Dorchester — Aug 11th 2015

Continuing our coverage of Pages under the title "Boxing Clever”, Michael expanded on the use of text boxes and both standard shapes (adjustable via handles) and adjustable free-form shapes using the Draw with Pen shape. Stroke style and colour, and fill colour are fully editable. He showed how text can be inserted in shapes and formatted just like text on the page. Body text can be wrapped around shapes (including text placed within shapes) in a number of ways. You can put a text box inside a shape which already includes text and wrap that text accordingly. Throughout Michael used the Inspector to control Style,Text & Arrangement. He covered both Pages 5 and the earlier Pages 4 — which still has several useful features though it was generally agreed that, having re-written the code behind an App to meet updated system software etc. Apple will soon incorporate any missing popular features.

Andy gave a hands on demonstration of movie making in Final Cut Pro X but included a couple of his favourite iMovie features namely Trailers and Movement Around the Globe. Useful links covering these feature are included below. Andy offered useful tips about movie making generally, many of which can be applied in iMovie if not with the same finesse. Andy covered the  adjustment of multiple background sounds and music so that an overlaid commentary can be clearly heard, and how to use subtitles if the clarity of the spoken word is poor or in a foreign language.  With multiple sound tracks it is possible to overlay different languages for different audiences.  Where video is, for whatever reason, of poor quality, Andy demonstrated the very effective use of stills using the Ken Burns effect to give a sense movement. He showed some footage where he was speaking short sentences in Spanish direct to the camera with subtitles and hand movements. Because each sentence was a separate clip he could provide a more compelling sequence simply by flipping some clips horizontally.  

Jim, on a welcome visit from Spain was having trouble with Mail changing his sending address to @.me even though he wanted it to send as @.mac. No one had an immediate answer but maybe this can be resolved on the discussion board.

Lesson - creating movie trailer
Lesson - animating maps

Comments

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Michael Corgan said…

I am sorry if I mesled people. It ISN"T possible to put a Text Box inside a shape. And I feel I should have given a more comprehensive demonstration (at the risk of ending insomnia in the audience) of the different ways of wrapping text around Shapes and Text Boxes. If there is an overwhelming desire to see this done - i.e. more than three people - I will address these points at some future time.

Mark Ford said…

Shame I missed this meeting - but thanks for the thorough write-up & links - I can see a use for animated maps straight away.
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