The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 21/12/08
Season's Greetings!
Well, I've finished work for the year now, so I've had time to put together an idea I had a week or so back.
It's a short animation set to what is perhaps my favourite Christmas song. You can play it in the Windows Media screen which should appear below (and, if it doesn't, you can download it from here). The file is only a touch over 4MB, so it shouldn't max out your bandwidth.
Update (September 2017): Like time and tide, technology waits for no man. What was common practice in 2008 is no longer even do-able today. So it is that there is now virtually no support for embedding Windows Media video files in the most up-to-date browsers.
I tried bringing things into the modern world by converting the original .wmv file to .mp4 or even the new handy-dandy .webm standard, but I either couldn't get it to play on one or more browsers or, if it did, I couldn't validate the code to conform to standards.
The best I can do, therefore, is offer the video (which I still think is pretty neat) as a download for you to view in the comfort of your own lovely home.
Isn't progress wonderful?
A few remarks on the video, if only to excuse myself:
First off, this is the first time I've done a proper animation with sound, and perhaps I should have considered making sure the images fit the music. As it is, the images don't always change on - or anywhere near - the beat, but trying to sort that out completely would have meant jettisoning some of the images, and I'd gone too far down the road with it by then to want to do that. I'm afraid IFWIT (It Fits Where It Touches) is the rule of the day there.
Secondly, I'm aware that the quality of the images is sometimes a bit lacking. This is the Curse Of The Compression Algorithm, which shows itself most markedly with reds and greens. I can live with it, and I'm sure you can too.
Thirdly, apologies to anyone who thinks I've 'disrespected' their flag. I know that Bangladesh's looks a bit squashed because I had to change the aspect ratio. Apart from that - get a life, everyone. I also hope that I haven't inadvertently wished anyone something unpleasant (a plague of boils, being hit by a falling suet dumpling, a visitation from Tony Blair, that sort of thing).
Finally, can you figure out which languages are featured, and in which order? The flags will give it away in most - but not all - cases.
Warning! If you don't want to know yet, don't read the next paragraph! (Which is also why I'm leaving a bit of a gap here - known to us experienced webnauts as 'spoiler space' - to reduce the risk/temptation)
Just
hum
to
yourselves
for
a
minute....
OK, the cast in order of appearance is: English, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Euskerra (Basque), Scots and Gaelic, Bosnian, Greek, Breton, Esperanto, Irish, Indonesian, Polish, Armenian, Azeri, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Hausa and Swahili (that's the Pan-African flag), Arabic (that's the flag of the Arab Revolt!), Czech, Slovenian, Croatian, Dutch, Hebrew (the menorah), Belorussian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Spanish, Catalan, German, Estonian, Hindi, Farsi, Turkish, Albanian, Greenlandic, Japanese, Bengali, Portuguese, Maltese, Italian, French, Romanian, Vietnamese, Mandarin and Cantonese, Welsh.
