The May general meeting featured our annual Quicktime Festival. Stuart Bonwit, Chair of the Quicktime SIG brought together a wide-ranging collection of Quicktime examples for us to view.
We started off with some Apple commercials, including my favorite "Want to see some dinosaurs?", the original "1984" Macintosh introduction (which played exactly once during the Superbowl) and the now infamous "Exploding Whale" Quicktime video. The "Exploding Whale" is some news footage, transferred to Quicktime, of an attempt to remove a dead whale from a beach by blowing it to smithereens with dynamite. Unfortunately, the plan failed spectacularly, with large pieces of the whale landing on spectators, cars and all over the beach. The highway department, which was in charge of the demolition, neglected to think that the loud noise would scare away the seagulls which were supposed to eat what was left. Unfortunately, lots of very large chunks were left and were buried later with a bulldozer. Quite funny.
Next we were treated to some beautiful original work by Dennis Dimick. This was "National Geographic" quality stuff. Beautiful photography and music. A wonderful experience. Writing about Quicktime movies is sort of like describing fireworks. You had to be there. Dennis had two great stories to tell and he told them magnificently. Unfortunately, he was unable to be with us in person, but his work spoke volumes for him.
Next we saw a Quicktime project by Jacob Freedman on Mexico. Jacob did this as a school project. I'm sure he got an A. It was a collage of images and music of Mexico. Very well done.
Karen Ackoff, also not able to attend, sent us her multimedia portfolio. This was fine work also which landed her the position as Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Indiana at South Bend.
This was followed by Mary Keene 's demo of The Alchemist. This is a multimedia CD-ROM which you use as a sort of "thought processor." It is supposed to help you with decision making, processing events, and other metaphysical chores. Very pretty but sort of weird too. Maybe just not my cup of tea.
We closed the meeting with some additional questions and answers and headed for the exits. The goodie box was empty. For some reason, vendors have been stingy lately. Maybe they are starting to believe the doom and gloom in the press. The Garage Sale is next month, followed in July by Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus telling us about the Motorola StarMax line of MacOS compatible computers. He will be joined by Connectix showing their new product, Virtual PC, which allows one to run Windows 95 or Windows 3.1.1 or MS-DOS on a Mac. But Why? See you there!