There's no question that the plans shown this week for the development of the Stag Brewery site in Mortlake are an improvement on those shown in the previous exhibition in March.
Housing density has been reduced somewhat, public areas between the housing blocks are a bit wider and the proposed tower block - previously described to me as the "visual flagship" of the development - has been scrapped.
I was impressed by the ingenious plan for a large underground car park - which will have space for 750 cars. Proposed restrictions on where those cars will be allowed to turn at its two entrances and exits will, in theory, prevent additional traffic using the mini-roundabout at the end of Sheen Lane.
But there's one further improvement which I think local residents would appreciate for generations to come. It only involves, for the developers, a small sacrifice of the end of one of the housing blocks, neatly bringing it into line with one next to it.
The square I've highlighted in red would be the housing that would go. The result (picture below) would be the creation of a much larger public space open to the river by joining together two smaller proposed spaces:
The above is taken from the previous development proposals. The new housing blocks are arranged a little differently in the current plans but those changes do not affect this proposal - which would create a really good-sized open area by the river.
I would encourage local residents to lobby for this change. Once the plans are accepted, public access to the river is never likely to become available again.
UPDATE:
I've now been able to download the new proposals and show how my suggestion still applies in the new design:
Carol Shields' clear, informal prose contains multiple levels of self-awareness about both its style and content. It could hardly be otherwise when this is a novel by a female Canadian novelist about a female Canadian novelist struggling with a novel.
Although novel-writing is not the main subject of Unless, it is necessarily the means through which the subject is explored and Shields enjoys the chance to slyly comment on her own story-telling, teasing the reader with insights into exactly the dilemmas she must be facing in writing the book we're reading.
She's also careful not to overdo it by building a hall of mirrors. So Shields' novelist, Reta, resists the urge to transplant her latest fictional invention, Alicia, from her job at a fashion magazine to an academic world, whose familiarity would make her life easier to write about. As Reta explains, if Alicia were to start a thesis on Chinese women's poetry, "I would become a woman writing about a woman writing about women writing, and that would lead straight to an echo chamber of infinite regress."
There are plenty of carefully orchestrated echoes in Unless: between Reta's life and that of her novel; between Reta's literary career and that of the older distinguished Canadian writer whose work she translates; between the drama of family life in Reta's home and hints of conflict in the family of its previous owners; most importantly, between Reta's conscious grudging acceptance of a woman's expected role in society ("goodness but not greatness") and her eldest daughter's extreme response, as Reta sees it, to the same realisation.
Reta has been in a local writers' group, and some of what she learns there Shields appears to make use of. The telling details of daily life which add conviction to the story are what a fellow writer calls "putty": "by this she meant the arbitrary, the odd, the ordinary, the mucilage of daily life that cements our genuine moments of being". A writer must be constantly looking out for useful putty, such as "buttonholes, for instance, they way they shred over time, especially on cheap clothes." Not a such a telling observation perhaps, but good enough to put into the mouth of an aspiring writer.
Shields' art is in making the putty indistinguishable from the weight-supporting beams of the plot - just as in life, when it is often only in retrospect that we can see the significance of an event or even a remark.
If anything, to my mind, the plot is a little too sturdily constructed. Further into the book, the characters seem to lose their autonomy and there's a sense that a grand plan is being played out too precisely. We can feel the end coming and, just before it, there's a debate about the endings of novels which, we know, will be resolved in our novel by page 213. That awareness is in danger of reducing Reta and her fellow players to ciphers. The male characters in particular have never been much more.
For all that, Unless is an absorbing, enjoyable book that's made me want to read more of Carol Shields. She talks to her reader directly and moves the story along in surprising ways. It's a book driven by ideas rather that characters but contains enough wholesome putty to join the hard surfaces with wit and ingenuity.
The good thing about using Google to store your photos and videos is that it's probably going to be around for a while and so your precious stuff isn't going to disappear if a flaky tech company closes. The bad thing is that you can't do much to organise or display things the way you want (despite Photos' unpredictable and uninvited efforts to create albums for you).
The best of both worlds would be to leave your items in the care of Google but to be able to embed them on another site, exactly how you want to see them - effectively creating a window through to Google without copying or moving them.
That can be done. Here's a ten-point instruction list, which isn't as complicated as it looks the first time you do it:
Upload the photo or video to your Google Photos account.
Open Google Drive in the same Google account and
find it in Google Photos in the left-hand menu. (If it’s not there,
start playing it in Photos and select the Google Drive icon top right, Add to
My Drive. Now open Drive and it’ll be there.)
Highlight the photo or video and click the Share button,
top right of the screen (the person icon with a plus sign).
On the Share with others window, click Advanced,
bottom right.
On the first option under Who has access, click
Change, and in the window that opens, choose the second line, On - anyone with
the link. Click Save.
Back on the Share settings page, click Done.
You are now back on the Google Photos page, with
your photo or video still highlighted. Click it to open or play.
Now select the three little
buttons at the far top right of the screen, and choose Open in new window.
The new window looks very similar to the old window,
but the three little buttons are in a slightly different position top right.
Select them again and this time, you’ll find Embed item… on the list.
Click
it to display the embed code that you can copy into the html of the webpage on
which you want to display the photo or video.
NB: if you copy from Photos to Drive in item two, you'll be using up some of your 15Gb of free storage, whereas in Photos, under certain conditions, you can store as much as you want. So it's best to wait for the photo or video to appear in Drive's Photos tab if you can (especially for videos, which use up so much more storage).
My thanks to Sue Waters in Australia for her explanation of this process, which you can find here, along with other interesting information about what you can do with Google Photos.
In my previous post I wrote about my first experiences filming on a 360 camera. Here, I want to follow up with what happened when I tried to edit - on Final Cut X.
The first question: how do you get the right file to edit?
It might seem best to take the SD card from the camera, insert it into the side of your laptop and copy the original files across. But that doesn't work: you'll find MP4 files to import on the SD card, but sadly, they won't play on Final Cut.
That's because, as I mentioned in the previous post, the process of saving the files from the camera onto the phone also converts them into a readable 360 format - and those are the files you want to edit with.
To get access to the files easily on your laptop, you can use Android File Transfer on the laptop. Then, when you plug the phone into the laptop, you'll see a file structure view of the phone memory and will find the files you're looking for in the DCIM folder. Transfer those files to your laptop and import into Final Cut.
Now you'll be able to view the shots - not in 360 but in a panoramic view, which is good enough to identify the cut points you want, plus, of course, you'll be able to hear their audio to help with that.
From here on, you're editing just as you would with non-360 footage. You can even add titles and effects, as I tried here, combining my two experimental shots:
A couple of things haven't quite worked as I expected:
Somehow the 360 sphere has turned into the inside of a cylinder, with a black hole at the top where the sky ought to be.
And second, the titles are much bigger than I was expecting. On reflection, I think that's because I was judging them, as usual, in relation to the width of the editing screen, whereas here the shot, in its panoramic view, was much wider once it came back into 360 mode.
Having made your edit, the next job is to export the finished product. I first made a .mov file, which I used my Android File Transfer to put back onto the phone, so I could view through the Gear headset. But it turns out that Gear doesn't recognise .mov files, so that was no good.
So I went back to my laptop and converted it to an mp.4, using Mpeg Streamclip, and put that on the phone. Now it could be recognised and played, but it wasn't in 360.
One more process was required. It involves 'injecting' data into the file, to label it as 360. It's explained in this page of YouTube help. The important part is downloading and using the Spatial Media Metadata Injector. It's actually very easy: just check a box to say you're going to be showing it a 360 video, and it will remake the file to include that information.
Now if you view that file on your phone, you can have the full 360 experience on a headset with something you have edited, or you can upload to YouTube, as I did with the video above, and watch it on your phone.
I'm not sure how to avoid the cylinder problem with 360 editing, but apart from that, the process from filming to edited video worked pretty well once I'd understood what I was trying to do.
I have been experimenting with 360 filming, using the Samsung Gear 360 camera linked to a Samsung Galaxy phone.
Here are some of the things I've learnt:
Camera position is everything. When you film with a conventional camera, where you place it is just one of many decisions that will define the shot. (Along with framing, choosing the lens and focus for instance.) In 360, camera position is almost the only decision you need to make before pressing record: you can't even decide where to point it, of course.
If you're filming in 360, you'd better offer 'value for money' by having different things happen in as many different directions as possible, requiring the viewer to make use of their ability to track around the picture.
This is the first of my experiments, filmed with that in mind:
NB: If the video still frame above is the first of the images below, then you're viewing in a browser that doesn't support 360 video play on YouTube (e.g. Safari). Try Chrome, where you should see the second image below, which is how it looks when it is going to play in 360.
When you're watching, you can navigate around either using the pointers on the button top left, or by holding the mouse (or your finger on a touch screen) and dragging the picture round.
Here's my second experiment, where I attached the camera to my bicycle like this:
This demonstrates a couple of things not to do:
First, if you view this through the Samsung Gear Headset, for the full immersive experience, it will make you feel distinctly sea-sick. Apparently that's caused by the camera tilting horizontally, as when the bicycle goes round the corner. If you want a happy audience, stay level.
Second, if you don't want to look like a grim, looming giant, put the camera at eye-level (and smile):
In those shots, I was controlling the camera (recording and viewing live what it was seeing) through a linked Samsung Galaxy phone.
So then the question is, how do you view what you've filmed? Well, first you have to save the shot from the camera, where it's recording, onto the phone, which takes a little while, depending on the length of the shot. In the process, a conversion from the original file happens.
The simplest option for viewing, playing back in the phone itself, isn't as easy as you might expect - unless I'm missing something.
The shots are saved to the phone's Gallery, as on other Android devices. But if you view from there, or through the Gear 360 app, you can't get the full 360 experience, moving the phone round to see different parts of the view. Instead, there's a choice between: Dual view (the two 180 cameras in the Gear shown as two corrected rectangles on a split screen); Panoramic (where the left side of the picture joins up with the far right side like a map of the world); 360 view (which is like a big distorted sphere); Stretched; and Round view (below), which looks like this:
Interesting, but not very useful.
To get the full, immersive 360 experience, you need to insert the phone into the back of the Gear VR headset. Before doing so, you need to go back to the Gear 360 app, and touch "View on Gear VR", which will prompt you to insert the device into the headset.
In my experience, it often takes a few attempts at putting the phone into the headset before you hear little pings on the headset that tell you it's ready for you to navigate with its controls on the right side, to find the Gallery, and press play on your video.
The immersive experience is good, giving you the ability to 'look' in different directions convincingly, although deciding to do so doesn't come naturally when we're so used to just staring ahead at video. There needs to be real motivation to keep a viewer's attention on what the director wants the audience to be seeing. Otherwise, they'll just be using the 360 opportunities to stare idly at irrelevancies to pass the time, like bored children in class.
So how do you make your video viewable to more people than can have access to your phone and a headset that takes a lot of fiddling to make work?
One answer is YouTube, and the Samsung phone lets you upload direct, which is handy. But do so from inside the Gear 360 app. If you upload direct from Gallery, YouTube won't recognise that your video is 360, and will just show it in the panoramic form, which looks weird.
Once you've uploaded, if you open YouTube on your phone, you'll get the proper effect, where you can 'look' at different things by tilting and rotating the phone.
In the next blog, I look at how to edit your 360 videos. If you want to find out about the very minimalist controls on the camera, here's a good video that someone has kindly made.
