Wednesday, November 19, 2008

...The process of simplification...

I spent last Sunday after Church from Noon to about Seven in a PANIC! I couldn't find the major find of the whole trip! The map in the middle, the missing link, the Rosetta Stone of Ordinance Survey Maps.... The one with Plots and Tithe Amounts scribbled on it.

I ripped the house apart, I called friends and relatives, I ripped the house apart again! It is a Xerox and I have a tendency use things like that as book marks so I flipped through books. I flipped through books I haven't read since before our trip! Then I sat down to watch some PBS in exasperation. After the show I was watching was over I stood up and looked down next to the couch at my Computer Bag. ...the one place I hadn't looked. Sure enough, I had placed it there the day I returned from Ireland and guess what... DAH! The only thing in there was THE MAPS! ...I hate it when I do that! I was even writing a pathetic Email in my head to the Migration Center to see if they would send me a new one. I also composed an even more pathetic Email in my head trying to explain to everyone in my Family Tree just what pathetic thing I had done. ...I hate it when I do that too!

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I had intended to come home after coffee hour and start to work in earnest at scaling my maps so that I could begin the animation necessary to make how I located the Gilmour and Glenn tenancies easily comprehensible.

[I LOVE MAPS] ...I mean: I LOVE MAPS!

...so its not that hard for me to place them all together in my head in chronological order, but the only way I have been able to get people to make sense of it, how I was able to cipher it, is to lay them over one another on my light table, flip them back and forth until it becomes apparent how they go together; showing how much the terrain has changed since 1831.

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I used to be a Graphic Artist so I used to do things like this all the time. Back in the day before Computers. It should be easier now but its not. If I owned a CREA Computer it might be simpler, but believe it or not I am currently using an 8 year old Gateway that I haven't yet dumped into the Waste-stream so some Chinese Child can melt the toxic waste off of it. I'm holding onto it as long as I can. Thats probably not good for our economy right now, but thats just what I'm doing. Regale me with all the TV ads you want, I'm not buying a new VISTA. I can only hope that if Vista is as bad as everyone says: Microsoft will go under along with GM. (...that one was for you Shawn...)

But I digress... :)

The first thing I have to do is scale them all to the right size. Then, by cropping and editing, and transitioning with animation, progress through the maps from 1831 to the present. If I have lost any of you here you now know why I am attempting to do this in a way that hopefully make things visually simplified. Like my Ol' man used to say: "The process of simplification is oversimplified." ...or was that WC Fields???

Anyway... that is what I'm working on, and it will hopefully occur in an upcoming video. Part Six or Seven I should think.

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Here is Part Four ...I call it my "Benny Hilly Sequence" but it's real name is: "Over the Sperrin Mountains."



obeedúid~
19/Nov/08