My partner, Pat, has been heavily involved with the annual fund-raising plant sale at Friends School of Minnesota ever since our daughter started kindergarten there nearly ten years ago. For the 2007 sale, she wondered if it would be possible to do a time-lapse video of the event to help promote it.

After investigating a number of possibilities, I decided that the simplest way would be to use the iSight camera built into my MacBook Pro along with Boinx Software’s iStopMotion.

The venue for the sale was the Grandstand at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, a cavernous space filled with concrete support columns every twenty or thirty feet. I was a bit concerned about leaving my laptop unattended for the week it would take to capture the video, but fortunately we found a well-placed column that had a flat “shelf” about ten feet off the ground. It had just enough space to hold the laptop. There was also a conduit that could be used to attach a security cable.

I still thought it might be a little conspicuous (and tempting) for my not-exactly-cheap MacBook Pro to be visible up there, so I covered it in a make-shift cardboard “disguise” to make it a bit less obvious what it was.

We alerted the fairgrounds security to its presence, but just in case an over-zealous and uninformed security guard happened upon it and thought it was a bomb or something, I added notes and stickers to the outside to explain what it was. And, of course, I completely backed up my hard drive, removed all personal files, logged out of my personal account and set up a temporary user account, in case all else failed and it got stolen or damaged.

Happily, none of that happened. It sat undisturbed for the whole week, shooting one frame every two minutes. I stopped by at least once a day to check on its progress (and to hit command-S to save the footage captured so far), hauling a ladder to and from the site in order to get at it. Unfortunately, some time during the last day of the sale, iStopMotion seems to have crashed, so any video it captured after I hit “save” that morning was lost. (Neither I or the helpful people at Boinx could figure out what happened.)

Nevertheless, the captured video was amazing. I added titles and music, and, well, here is the finished video:

I Rotis for Typophile a few years back…

I Meta man once. I said, “Avenir seen you somewhere before?”

He replied, “I was elected Centaur once. Joanna know what happened? Italia what happened. The Air Force took a Janson me. They put me in charge of Arial maneuvers. But the DIN was terrible. I lost my Tempo and stormed out Didot. I shouted, ‘Avant Gardes posted Ronda clock! To Helvetica Mandarin chief! Peignot attention to him!’

“They said, ‘This Stymie went too far.’ Well, no more Beton Ronda bush. I admit I made some Eras. It cost me my Courier. Univers see it until it’s too late.

“Bodoni hurts when I laugh. Now, I spend my Times Roman the streets.” He walked away singing Myriad a Little Lamb.

I wondered Weidemann was saying all these crazy things.

Franklin, I don’t give a Dom.

(My sincerest apologies. Please don’t bother to Melior complaints to me.)

Yesterday afternoon I went to a packed rock concert with my daughter at the new Minneapolis Public Library. You read that right: a rock concert in a library. The band was Harry and the Potters who, if you have never heard of them, pretend to be Harry Potter (two of them) and play songs inspired by characters and situations in the famous books. (That’s “Bill Weasley” on drums.) The warm up act was Draco and the Malfoys (what else?), who advised the audience that there was no point in staying once they finished. Both bands were very fun, very loud, and very punk rock. Fans do amazing things sometimes.

As a long time fan of the books, radio show, TV series, computer game, etc., I am looking forward to April 29 when The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy finally makes it to the medium of motion pictures. It looks to be very different visually from the TV series (not necessarily a bad thing) but true to the spirit of the stories in all their incarnations.

I’m still sad about author Douglas Adams’ death in 2001, but, according to everything I’ve read, the movie is based entirely on the screenplay he was working on when he died. Whatever is different from the earlier works will be either thanks to or the fault of Adams. (Not that there was ever a definitive version of any of the Hitchhiker stories anyway.)

Website here. Towels here. [Update: The links that used to be here are dead.]

In other quirky British franchise news, Aardman Studios is working on a Wallace and Gromit movie to be released next Fall. (Yippee!)

Flash animation designed to promote my typeface Mostra. Move your mouse over it to mix and match the different weights and alternate characters of Mostra in a playful way. You can also think of it as a puzzle: Scramble the letters up and then try to get them back the way they started. If you give up, just reload the page. Created in 2001.

Note: Flash 5 or later plug-in required for animation.

If you were or are a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 like me, this is pretty cool: RiffTrax. (Via Wired News this morning.)