Tag: wire106

Schooling the Wire

Three SuperCut videos from season 4 of the wire on the words, school, schooled and schooling after a prompt from Jim Groom. Made with videogrep.py

I was surprised at how few times schooled or schooling were used.

Supercut videos are a nice way of looking at this sort of stuff but you can get a quick idea of the use of words by finding them in the subtitle (.srt) files.

For example I downloaded season 4 subtitles from The Wire S04(Season 4) english subtitles – TVsubs.net. This gives several versions of the files. I found before that the DVDRip.TOPAZ.en.srt ones work best for me. I’ve put them in the same folder as my wire episodes and renamed them to match these files.

I open the terminal and type cd then drag the folder from the finder into the terminal window and hit return. This moves me into the folder.

I then grep -e 'school ' *.srt which outputs a list of the episodes with school in the subtitles and the line:

The Wire Season 4 Episode 01 - Boys of Summer.srt:for some back-to-school stuff.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 01 - Boys of Summer.srt:back-to-school stuff for?
The Wire Season 4 Episode 01 - Boys of Summer.srt:When school start, I'll be selling it
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:for your school clothes,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:your school shit, man.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:I can't wait until school starts.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:of school coming up, right?
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:- Y'all need school clothes and shit?
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:to buy school clothes with.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:to school some.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:to that school lookin'
The Wire Season 4 Episode 03 - Home Rooms.srt:do you want to go to school for?
The Wire Season 4 Episode 04 - Refugees.srt:For school or out the business,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 04 - Refugees.srt:to start out a school year,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 04 - Refugees.srt:school on Friday,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 04 - Refugees.srt:school you, brother.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 05 - Alliances.srt:ain't in school tomorrow morning,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 05 - Alliances.srt:take him in, school him,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 06 - Margin of Error.srt:- High-school biology.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 06 - Margin of Error.srt:Ain't no school today.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 07 - Unto Others.srt:Does the school have
The Wire Season 4 Episode 07 - Unto Others.srt:creep out of school after lunch.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 07 - Unto Others.srt:He's got to be at school in the morning.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 08 - Corner Boys.srt:the word around school is
The Wire Season 4 Episode 08 - Corner Boys.srt:the school or not.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 09 - Know Your Place.srt:after school lets out--
The Wire Season 4 Episode 09 - Know Your Place.srt:to the school social worker.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 10 - Misgivings.srt:I'll get the school police.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 10 - Misgivings.srt:of the school year,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 11 - A New Day.srt:front of the school today,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 11 - A New Day.srt:at school 45,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 11 - A New Day.srt:school 52, and school 58
The Wire Season 4 Episode 11 - A New Day.srt:- The school audit.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:when I look at the school budget.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:for the school budget.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:with the school board itself.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:is on the school system.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:As president of the school board,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:not the school board,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:- to go see the school superintendent.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:the Baltimore school system's
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:middle school no more.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:no school closures.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:over the school board
The Wire Season 4 Episode 13 - Final Grades.srt:It knocks the school deficit
The Wire Season 4 Episode 13 - Final Grades.srt:your school system."
The Wire Season 4 Episode 13 - Final Grades.srt:I went to school here

Where as schooling:


01 - Boys of Summer.srt:So... he was schooling me.
07 - Unto Others.srt:Don't be schooling us now.
08 - Corner Boys.srt:we schooling them.

Only has 3 mentions as does schooled


01 - Boys of Summer.srt:You laughing. I've been schooled, dog.
09 - Know Your Place.srt:You schooled me good.
10 - Misgivings.srt:- You schooled them well.

If you just want the number of mentions:
grep -e 'school ' *.srt | wc -l
outputs 45.

I am sure lots of ds106 students can thing of some other useful and interesting ways to use this.

Colour of the Wire

After the last post I’ve watched a few more episodes and have arrived in Season 3 of the wire. I though it might be interesting to see the overall colours of different episodes or seasons and compare them.

Following the same path1 as in the previous post I created a montage of screenshots from Episode 1 of season 3. I sort of expected it to be a bit brighter but:

out-1000

A bit of googling took me to Image Color Summarizer – RGB and HSV Image Statistics and:

Image Color Summarizer – RGB and HSV Image Statistics Season 1 Episode 1

Image Color Summarizer – RGB and HSV Image Statistics Season 3 Episode 1

Both described as dark faded red.

colours-of-the-wire

I wonder if it would be interesting to expand this to other episodes and series or if everything looks dark.

Footnotes:

1. I had a few problems with Storyboard this time as the .srt file I downloaded didn’t work, a quick google found one that did. I also noticed that the montage code I posted last time was missing a parameter --geometry +0+0 to remove padding

Chain of Command

wire01
(the above gif has nothing to do with the rest of the post, other than it is to do with the wire.)
A while back I posted about gifboard and it’s bigger brother storyboard. I’ve played a bit with storyboard and the wire this week.

Storyboard is a command line application which creates pdfs from movies with subtitles, one page per subtitle.

I just started with a bit of playing round with no particular destination in mind. The first thing I did was rip a pdf of subtitled frames from Episode 1 using storyboard. This gave me a 30mb file with >1400 ‘pages’.

I then thought that it might be an idea to get all of these pages out as images, a quick google suggested pdfseparate. This is another commandline app. I generally have no idea what commandline options are available, so I typed: man pdfseparate in the terminal and got back the man page, so it was installed.1

For once I though ahead and moved the pdf into its own folder, I then, in the terminal, cd into the folder and:

pdfseparate The\ Wire\ Episode\ 01\ -\ The\ Target.pdf  wire-ep-1-%d.pdf

The %d bit just gave me a numbered set of jpegs. I ended up with a folder full of 1497 pdfs. I really wanted images rather than pdfs so:

mkdir jpgs; sips -s format jpeg *.* --out jpgs

This command first makes a new folder called jpgs and then uses sips (built into OSX) to convert each pdf into a jpg and put it in the folder. These jpgs were quite big so I cd into the folder and:

sips --resampleWidth 300 *.jpg

Which resizes them nicely. I also duplicated the folder and made a set of smaller jpgs and some gifs with sips too.

My first thought was to make some animated gifs2, but a gif with 1497 frames turns out to be pretty big, even if you reduce it to 8bit. There are probably a few interesting gifs in this project which I might return to.

My next idea was to make one of those infinite scrolling web page with the jpg, and this turned out ok: The Wire Scrolls On, S1E1.

infinite-scroll

This gives quite an interesting view of the episode, it is pretty dark and there are a lot of closeups and expressive faces (this might be skewed by the fact we grab bits of dialog). I was quite surprised that the page loaded quite well.

After seeing that page I thought a montage would be the next obvious step. Again a quick google suggested the ImageMagick set of command line tools. Again I’d already installed these at some time in the past so it only took another google to suggest that the montage tool was the way to go. So inside the folder of smaller jpgs:

montage wire-ep-1-[1-1497].jpg out.jpg

out-1000
I can’t imagine how long it would take to do something like this with a gui application. I can imagine that quite a few folk would not be all that interested in this process or the results, am thinking that it is somewhat analogous to looking at large sets of data. These image manipulating commandline tools allow different views of video to be created quickly. They also give an overview of a whole section that can be analysed and mused over.

I am not really much of a command line user although I’ve dabbled over the years and installed a fair number of applications along the way. I would recommend that dipping toes in, with say gifsicle before jumping in to install and try a pile of stuff. Google is your friend here and you can often find a command line way to do something by adding ‘command line’ to the search. In addition to the tools above, or even before, ffmpeg for example.

Update: The Wire EP 1 Mashup.

Footnotes:

1. I little digging around reminded me I had installed this as part of poppler. Poppler I’d installed using homebrew (the chain is tangling already). If you want to install various command line apps I’d recommend homebrew as a good option.

2. gifsicle is a wonderful command line application for creating animated gifs.

all in the game

Wire Characters Season 1

My last couple of posts have been about using and setting up videogrep.py.

Videogrep is a python script that searches through dialog in videos and then cuts together a new video based on what it finds. Basically, it’s a command-line “supercut” generator.

I’ve been thinking about how to use it, especially since Jim Groom gave it a rousing reception( Wiring Supercuts & The Game Supercut ).

I’ve always liked the suspect board on the wire, where the detectives pin up pictures of suspects in a mindmap fashion, and wondered if I could make a board with Supercut videos of the characters. Turns out I can: Wire Characters Season 1.

A man must have a code

The Wire Season 1 Episode 07 one Arrest

First thing I had to do was make the supercuts, I just used the method described in the previous post, with one wrinkle. Some of the characters are refered to by more than one name, some times Kima is Greggs, I wanted to catch all of the references. It turns out that the default search for videogrep is a regular expression. Now I don’t know much (anything) about regEx, but a quick google game me the pipe character as OR, so:

python ../videogrep.py -i /Users/john/Movies/The\ Wire/Season\ 1 -s 'Kima|Greggs' -o Kima.mp4

Gets clips with either Kima or Greggs in the subtitles.

I then convert the mp4 files with miro video converter, using iphone as the setting, this lets me hear the clips which lose sound on my system. I open the output movies with QuickTime Pro find a still and hit copy. Switch to Fireworks and paste into a new document, save as a jpge with the same name as the video apart from the file extension.

I’ve now got a folder full of movies and images and just need a html file to display them.

I wanted to do a few things with the display of the videos, I wanted them to be is some sort of disarray as if pinned on, not all lined up. I also was making this in between all of the supercutting. This lead me to put the videos on the page with Javascript rather than hard coding all the tags. If you are really interested you can view the code on the page, I’ll just blog a few concepts here. I did hardcode an array of the names, without the file extensions and a matching one with the character names. It was them easy to loop through these arrays creating video elements and populating them with the video source and the jpg images as posters.

The CSS gives the div wrapping the video a white background and a drop shadow, some javascript rotates the divs (JavaScript Rotate | KaisarCode) and randomised the margins between them and the white border width.

I also used the javascript to scale down the video to fit more across the page and css to set the page width to 1600 pixels (side scroll I am afraid).

when it’s not your turn

I also missed a few things out.

  • The files are big, converting them with miro made them bigger, I guess I could use ffmpeg to do a better job of that, I could also scale them down to the size they are displayed.
  • The videos do not play in Firefox on a mac, firefox does not support the video format in the video tag. I had a very quick try using mediaelement.js to add flash for firefox but it looked like it would be too much work to display properly. I could also convert all the files to ogg for firefox, I might try that in combonation with scaleing them down a bit at a later date.

Update: I’ve run all the videos first throught te commandline ffmpg to downsize them to 360×240 and then ffmpeg2theora to create ogg versions.

Dope on the damn table

So while some of this has been for self education around javascript and css there are a few ds106 style things that spring to mind from the exercise.

The supercuts get the parts of the video where a character is mentions, sometimes this is never when they are on screen. I had to use other parts of the movie to get posters for some characters. The supercuts let you focus on the character from other characters points of view and the POV of the writers and directors. Some characters I love and feel are important are not refered to much by name, the video file sizes gives a view of this, Ellis Carver’s video is tiny (I love how his character in season 1 hints of his growth during the wire as a whole).

Although I’ve now watched most of season 1 (third time round) I’ve struggled to watch with a critical eye, or even an eye to a gif, the programme is too absorbing and emotionally involving. It has reinforced the series as my favourite tv. I am especially noticing the parts when charcters show complexity beyond normal tv. Kima, presented very positivly, leads the charge to kick and beat a youth that hits the rather usless police Pogue (or Mahone). The emotion showed by the character at the end of episode 10 and the beginning of 11 is viceral, rewatching brings back the shock from the first viewing in a suprisingly powerful way.

Watching the supercuts allows you to step back a bit, pulls information about a character together in a suprising way letting you see the character and how their story is told in new light.