I called the mom Friday to find out what the actual story was. As you recall, Boy and his friends in class had done a video Western silent movie project for class to demonstrate something about math and deductive reasoning or some such stuff. They turned it in, but the CD was unreadable, leading to much speculation about grades and reshooting and all sorts of other misinformation.
What happened? Who knows. The nice young lady said their video camera messed up when the started out, so she just used the video function on her digital still camera. Good enough so far.
And then Murphy's Law kicks in.
She told me they couldn't get the file to translate into a DVD compatible format, and after spending nearly a week trying to figure it all out, they finally just copied it onto a CD. Only trouble was that no one's computer would seem to play the CD. Including the teacher's.
Acrimony, recriminations, hurt feelings, potential for an incomplete grade. So, anyway, she said she was going to try again to get something to work, and had taken the extraordinary step of complaining about the teacher to the next higher up, because she seemed so unwilling to work through the technical issues, and wouldn't return any messages. Oh boy.
So, as it stood Friday, no reshoot on Saturday, and we'll just all hang for a while and see if anyone can get the silly thing to play on a computer. After I hung up, I got the bright idea that maybe if it was small enough, she could e-mail it to me and I could see what it looked like--since the CD she gave Jonathan didn't work, either. The computer can't even read it as a disc.
She sent it, and from home, nothing. Just an empty link. And I had to sign up with Kodak Photoshare just to view the thing. Or not view it, as the case may be. Oddly enough, when I snuck by the library on Saturday, I COULD view it--the first ten seconds or so. And that was it.
But at least we didn't have to take up Saturday morning trying to reshoot the thing. Leaving time for me to SWAP MY DASHBOARD! WOO-HOO!
Next: Or not.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at November 7, 2005 10:15 AM