Got to do a few new things today while working on my virtual river. Needs to be done, for Waterschap Rivierenland iis interested in exihibiting it. First off, I needed to teach myself audio editing, for I caught a few on-the-river sounds – a train running over a bridge, bells from a church tower – and needed to trim them a little. So I installed Audacity, which came highly recommended, and did my trimming, cutting and pasting. This is exacting work! The ear is very unforgiving …

One now hears a gurgling sound while the river flows, and every 40 seconds or so a leaf comes floating by – well, actually it is a text telling people that they can interact with the screen. This floating leaf caused me no end of trouble, but eventually I found a way to keep it in the middle of the ‘river’ and off the banks. Then attention had to be grabbed, did that by connecting sound to the floating leaf.

It now plays river sounds in random order. I have ducks, geese, seagulls and a train on a bridge, on my to-do are church bells, carillion, frogs, boats, swan, …

Then I tried to film the river in motion. Very disappointing try with tripod and mobile phone – screen worked like a mirror, very off-putting. Then googled the subject and found ActivePresenter, a screen capturing software app that does all I need done and then some. Its interface isn’t totally intuitive, but after a few false starts I managed to capture the river in flow.

Then had to rediscover how best to incorporate a video in WordPress – did this ages ago but forgot how. Went with Vimeo, result shown below. Not very happy with the startup screen, but there are limits to what this girl will do in a day ….