21 Feb, 09

Anne (a work colleague) passed me the newspaper clipping and said “I saw this and thought of you straight away”. Spot on.

For anyone who’s missed this Queensland Tourism have advertised a job for an Island Caretaker. Even though it’s only for 6 months, I’d love to do this. So I needed to make it happen. But I needed to put together a video. Only problems … 1) I’d not put together a video before and 2) I haven’t got a movie camera.

Now I figured that Andy talking to a webcam would have limited appeal, so I dragged my mate Paul and his camcorder down to Sutton Park to do some location shots. I was going to include photos of me actually diving there, but the January session was cancelled and today’s the next chance - this is the closing date for applications, so it would have been leaving it a bit late!

As luck would have it, we had a cold snap a couple of weeks later, so I took the opportunity for a follow up.

My obvious “selling point” is that I can take pretty reasonable photos underwater. This is something that takes time, practice, being able to work with the software, and some quite expensive toys.

This was where the move to the Apple Mac (at the start of January) came good, because the (installed as standard) iMovie software is really pretty accessible to a complete beginner. It also makes it pretty easy to make (static) images quite dynamic. I did wait until the iLife ‘09 version was delivered, then put together a first cut.

In the meantime, I realised my Gallery album was waaay out-of-date - missing out (for starters) everything I’ve done with a DSLR. So I’ve been getting on with redeveloping that (there’ll be another entry on that before long) … hopefully, there’ll be a new one will be along in the next week or two.

(The only thing that was disappointing was that I had to get a USB microphone - the standard headsets apparently work at the wrong level).

Two more iterations later and I was ready to upload. Apparently, that got knocked about in the ether, so I eventually managed to resend it with just two days to go.

Queensland Tourism have apparently been blown away by the interest they’ve had. I’d actually guessed very early on that there’s be about 20,000 applications, and that’s not far away.

So (phew) it’s there now. You can see it by clicking on this link.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Assorted rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.