you know:
That as a student or teacher you can get a free license for Flex Builder 3 Pro? A set of tools for creating Flex and Flash applications without the hassle of framescripts in Flash itself. Let one person create the visual assets and another person the code and compile them together.
Go get it: flexregistration.com
For a project i am working on i needed to have a way to print pictures from Max. The first (and easy) step was to save the image to the disk. But for printing a file there is no default object. But thanks to the aka.shell external I was able to actually print the file on a Mac.
Just as simple as:
lpr -P printername "/path/to/file"
Easy as pie. To configure your printer use CUPS: http://127.0.0.1:631/
update
The most common mistake here is that there is a space in the path to the file. To make sure that it works put this in the messagebox that goes to the aka.shell:
lpr -P printername \"/path/to/file with/spaces\"
This will keep the full path intact instead of splitting it at the space, in which case lpr will never find the file.