I
posted a new video this week about my trip to Mars. I didn't actually go to
Mars to make it. The video began as a short story I wrote for a class I took on
conversational Mandarin, so the narration is in Mandarin. There are English
subtitles though.
My
new trip to Mars video is now posted at:
After
my wife died last year, her brother took her remains back to China for burial.
My wife and I agreed to that before she died. My brother-in-law invited me to
visit to see her grave. I didn't speak any Mandarin and was worried about
travelling there on my own. I decided to take a class to learn some of the
language.
We
had to write, and present, a short story in Mandarin. It was supposed to be
only five sentences long. Mine ended up as six, but no one complained.
I'm
still not very confident about my pronunciation, and I have trouble remembering
words. After I recorded the audio, I asked some Mandarin speaking friends
review it. I had to rerecord part of it.
I
used some images of the Earth and Mars from the NASA website. They are in the
public domain. I only needed one image of the Earth. I used several images of
the Martian surface. To make them more visually interesting, I did either a pan
or a zoom to give some motion. I had created a star-scape for another project,
and I used that as the background for the full planet images.
In
my original version, I used an image from the movie "The Martian". The image was exactly what I wanted, but
since it wasn't public domain, I decided I needed something else. I tried
several approaches before I found something I liked. Like the other images, I
have an image of the Martian surface pan across the screen. I added a video of
an eye blinking, so as to appear as if an astronaut was looking through a
visor.
I
wanted to add some background sound to the narration. NASA created audio files
of the sounds that different planets and the Sun make. I think they convert the
radio waves they produce to make the sound. I used sounds for the Earth, The
Sun, and Mars.
I did sneak in a bit of an Easter egg. Only one
person has mentioned it so far.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
