It was the early Spring of 2013. I left Atlanta for the Cancun airport. I had been in Atlanta for the final four. Syracuse played and didn’t win. The idea had been to fly to Cancun, spend a few nights in Playa del Carmen and then head south toward Colombia. Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia. A boat around the Darian Gap. That was the plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It didn’t play out that way at all. I had only a backpack with very minimal supplies. All the better if I was robbed. That was the logic. And no real plan. Back then I never made anything other than the most vague of plans. All the better if I changed my mind or the conditions changed. Flexibility. Freedom. Again, that was the logic. I had been to Mexico many times before and Costa Rica and Panama. I would eventually find my way to Colombia on another trip. But that is another story. My Spanish was lousy but functional. I was experienced in loose travel. Booking places to stay and ways to get there on a moments notice. I had sorted out the required transportation and that it would be possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remember vividly my first view of the ocean in Playa, adjacent to the Cozumel ferry terminal, through an ADO bus window in the bus station across the street. It was choppy and that incredible greenish blue of the Caribbean. It was love at first sight. It was the end of the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I spent several weeks in Playa, finding a Spanish school with a dorm. Thirty-five dollars a night for lodging, four hours of lessons, breakfast and the comradery of the school environment. A small private room with communal bathrooms. A balcony. Playa Lingua was the school. It is now no longer. The buildings are now a small hotel that caters more to visitors from elsewhere in Mexico or other Latin American countries. I returned to the school for three-week stints three or so times a year for four years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The school had and Playa in general has more of a European connection, while Americans are all about Cancun. The school was tied in some capacity with a Norwegian university annex program. My classmates were most often Europeans: Norwegians, Germans, Brits, French, Irish, Italians, and probably another dozen European country affiliations, and Canadians, lots of Canadians. I was usually the only American. The school was also a hotel at that time and most guests were European, Canadian or Latin American.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Playa, unlike Cancun, doesn’t have a special tourist zone which is sharply differentiated from the rest of the town. It all grades together with more tourists near the water. The school was located a half-block off of the main tourist path, Quinta Avenida, at the center of town. It was the ideal location. I needed better and more clothes so I went to Walmart and the only shirts they had that fit me were the traditional shirts that waiters wear in Mexico. So there I would sit for four hours a day among the Norwegian women in my Mexican waiter’s outfit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the years that I went to the school, Playa changed and had become more and more sophisticated, more and more like the Los Angeles neighborhoods near the sea. It started to take off in a positive way, excellent Mexican and vegetarian restaurants, a pizza place run by Italians, coworking spaces that hosted digital nomads, beach front bars, little shuttle vans called colectivos that ran up and down the coast, for around two dollars, stopping to pick you up on the highway, to a beach where you swam with turtles in Akumal, to the ruins and beaches in Tulum, to several freshwater cenotes with tiny fish that nibbled your toes also along the same main road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The language school was haphazard. Everything in Spanish. Often other students didn’t speak English and the instructors did not. I would arrive for my three weeks and be put in one of three classes depending on which was closest to my level at the time. So I jumped around a bit. Continuity is important in language learning but not essential. The only time I was upset about it was when I was placed in a class with one other student, a German “profesor de Espanol” and we were tasked with tackling the horror of the subjuntivo together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So many interesting things came my way there: attending the birthday party of a security guard’s mother where everyone else was quite old and generally spoke only Mayan, listening to trumpet players playing Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain from several rooftops around the school into the early morning during a jazz festival on the beach, a woman from somewhere in eastern Europe who spent six months there and never learned any Spanish even though most of her time was spent dating Mexican men, a time when I decided only to speak Spanish for three weeks and found myself in an awkward place where I lost my English and didn’t yet have adequate Spanish, without a language one can not think, the Canadian woman who spoke Spanish with a Russian accent, or the guitarist trained in classical Spanish guitar at a conservatory in Mexico City who played Hotel California in a quiet special way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Juan was the breakfast cook who had long straight black hair half way down his back and worked four jobs. Carolina ran the part of the school where Mexican and international kids were taught English. She always found a place for me and managed to free up my room when I emailed. The two housekeeping women kept my ventalodor, a box window fan I bought at Walmart, for me in-between visits. There was the security guard who liked to chat in Spanish, the son of the coroner of London who worked on yachts out of an Island in Honduras, an older SUNY Buffalo college professor who spent his retirement winters in Playa and who had just lost his wife and went to the school so as not to be alone, the woman Doctor from Saskatchewan, the French woman scuba-diver who was there to start a diving business, the snooty professor of aesthetics from Montreal, the woman from Rome who spoke absolutely perfect British English, the volatile gentleman who had private lessons and periodically screamed at his teacher, from Milan and sent to Mexico to learn Spanish by an Italian lingerie brand, the Ladies from British Columbia and, Yanet, one of my two teachers, who told long and involved stories of the people of Playa and gossiped with the Norwegian women, and the other, the kind and gracious Sergio, who commuted all the way from Cancun every day. A myriad of eccentricity from all over the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It wasn’t a fancy place at all. A bit run down. But it was extremely comfortable. Think of Sisyphus happy. My days involved getting up and showering, having a quick breakfast, four hours of school, a two-mile walk along the water or La Quinta to my favorite beach, a frozen yogurt cone, laying on the sand and body surfing, the two-mile walk back, dinner, wine and homework. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It all felt a lot like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”. I loved it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately as things in Mexico became more difficult for a whole host of reasons I moved on to other adventures. I will always cherish my days and nights there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wish I would have continued photographing and making video during that time but I didn’t. I was all about learning the language. Playa Lingua was an opportunity to capture something quite special that I missed. But ironically, I do have language to capture it all. I did take a few photos but those have been lost and I do have some video from my first week there. From before I found the school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve been wondering what to do with it and decided to put together a small project I’ve been considering since starting experimenting with animating still photographs in AI in Lightroom. The result is a collage which contains the video broken into several sections, animations of quite-old scientific illustrations of the flora and fauna of Quintana Roo and the Yucatan, and Mexican-flavored still photography from Unsplash, Music from Artlist, sounds from Freesound, and maps I’ve styled from Open Street Map. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The main reason for putting this together has been to bring myself up to speed with a lot of new features that are coming to many Adobe programs. Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere Pro were all used extensively in making the video. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The new color panel in Premiere beta was used to edit the base videos. I have mixed feelings about that. But I realize that taking stills from video in Premiere, processing these in Photoshop, generating LUT’s and using these in Premiere still works. There is a LUT input in the new process. The color panel features will take a little getting used to. I find the controls to be difficult to use. I do find the ability to color sequences and clips independently to be a strong positive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another Premiere feature that I used extensively is AI supported masking and that worked extremely well and quickly. When I first set up the project I set up the file system expecting to have to rotoscope all of the animated illustrations in After Effects which could have been a painful process. After using the new masking in After Effects a few times I tried it in Premiere and was greatly impressed. Suffice it to say that masking is no longer a thing. It is just part of the flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also I find the incorporation of Film Impact effects and transitions in Premiere to be really great. These provide a lot of capability that used to be available only in After Effects and often only with third party plugins. And they just work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another simple thing is the link between Premiere and After Effects now works effortlessly and can be set up with a really logical file system. I haven’t found that to be the case in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In After Effects I found the overall performance to be substantially improved. Masking is now much easier than it used to be but that is in part less important because masking can now quite easily be performed in Premiere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The weird intricacies of After Effects remain. I am good with that because I know them. To some extent it is losing its ground to Premiere. A few things that were an obvious go to for After Effects have now moved over to Premiere. Masking is chief among those. I used variable fonts in After Effects and found it fine but not earth shattering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Lightroom I created the animated images based on old illustrations. I continue to be amazed. In Illustrator I created the maps in the video using pdf files exported from Open Street Map. This involves deleting a lot of unwanted stuff. Creating new folders for each map feature you would like to preserve and moving the different types of features into the new folders, styling them and rasterizing what is left. Then placing paper textures beneath the rasterized image and using blend modes to make it work. This all performs well but took a while to figure out. Open Street Map will be my go to for creating maps from now on. It can be a little frustrating. But it works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And finally, the video:<\/p>\n\n\n\n