Driven Blind is a short documentary film that follows Dan Parker, a world champion drag racer, as he seeks to redefine his life in the wake of a tragedy that left him blind.
The film is finally done. I wish I could share it with you here, but I have agreed to wait until we screen it at festivals before sharing it online. For now, here’s a link to the facebook page.
Atomic Retro Customs is a short documentary about Matt Nowicki, a luthier in North Carolina building electric guitars that have become famous for their retro designs and custom details. This film explores his process for constructing electric guitars and the inspiration behind his designs: classic science fiction and old-world craftsmanship. The film screened at regional festivals in the South in 2015 and 2016.
The Silence of War is a transmedia storytelling project about a small group of African American Vietnam Veterans from rural Eastern North Carolina. Their stories are told through interviews, photos, videos and other media.
The project was created by faculty and students at Wake Forest University. I was a co-director and also led the web development and design.
One of the fun things about the project for me was creating the web framework. It’s a single-page application designed for the presentation of rich media. And it’s based entirely on front-end technologies: HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. It was refreshing since I usually do a lot of backend programming.
The framework is built for storytelling. Stories are created with a series of slides that contain all kinds of rich media. Video, audio, images, text, gradients, and more can be layered in interesting ways and navigated with smooth transitions in between. There are lots of interesting techniques I used to help with things like positioning text, creating rich full-screen backgrounds (including video backgrounds), overlaying transparent vignettes and gradients, and creating smooth background audio transitions.
In order to deal with all of the large video files and other media I created a custom lazy-loader in javascript. The lazy-loader basically downloads large media files just before they are needed, rather than trying to download everything at once. It looks ahead to see what slides the viewer can potentially view next and downloads only the media for those.
Building the framework gave me some new ideas and changed the way I think about storytelling on the web. Background audio is especially interesting to me in this type of application and I’m planning on doing more with it in the future.
View the The Silence of War.
Eira is going to start violin lessons so we bought her a violin. She’s delighted. And as you can see in the photo, Lucy and Amanda have already started teaching her how to play. Important note: Lucy and Amanda don’t know how to play the violin.
Transcribe is a web app I built while working for the Lee Library. It’s been one of the more rewarding apps I’ve built because it’s a crowd-sourcing application that continues to be used.
Transcribe was built for Special Collections. They have a lot of old books and manuscripts that are not available electronically. Transcribe allows students to help get these documents transcribed, making them searchable and much more available for research and scholarship.
It’s an application that employs crowd-sourcing. A student logs in and grabs a “task,” in this case usually a single page to be transcribed. The application also allows for transcribing time-based media (video and audio).
Each task gets completed twice, by different people. So for every page, there will be two transcriptions. The two transcriptions are then “diffed,” highlighting any discrepancies between the two.
At this point, a new task is made available to a reviewer. The reviewer can quickly see highlighted discrepancies and choose between them, along with making any other changes. The reviewer can also easily point and click to add XML tags, identifying people, places, and dates, for example, to make the document more searchable.
Rather than using a textarea tag, we used HTML5’s contenteditable attribute. This allowed us to style transcribed text in ways that wouldn’t have been possible using a textarea. Another interesting UI/UX feature is that the transcription interface can be toggled by the user to be side-by-side or up-down.
After all pages in a project have been transcribed, reviewed, and tagged, the application compiles them into an XML file (adhering to the TEI Lite standard) that the library can use to make the document electronically available and searchable. I built the application in 2014 and I’m happy to see that as of 2017 it is very much alive and being used to make rare documents more available.
I was listening to Christmas music on the radio the other morning on my way to work when one of my own recordings came on.
These are excerpts from a documentary I made in 2005 about playing in a small bluegrass band.
I was interviewed about my music for Mormon Artist (web magazine). Read the interview here.
“You know Cecilie I’m just calling because you are a friend of mine and I want to tell you that you have a pretzel in your ear.”
I was digging through some old video tapes and found this, from 1996. I took a video camera with me when I toured with the International BYU Folk Dance Ensemble. I was musician and I had the time of my life traveling around on a bus in Scandinavia with a bunch of college students.
I apologize in advance that not everyone from the tour is represented equally here. But I hope this brings back some good memories. I had forgotten a few things and it made me laugh out loud more than once.
