Posted by Doug
Wed, 19 Jul 2006 13:12:44 GMT
Josh and I just got back from the Apple Summer Camp: Movie Workshop. It was pretty fun, but fast moving. We were assigned a project to create a 30 second commercial for anything in the Apple store. Earlier that morning the “camp counselors” had shot some raw footage for the Nike+iPod shoes. Right after telling us our assignment, they went through importing and editing their video to produce a commercial. They added music and a voice over and some transitions. They then turned us loose to shoot our own video.
Josh decided to shoot a video for Star Wars Battlefront. We had 10 minutes to shoot the video and 30 minutes to edit and produce the commercial. We ended up with a pretty good little video (2MB Quicktime).
I took my Panasonic PV-GS180 DV camcorder and my Macbook Pro. It’s a good thing too because they didn’t have enough cameras for everyone to use. Their plan was to use the built in iSights on the various Macs. Also, my Macbook Pro was pretty snappy for edits and such.
All in all we had fun. I’m going to try and get Josh to do another video today at home while it’s still fresh in his mind. We’re both looking forward to tomorrow’s iWeb Workshop.
UPDATED: We had about 30 minutes to kill before the camp started. Josh and I created this three page comic using Comic Life called
Camping Chaos (3MB PDF)—zero prior experience. I actually think Josh had more fun with this than making the movie!
Posted in Movies, Family, Software, Mac OS X | Tags Apple, camping, comiclife, creativity, Josh, Kids, MacbookPro, video | 2 comments
Posted by Doug
Thu, 08 Jun 2006 13:37:08 GMT
My oldest son, Josh, can go to Apple Summer Camp this year. I’ve signed him up for the Movie Workshop and iWeb Workshop.
“Summer Camp” is a bit of a misnomer. Each “camp” is 3 hours on one day. Since Josh is under 13, I’ll need to take off work to be there with him. It should be fun! The idea is to actually finish a project and take it home burned on DVD. Plus he gets a T-Shirt for each “camp” he goes to.
Oh, and Josh has been asking me about teaching him to write games. I’m not sure which direction do go here. I have so much respect for The Pragmatic Programmers I’m tempted to get Learn to Program. On the other hand, I’m also tempted to do something like Beginning Flash Game Programming for Dummies. I’ve heard good things about Learn to Program. I’d expect that it would give a good foundation in programming. But Flash is… well flashy. If you have any input on the subject of teaching pre-teens to program I’d love to hear it.
Posted in Josh, Family, Programming, Mac OS X | Tags Apple, camp, Josh, Kids, programming | 3 comments
Posted by Doug
Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:42:27 GMT
My son, Joshua, has been in Karate for about a year. He started in the “kinder” program and then moved up to the youth classes. Board breaking is very exciting to kids. As part of his blue belt testing he has to break a board with a shuto (knife hand) strike.
He’d been building up to this for a while. One night he thought he was going to do it, but another student started before him. He stood there and watched and listened to the Sensei as she instructed the other student. It took the girl like 4 or 5 strikes before she broke it.
I was nervous about Josh not being able to do it either, so I had him practice on the plastic “breaking boards”. These are boards that fit together like a puzzle and are meant to break in the middle and then you put them back together again. Theoretically they have the same strength as wood. I had him do three good breaks on the breaking board. At that point we were out of time for the night.
It was a little sneaky on my part. I had forgotten my video camera that night and wanted him to do it on a night when I had it. So the next lesson I brought my camera and caught this video (~20MB Quicktime movie). This is the first time he’s ever attempted to break a real wood board. The original take was pretty good, but I went ahead and spruced it up in iMovie with some fun effects.
Posted in Josh, Family | Tags Josh, karate, Kids | 4 comments
