OSR asks me to produce a promo video each year promotes the camp. The first year I did this, Gary Marosy provided me with thousands of nice pictures of every area of camp and the program staff provided me with more pictures that campers had taken. Each year it has dwindled until last year I receive 1600 pictures of either night volleyball or kids in tubes.
This year’s video was an exercise in austerity as I received no pictures of Ecology, any involving a bicycle, and only pictures of sailing containing people that had been fired. On the plus side, I have a wonderful pictures of Todd Warner angrily pointing at a white board as children look on in rapt amazement.
For the past three years I’ve done a promotional video for Ockanickon, initially to fill a gap when an offer to film one by some third party fell through and I volunteered to do one on condition that someone else provide the raw material. This year I received 3800 pictures from the photography crew at camp, more than I received in any other year and coupled with my new SSD I was looking to make short work of the promo. I quickly encountered difficulties:
1200 shots were simply out of focus.
800 were improperly illuminated. My favorite being those of night activities where the flash caught only a single white object like a shoe or volleyball in the dead stillness of night.
700 depict a single child staring at something, completely bored, or with an indeterminate activity involving a book or pencil.
600 involved volleyball, the volleyball tournament, or sitting around Totem lodge.
Golf, horseback riding, rafting, law, dining hall program, the health lodge, mountain biking, CPR and all other leader training had no pictures taken of them at all.
Ecology only had pictures of people washing their hands.
Eagle only had pictures of kids staring into the distance or doing a dog pile.
Handicraft had 4 pictures, but they were quite nice.
I faked a picture of mountain biking by doing a ridiculous crop + rotation on a guy passing by Neshaminy camp site. Also, I found a wonderful picture of adults engaged in a whipped cream eating contest where if you rotate it and crop out the kids it looks like a group of village elders climbing a glacier with their beards.
I reduced the pool to about 140 usable images that met my requirements and made a video.
Next year I’m either going to provide a shot list or stage everything after the fact at my house.
The degree to which Comic Sans has penetrated Woodbadge is nothing short of stunning. Body text, banners, notes, and even our shirts are in Comic Sans. The rest of the text of the event is done in that font where it looks like things are spelled with logs. People are commenting about the font mix and I keep thinking “here I will start my rebellion”.
Fall at OSR included repeated volleys of shagbark hickory nuts that are capable of raising welts. I find people’s prioritization in what they cover interesting: during one volley, everyone used their binders to cover their heads except for our Troop Guide who covered his junk.
I integrated google analytics into the OSR page to see where people were going and hopefully create better navigation tools. I looked at the map showing usage patterns by locations and found this:
A near perfect T. Middle America (both horizontally and largely vertically) hates us.
I integrated google analytics into the OSR page to see where people were going and hopefully create better navigation tools. I looked at the map showing usage patterns by locations and found this:
A near perfect T. Middle America (both horizontally and largely vertically) hates us.
