Blog - Flick Harrison

September 10, 2020September 10, 2020

Dakota Bowl Bear Sanctuary 360 Photos

This weekend I went on an expedition hosted by The Only Animal to the Bear Sanctuary on the sunshine coast, in an old-growth rain forest which hasn’t been in a fire for 3000 years. We saw Culturally Modified Trees (where indigenous people had stripped bark to produce blankets, etc) and bear dens (hollow trees where the black bears will hibernate in the winter).

This area is slated to be sold for clear cutting this fall, and Elphinstone Logging Focus is trying to drum up opposition to prevent this from happening. Here’s a photo embedded into this blog by WordPress itself:

Here’s a 360 view (click and drag to look around) from our trip, or you can see a map and the whole 360 gallery HERE. Remember to use your mouse wheel or touch pad to zoom in and out, drag with your mouse to look around, and try the tools at top right to see different views. It was an amazing place, and seeing it in 360 is almost the only way for a picture to do justice to the amazing sights there.

More to follow as the campaign to save the Dakota Bowl Bear Sanctuary gets momentum going into the fall.

I played with posting on ROUNDME where tours are easy to set up, but setting the initial POV is a bit of a pain and often fails completely. Dang!

Then I tread the Insta360 One X community, which is nice quality but forces me to use my phone and it’s therefore clunky, plus I can’t group things together.

So I tried SeekBeak which is pretty cool, might be worth a paid plan, although I think I’d almost get tempted to do Real Estate photos once I spent money…

Artists jam on ideasSnap Content

https://www.Insta360.community/post/dc25797ff6aa5d31d0ee172eb4d580ec

And there’s always boring old Facebook, which works too but is boring and limited:

March 19, 2018November 13, 2019

New Camera – Panasonic UX90

So after some camera research and helpful discussion from people on the EvilFB and elsewhere, I decided on the Panasonic UX90 camera. Played with the one at VIVO Media Arts Centre (the UX180 with higher-end outputs and one nicer shooting mode) and shot some dance / music at Chutzpah! Festival & The Norman Rothstein Theatre… what a great camera!

My fave is the touchscreen focus: I can tap things on the screen and have them come into focus, which is help when shooting wide shots of live shows when performers are rarely in the centre of frame where focus assist comes in.

This chart is what helped me decide on the hard facts but I also had to feel the smooth zoom, see the nice colours and feel like it would do the job nicely. The 4k sensor is great, mostly I will use it (for now) as a stabilized 1080p60 but that big chip makes for very not shaky!!!

Ask me about this chart if you want. I compared the Canon XC15, XF400, Xa30, the Sony HDRNX80, Panasonic UX90 and Panasonic G5.

DSLR / DSLM form factors are too annoying – switching lenses and swapping out batteries chiefly the problem. Plus power zoom is a thing I need.

So – as always – I love to make media and my new project Polity is here to help you make video with your organization and their community. Hit me up!

August 23, 2015August 25, 2019

Trick iDVD into recognizing a modified video file

After many years working with iDVD, I’ve finally beaten the worst bug – I mean feature – of that clunky kids’ program.

The worst thing that could happen when creating a long iDVD project was to realize, after burning, that there was a typo in the credits or a sound glitch that you had missed in editing. Bad enough to go back and re-edit the footage, and re-output to an MOV file, that’s some time and effort. But the worst part was that when you re-opened your iDVD project, iDVD would throw up an error – “Modified Asset Warning.”

The only thing iDVD would fail on at that point would be to mess up all your chapter buttons. They would still be there, with their proper names, but they would all point to chapter one. This was unavoidable, even if you had named the file the same thing, all the chapter markers were in the same place, etc etc.

Since renaming chapter buttons and selecting thumbnails is so clunky in iDVD (my projects often have 40 chapters per disk!) it’s worth finding a way to avoid this error if you ever need to re-export a video file with minor changes.

I finally figured out that the reason it fails to accept the file is that the TIME STAMP has changed! This is truly the mark of an amateur program – good as it is. It assumes that if the file has been modified since you last opened iDVD, then there must be a mistake, and it doesn’t even bother checking the length, the file size, the placement of chapter markers – anything!

Notice the “modified asset warning” error message – click through to see an example – complains about the date stamp! It’s easy to miss if you don’t hit the dropdown triangle – the first time I’ve ever seen such a drop-down in an error message. No wonder I never noticed it before.

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March 31, 2015August 25, 2019

Flick teaches DSLR filmmaking at Dawson City International Short Film Festival

If you have friends in Dawson City, or headed there for the film festival, spread the word about this workshop I’m teaching…

In this 3-hour session, participants will be introduced to DSLR cinematography for documentary and drama. Bring your own DSLR camera and compare with your colleagues’! We’ll discuss the differences between DSLR cameras and dedicated film or video cameras, including advantages and disadvantages in comparison to ENG and cinema cameras around Run’n’gun, sound, stabilization, form factor, overheating, and data rates.

Interchangeable lenses bring the beauty (and danger) of depth-of field but a whole new category of learning about chips, adapters, connectivity, speed doublers and more. We’ll touch on gear that can make your DSLR behave more like a regular camera, replace or adapt some of the functions like sound recording, and hacking your cam to unleash the power inside it. And we’ll talk practicalities of hand-holding with or without rigs, manual vs. automatic adjustments, monitoring or using separate-system sound.

Flick Harrison (www.flickharrison.com) is a writer, media artist, filmmaker, hacker, community artist, educator and drone pilot in Vancouver. Starting out on the CBC youth series Road Movies as one of Canada’s first professional videographers, he’s since made videos in Pakistan, the US, Mexico and China. As part of the Art and Social Change project, he is studying community arts across Canada in conjunction with SFU, Concordia, U of A and U of T.!

His work has been seen on dance and theatre stages, by millions on television, been nominated and won awards internationally, and slipped into, under and through almost every Canadian funding niche. The Globe and Mail called him “hilarious,” and the Georgia Straight called his work “gorgeously sophisticated.”

March 31, 2015August 25, 2019

Flick shows new digital photo drawings at Capture Photography festival

I’ll be showing some original artwork at the Capture Photography Festival as part of the Arts Umbrella Alumni and Student show.

The festival celebrates lens-based art, and my work pushes that definition to the limit with digital drawings taken from original photos.

The texture of my prints is an unusual way to encounter digital work. Seeing them in person is the best way to appreciate this.

When I create art, media accumulates around me on a theme until it has its own identity as a unit. From that creative, investigative and contemplative research I hone the idea down to the core and then declare it done.

Capture opens with a launch event on April 2, and my work will be on display at the Remington Gallery from April 3-14.

March 19, 2015August 25, 2019

Yanis Varoufakis is my new Economics Professor

Figuratively speaking, that is. I just drew this portrait of him and now I want to explain why.

I first liked him when he spoke of dismantling the media oligopolies in Greece. His interview on that subject hit my radars at the same time as Sun News TV, the conservative mouthpiece in Canada, finally ran out of rich-guy lolly and closed its doors. The happy feeling I got from that closure primed me to enjoy Varoufakis’ explanation that rich people putting their pocket change into media outlets wasn’t a formula for press freedom, rather quite the opposite.

Varoufakis is the new Greek finance minister who is taking Europe by storm, or at least trying. He’s the most public face of the Syriza government which pledged to cancel the cutbacks and austerity of the Euro-bailout. He’s not wearing a tie in the legislature – something which seems like nothing until you realize how rare this is in a Western parliament. His casual style also helped him catch the eye of German media at a time when he was confronting their government with brick-wall obstinancy around paying back the loans Greece had borrowed under previous governments. Then he, um, caved sort of.

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February 13, 2015

As we commemorate St Valentine’s beheading!

August 27, 2014

App Store Fix: Unable to update free apps.

I couldn’t update iMovie today at the lab where I work. It just said:

“Update unavailable with this Apple ID

This update is for an app downloaded with a different Apple ID. Sign in with that Apple ID and try again.”

I tried deleting the half-downloaded app from the Applications folder, restarting the computer, and that fixed it.

But then it happened a few more times on other computers, and by the third time my fix didn’t work anymore!

After trying a few things, including signing out and back into the app store, restarting everything, re-indexing my whole hard drive on spotlight, deleting iMovie and copying a version that worked on another computer into the failing computer’s Applications folder, here’s what worked:

When I started the App Store update, it made another copy of iMovie in the Applications folder (in addition to the one I copied from another computer), with the same name. Bizarre, but whatever.

I noticed that Launchpad had a “downloading” strip in its icon. Clicking that in the dock brought up a page of apps, one of which was a blank square with “downloading” written underneath. So I clicked and held on it until all the apps started wiggling (with little x’s, iphone-style).

I deleted the delinquent app, then tried the app store again. Now it didn’t even show any need to update – everything works fine.

The end!