The Not-So-Easy Button

Yeah, so I realize it's been a while a really, really, really long time since I've blogged about anything, but it's not like I'm going to feel guilty about it or anything like that.

For Christmas I got a gift certificate to Staples from my siblings-in-law (which was cool because I wanted a paper shredder). I went to Staples.com and found one that I liked. There was no option online to check availability at the local stores, so I called around and found that that model was on clearance and is only available online. No problem, I'll just order it online (shipping was free).

I went through the checkout process, but at the point where I'm supposed to pay, there's no option for gift certificates. After searching for quite a while, I figured I was doing something wrong and called customer service - nope, I wasn't doing anything wrong.

Yes, that's right: Staples.com does not accept Staples gift certificates! So to get the paper shredder I had to drive to the nearest Staples store just to give them my gift certificate and have them order it for me (they actually ordered it off of their own website) and then go back home and wait for it to be delivered.

I don't think they really get this whole easy thing. If you're going to have an online store, you should accept your own gift certificates. Hopefully someone searching online for "how to use a Staples gift certificate on the Staples.com website" will find this post and it will save them a small bit of frustration.

The good news is that it arrived today, although it was delivered by an un-uniformed man in an unmarked white van.

A Bit Ironic

And this one takes the cake. Apparently Microsoft is whining to the Justice Department about an advertising partnership between Google & Yahoo because together they control 80% of the search market. Yes, this is the same Microsoft who dominates 90-95% of the PC Operating System market. What's next, congress lecturing us about not being in debt?

Me Too!

Katie started it, so I figured I'd tag along too.

Have You Ever…

1. gone on a blind date? No, the closest to that was someone I'd never met face-to-face, but we had talked on the phone.
   
2. skipped school? If so, it wasn't very memorable.
3. been on the opposite side of your country? I suppose that would be California or Washington or something, so not really. The furthest I've been in each direction... New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Canada.
4. swam in the ocean? Yes, in the Atlantic & the Gulf of Mexico.
5. had your booze taken away by the cops? Nope, I don't think I ever had any for them to take.
6. lettered in a high school sport? I Think I got a C most of the time, does that count?
7. cried yourself to sleep? Ahem... No, of course not! How dare you imply that!
   
8. played a musical instrument? What's the difference between playing and attempting to play? I mean, if you attempt to play the guitar and sound comes out, no matter how awful that sounds is, does it still count as playing?
9. sung karaoke? No.
10. cheated on an exam? Yes, in high-school. Virtually my entire class did, and I got caught with the questions ahead of time. There was an inquisition of the entire class. It was not fun. It was complete dumb-luck chance that I caught. I remember my youth pastor later telling me that when he prayed for us he prayed that we would get caught if we ever did anything wrong, so I figure the whole thing was his fault.
11. played spin-the-bottle? No.
12. laughed until some sort of beverage came out of your nose? I think so, but I don't recall the specifics.
13. watched the sun rise with someone you care about? When we were in New Mexico a few years ago Katie & I got up early and drove about an hour into the mountains outside of Santa Fe to watch the sun rise. We were on the west side of the mountain, so we really didn't get to see the sun rise, but it was really cool to watch the Santa Fe Valley as the sunlight spilled over the mountain to fill it.
14. ever been arrested? No. I was put into the back of a police car once after being pulled over for speeding, (not really sure why) but not arrested.
15. gone ice skating? Yes, a couple of times.
16. been skinny dipping? No.
17. been on television? Yes, The Uncle Al Show.
18. thrown up in front of a date? No, not that I recall.
19. been out of the country? Belize, Cozumel, Canada, Kenya, The Netherlands.
20. had sushi? No, and I have no desire to.

Google Analytics

This is for Tate and anyone else out there wondering how they can learn a little more about who visits their blog. I'd like to suggest Google Analytics. GA is a free tool provided by Google that can not only tell you how many people are visiting your site, it can tell you where your visitors are from, if they found your site from another site or if they found you through a search engine (and if so what words they were searching on).

You can determine what posts are the most popular. You may find that most of you visitors find you from another blog that you didn't even know linked to you. You may find that you have a secret following of readers from Wisconsin or Switzerland. And for the other geeky people out there, it also gives you information like browser usage, OS and a ton of other stuff. It's all pretty interesting, and you'll probably find that you have a lot more people reading your blog than you thought. (Keep in mind that it won't give you the names of the people visiting your site or any other identifying information.)

Google has a comprehensive guide to setting everything up that covers everything, but I'm going to offer a reader's digest version here. Don't be intimidated, it's really quite simple and only takes a few minutes to set up.

1. The first step is to create a GA account. If you're using blogger for you blog, or if you already have a Google account for anything else like Gmail, you can use that user name and password to log in. Follow the instructions to set up your account.
   
2. Once everything's set up, from the main page in the "Settings" column, click "Edit". Then on the next page, click "Check Status" (it's towards the upper right hand corner of the page). On the next page you'll find a box with a bunch of code in it. It will look pretty scary, but don't worry about it, just select it all and copy it. This is your tracking code.
   
3. Pasting the code
   • Sign into you blogger account, and select the "Layout" tab.
   • On the next page, select "Edit HTML".
   • You may want to follow the instructions at the top of the page for backing up your template, because if you mess up the next few steps your blog may not display correctly.
   • In the box of code, scroll down to the very bottom. You're looking for the "body end tag", which is usually in the second to last line of code and looks like this: </body>
     
   • Place your cursor just to the left of the body end tag, and paste the tracking code you copied in step 2.
   • The last part of you code should now look something like this:
     
     <script type="text/javascript">
     var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
     document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
     </script>
     <script type="text/javascript">
     var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-0000000-1");
     pageTracker._trackPageview();
     </script></body>
     </html>
     
     
   • Hit "Preview" to make sure everything looks ok, then hit "Save Template"
4. Go back to your Google Analytics page, in the "Settings" column, click "Edit", then on the next page, click "Check Status" (just like in step 2). In the yellow box it should say
   

   Tracking Status:

   Receiving Data

5. At this point you're done, but you'll have to wait about 24 hours for results to start showing up. To view the reports, just sign into Google Analytics and click on "View Reports".

As a side note, if you ever change your template it will erase the tracking code, so you'll have to repeat steps 2-5 to get everything working again.

There are all sorts of other things you can do, like have it not count when you visit your blog (seriously, who cares if you blog was visited 20 times yesterday if 19 of them were you checking to see if anybody left any comments?), but that's another post. Good luck, and feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Flawed Logic

I found this while reading and found it very interesting.

Recently, a number of Catholic bishops have criticized Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, a Catholic, for his position on abortion. Biden has said, "I'm prepared as a matter of faith, to accept that life begins at conception," but, he said, "for me to impose that judgment on others is inappropriate in a pluralistic society."

Archbishop Donald Wuerl disagreed. "When life begins is not a matter of faith, but a matter of science," he said. "Defense of innocent human life is not an imposition of personal religious conviction but an act of justice."

I especially love the quote from Wuerl. I've always thought the same thing, but he puts it so eloquently. It brings up the interesting point that the Pro-Life position, although it often coincides with religious faith, is not necessarily arrived at through question of faith.

In regard to a fetus, the first question is: "Is this entity a human being?" This question is a scientific question, and even the most basic understanding of science tells us that at conception a new being is formed in the likeness of it's parents. So I don't simply believe that life begins at conception because my religion indicates that I should (and while that would be sufficient for me, it would not be sufficient for those who did not share my faith), I also understand that this is the case as has been demonstrated by scientific observation.

So if science answers yes to the first question, a second question needs to be posed: "How are we to handle this life?" This is not a question of science, but of morality. Although this may seem a little more difficult since there is not a universal accepted standard of morality, that fact has not stopped our society from making universal decisions about similar situations. Murder, rape, theft and many other actions have been deemed crimes by our society on the basis of morality, not faith (even though faith in many cases would answer the same).

So to say that abortion is only an isue of faith, and that "to impose that judgment on others is inappropriate in a pluralistic society" is as logically absurd as to say the same of murder, rape, theft or any other number of crimes. The fact that faith has an opinion on the matter should not prevent us from discussing the issue in the shared arenas of science and common morality.

The Bailout

Please contact your Senators & Representatives about the proposed $700 billion bailout. This is what I wrote:

This is in regards to the proposed $700 bailout plan being discussed right now. Please do not make the mistake of throwing billions of dollars of taxpayer money to the banking industry in a desperate hope that it will cause more good than harm. I am against any plan that uses taxpayer money, or puts us in to debt to relieve these financial institutions of the unmarketable securities. I am livid that this type of irresponsible action is even being considered.

I understand that standing back may seem to be to ignore the problem, but taking the course of action proposed by the President will have consequences that will haunt us far beyond those we are currently facing. I do not want to be forced to pay for the mistakes of those greedy individuals who should have known better.

I would be in support of government backed insurance of these securities as a tool to free up the lending market. I believe there are some Republicans in the House that have presented this as an option. I would also be in support of temporary modification of the Sarbanes-Oxley mark-to-market rules.

I have voted for you in the past because I believed you had the wisdom to handle situations like this in a responsible matter. I hope that I can vote for you again.

Reason of the week to use Firefox: FxIF

I know a lot of you dabble in photography, so I think you'll find this little tool very fun. Here's how it works: Say you come across a photograph you really like, and you'd like to know how they got the shot. What camera did they use? Is it a long exposure? What was the aperture setting? A lot of times that information is embedded in the picture as EXIF data. With the Firefox add-on FxIF, all you have to do is right-click on the image and select Properties and you get a little window like the one below.

To install FxIF, click here.
If you haven't installed Firefox yet you'll need to do that first: click here.

Elise's Date With Daddy

We got the idea of doing "Dates with Daddy" with our girls from Brad's parenting series. I haven't been the best at being consistent with these, but this past weekend Elise & I went on a date.

Ever since Labor Day when she saw the planes flying around with advertisements in tow, she's been asking to see "planes go fast". So we went to Lunken Airport. We couldn't find a great view there, so we headed up to Alms Park, which overlooks the airport.

Elise liked to wave at the planes and say hi to them. Apparently "Hi" in plane language is a high-pitched shriek.

In between yelling at planes, she enjoyed walking around, and I enjoyed taking pictures.

It was pretty, but not that pretty. (I made the sky a little bluer and the grass a little greener.)

After looking at planes we walked over to the park and she played on the playground.

After that we went to UDF for some ice cream, then headed home for a much-needed nap. I think Elise slept too.

Michigan: Part 4

OK, one more picture of Michigan. I hadn't really noticed this one until I was showing some pictures to Brad Spence, and he liked this one. It's pretty simple, and I guess it never really stood out against the other 400 or so pictures I took that week, but the more I look at it the more I like it. It's a 10 second exposure (with a tripod of course) taken after the sun had been down for a while, so it looked a lot darker to the naked eye than it looks here. The water was pretty calm anyway, but the long exposure makes it look even smoother.

ISO: 200
Exposure: 10.0 sec
Aperture: f/14.0
Focal Length: 18mm (35mm equivalent = 27mm)

The Firefox One Week Test Drive

If you're reading this, I'm going to jump to the conclusion that you use the internet. I also know that statistically, most of you (about 66% at the time of this writing) are using one version or another of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE for short). You're probably using IE because you simply are not aware that there's a browser out there that's faster, safer, more useful and just plain better. It's called Firefox.

Until a few weeks ago, my wife was an IE user, and despite my best arguments for her to use Firefox, she stuck with IE. Then one day (after getting rid of a virus that we had gotten while using IE) she said she would give Firefox a try for one week. Now I realized that this was probably just to get me to stop bugging her about it, but that was OK. I set up a profile for her, so she could have her own set of bookmarks and features, and the trial began. The first day or two was the break-in period, getting used to the different layout and features. By the third or fourth day she announced that she was starting to like it better. A week or so later, and she is a convert.

"So what about me?" you ask. "I don't have a nerdy husband bugging me about what browser I use, so why should I switch?" [sorry about that; I've been reading Lou Priolo] That's a great question, but there are so many great answers that I can't fit them all in here. So I''ll be doing as series of posts highlighting the advantages of Firefox over IE. If at any time you want to give Firefox a try, just go to firefox.com.

Follow Me

Google is always introducing new things, and they're usually pretty good. Recently they came out with this thing called Following for blogs. It lets people keep up do date with your blog, and lets you know who's interested in your blog. So if you really love me, you'll click the Follow this blog link to the right.

Michigan: Part 3

While on the lake I had some fun with fire and long exposures.

We built a fire on the beach one night.

When you throw balsam branches on the fire, you get a lot of sparks.

Here's a shot of those sparks flying through the air.
1.6 second exposure

More flying sparks. Click on the picture to get a closer look and you can see large "ribbons" of light from some larger pieces of ash that flew from the fire.
1 second exposure

My brother waving a burning branch in the air. (don't blame him, I told him to do it)
5 second esposure

This is a shot of the dock illuminated by the fire. I used a tripod and did a 10 second exposure. I used automatic ISO so it was taken at ISO-560. I should have manually set it to 200 (the lowest setting on the D40) which would have resulted in less noise in the image.

Picture of the sky. Click on it to see the large version, and you'll be able to see the stars.
30 second exposure

Michigan: Part 2

Here are some pictures from our trip to Michigan.
I'll try not to post any that Katie's already posted.


This is the view of Wilderness Bay from the end of the dock.
You can see the Sheppard's dock that I mentioned in my last post.

The view of the bay from the base of our dock.

Thought this was a cool picture of the sun glistening across the water.

The american flag at the base of our dock.
This is an un-retouched photo. The sky really was that blue.

The sun setting across the bay.

Another shot of the sunset from the end of the dock.

The afterglow.

Michigan: Part 1

These are the Les Cheneaux Islands, where we went on vacation last week. It's a group of islands on Lake Huron in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, part of the towns of Hessel & Cedarville. I've been going up there since I was six months old (and lived there for a year and a half then). The biggest island is Marquette, which is where we stayed. If you look real close you'll see a white box drawn around part of the island - the next picture is a close-up of that area.

As you can see from the satellite images, there's not a lot of development on the island, which is really nice if you like natural stuff. There are no roads, just walking trails through the woods You may be able to make out a few lines running through the island that look like roads, but those are the clearings cut for the electrical power lines. Again, we're going to zoom into the liitle white box to have a closer look.

The only access is by boat, so most every cabin has a dock. In this picture you can see our cabin, named Foxfire after the glowing wood that can be found in the surrounding woods. In the upper left of the image is the Sheppard's dock & boathouse, which can be seen in a lot of the sunset pictures I'll post later. As a point of reference, the docks are roughly 400 ft apart. It this image you can also clearly see the distinct drop-off in the water. So that's the background info, soon I'll post some more interesting pictures.

Another Biking Milestone

Monday, on the ride home of my 16th day of commuting, I experienced a biking milestone: I passed another biker. He was not stopped to take a brake or fix a flat, he was not hauling a huge pack, (and no, he wasn't going the other way) he was just another bike rider that was going slightly slower than I was. This has never happened before. I am now officially not the slowest biker in Cincinnati!

Fun with Photoshop

About a year and a half ago, we took this cute picture of Elise sitting on our bed. When she got excited she would wave her arms about wildly and yell.


Although it was a pretty cute picture to begin with, I thought it could use a little something.

Pictures of the Kids

Last year, after having mixed results taking Elise to the portrait studio, we decided to buy a better camera and do photos ourselves. After using Kara & Ben's Nikon, we bought a Nikon D40 from B&H. We also got the Nikon SB-400 flash, both of which are absolutely wonderful. We've gotten a ton of great candid photos of the kids, but we also wanted to get some posed shots too.

So last week Katie & I went outside to take some pictures of the girls. It was a nice sunny day, and I had the flash one the camera to provide some fill light. We started out with Elise in the sun, until a helpful neighbor (who happened to be a professional photographer) suggested we put her in the shade. This turned out to be very good advice. Below is one of the pictures of Elise.

That's the original image as captured by the camera without any processing. Nice, but a little flat and washed out. Below is the same picture with the default processing by the camera. Better, but still leavs a little to be desired.

I shot the photos in RAW mode, which means the file is a .NEF instead of a .JPG. It's sort of like shooting on film and having access to the the negative - it has more detail than a print.
I opened the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw, part of Photoshop. This gave me all kinds of tools for correcting exposure & white balance, boosting saturation, and adjusting individual colors. This let me do things like fix the blue ribbons on her dress that had previously been washed out. Anyway, below is the finished picture. Isn't she cute?

And here's a split of all three pictures:

Biking to Work - Day 13

Here are some notes from biking to work for 13 days. I'm writing this partly for me to look back on and partly for any other bikers that might stumble onto this and be interested it someone else's experience.

• It feels like a lot longer than 13 days. (12½ days actually, I still have to bike home tonight.) I feel like I've been doing this for a long time
• It's a lot easier than when I started. Still a lot of work, but more manageable.
• I'm taking Memorial Parkway home instead of Waterworks. I like it much better.
  
• I still drive to work on Tuesdays & Thursdays, but every time I get in my car it feels like it's been about a couple of weeks since I drove.
• Even on a fairly mild morning, a water bottle full of ice cubes will melt in under 30 minutes.
• Most cars are pretty tolerant and courteous of bikes, but every once in a while there's some guy who thinks 6 inches is plenty of space to leave between us, even though there's an empty lane right next to him.
• Sometimes it's safer to take up a whole lane than to stay all the way to the right.
• For the first two weeks, my leg muscles weren't sore, stiff or anything. My lungs and heart couldn't keep enough to give them a real workout. The past two weeks, my heart & lungs have caught up enough allow my legs to start getting workout.
• I've lost about 10 pounds.
• I'm still making some progress on my times, but it has definitely started to slow. Here's a graph:

Go Get Some Friends

Katie is working at Grace's VBS this week, so the girls will be spending the week in the nursery. Last night at dinner we were telling Elise about it, mentioning the fact that she would be spending a lot of time this week playing with other little boys & girls, which she refers to as: "Go get some friends."

Knowing that it would be a big day, we put her to bed early. Katie got stuff ready for the next morning and I did some work, and three hours later she still wasn't asleep - we could hear her in her room talking and singing and making noise. Katie got a sippie-cup of milk, hoping that would help her go to sleep. The moment I opened the door to go in and give it to her, out of the dark I hear her tiny, excited and very awake little voice: "Go get some friends?" Like a kid on Christmas morning, at 10pm she was hoping it was time to get up and play with friends.

7 Days of Commuting

I guess it's time for an update on the commuting thing. For starters, at the suggestion of my biking friend I decided that rather than going from no exercise at all to biking 15 miles per day in traffic, I would start out doing it every other day - so that I wouldn't die. So I and am doing Monday Wednesday & Friday.

Because I'm a geek, I keep track of how long it takes me and calculate my average overall speed. And I make graphs. Pastor Steve would be proud. What the graph doesn't show is the fact that my times have decreased every day with one exception (the obvious dip in the blue line). The slight dips in the red line is were I took a shortcut which decreased my overall time, but also decreased my average speed.

I's also getting easier. Not easy, but easier. Here's a few things I've noticed:

• The first few days all I could think about was "What have I gotten myself into?" Then when I would arrive I would collapse on the floor for 15 minutes to recover and wonder if I could return the bike. Now I don't even have to collapse on the floor at all.
• On my first commute it took 43 minutes to get in. This morning it took just under 29.
• The first ride I stopped about 5 times on the way in to rest, this morning I didn't stop at all. (the rests alone probably account for the time difference)

I say all this not to brag, because I realize that a 7½ mile bike trip is not a huge deal. I thank God for giving me the discipline to do this, because it doesn't come naturally to me - I'm not an extremely physically disciplined person by nature. I know a lot of people who are, and I think you're all weird :) Anyway, I'll keep you posted.

Open Office

This post of the first of many that probably won't be entertaining, but hopefully useful.

Microsoft Office is a great tool, but fairly expensive. It's goes right now for just under $400. That pretty steep for a lot of people. If you're one of those people, you might want to check out OpenOffice.org, or OOo as it's commonly referred to. OOo is free, open source (that's generally a good thing), can read and write MS Office files, and contains most of the functionality of Microsoft Office. In some cases, OOo has a step up on Microsoft. For example: Excel hasn't yet figured out that time began before Jan 1st, 1900. Yup, so if you're making a list of historical events or birthdates of ancestors and want to sort them, Excel won't help much. Calc (the spreadsheet tool in OOo) handles that just fine. Enjoy!

Tagging Spots

A couple of weeks ago I did a post about a TV spot I do for the Cincinnati Zoo. Lest you think my job is always that exciting, I thought I'd tell you about what I did last week: I tagged spots for Fazoli's. What is "tagging" you ask? Well, someone else edited a commercial, and at the end they left some empty space on the screen. It looked like this:


My job is to "tag" that commercial with special text for about 40 different markets that are running the commercial. So if you live in Lexington, KY you'll see this:


I know it's exciting, but please try to contain yourselves, folks. After that, we send them out and the TV stations air them, and people all around the country say "Hey, it's 10:30 and I'm hungry, but Fazoli's is still open so let's go find one of their 15 area locations locations and get some food!"

Tickle, Tickle.

"Evie likes a tickle from Elise"

My First Commute

Yesterday was my first commute to work. All things considered it went fairly well. I rode the 7.4 miles in 43 minutes. The ride back was a little tougher, due to the fact that it is more uphill, and I did that (7.5 miles) in 1 hour even. This morning I did the ride in to work in 39 minutes. I'm going to take an alternate route home tonight which should shave 0.3 miles off of the uphill part of the trip. Of course that will also probably mean that the climb will be that much steeper, but I'll just have to try it and see.

I bought a bike

OK, as Katie hinted about, it's time for an update on my plans to bike to work. I bought a bike! After riding a low-end Scott, a Rocky Mountain Metro 30, a Rocky Mountain RC 30 DISC and a Scott Sub 10. I finally settled on a Rocky Mountain RC 50 DISC from Reser Bicycle Outfitters in Newport. The picture to the left is a stock picture of the RC 50 from Rocky Mountain's website. Mine is pretty much the same, but it's black.

If you're ever in the market for a bike, I highly recommend Reser. They are very knowledgeable, helpful, and encourage you to test ride a lot of bikes so you can get a feel of what you're comfortable with. As an added bonus, they don't make fun of you when you're so out of shape that after your first test ride you're so worn out that you have to go home and take a break and come back a few hours later - or so I've heard.

Anyway, I've taken it on a ride around the neighborhood and around town. Both rides confirmed that I am very out of shape (as if there was a doubt after my test ride). Tomorrow morning is my first commute to work, about 7.4 miles. Going to work will be bad enough, but at least it's a lot of downhill (300 ft decrease in elevation), and it'll be relatively cool. What I'm really dreading is the ride home, uphill in the afternoon. If I make it, I'll let you know how it went.

Biking to Work

A guy I work with started biking to work recently, and I thought I should give it a try. My commute would only be about 6 miles, which is about a third of my friend's commute. Biking would save me money on gas & parking, and would also be good exercise. I was actually discussing all this with Katie right before we saw this on The Office:

I haven't started yet because I don't have a bike, but I'm going to buy a Motobecane Elite from bikesdirect.com, so hopefully I'll be able to start in a week or two. It's been about 15 years since I've really done any biking, so this should be interesting. I'll keep you posted. If anybody has any pointers for me, I'd be interested in hearing them.

Building a Playhouse

Some of you may remember Katie's post a few months ago about our search for a playhouse, then finally buying one, but now you finally get to see the construction process. As a video geek, I of course insisted that we document the entire process, and our camcorder (a Sony DCR-HC90 for the other video geeks out there) has a very nice time lapse function.

You'll notice that we were almost done with the roof when we stopped for the night, then there's a slight pause before the video resumes. That's because we realized that we were putting the roof on upside down, and at that point it was about 11:30pm so we decided to stop and finish it the next evening.

For those of you interested in the Woodridge Playhouse Leisure Time Products (Item #1150), it was fairly easy to assemble, and the instructions were actually fairly good. The materials seem to be of fairly decent quality, so hopefully it will hold up for quite a while.

Giraffes at the Zoo

I was going to make my first post be all about how it was my first post, but that seemed kinda boring, so I'm making it about something - what I worked on last week.

For those of you who don't know, I'm an editor at red echo post, a video post production company in Cincinnati. Last week I worked on a spot for the Cincinnati Zoo to promote their new giraffes. It was a challenging but very interesting spot to work on.

The giraffe in the first and last shots was originally in front of a clear sky background. I keyed it out, applied an effect that creates the outlines, then composited all 3 back onto the new background.



The middle shot was composited from 2 different scenes in much the same way, except that the platform and the people had to be motion tracked to the background so that it looked like it was part of the scene. For that I had to enlist the help of Scott, our 3D animator - he has better tools and a better brain for tracking that sort of scene. He tracked the separate elements, then I composited them back together.