Months of planning and details boil down to this week. Filming started today, but we’ll only be on set Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I spent most of this week working on last minute details and baking breads, cakes, and cookies for the snack table. Friday we also went to Portland and picked up some lighting equipment – no lights, just stands and screens. I’m hoping to spend some time this week taking notes, videos, and pictures and generally just learning and putting some interesting things up on the film’s tumblr that I created earlier this week. Alex and I are also keeping track of terms and equipment so we can learn about them later and actually have an idea of what things do. Like a crash course on how stuff works.
I’m really looking forward to seeing everything come together this week so follow the tumblr and at the end of the week I’ll post a full update. 😀
Monthly Archives: June 2010
13 posts
Was thinking earlier today about what would happen if I lost my hearing. Weird thought, I know, but I figured that it wouldn’t be something that I couldn’t handle. I know sign language and could probably still talk and communicate decently enough if I learned to lip read. I think everyone kinda lipreads to a certain extent – at least I do. So then I thought about what I would do with myself…
I know I’d remember what things used to sound like even if I couldn’t hear them anymore. Just like you still remember the taste of something years after you’ve eaten it.
So I decided that if I were deaf, I would draw sound.
…then I started thinking about how that would work and thought hey, I want to draw sound, just to see if I can. So next week sometime I think I’ll try.
Also, typing on my new iPhone is fun.
She’s tired.
Some days I just like to bring my out pillow and blanket and cuddle up on the couch.
Last night Alex worked really late, but we still went on a walk at like 10:30/11. On the way back, walking past a (closed) restaurant we noticed that the speakers were still on, and it was playing Over The Rainbow. We came back home and Alex started playing video games (I play during the day, he plays at night) so I hopped on the iMac that has fireworks and decided to play. I hadn’t made a pretty picture in a while, so I thought I’d try, and since Over The Rainbow was still in my head…
Most of you know that I’m rediscovering my inner artist, and I thought it would be fun to put some of my pieces up for sale, as a motivation to keep getting better and better and learn more. I’ve used Etsy and a free trial of shopify. Both have their advantages – etsy has a massive yet strong community of artists and shopify allows customizable store fronts and easy(ish) transactions. However, my crocheted scarves and sets were too buried in with all of the other crocheters and I don’t have enough real-life connections to make paying .20 per item for etsy or $24 a month for shopify worth it right now as I’m still brushing up on my mad skills. So I spent yesterday (I like to get as much out of my domain as I can 😉 ) installing wordpress on a subdomain and finding and installing a (decent) e-commerce plugin to host my own shop.
I worked almost as long as my husband doing roughly the same thing (except, he gets paid for it). I underestimated how much time it takes to find the right plugin and after that, get it set up so it actually looks right with the theme and make sure it’s all working (404 errors aren’t very fun) and add a few tweaks to the navigation. Needless to say, it took me about 5 hours (more if you count actually having to move all the products over from shopify) to get it all nice and working with a theme that works with it (tried to use this one, it just looked sad).
And then, I was done! I successfully installed and hosted my own shop! yay!
So if anyone else is thinking of doing the same here are some tips:
- I used the WP-ecommerce plugin. It’s not the best, but it worked better than the other ones that I tried. Ecwid was confusing and Zingiri didn’t work right for me, though they looked promising, just didn’t look like I wanted them too.
- Make sure you have time to spare – It took me 5 consecutive hours and I’d installed wp the night before…and then I had to move everything over on top of that.
- Whatever you do, don’t mess with the picture size, or the other themes, just keep it at default. It would have saved me a lot of  “why is it not working?!” moments.
- I’m using Crafty Cart, since it was built to work nicely with the widget but there are some other nice themes that work too – Eco and WP-Creativix were some other ones that I liked (but if you search for “shop”, “ecommerce”, or “flexible width” you’ll find some other nice ones too).
- You can only upload one picture/thumbnail in the free version of WP-ecommerce, otherwise you’ll have to pay/upgrade.
We went to the mall today, and I came home like so –
Also, my learning experiment for this week: playing with my pretty (colorful) eyeshadow from Icing 😀
So after futile attempts to try and make a custom shopify header on my laptop, I moved over to the iMac where we have fireworks installed. Needless to say it worked much better than what I was trying to do on my laptop, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. It’s not the best thing ever, but I don’t really want to delve into my shopify theme files right now.
It was really easy to make though – I took a screenshot of the header area to give me an idea of the placement, then I created a rectangle and applied some transparency, uploaded and took a screenshot.
So I put that up against the background that was already there, and that didn’t look quite right so I went back into fireworks and took out the background but left the rest.
So, I uploaded that, hoping it would work, and a few tweaks later….
Tada!
….is fleeting.
(RIP Chris and Jake)