Africa: Pixel Corps Tanzania launch presentation

We are off at 5 a.m. to Ruaha and Mufindi until Saturday.
Up at 7:30 a.m. and jumped right back into prepping elements for the Foxes of Africa DVD. Our presentation begins at 6:30 p.m. this evening. We all have a lot of work to finish up before then. Chantal has to get over to the DTP office to talk with the Mobitel folks about the photo shoot she did yesterday. Alex, Harvey and I finish up at the house and await the driver. We are sequestered in Hanif and Shafiq’s office again. Chantal is finishing her edit, Alex is getting his presentaion together and I am compressing video. Harvey and Maina head over to the hall to stat setting things up.

Tony came by and we show him a bit of what we were working on. My inquiries after the nature of the advertising market reveal that outside of tech sector, most businesses are completely reactionary about their own promotion. The only time a business will make any effort is if their competitors have something they don’t.

We have lunch at the office, as none of us really feel that we can spare the time for a full sit down meal. I am having some fits with Compressor, the new video compression application that ships with Final Cut Pro 4.

The presentation got started at 6:30 to a crowd of about 150. Most of the attendees were graphics professionals in the Dar es Salaam area. Some of the folks are employees at the local TV stations that were all brought in by their managers. The meeting ran for just under four hours. Alex talked for most of the time. Chantal and I got up at the end to do a little bit about the DVD project. I talked about the interface and authoring, while Chantal talked about editing in Final Cut Pro. My piece was hindered by a number of equipment problems. First I ran into trouble with a bent pin in the VGA connector from the Titanium to the projector. Next the headphone jack was not being picked up by the mixing board. And to add insult to injury, my computer powered off halfway through showing the DVD.

We finally got on the road at 10:45 p.m. Headed over to get something to eat at a late-night establishment. The only thing I could eat were french fries which I opted to pass up. About half-way through the meal, there was some commotion over by the car. Someone called Hanif over and was holding up a floor jack. It turned out that the rear window on the truck was not locked and someone had reached in and grabbed the jack then set it on the ground. The guy that reached into the car was caught a couple of minutes later. Everyone within earshot ran up to where they were holding the would-be thief. By the sound of his wailing, he was pretty severley flogged. Eventually he was dragged off to the Police.

The rest of dinner was uneventful and now we are over at the DTP office getting enough of an internet fix to last us for the next couple of days.