Bill Streeter

Free St. Louis flag Graphics (vector, png, jpg and gif)

Bill Streeter — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:10:47 +0000

In working on several St. Louis themed projects over the years I’ve often found myself in need of a good clean graphic of the official flag of the City of St. Louis. Unfortunately there are precious few of these graphics available around online. The ones that are available are low resolution jpgs that don’t scale well for printing purposes. So a couple of years back I sat down and decided to create my own nice vector version of the flag. I recently came across this recently while tidying up some files on my hard drive and decided to make them available to anyone else who needed them. So here they are. I made several versions, AI, EPS, SVG, PNG, JPG and GIF and they are all packed up in this zip file. Take them and use them, I am making them public domain as all public symbols should be. My version is slightly different than many versions you might see around on the internet–mainly in the fleur de lis which is in better shape than a lot of them. I think that a lot of the STL flag graphics you see around are the result of generations of analoge copies that have caused the fleur de lis to degrade and become less defined.

Anyway consider this my little gift to you. Enjoy in good health.

By the way here is a little history on the flag and how it came to be. It may not be as old as you think. The flag was designed in the late 1960′s by a college professor named Theodore Sizer, ~~who died just last year.~~ (Correction: Theodore Sizer the designer of the flag, passed in 1967, it was his son that died last year. Thanks to his grandson left a kind correction in the comments below) From Wikipedia:

The flag of St. Louis, Missouri was designed by Yale Universityprofessor Theodore Sizer. The flag is often called the “Three Rivers” flag, symbolizing the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and the Meramecrivers near St. Louis. The intersection of the blue lines is covered by afleur-de-lis, which symbolizes St. Louis’s French heritage. Although the flag is strictly the municipal flag of St. Louis, it is sometimes flown over government buildings in St. Louis County.

Revised Code of the City of St. Louis, (Section 1.20.010)

“The design submitted by Professor Emeritus Theodore Sizer, Pursuivant of Arms at Yale university, and now on file in the office of the City register is approved, adopted and designated as the official flag of the City. The flag with a solid red background has two broad heraldic wavy bars, colored blue and white, extending from the left top and bottom corners toward left center where they join and continue as one to the center right edge. This symbolizes the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Over the point of confluence a round golden disk upon which is the fleur-de-lis of France (blue) calling attention to the French background of the early city and more particularly to St. Louis of France for whom the City is named. The golden disk represents the City and/or the Louisiana Purchase. (Heraldically, the disk is a “bezant” or Byzantine coin signifying, money or simply purchase.)

The flag’s colors recall those of Spain (red and yellow or gold), Bourbon France (white and gold), Napoleonic and Republican France (blue, white and red), and the United States of America (red, white, and blue).”

Kinetic Typography Experiment

Bill Streeter — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:09:16 +0000

I’ve always admired some of the more elaborate kinetic typography examples out there. They’re good to watch if you’re looking for examples of creative things that you can do with type and graphics with modern tools. There are a lot of bad examples of it out there too. The trick, I think, to making a successful one, is to discover a literal or metaphorical visual theme that complements the speech you are animating and be consistent with it.

I thought I’d give it a shot. It’s not quite as elaborate as some I’ve seen, but I think it’s effective. It’s the famous paper bag speech from Major (Bunny) Colvin from HBO’s The Wire (the greatest TV show ever), so given his cop like manner and cadence of speech, I don’t think it required a lot of movement. In fact I tried a version with a lot of movement and it didn’t really work very well at all. And I think the choice of a brown paper bag texture was obvious, but I think it works. Sometimes the obvious choice is best.

Anyway here it is for what it’s worth. I would like to do more of these, but I don’t know when I’ll have time. It was fun to work on and I learned some new stuff. Oh an in case you’re wondering; I did the whole project in Apple Motion.

An Entire Radio Program About Type

Bill Streeter — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:58:57 +0000

This is sort of a typophiles wet dream. An hour of radio dedicated to a discussion of Typography. One surprising take away is that the Coca-Cola logo is based on someone’s actual handwriting who was trained in a kind of penmanship called Spencer Writing. There is also an interview with Matthew Carter the type designer responsible for Verdana as well as Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones who designed the ‘Obama’ font Gotham. Here is the link to the show page: http://www.wpr.org/book/091101b.cfm

Update: It’s come to my attention that the main link on that page is to a Real Audio stream of the program (who still uses Real?). I heard it via their podcast I’m subscribed to, so here is the direct link to the podcast MP3 File.

Brick By Chance and Fortune

Bill Streeter — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:07:16 +0000

First official trailer for Brick by Chance and Fortune the documentary I’ve been working on since last fall about St. Louis brick. We’re currently halfway through production and hope to have the final cut done by fall 2010. Follow our progress at our site stlbrickfilm.com

Bill Streeter
Director/Producer/
Editor

Jeannette Hoss
Managing Producer

Virginia Lee Hunter
Director of Photography

B. Bowls MacLean
Assistant Director of Photography

Greer Lange
Assistant Editor

Original Music by:
Pokey LaFarge & Mat Wilson

Music Supervisor:
Matt Giant

This film is being produced with a generous grant from the Commission for Access and Local Original Programming (CALOP).

The Amazing Maysles Brothers

Bill Streeter — Wed, 26 May 2010 03:40:06 +0000

via youtube.com

I watched this movie recently.

It started out with the idea that I would watch all of the Rolling Stones concert movies but I got sidetracked into watching the Maysles brothers films. I’m sorta taken with their work. Not just because it’s the infamous Stones at Altamonte concert, but for technical reasons.

The concert footage in this film was shot with very primitive 16mm film cameras with a separate sound recordist. So there were 18 two man crews covering this concert. They didn’t even have simpte back then. They had to slate everything with markers and notepads and the editor had to manually identify each roll of film and match it to the correct audio. And the longest they could shoot a on a reel was about 10 minutes. One of the brothers, Albert Maysles, said on the DVD commentary that he built his own camera rig to make it easier to “run and gun.” It sounds to me that he built some kind of shoulder rig with a mirror that allowed him to see his f-stop settings while he was shooting. He also built some kind of follow focus mechanism. Given all the technical limitations that they had to overcome, it’s amazing they shot anything. A couple of other tid bits gleened from the commentary was that they eschewed zoom lenses (which were fairly new technology at the time) in favor of normal primes, so that close-ups that appear in the film are there because the camera was actually close to the subject.

This might be their most famous film, but their film Grey Gardens has also been getting a lot of attention in recent years. I don’t think a lot of people have seen or even know of their film Salesman which is a quite brilliant documentary that follows Bible salesmen on their rounds in the mid 1960′s. Here’s a clip:

They’re considered to be the progenitors of a documentary style called Direct Cinema where a subject is shot in a cinéma vérité style (handheld following the subject) but the filmmaker’s goal in Direct Cinema is to capture the subject and not get involved with questions or interviews–only to capture what happens. It was a breakthrough in filmmaking in the 1960′s and only made possible because portable film cameras were invented that could be carried around and used at the same time. No doubt modern reality TV owes a lot to this style of fimmaking.

Posted via web from Bill’s posterous

Revisit and Re-Read: The Great American Bubble Machine PT.1 of 5

Bill Streeter — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 03:35:02 +0000

via youtube.com

Good to go back and watch this video made nearly a year ago and read the article that Taibbi is talking about here– especially after the indictments last week. You can download Taibbi’s RS piece here as a PDF: www.swissamerica.com/reports/20090702085037.pdf

Posted via web from Bill’s posterous

I would like an ISPIAO card please (Orson Welles on privacy)

Bill Streeter — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:10:54 +0000

via wellesnet.com

This is to certify that the bearer is a member of the human race. All relevant information is to be found in his passport. And except when there is good reason for suspecting him of some crime, he will refuse to submit to police interrogation, on the grounds that any such interrogation is an intolerable nuisance. And life being as short as it is, a waste of time. Any infringement on his privacy, or interference with his liberty, any assault, however petty, against his dignity as a human being, will be rigorously prosecuted by the undersigned, I.S.[sic].P.I.A.O. That would be the International Association for the Protection of the Individual Against Officialdom. If any such outfit is ever organized, you can put me down as a charter member…

In light of Facebook’s announcement today.

Posted via web from Bill’s posterous

Amazing movie title sequence “How We Built Britain” pretty damn cool …

Bill Streeter — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:19:32 +0000

via youtube.com

Sorry the Youtube quality on this is so low, but I’ve been researching title sequences lately and I came across this beauty. If you want to see it with more of it’s glory intact look at it here: http://www.artofthetitle.com/2009/11/30/how-we-built-britain/

Posted via web from Bill’s posterous

WTTW Channel 11 – Wild Chicago – “Stephen Colbert Cameo” (1990)

Bill Streeter — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:36:24 +0000

via youtube.com

This is one of my favorite locally produced TV shows. This segment was from 1990. Mind you, this was on PUBLIC TV–not on commercial television and not public access–this was from the local PBS affiliate in Chicago; Channel 11. Now that I live in St. Louis it’s hard for me to imagine the local PBS affiliate here, Channel 9 doing something this … um … wild.

Posted via web from Bill’s posterous

Upcoming Events Where I’ll Be Showing my Mug

Bill Streeter — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:59:24 +0000

Photo by Chuck Olsen

I have a few events where I’m booked to show my mug at this fall. The First is tomorrow. I’ll be sitting on a panel to discuss Old Media vs. New Media at the montly Social Media Club of St. Louis meeting. Get the details here. The panel will include Tim Eby Director and General Manager at 90.7 KWMU-FM – NPR, Craig Cheatham Investigative Reporter at Channel 4 News – KMOV, Erica Smith Multimedia producer at St. Louis Post Dispatch, and Mike Flynn Blogger at PunchingKitty.com, Web Developer, in addition to myself.

On Saturday I’ll be on another panel that will be part of the PlayFest STL 2009 event. The session is called Social Networking: Why Facebook and Twitter Aren’t Just a Fad and you can get details about this event here.

On October 7th I’ll be speaking to media students at St. Louis Community College at the Merrimac Campus. Meramec Campus at 10 am. I’m not certain that this event will be posted on their site or not. If it is I’ll update this post with a link.

And on October 16th and 17th I’ll be conducting a video training practicum in San Fancisco as part of VideoCamp SF. Follow the link for more details.