Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Laws regarding pointing a camera outside of my home?

Q. Last week my neighbor's car was vandalized, leading to me buying a security camera to film the spot where I park my own vehicle. I basically bought the biggest, most gaudy camera I could because I wanted people to see it and know to leave the area in front of it alone. Almost immediately a neighbor came to me to complain. She first accused me of filming her property (I showed her it actually only records the street its self), and then she said I could not film that area because it's not my property. She said if I don't remove the camera she'll bring legal charges against me.

I live in Upstate New York (not the city). I plan to consult the police to find out for sure, but in the mean time does anyone here know if she's right?

A. Filming your neighbor's house might be illegal. Filming the public street and your front yard should not be.

Legal or not, you aren't doing well on the being neighborly thing.

Replace the camera with a big sign that says 24 your video surveillance. Walk over and tell your neighbor that you understand her concerns and that you have removed the camera. The sign is just for deterrence and you have removed the camera.

If you feel strongly about having a camera, wait a few weeks and then secretly install a concealed camera that records only your driveway up to the edge of the road.

The camera is really only for deterrence anyway. If someone breaks into your car, you will still have a missing car, damage to your car and/or missing items from the car and a video of a dark, faceless smudge to show the police.

A better attack is to form a neighborhood watch program in conjunction with your local police department, have regular meetings of your neighbors so you all know each other and you all know who belongs where and when on your street. Distribute phone numbers so neighbors can report suspicious people on your street. Put a light in your driveway so it illuminates the car and front of the house without causing light problems with your neighbors and don't leave valuable items in your car.


How where cartoons like Scooby Doo made?
Q. Cartoons I see on TV today are all cleanly animated, where as the cartoons I used to watch back when I was young like Scooby Doo & Tales From The Crypt Keeper all looked like they had been hand drawn then animated.

How did the artists go about animating them? Can you still do it today? I hate the new style of cartoons; the old "hand drawn" ones looked so much cooler!

A. Okay, first point. Scooby Doo was created in a series of meetings where producers worked with writers (who were probably producers and designers (one of whom who I'll get to was probably as senior as most of the others) to come up with concepts like the Mystery Mobile its inhabitants and so on. The designer who worked on Scooby-Doo more than any other was Iwao Takamoto who was absolutely trained in the US though he got his first drawing lessons while interned in one of our Concentration Camps for Japanese during World War II. Takamoto was responsible for concept sketches, designs of the characters and model sheets for ALL of them. He had other artists working with him but he was primarily responsible as, at the time was Alex Toth on other series.

Then scripts were commissioned and as they took shape storyboards, backgrounds and designs and model sheets for other characters. WHILE that was going on, finished episodes were recorded and someone was assigned to time each episode, writing down just how long each sound effect or each syllable of each word took, as a guide for synching the animation. Finally the timing sheets and model sheets and so forth would be given to the key animators, who would draw the key positions of everything which changed in the episode (like characters, buttons, clubs -- guns weren't permitted on TV) and turn them over to junior animators called in-betweeners who exactly drew in the actions in between the key images they were given. These were usually drawn on light boxes in pencil using a thin paper with holes punched in them to allow them to hang from a register bar which kept all the drawing consistent (the first bevis and butthead was drawn on notebook paper, which makes sense as it already has holes for registration). The drawings were, for Scooby-Doo, in limited animation, which meant each would be on the screen for 1/12 of a second rather than the 1/24 of a second of a traditional animation. They were then, by that time, xeroxed onto clear acetate sheets known as cells, which were hand painted and sent to what is called a multiplane camera to be photographed in front of the backgrounds. Finally the film was edited to fit the soundtrack and the whole thing was transferred to video. The first series was done mainly in California but for monetary reasons, I believe they shipped the animation overseas after the episodes were recorded.


What's the cheapest way to record digital video and audio of our speakers at our Toastmasters meetings?
Q. With or without a laptop.
Thanks,
Vince

A. If you want separate recording (audio- video) you might have trouble when synchronizing them.. Actually this is the best way. You can load video (videos) and audio on Adobe Premier and have little work...

If you use some camera it will record audio and video, you don't have to sync.. But the camera microphone can't be better then normal mics.. If this is not the problem, just find no matter how cheap camcorders which has built in mic, that will be good..

If your place is big and you need record all audio in the room, so normal camcorders wouldn't capture all the audio..

Good luck





Powered by Yahoo! Answers

No comments:

Post a Comment