Friday, June 10, 2011

Gallows Humour, part 1: The Reporter vs. Radiation (Radiation wins)

The story of the children of Minamisoma is frustrating and sad. While editing, I have found myself with a range of emotions: anger, disbelief... but one reaction I hadn't expected was: laughter.

There have been a few really funny moments in the footage. At first I felt like I shouldn't be laughing, but then I realized:

The earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown have taken away so much from so many people in Japan. We simply cannot allow the events of March 11 to take away our sense of humour as well. We can still laugh.

May I present to you: The Reporter vs. Radiation

3 comments:

Michael Holloway said...

Hi Ian,

We've never meet, I've been following your blog for about a month now, about the aftermath in Minamisoma. I found you by following a link at "CommonDreams.org".

I noticed that the Youtube uploads that you embed in your posts are spilling into the sidebar. They are formatted a little too wide for you blog's width.

I know you're a film maker, and are an expert in many areas of media production that I have no clue about; but I am a bit of an expert at blogging - so I thought I offer some technical help as far as re-sizing your video embeds so they fit the width your blog is set to.

When you copy and paste the embed data from Youtube, note that the video's width is defined:

width="560"

It looks like your blog, with a little padding around the edges, wants a width of about 480. Just replace the numbers between the quotes with the new. Like so:

width="480"

You can reduce the height a little in a relative ratio:

height="303"

Youtube has a neat feature underneath the embed code box - a custom size adjustment widget. Just write in 480 in the width box and it automatically re-sizes your video embed HTML to the size you need.



Michael Holloway
Toronto

Ian Thomas Ash said...

Michael,

Thank you very much for reading and watching! And thank you for the advice as well.

Actually, the problem with the size of the video was bothering me as well. It was on my list of things to investigate as I was sure there would be some way to fix it.

My brother-in-law is also trying to get me up to speed on all the ins and outs of social media. As you said I am a filmmaker, but I have a lot to learn about the technical side of blogging/ YouTube, etc.

If you have any other advice, I would really appreciate it. Thank you again for your help and support!

Ian

Michael Holloway said...

Ah Ha! I could see before I read your response my instructions were understood; the video box looks great!

I usually don't like white copy on a black background - but since you work in film I guess it's OK. :)