Yesterday was Jonathan Coulton’s birthday. Here is a collaborative video put together in about 14 days by 13 people (at least, 13 who contributed video; others contributed ideas) on his forums, as a birthday present. It’s a cover of Jonathan’s song ‘I’m Having a Party‘, with a few changes in the lyrics (and a title change to ‘We’re Having a Party’) to make it more suitable for a group of fans to sing to him. I’m posting it here because I did all the video editing (under the pseudonym Angelastic) except for the awesome tiling in the final chorus. See below for details on how this little idea blossomed into something scarily huge which was nonetheless sculpted into a less scary huge thing in the nick of time. You’ll also see why I’m a little too tired for fancy metaphors tonight.

The ’simple (but easy to overcomplicate) idea’ I proposed for this was that we all simply sing Happy Birthday, or some similar song which Time Warner doesn’t own the copyright to. Mark T. Gordon suggested ‘I’m Having a Party’, and doing a video rather than just audio. When I volunteered to edit the video, I thought I would just be splicing together footage of people singing into their webcams, maybe doing the occasional appropriate action. I thought the audio would be merely a group of people singing along with the karaoke version of the original song, but luckily somebody competent volunteered for the audio mixing.

Of course, the simple idea was indeed overcomplicated, and before long we had not only 11 videos of people singing into cameras (one of which was shot in a professional studio with a green screen), but footage of people doing all sorts of other interesting things, including playing ukulele, cello, and accordion, making actual onion dip, and hopefully not wetting actual pants. There was even one full video which is now on YouTube in its own right. People were treating me as some kind of project leader, because I’d made the initial suggestion which they’d all added to. Jonathan’s birthday was on a Tuesday, so I set a deadline for video submissions the previous Friday night, knowing that anything can be accomplished in the infinite expanse of a weekend, if there are no constraints on how well it’s done. I learnt that from Writing Cards and Letters and Zeno.

I went to the Apple Store on Saturday morning and bought a copy of Final Cut Express, which I had been considering getting for a while, thinking that I could do some fancy tiling and other effects to emphasise how many people were involved in the project. Unfortunately, I found that Final Cut Express crashed once every ten minutes on average, and after wasting several hours with it I hadn’t even managed to get even the simplest sequence created and saved between crashes. A friend of mine who teaches Final Cut Express says he’s never seen it crash, so I’m not sure what went wrong on my case. I went back to using iMovie, and some time on Sunday I informed the others that I couldn’t do the tiling.

Because of the time lost to Final Cut Express, and more time than expected spent converting or attempting to convert 13 videos from different sources into iMovie-friendly formats, I was still working on it past the midnight Sunday deadline I’m used to. If you think I look tired in the shot of me getting into bed, it’s because I filmed that at 1a.m. on Monday, when I reached that part of the video and realised I didn’t have enough ‘time to go to bed’ shots. I got back out of bed and worked on the video for another hour, up to the end of the guitar solo.

The next morning, I woke to find Chicazul had come to the rescue with a fantastic tiled final chorus made in Adobe Premiere. All I had to do after work was add an introduction, credits, and the greetings at the end. This meant one more conversion headache. Nothing I could find for free was able to convert BorbaSpinotti’s contribution properly, and this was the most important one, as it was the only footage of Borba and he’d done such great work mixing the audi0. At around 3a.m, I asked on the forums and The Clinger uploaded a converted version within minutes. I love collaboration across time zones.

Ignoring the problems with video conversion and Final Cut Express, actually making the video was a lot of fun… the only problem was that there was too much great footage to choose between. It was all the fun of making A Laptop Like You, but without the endless takes whenever there was daylight to get the raw footage.

Most importantly, Jonathan Coulton apparently liked it, and called us the greatest fans in the world. We were not able to get a statement from Wil Wheaton before releasing the video (although that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love us), so I’m pleased to see that Wil did not come down and punch Jonathan. I wouldn’t want to misrepresent somebody who is inclined to punch people.

Now I have to admit something. I didn’t just do this for the fun, nor even for the amusing effects of sleep deprivation (you should’ve seen me attempting to do improv on Tuesday evening.) It happens that Jonathan Coulton’s birthday fell on the same day as my last half-birthday. Now, I’m not planning on doing all the crazy things that Carrie Dahlby hoped to do in the six months before she turned thirty, but I am planning something, and I thought this video would be a good way to kick it off. I’m starting another Thing a Week project called ‘The Last Six Months’, in which I will release something creative every Sunday for the remaining six months of my life (if this doesn’t make sense to you, go back and click on that ‘last half-birthday’ link.) I know, it’s crazy, it’s as if I’ve forgotten the tired Mondays of the previous project, despite being reminded of them by this video.

This time, though, it won’t always be writing… there might be some music videos, videos of me reading my poetry, robot-choir recordings of my own songs and others’, drawings, even some software. Who knows? I will also redo some of the cards from Writing Cards and Letters, because I would like to eventually publish a book of that project, but some of the Things wouldn’t sit well in a book, or just aren’t very good. The novel chapters are an example of both. I’m also planning a surprise for the end, although I might be lenient about the release date for that, since it will be close to my own birthday. The plan is I’ll work on part of that each week, though.

Next week’s Thing probably won’t be too elaborate, since I’ll be in meetings all Sunday. But there will be something, so come back and check on Monday, or subscribe by email or RSS using the links on the top right.

This is a video I made for Jonathan Coulton’s song ‘A Laptop Like You‘. It stars my trusty PowerBook G4, which I bought in early 2005, just before moving from New Zealand to Geneva. I recently replaced it with a MacBook Pro, but my PowerBook wanted to become an internet superstar before retiring, and I just can’t say no to that sweet little thing. I love the song, I love my Mac, and I have all the right props, so I knew I had to make this video.

The song in the credits is ‘When You Go‘, also by Jonathan Coulton. His song ‘Code Monkey‘ is also referred to in this video, and a few other songs directly or tangentially related to Jonathan Coulton are referenced in the Skype userlist. Bram Tant, who valiantly confronted various Vista hassles in order to pretend to be my not-really-love-interest for about 50 seconds, and then unexpectedly got a MacBook Pro on the day he filmed his part, also makes music. He hopes his new laptop will help him record songs for the Masters of Song Fu competition.

Somewhat interesting facts and bloopers:

• There’s another video for this song on YouTube, which also features a large Swiss flag on a wall.
• My MacBook Pro actually weighs 42g more than the PowerBook.
• This is the 42nd video I’ve uploaded to YouTube.
• I filmed so many takes of the ‘break it in two pieces’ scene that I think I ruined the contacts or something; my PowerBook’s battery doesn’t charge any more, as you can see in the close-ups of the menu bar in the end credits.
• The grey T-shirt is from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2004. I originally intended to zoom out to show the back of it (which says ‘WWDC 2004′) after the video chat, so that it would be clear what year we were in (and perhaps amusing when the same T-shirt is used to sleep in years later) but the video chat ran a bit longer than I had anticipated.
• The opening sequence was filmed on the MacBook Pro, and you can see a few icons there for things which didn’t exist when I got the PowerBook.
• The Calendar Dashboard widget shown did not exist in that form when I got the PowerBook G4. I did have a Dashboard at the time, since I had a beta of Mac OS X 10.4, but the calendar didn’t look like that until 10.5.
• All of the effects shown in the video chat are possible on the PowerBook G4, using CamTwist. However, Bram had problems starting a video chat in Skype (he was on Vista at the time) so we ended up faking the video chat. Since it was fake anyway, I recorded it on the MacBook Pro.
• You can see this in the short fake video chat in the credits, where I forgot to hook up the iSight to the PowerBook, and put the PowerBook somewhere where it would not have seen me with that background anyway. It was late. I guess I could have had the iSight in the right place to see me from that angle… that is, not on the PowerBook’s screen.

Here’s a remix I made of Jonathan Coulton’s song, ‘The Future Soon‘, with the help of my robot choir.

For much of the song, it’s identical to the original, but Jonathan’s singing is replaced by two different MacInTalk voices at appropriate places in the song, so that he sounds more and more robotic. It starts with Alex, the newest and presumably highest-quality voice. Alex sounds a bit silly singing this high; in retrospect, perhaps I should have used the version of The Future Soon that Rob Gonzo transposed into the key of C instead.

Alex then passes the mic to Trinoids, an intentionally robotic-sounding voice which has been around at least since I got my first Mac 15 years ago. Being an old-timer, Trinoids sings a little out of time (technically speaking, it’s a MacInTalk 2 voice, and doesn’t seem to fully respect the TUNE commands), so I had to do a fair bit of post-synthesis fiddling to get it to sing at the right speed. Apart from that, since many people are annoyed by the beeps in the original, I updated them to the ’90s equivalent.

Here’s a bit of information about how I did it. Last December, Spektugalo released UltraStar Deluxe versions of 25 Jonathan Coulton songs. UltraStar Deluxe is a karaoke game, and the song files for it give lyrics and the notes and timing that you’re supposed to sing them in. I pretty much immediately recognized these as a potential input for my robot choir, and soon afterwards had my Mac singing along to UltraStar files reasonably well. Apart from getting it to read the UltraStar file, I had to improve the way the time allotted to each syllable was shared between consonants and vowels, and add the possibility of changing pitch mid-syllable; both of these improvements should be useful for songs input in other ways as well.

I was all ready to release a slew of instant robotic covers, except for one problem. I was still puzzled by part of the format, and couldn’t get UltraStar Deluxe to run on my PowerBook in order to experiment with the song editor. I could get it to sing the songs recognizably, but the pauses between lines were all wrong. So I let it go for a while.

Now I have a MacBook Pro which can run both UltraStar and UltraStar deluxe, and I found some actual documentation on the UltraStar file format. The documentation basically told me I could ignore the extra numbers that were confusing me, but whichever way I looked at it, the pauses between lines were about twice as long as they should have been. I ended up concluding that UltraStar Deluxe must interpret the timing differently when there’s no singing, and resigned myself to adjusting the timing manually. Not a problem: I was at a LAN party last weekend, so I had the whole night to do whatever I felt like on my Mac, and this is what I felt like doing.

This remix is also available on the podcast.

As I mentioned in my last post, Offshoots X will be launched at the Geneva Press Club after the workshop of the Geneva Writers’ Group tomorrow. There will be readings from Offshoots from 17:00, and you’re welcome to come along and listen, or even come earlier for the workshop or critiquing session.

There will be two other readings: one at Payot Chantepoulet from 18:00 to 20:00 on Thursday October 1, and one at BooksBooksBooks in Lausanne at 18.30 on Tuesday, November 24. I’ll be reading my poem at the Payot event, and I would recommend going to all three if you can. I’m not sure if I can make it to the Lausanne one.

I am working on some more writing-related things, and I encourage people who are here for the writing to go to the launch of Offshoots X (which includes my poem, Role Reversal) after the September 19 workshop but since Writing Cards and Letters finished I also have time to play with other things, such as video.

For my birthday this year, I made my favourite dessert… a New Zealand invention called a pavlova. It’s like a giant meringue which is soft in the centre. Since my friends often ask how to make one, I filmed myself making it in time-lapse mode. I also took photographs of the ingredients, mostly in multilingual Swiss packets, which might help people looking for the ingredients in French-, German- or Italian-speaking countries. I then added music and titles to create this video recipe:

Here’s a transcript:

For my birthday this year I made a pavlova, a typical New Zealand dessert. The typical New Zealand recipe involves buying one ready-made from the supermarket… but I live in Switzerland, so I used:

“Aunt Daisy’s” pavlova recipe on a fridge magnet. Extracts from this recipe will be in blue [My comments will be in black… or in square brackets in the transcript]

a small pinch of salt

one teaspoon white vinegar [I used balsamic because it's what I had]

1/4 teaspoon vanilla essence [I used a teaspoon of coffee instead, for a coffee pavlova]

one teaspoon cornflour (cornstarch)

3/4 cup caster sugr (berry sugar)

Note: do not use ordinary granulated sugar [I used raw caster sugar because it was easier to find. It's also tastier in case I forget the vanilla. A mixture of normal sugar and icing sugar also works. My sister, who lost 80kg, says it's fine with half NutraSweet.]

[0 cups Russian ballerina]

4 egg whites at room temperature [so, 4 eggs and a bowl to put the yolks in]

one cup heavy whipping cream

sliced and peeled kiwifruit, passionfruit, strawberries or seasonal berries to garnish

[An oven that does what I tell it. You can't make pavlova in an oven that can't get the temperature right.]

an oven tray with a sheet of cooking paper

an electric food mixer. The bowl should be clean and perfectly dry.

[Sound isolating earphones to block the noise of the beater; NOT to listen to music]

——

Separate the eggs. Beat egg whites. When soft peaks form, add sugar very gradually, putting in one dessertspoon at a time, sprinkling it across the surface with a good interval between additions. [(not actual speed)] Beat until very stiff (any undissolved sugar generally goes gummy and spoils the texture.) Continue beating.

[Beat it, beat it, beat it, beat it. Everyone will want to eat it. Beat in your sugar, beat your egg white. It will go gummy if it's not right. Beat it, beat it, beat it, beat it. Everyone will want to eat it. Beat in your sugar, beat your egg white. It will go gummy if it's not right. Introducing the latest in cakedancing: the spoonwalk.]

Add salt [{it goes a lot thicker at this point)] then vinegar and vanilla [for my coffee pavlova, this means coffee powder dissolved in a teaspoonful of water] a few drops at a time. Keep beating as you do so. Beat in the cornflour. Keep beating until the mixture is really glossy and will stand when cut with a knife [(or spoon)]. Draw a circle as a guide [yeah, right]. Tip the pavlova mix into the centre of the tray. Spread it with a spoon [(or knife)] into a round about 8-9in [(20-23cm)] across, leaving the centre slightly dished (concave). [My mother says to leave the centre convex, so I leave it flat and draw a smiley face.] Place on rack in centre of oven and cook for one hour.

[Then comes the best thing about making your own pavlova… cleaning the bowl and the beaters. If you don't do this thoroughly enough, you'll have to wash the remaining mixture off your hands and off the bowl.]

After the hour, turn the oven off and it’s crucial to leave the pavlova inside until the oven is cold. [(Oven pictured is empty, because I forgot to take pictures after this.)] Remove the pavlova from the oven [(here's one I prepared earlier.)] Beat the cream. Top the pavlova with the whipped cream and nestle the fruit decoratively on top of the cream.

——

tripod

camera

mirror to photograph the camera

Mac to edit the video

Pavlova made by Angela Brett

Eaten by the people playing pass the parcel in the background and the one holding the camera

Video also made by Angela Brett, to try out iMovie ‘09, and take revenge on the camera that once recorded an entire concert from a great angle, accidentally in time-lapse mode

Featured music:

I’m Having a Party by Jonathan Coulton

http://jonathancoulton.com

(used with Creative Commons license)

Tensor (Instrumentality) by Rob Rix

http://robrix.org/

(used with permission)

Barroco by Talking Cure

http://cyrille.lips.club.fr

(used with Creative Commons license)

Beat It by Michael Jackson

(used with chutzpah)

reverse, rinse, repeat

No disrespect is intended toward Michael Jackson, Anna Pavlova, Aunt Daisy, or any other dead or living person or chicken implicated in this video. If you liked the video, please do something nice to their heritors so that they don’t get upset with me.

So, how did I find iMovie ‘09? I’d previously used up to iMovie ‘06, so I was skipping a version, though I’m not sure how much difference that made since iMovie ‘09 has a completely different interface. I found it pretty frustrating for several reasons:

• I couldn’t copy and paste entire titles (which would have been useful for the multiple ‘beat it’s, and in other places) and copying the text from the titles did not copy the transparency of the colour. That said, all of these titles would have been even more fiddly to add and edit in iMovie ‘06.
• The only way I could find to change the length of time a still image showed for, other than cutting a clip (which would have altered the Ken Burns effect) was to type in a duration. But more often than not, iMovie would immediately change the duration to something else; I’d type 3.2 seconds, it’d change it to 3.1 seconds, and so on. So it was impossible to get the clips lining up perfectly with the music. Also, although there is a feature to line up beats in the music with videos, this doesn’t help much with still pictures.

Apart from that, though, it was fun. I’d never created a video with many titles and Ken-Burnsing still photos in the earlier versions, and I’ve never created a more ‘usual’ video-made-mostly-of-video-clips in this iMovie, so I can’t really use these problems as a basis for judging iMovie ‘09 or comparing it with previous versions.

I didn’t put a Creative Commons thingy at the end of this video because it would be complicated to explain… basically, the parts I did, and the CC-licensed music I used, are all under pretty much the same license as the rest of this blog, however the music to the ‘Beat It’ part in the middle (from a MIDI I found on the internet of a song by Michael Jackson) obviously can’t be covered by this since I probably wasn’t allowed to use it to begin with.I couldn’t resist. Sosumi.

Bon appétit!

I’ve mentioned a few times that ‘Writing Cards and Letters’ is no longer a relevant name for this blog now that the Writing Cards and Letters project is over. Not only am I not writing about cards and letters any more, I’m also publishing other creative things I’ve done which are not necessarily writing. Perhaps the least imaginative name for what this blog will become is ‘Creative Output’, and since I had a nice idea for an image to go with that phrase, it’s the least imaginative name that I went for.

Now, I’m no graphic artist, but sometimes I can take decent photos of beautiful things, and scribble on them in ways that I like. That’s what I did today, and here is my art to represent Creative Output.

The original is 4000×2878 pixels, and has quite a bit of detail, with bits of my writing, programming and maths mixed in. I’m not sure why I made it that big when the website will only get this small version, and the software I used often ran out of memory and crashed while trying to save it. Perhaps I’m destined to print it on a poster or something.

I’d like to change the theme of this blog so that I can better integrate this image into the header, but alas, this is the only theme on wordpress.com which has variable width and a customisable header.

A few days ago I got a shiny new MacBook Pro. I’m usually monomacous, so it’s the first time in four years that I’ve had two Macs at the same time. This had me wondering what to do with them, and one of the first ideas was to have them sing a duet. Of course, it’s easy enough to get a single Mac to sing something twice in different voices and then edit them together (as I did with You’ve gotta be happy), but with two Macs I could make a somewhat interesting video. A friend of mine suggested it would be good to do a round, and I agreed.

While I was still thinking about which round to get them to sing, I saw a link to this article, showing a video of three robots humming happy birthday to the London Science Museum. They’re a lot more sophisticated than my own ‘robot choir’, having actually learnt to sing together, but nonetheless I decided to get my Macs to sing it too. Here is the result:

It was easy enough; a short song with music available. I think I spent the most time deciding on appropriate desktop pictures for my Macs to wear on stage. The other challenge was tapping ‘Start Speaking’ at the same time on both computers. As you can hear, I didn’t quite manage it the first time around. I could have done it automatically, with a script starting it on both computers at a given time, but then the video would have been essentially two unchanging computer screens with some singing in the background. This is a ‘live’ performance, and dalrymples are obligatory.

Audio of the successful attempt will soon be available on the podcast.

Things To Listen To: Not to be taken orally

I said a while ago that I’d make a podcast of the various songs and poems I’ve recorded. Well, I finally got around to working around the bugs of the podcast hosting system I planned to use, and I now have a working podcast. It’s called Things To Listen To, with each word beginning with a capital letter, because it  looked funny with one ‘To’ and one ‘to’, and it didn’t seem right to make half a phrasal verb lowercase. As the name implies, Things To Listen To is an audio-only podcast. I might create a separate video podcast later, but I will not add video to this podcast.

For now Things To Listen To has the three recordings I made during the Writing Cards and Letters project: Pretender, You’ve Gotta Be Happy, and Fork and Tongs. Let’s pretend the recording of me singing My Favourite Strings never existed, shall we? Perhaps I’ll add Code Monkey Like though.

The Writing Cards and Letters project, by the way, is what used to be known as Thing A Week. I will soon change this blog title to something more general.

The podcast will also turn into something more general. Here are some things it is likely to contain:

• Robot choir recordings of the poems from Writing Cards and Letters which have tunes.
• Robot choir covers and remixes of other people’s songs, most likely Jonathan Coulton’s because the licensing and availability of source tracks makes it easier.
• More recordings of me reading my poems and prose.
• Any recordings I manage to obtain of actual singers or voice actors performing my work. Feel free to volunteer.
• Things not covered by this list.

You can subscribe to the podcast here. If you find any technical problems with it, or even just details which could be improved, let me know. Although I’ve listened to tens of thousands of podcasts, this is the first one I’ve made, and I’m sure to have done something wrong.

Yesterday was the annual evening of readings of the Geneva Writers’ Group. I really enjoyed listening to the pieces people read. You can read some of their blogs and other works if you want to know what you missed.

I also read a few poems of my own. I had the welcome problem of having written too much, and not knowing which poems to read. In the end I went with Grand Unification and Love Letters. I was a little unsure about the former, since some parts would be enjoyed more by physicists, but by the time it was my turn, a few poems about the LHC had already been read, so I decided to continue the theme. People seemed to like it.

A few people came up to me afterwards asking if they could have copies, so I pointed them to my blog. This post should make it easier for them to find those two poems.

A while ago I asked you which Things I should submit to Offshoots, the biennial anthology of the Geneva Writers’ Group. Then, rather than deciding what to submit based on the results, I submitted the two poems which my printer had managed to print before succumbing to persistent paper jams. I guess it’s official enough now that I can announce that ɘloЯ was accepted. However, the editors thought the last line could be more interesting, and wanted a title which was unlikely to cause typographic problems. So I renamed it to ‘Role Reversal’ and changed the last stanza. This is the new version of the poem:

One ev’’ning I went to the pub for a beer
and later went home to my bed.
As I went off to sleep I was feeling quite queer,
and the world turned around in my head.

The pieces of bread dipped us humans in cheese,
the cheese made by cows from our milk.
Early worms got the birds, while they made their pongees
from our swaddling, and christened it silk.

As letters sent men they would each seal a kiss,
which itself stole a beau, what a turnoff.
And Soviet Russia was in all of this,
poking fun at our man Yakov Smirnoff.

The horses on knightback were chased by the steeple,
convinced they should set the truth free.
And wars fought in soldiers then started the people,
till their shoes walked a mile in me.

Then science was checked by remains prehistoric:
the reptiles who warmed up the air
and caused the extinction of things meteoric
while the common were sought by the rare.

At some point, I think I awoke my alarm,
but I don’t know quite when in the tale,
for certain events have a true-to-life charm,
for a man who is drunk by his ale.

I’m not sure when this volume of Offshoots will be published, but I hope you’ll all rush out to buy them when they do, and then come home disappointed because unless you live in Geneva, you’re unlikely to find any. I’ll probably send some copies to friends. I’ve read previous volumes and they’re full of interesting writing. I probably shouldn’t compliment it too much, though, since my poem is apparently just as good, and one kind of poetic conceit is enough for me.

It’s been a while since I’ve had anything published; indeed, it had been a while since I’d written anything. I plan to submit a few more of my favourite Things to various appropriate publications. I’m also working on a few other spinoffs from this project, so there should be more updates soon. This has certainly worked; I keep coming up with ideas for things to write, and then not writing them because I have no deadline.