Jonathan: January 2010 Archives
When he isn’t judging SciCast, geologist Iain Stewart manages to squeeze in a series or two for the BBC. His latest starts on BBC2 tonight, and there’s an astounding sneak preview.
Iain travels to the Naica Cave in Mexico, where he and his crew battle 50°C temperatures and 100% humidity to bring remarkable footage of the world’s largest crystals, in a deep underground cavern. It’s phenomenal stuff.
I can’t embed the video, sadly, but do check out the link. You’ll be glad you did. And remember, we do have a geology category for the SciCast Awards…
[update 20th Jan: 3.5 million viewers! The highest figures for a science programme on BBC2 in four years, according to the Guardian. Fantastic news — congratulations Iain!]
We’re aware that the main SciCast site is having problems at the moment. Most of the sections are working as intended, and the individual film pages are fine, too. However, the ‘front page’ list of films — the view you see most of the time when you come to the site — is throwing an error.
We noticed this just after everyone at our hosting partner went home last night. There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do to fix it, sadly, so we’ll have to live like this for the weekend. Hopefully we’ll be able to get the site fixed up first thing next week.
Apologies for the inconvenience, and all that. Perhaps it’s a cue for everyone to pick up cameras and spend the weekend making films rather than watching them?
I’ve just stumbled across what looks to be a terrific archive of music that looks to be entirely usable. It’s termed ‘Royalty Free’ which is usually a sign that it isn’t (see this link for an explanation), however in this case it really is free. It’s all under Creative Commons Attribution licenses, the same ones we use. It’s great stuff, too.
You can browse by genre, or search by style/feel/tone — then you can preview the tracks before you download them and put them in your movies. Most of the tracks I’ve previewed have more than long enough for a SciCast film, which saves trying to loop them. You can try editing them so they finish neatly, or simply add a fade at the end of your film.
The composer/performer is Kevin MacLeod; if you use his work, remember to credit him in your film, and make sure you keep a note of which track you’ve used (so you can tell us, and we can link to it from the SciCast site).
