Shaken, Not Stirred: Copy and paste.

July 24, 2016
Jim Bond

Jim Bond

#ShakenNotStirred #MasonCountyPress

Shaken, Not Stirred. A blog by Jim Bond.

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No, no, no. This is not what you think. It’s not about political convention snafus.

Today’s story is about different meanings of ‘copy and paste’, or perhaps more appropriately, ‘cut and paste’.

Recently, I’ve resumed writing and scripting some short videos and television commercials, an activity I had engaged in for a great deal of my career. Since it had been well over a decade since I had done this, I found myself relying on technologies old and new to complete the task.

Step number one is to write the script. Step number two is to apply the script to something called a storyboard (seen below), which gives a clear outline to all as to how the visuals fit together with the script, and, as you can see in the diagram, any additional information to the video editor, whose job it is to piece all the elements together for the final product.

bond_copy_storyboard‘Image Description’, ‘Audio’, and ‘Notes’ I figured out how to do using the computer, just typing directly into the boxes. “Sketch’ issued a challenge for three reasons: I’m not an artist; changes are inevitable as the process continues through a variety of people. Third, since I’m not adept on the computer, there would be a lot of repetition, creating the visuals many times.

Therefore, I had to rely on an old process of ‘cut and paste’, where literally, I would print my original sketches, cut them with a pair of scissors, carefully trimming so that the sketch looked exactly as it had previously.

When I used the word ‘crude’ in the previous paragraph, it was not a statement of humility. It was absolute truth.

“Uh Jim, why did you sketch a school bus? Isn’t this video about corporate retreats?”

“It’s not a school bus. It’s a video screen in a meeting. The circles are not wheels, they’re the heads of those watching the video screen.”

“Oh. I see.”

This worked fairly well through various incarnations of scripting and storyboarding. On revision number seven or so, the process became more tedious and I was less careful about double and triple checking. As I started to ‘cut and paste’ the first copy image to what I hoped would be the final approved version of the script/storyboard, I absently opened the drawer to my left and, without looking, reached in to grab the little plastic cylinder of gluestick which I had used countless times during the project.

I uncapped it and started applying to the back of the small sketch, preparing to apply it to the far left of the diagram above.

As I was positioning and applying the snippet of paper to the diagram, I noticed that an oily substance was leaching through the paper. Puzzled, I looked at the cylinder, only to determine that instead of glue stick, I had mistakenly grabbed lip balm.

So the moral is: look before you glue. Another idea might be to learn a little more about computer graphics.

Back to square one. Literally.

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