We live in a time where the strong dominate the weak A dawning of a new aristocracy An authoritarian regime Where all must bend the knee A time where manicured communication is in vogue Controlled and manipulated
A time where politicians serve a ruling class Demigogs expounding their filth For an elite no longer lurking in the shadows Proudly wallowing in their own excess An endgame finally reached
Our minds altered at their whim Their playthings to dangle No thought left unbidden They know us better than we do With databanks of our private histories Spanning the ages at their disposal
And their lies stack up and consume all space Our strings pulled until our deaths What happened to doing what’s right? Our moral outrage contained What happened to our humanity?
A short experimental animation started over the Christmas holidays while the Australian Bushfires were a little too close to home.
Now I have a full body rigged character animation I can use it as part of a larger climate change story.
The quotes in this maybe too quick video are all from Scott Morrison.
Right now economic growth at all costs is the Australian mantra from both sides of politics and until that changes, we will see very real significant change to our policies.
An experimental animation illustrating a series of climate change quotes, to go into a larger piece. I’m in the middle of writing a poem to go along with this, so we’ll see how that goes and maybe I’ll update it.
This was actually from a kick-off event I ran at work on climate change where I read out these quotes. It turned out to be a pretty effective way to start an event.
The timeline that animates down population estimates to 2100 is a shocking number from a British Scientist, James Lovelock who has estimated the future number of people who will live on this planet. If you look him up he definitely isn’t a crackpot – far from it. His books on theory on Gaia are worth checking out as well.
I quite like the typewriter effect in Adobe After Effects using effects from their sound library.
A quick experimental animation on climate change that I plan to insert into some other work. I think variants of this has been used in many places and times a.k.a Rome is burning.
Can you not see? The world is burning.
I used a couple of old icons I had created a couple of years back for a mobile app and Adobe After Effects. One thing that was of note is that I used 43 different fire sound effects from Adobes sound library running in parallel to give a great, sudden impact of noise.
For some reason it didn’t export sound correctly in After Effects so I had to import them all in to Premiere Pro and render from there.
I’ve been putting together a compilation of animated poems for an upcoming event. I was amazed that it ended up being forty-five minutes across nine different subject areas. I’ll publish a link to the collection once the external event has taken place.
My mediocre special effects using Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects are slowly improving. Its interesting to see how all the different tools in Adobe suite can be used.
The protests exemplify how out of step the Australian Government is with everyday Australians who are increasingly waking up to the climate crisis .
Scott Morrison adds further insult to injury and snubs the Climate Action Summit to have a state dinner with the US President. His push to increase coal exports propping up declining China exports leaves us as a global embarrassment.
Another year and one of the highlights of the hackathon scene came
and went – govhack – the now international data hackathon focusing on
open government datasets.
Our intrepid team of six, five from Deloitte and one ring in came
together and had to figure out what challenges to solve for. Always the
hardest part! After much angst – should it be transport, environment or
social impact? Our team had tackled climate change as a topic the year
before using SEED data sets so this year – as we thought transport would
be too popular – we opted for social impact.
After trawling through the sponsor challenges, we ended up looking at
how we could help start-ups and small businesses, especially ones
focused on social good to make better decisions throughout the value
chain of a business.
Firstly, during their initial phases, giving them some data to make
decisions on the problem space, issues that were growing, competition
from other businesses – basically improving decision making when looking
at the demand side of the equation. Then we look at the end of the
value chain – giving them a common outcomes framework to work to – so
that their work could be measured and to ensure that they focused on
issued that mattered and maintained transparency on how they were
performing.
Food was surprisingly good this year. The traditional pizza had been
banished and replaced with a pretty good curry and salad combination. So
hats off to the organisation for taking a chance – there was no riot!
By the end of Friday our team had figured out the problem they wanted
to solve and we left feeling good. We even finished the night with a
trip with some team forming at Chinatown.
However, by Saturday morning we came back… scratching our heads and trying to figure out exactly what had we agreed to!
Storyboard
With hackathons you can go small or large. Build something niche with
an idea that can be easily demonstrated but potentially has little
prospect of making an impact, or something large that tackles a big
problem but is difficult to explain in a three minute pitch. To that
end, most of Saturday was spent trying to figure out how simplify,
simplify, simplify. It all seemed so easy when we started…
The tech team got busy finding useful datasets across the
overwhelming number of websites and datasets building a demand
evaluation dashboard. Data that is never quite right or accurate.
“It is always darkest just before the day dawneth”
Thomas Fuller
By the end of Saturday, well we had nothing. Nothing. No dashboard
screens. No running code. No video. So just like all hackathons before,
night beckoned, the final stretch was upon us and we questioned if we
were up for the challenge?
Travis, Joe, Michael and Jay
So lets say I’m a morning person but even for me I got up a bit
earlier than normal! My job was to create video and pull evidence of
assets created together. So by 7am I had the script written, narrated,
edited with b-roll stock video footage so we had a solid foundation for
the work the rest of the team would complete during the rest of the day.
The day passed with a hectic blur. Travis and Jay worked on demand
dashboard pulling views of predictive trends of issues together. Then
Joe and Michael started pulling additional views of services needed
together. Very helpful and insightful mentors gave advice and we doubled
down on more code and machine learning to recommend locations for new
services. Umar worked remotely on Sunday and Joe and Umar got a great
website together explaining our architecture approach. Jay battled a
presentation slide for a few hours on Sunday but it came good in the
end!
Who said miracles couldn’t happen?
A frantic rush from start to end. Furious video editing ensued as
piece by piece the video came together. With stress levels rising, and
the 5pm deadline looming, we managed to submit with 15 minutes to spare.
That was a relief! A job well done and time to say well – we did it! Great job team!!!
Now a 6 week wait for the judges to make their selection.
Exhausted teams at the closing ceremony – thanks John!
Always challenging. Always fun! A weekend full of learning. You meet
great people and have the opportunity to tackle wicked societal issues.
The Spoken Word 