An Elephant a Day 2.0: elephant video

Saturday, 17 January 2015

Elephant No. 106: Elephants Never Forget

African forest elephant
Photo: Pal Teravagimov
Source: redOrbit

A couple of days ago, my friend Lucie Lamoureux sent me a link to a wonderful animated short by Alex Gendler and Avi Ofer.

It's only about five minutes long, but packs a lot of great information into those five minutes. Some of the information it contains actually seems to have been come from my original Elephant a Day blog, which is kind of cool.

Elephant Lore of the Day
Since the title of the short is Why Elephants Never Forget, today's elephant lore features a couple of memory-related stories from my original blog.

In the late nineteenth century, Toby the elephant was a popular attraction at Moore Park in Sydney, Australia. Toby could do a wide range of tricks, including removing her keeper's hat when asked, and ringing a handbell held in her trunk. Toby, like all elephants, also had a very good memory.

During a voyage along Australia's coast, a deckhand fed Toby an orange loaded with hot peppers. It was a cruel thing to do, given the sensitivity of an elephant's trunk and mouth. On a much later voyage, the same deckhand happened to be passing by, when Toby grabbed him with her trunk. She tried to dump him overboard, but he landed in the rigging and was saved.

Pangal the elephant showed a similar ability to remember an affront to his dignity. In the early nineteenth century, Pangal worked as an army pack elephant in India. Pangal was a remarkably clever elephant, and had decided that he was willing to carry only a certain amount of weight. If he was given a heavier load, he would simply pull off the excess and throw it on the ground. Pangal was by no means unwilling to carry things; he just had a clear idea of what was fair.

One day, the army quartermaster lost his temper at Pangal. He threw a tent peg at the elephant's head, yelled at him, then stormed off.

A few days later, as Pangal was walking from the camp to a waterhole, he happened to pass the quartermaster. Seizing the man in his trunk, Pangal placed him high in a tamarind tree overhanging the road. Pangal then calmly walked away, leaving the quartermaster clinging to the branches until rescued by members of his brigade.

Forest Elephant
Photo: Patricia Rosengrave
Source: University of Canterbury, Christchurch

To Support Elephant Welfare

World Wildlife Fund

World Society for the Protection of Animals

Performing Animal Welfare Society

Zoocheck

Bring the Elephant Home

African Wildlife Foundation

Elephants Without Borders

Save the Elephants

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

Elephant Nature Park (Thailand)

Wildlife Trust of India

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)

David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation

Big Life Foundation
The Asian Elephant Foundation

Sunday, 6 October 2013

Elephant No. 34: Music Video


Orphaned baby elephant with keeper, David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, Kenya. Source: http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/

I wasn't sure what to call this—mini-film, slide show, music video—so I settled for the latter. It's also a bit hard to say much about how I made it, since my process wasn't all that methodical.

Although I know how to use Final Cut Pro editing software, I opted to use iMovie for this project, because it's quick. I dislike many things about iMovie—the automatic save feature in particular—but Final Cut is more time-consuming to get it right, so I opted for iMovie today.

After a year or more of daily blogging about elephants, I have a vast mental bank of images, so it was relatively easy to source photographs from the Internet with a Google search. I also remembered to take down credit information to add to the end of my little film—although, if I were doing this professionally, I would obviously have to do more than add a credit. I hope those whose photographs I used won't mind for a blog project like this.

Next, I chose a piece of music I thought might work: "I'll Find My Way Home" by David Hobson, which I downloaded from iTunes.

After this, it was mostly a matter of sticking the photographs in a general order that seemed to work, moving them around to match the music, compressing or stretching them to fit logical breaks in the song, adding the Ken Burns effect to give the static photos a sense of movement, and generally fiddling around with it.

When I was happy with the image-song sequence, I added a quotation and credits at the end.

The total process took me three hours or so, which was about all the time I had. It has lots of flaws—and is maybe even a bit cheesy—but I'm happy with it.

If I'd had more time, I would have chosen higher-resolution photographs in some cases, and fussed around with it some more, maybe even creating some original music in Garage Band. Anyway, for better or worse, here it is. Because the viewer here is small and only of medium resolution, I've uploaded it to YouTube—my very first YouTube upload ever. You can see it on YouTube here.

Elephant Lore of the Day

Because I ran out of time today to research elephant lore, here's one of my favourite bits of lore from the original Elephant a Day blog. It was originally posted on March 21, 2012

I love this little story from Alex Edwards of Natural High Safaris. Last year at a safari camp in Tanzania's Katavi National Park, one of the normally well-behaved elephants in the area suddenly took to ripping the canvas flysheets on the camp's tents.

At first everyone assumed this was an accident, despite the fact that elephants are usually clever enough to pick their way over guy ropes and other obstacles with no trouble. The safari operators called in a tailor, who carefully sewed the tears in the sheets.

A day or two later, it happened again. This was repeated several times, until the guilty elephant was caught in the act. Resting his tusks on the flysheet at the back of a tent, he was gently pushing down on the canvas to make it rip. At first no one could figure out why this particular elephant had become so destructive. Then in occurred to them: he simply liked the noise of ripping canvas.

Because the flysheets could only be mended so many times, the safari operators came up with a clever solution. Instead of sewing the flysheets back together, they fastened on new pieces of canvas with Velcro®. The elephant still gets to enjoy the sound of tearing Velcro, but now it's easier to patch up.