nprfreshair:

ratsoff:

ilovecharts.

Steve Miller on World Cafe Live

In 2004, I won a pitching contest at the Banff TV festival, for the film that would eventually become Rip. It was called the “New Players Pitch”, and the prize was a bunch of film from Kodak. I got a whole bunch of 16mm, which I used for some sequences in Rip, and a whole bunch of Super8. I used the Super8 on various experimental things, but a box of Kodachrome (K40) sat around in the fridge at EyeSteelFilm for years and years.

Kodak discontinued making the stock a few years back, and then eventually outsourced development to a shop in Kansas. Dwayne’s Photo announced they would process the last roll at the end of 2010. Knowing all this, I dug out the last roll just before I moved away from Montreal last September, and filmed a day with my daughter Layla in the park. I forgot I had done that, and sometime around the middle of December found the roll, and rushed it Fedex to Dwayne’s.

As far as I know, Layla is the last kid on Kodachrome.

Unfortunately, the film got pretty degraded in that crummy fridge, and so it isn’t the full Kodachrome glory, but I still love the look of the stock and will really miss it.

tpdsaa:

Submitted by Brooklyn_Dodger.

I’ve been working on and off for many months on a video to explain Mozilla to the uninitiated. The home for the video is now on the Get Involved page of the mozilla.org site, and I’m excited that it will be part of a process for getting people excited about pitching in at Mozilla. You can watch it below: mega hats off to Rainer Cvillink, Mozilla’s in-house video wizard, for all the great camera work, and to Jenn Strom for editing and motion grapnics.

Everyone is still recovering a bit from Buttercamp. Anna Sobiepanek beat us all to it with a great recap of the event, but let me say how thankful I am for the extraordinary effort the participants put into the day. We learned a lot about how to do events like these, and definitely left wanting to do more.

As Anna mentioned in her blog, our biggest lessons were a) the need for designers to be present, and b) that we should probably do these over two days. Scott Downe benefited from teaming with Zach Liberman, and mentioned that 2 developers are crucial for a team, so that if one struggles with a blocker, the other can forge ahead. Well noted.

Demos:

Note: these demos will all require a modern browser, may not work for you at all, and are the product of one day’s work.
GML + Popcorn:

http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/sdowne/popcornGML/gml+popcorn/
Integrating the Graffiti Markup Language (GML) XML standard with timed popcorn events.

Robots:
An experiment with “node” style decision forking using popcorn
http://robothaus.org/robots/

#18daysinEgypt:
To have popcorn events appear in specific locations on a full screen video, Brian Chirls wrote a popup video plugin. Video events that appear cause the main video to lower volume and loop.
http://code.chirls.com/buttercamp/

Digital Diaspora Road Show:
Accompanying the feature documentary Through A Lens Darkly, filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris creates “Roadshows” were participants explore how photography connects them to their heritage. This demo made extensive use of the Butter application, and to facilitate multiple editors, Boaz Sender added import/export functionality to the edge version of Butter.
http://dev.webmademovies.org/lensdarkly/
note: this demo does not work in Firefox due to mp4 only source.

Kapor Center Mural Unveiling
Trevor Parham used Butter initially for data entry, but then decided to focus on CSS and layout to create this compelling use case for popcorn: an annotated version of a recent event at the Kapor Center.
http://kaporcenter.org/files/video/

TubeyLoops
A modified version of PatternSketch, which controls videos via popcorn to create a video remix machine.
http://www.tubeyloops.com/tubeyloops/
note: use keyboard keys Q W E R to control video.

In addition to these demos, other plugins, connections, and starts of new projects were forged. Thanks to ITP, the Center for Development of Open Technology, Bocoup and Eyebeam for helping facilitate this meeting of great minds.

Buttercamp was:

Michael McCarthy Henrik Moltke Yasmin Elayat Kirby Ferguson Peter Asaro Peter Kaufman Ann Bennet Thomas Allen Harris Woo Cho Anna Sobiepanek Baowen Huang Ben Moskowitz Boaz Sender Bobby Richter Brett Gaylor Brian Chirls Elad Schanin Fred Truman Greg Dorsainville Ingrid Kopp Jeff Howard Jeremy Diamond Jonathan McIntosh Matt Thompson Rick Waldron Scott Downe Todd Carter Trevor Parham Yujin Yi Zachary Leiberman

I’m very happy to announce that Bobby Richter is joining the Web Made Movies team as Creative Technical Lead. Already a Mozilla contributor, having worked with the #audio team on a variety of demos and libraries, Bobby is joining us to, as he writes on his about page, “make Web Made Movie’s ideas tangible as quick as possible”. Bobby’s job will be diverse: contributing to the popcorn.js community, advancing the Butter platform, and helping to create magnetic productions as outlined in our 2011 goals.

Bobby brings a range of experience – from helping to create the NFB’s award winning Out My Window, to a stint at Electronic Arts, Bobby has both skill and experience that all of us on the media team are thrilled to have among our nascent group.

During our recruiting conversations, I was particularly excited about his experience with WebGL, and these discussions manifested themselves in a demo. Please check it out here – its an early peek at integration WebGL and Popcorn, via an homage to Mozilla’s JavaScript jedi master Brendan Eich.

Say hello to Bobby over at his blog, and you can find him on irc.mozilla.org in the #popcorn channel as “richter”, or sometimes under has super hero name, secretrobotron. Welcome, Bobby!

As a part of our webmademovies.org relaunch, I thought I’d create a screencast of Butter, the authoring environment for popcorn.js. What do you think?

Two things I learned this week:

1) Exercise caution when giving 12 high school students access to an etherpad that is projected against a wall

2) The Bay Area Coalition (BAVC)’s Factory program for youth is srs bizness

Mozilla has partnered up with the Bay Area Video Coalition and Zero Divide to implement the technologies coming out of Web Made Movies into the current curriculum of The Factory, a video collective for motivated youth in the Bay.

Ben Moskowitz and I came to meet members of the collective, and were joined by our Mozilla colleagues Atul Varna and Lukas Blakk. Lukas had recently been working with teenage girls at the Dare 2 B Digital Conference, addressing the gender gap in computer science, and Atul has been working on the Hackasaurus project with Drumbeat, a set of tools to encourage kids to hack the web. The 2 days at BAVC were for us a way to test some of our thinking about “web literacy”, to test the Butter authoring tool, and to meet the youth at BAVC. We were hoping that they’d understand what we were banging on about after the two days and would be inspired to bring a hacker ethic to their projects.

Our first excercise was to wake the HACKASAURUS. Everyone checked out the X-Ray Goggles, a fantastic tool that lets you see how a web page is put together, and modify elements of it. Paired with HTMLpad.org, which renders HTML typed into an Etherpad of the same name (try it - its awesome), the Hackasaurus tools teach the user that the web really is made up of many simple parts. To help visualize things, students printed out their favourite websites, cut them up, pasted them back together, and re-created their cutups in HTML. Its a great basis on which to start playing with popcorn.js - it puts one in the mindspace to consider “how can I hack this video?”.

Fortunately, our friends at Bocoup had pushed some last minute changes to Butter, the authoring tool for popcorn, and it was ready enough to be tested by the group. We loaded up one of their productions from last year, “The List”, which was a dramatization of the military recruitment that happens when students take standardized tests. There was a lot of factual information in the video, so it was a perfect test bed for popcorn.

The students formed groups and each took a section of The List and pulled it into Butter. They added semantic data, some hacked with Ben a method for displaying images on top of the frame, others linked to an HTML page that let users opt-out of recruitment, others brought in photos from flickr, articles from Wikipedia and maps of their school on Google Maps. Lukas wrote a quick script that would chain the videos together, and then we had a screening at the last minute!

You can watch the completed movies here - keep in mind these were created in two hours by a group that had never written any HTML, so we were well impressed.

One of the great things that came out of the workshop was a huge list of bugs for popcorn and butter created by the students that we can now bring back to the development community. We’re looking forward to coming back in April and working with The Factory through till the fall!

Along with my other colleagues at Mozilla, I’ve been doing a lot of work lately thinking about what the rest of 2011 holds. It’s been great to read posts by Ben Moskowitz, Phillip Smith and Nathaniel James as they describe and forecast their work on the Knight/Mozilla Technology Partnership. It’s painting a great picture of Mozilla’s commitment to transforming media and journalism - I thought I’d share my plans as well in the video above.

This past week, I was fortunate to be part of a great collaboration between Mozilla and the PBS Newshour team, creating an annotated version of Barack Obama’s State of The Union Speech using popcorn.js. While the demo itself is fairly humble, its actually quite an accomplishment given that we had only met the Newsroom staff the day of the speech during a meeting at the Corporation For Public Broadcasting. I think the Newshour team experienced the power of the open web first hand - a talented group of developers were able to collaborate quickly and produce something of high quality (not unlike a tv newsroom). So much so that we’ve begun a conversation on PBS to use popcorn.js in all of their future analysis.

The whole experience was a great example of the kind of innovation that we’re trying to foster with Web Made Movies: video producers come up with new use cases for technology , and the resulting code is put in a repository for future use. It’s proof that HTML5 video is a great space to be exploring.

David Humphrey and PBS Newshour recently blogged about their experiences. I thought I’d provide a blow by blow.

January 25th, 2011
Washington, DC: Ben Moskowitz, Nicholas Reville, Geoffrey MacDougall and myself are pacing around a presentation room at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We’ve come to express why we think there is natural alignment between public media and the open web.

10:00
A little bleary from travel, a previous day of meetings, and bad breakfast joint coffee, we meet a room full of people involved in American public media - PBS affiliate stations, the PBS Newshour team, National Public Radio, and others.

We had created some demos over the previous 2 weeks - including this popcorn treatment of a PBS Newshour piece on Hait (only the first several minutes are annotated). We also experimented with the WGBH Open Vault, creating a parser for their metadata schema that would translate into popcorn data (due to mp4 video, works only in webkit browsers. Ben and his cousin created this example video report, based on lesson plans in the PBS Newshour piece on Haiti. Nicholas at PCF also showed the results of a translation party that Universal Subtitles had hosted with PBS Newshour.

We felt the presentation went well - the room was definitely thinking about the possibilities present in popcorn, and immediately grasped the advantage of adopting Universal Subtitles.

11:30
After the speech, PBS Newshour correspondent Hari Sreenivasan remarked how they wished they had it for the State of The Union address. “Isn’t that tonight? Someone asked” Hari nods. A wireframe is sketched out.

3:00
We’re with Travis Daub, the Newshour’s digital producer. He’s on the phone getting the run down on when the video of the president’s speech will be on Youtube. He says midnight, and analysis will come in throughout the evening These news people stay up all night, too!

We hop on the popcorn irc channel (link). I ask David Humphrey at CDOT if he is up for bringing popcorn.js to the State of The Union. He laughs, of course he is. He asks if Anna Sobiepanek and Scott Downe who are co-op students at Seneca if they are in - you bet. Rick Waldron, a javascript ninja at Bocoup picks up on what is happening and starts writing code immediately based on the spec. Ben Moskowitz and I rush to keep up, posting wireframes, and communicating with Dean Jensen at PCF / Universal Subtitles who is co-ordinating the transcript that will be instumental in timing the analysis. Travis logs into IRC from his iphone in a cab.

7:00
Robert Bole for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting orders some Chinese food.

9:00
75% of the code necessary to convert PBS’ annotation system to popcorn. The wireframes are posted. Its gonna pull in twitter, have chapter selectors, wash your car, and email Obama. This is going to be easy. Lets watch the speech.

10:30
Travis starts uploading the video.

11:00
Snag. The encoded video doesn’t have audio. Travis will have to start again, and do it twice for browser compatability. Ouch. The video is so long that the encoding process is painful.

11:15
New snag. Servers seem to be failing.

1:00
Multiple snags. Grumpiness sets in. Travis valiantly posting new versions. Popcorn hackers have the analysis working with a dummy video - just waiting for the pieces to come together.

3:00 
The pieces are not coming together. The night is called.

The next day
A snow storm, a train travel, multiple taxis and subways, a hamburger at a breakfast spot - next thing you know its midnight again. Is it working yet? No, it is not. Inconsistencies in the transcript. Hotel Wifi killing us. Must sleep.

With a final push, and additional work in the morning, the bugs are ironed out. Vanessa Dennis at PBS Newshour adds styling and pushes to their blog on the front page. My favourite quote from theirblog:

“The Web is changing, and we at the PBS Newshour are changing with it through experiments like these.”

Experiments like these can be exhausting, but the thing I love about working with Mozilla is that we make change by building things. It feels great that Web Made Movies is really starting to accomplish this.

I’m very excited! I was just sent some very cool wireframes from Al Macdonald (aka F1LT3R), developer extraordinaire at Bocoup. He and others at the Boston-based Javascript house are in full stride working on the next release of popcorn.js and the first release of the Graphical User Interface for developing popcorn pages that we like to call Butter.

The goal for butter is that anyone with a video anywhere on the web can build HTML5 video pages that incorporate other elements of the web – allowing non-developers to create what my fellow Mozillian Tristan Nitot has dubbed “Hypervideo”.

In the new version of popcorn (its only version 0.2, so still a ways to go), we are moving all of the functionality from the previous version into plugins. This is a timely step towards a more open infrastructure that will allow any developer to write a plugin that will work with popcorn.js, and then by extension, Butter. So while the first plugins we have developed are for popular sites and services such as twitter, flickr and wikipedia, now anyone can create a plugin to support identica, open street maps, or whatever new thing the web churns out tomorrow. We have big plans for butter, and as we progress towards a 1.0 release in 2011 there will be much more functionality.

Check out our evolving project scope on our etherpad.

We have a goal for popcorn to be part of an open media ecosystem – a great web app and development platform that creators can add to the growing list of HTML5 tools that are available to them. We’ve been very inspired by projects like processing.js and Universal Subtitles that illustrate the advantages of federated and collaborative systems for creating culture that is truly OF the web. We are very early in that process and of course could use all the help we can get!

One of our next goals is to make it more clear how contributors can get involved – the best page for this is at www.webmademovies.org, where you can join our mailing list, talk in IRC or pick up a bug on our Lighthouse issue tracker.

On a personal note, this has been a great learning experience for me, as I’ve seen the power of the open web play out in realtime – a seed of an idea (what if a video could trigger events in a web page?) gets a proof of concept demo, which is turned into a library, which is now being turned into a product that we hope a lot of people will get behind. It’s been inspiring to see students from Seneca College working side by side with seasoned professionals towards a goal that will benefit the web, and makes me happy to be part of Mozilla.

Please stay tuned, and also check out Bocoup’s post on the subject, as well as Scott Downe’s recap of the experience from his end at Seneca, as well as Anna Sobiepanek’s thoughts on the refactoring for 0.2. We’re planning a release just in time for Christmas!

Last week, in collaboration with David Humphrey, I ran the Video Lab at the Mozilla Drumbeat festival in Barcelona. I’m still recovering, so this post is a bit late, but a week has actually given me some perspective on why events like this are necessary crucibles for innovation.

Everything we’ve achieved so far within the Web Made Movies project has been the result of intense collaboration over a short period of time. The popcorn.js library was created in a span of only two weeks, with half of this time devoted to creating our first demo (screen capture embedded below).

The forcing function of this demo was the Mozilla Summit - a gathering of the entire Mozilla community in Whistler, BC. It really opened my eyes to the degree to which demos drive the developer community - showing our demo at the summit was the moment we moved from “hand waving arty types” to “people actually trying to do something” in the eyes of the developers in the room. This will be crucial as we begin to move from “demo or die” mode towards shipping software.

Our next event was the Open Video Conference in New York. In the run up to this event, we knew that we were meeting with folks from the Public Broadcasting community in the US, so we wanted to show how open video technologies have a competitive advantage in that they can be quickly iterated upon. So Scott Downe and Anna Sobiepanek created two quick demos - one of a test integration between popcorn.js and Universal Subtitles (video below), and Lev Feels Fine, a an experiment in data-driven narrative.

In the run up to the Barcelona event, we knew we needed to think about how the open video tools we were developing could be used in education. I knew that Mark Surman’s son Tristan made video tutorials for video games, so I asked him and Mark for a “video book report” around a novel he was currently reading, and then we layered popcorn.js on top of his video - see the results. It was a great penny-drop for many people, illustrating how the web could be a canvas for students to create their own multi-media essays and reports.

When David and I arrived in Barcelona, we knew we’d have to show something on the first day to get people thinking. So we recorded some video of the people who we’d shared a “space wranglers” meeting with in Plaza del Ángel and asked them where they were from. David went back to his hotel to recover from jet lag, but hacked together a demo that mashed the video with Google Maps and Wikipedia (video version below).

Popcorn.js Demo: Google Maps API and Wikipedia from David Humphrey on Vimeo.

Our mission was to create something while in Barcelona - a lofty goal for these types of events, and one that depended on a delicate mix of developers, filmmakers, designers and educators showing up. As luck would have it, they did!

Over our first day we had an overview of HTML5 video technologies, and split into several breakout groups to brainstorm what we could build in our second day. We also had a visit from Aza Raskin, the creative lead for Firefox at the Mozilla Corporation, who did a talk he called “How to prototype and influence people”. It was fun and drew a pretty big crowd. The talk is below, and was picked up by BoingBoing after the conference, which was fun.

Rapid Prototyping with Aza Raskin from Dan Braghis on Vimeo.

So after some facilitation, it was decided that we would work on two projects: A meta-data demo that overlays Dublin Core data on to videos (requires Firefox 4 beta or nighties), the creation of which was certainly influenced by the fact that so many librarians and academics at the conference were expressing the lack of tools like this.

Our second creation was a short web made movie exploring the Future Of Education. The video was shot before lunch, edited, then layered with the twitter hashtag #futureofeducation (which didn’t exist the day before), and javcascript and css was hacked to overlay images from the evolving #drumbeat flickr hashtag. It isn’t exactly what everyone imagined (when does that ever happen anyway?), but remains a great outcome and a compelling piece of content by any standard.

Drumbeat “Future of Education” Demo from David Humphrey on Vimeo.

I know both projects will continue to be improved by this talented group that came together to hack, create, play and collaborate.

And as far as forcing functions, for me it has reinforced a need to improve the popcorn.js library, to create documentation, more demos, better code, to not loose sight of the artistic component of our project, and to have more events like these. The event has encouraged me to publish more, to find new collaborators, to advance the state of Open Source Cinema, to develop new forms and new languages, and to follow through on the promise of Web Made Movies - to bring developers and filmmakers together in a collaborative environment. Stay tuned for our next forcing function: 2011.

Galiano is amazing minus one fact: it has spotty Internet coverage. DSL and cable only cover the southern end of the island, where the population is most dense.

I live in the middle of the island. The only pre-existing option then is dialup (not an option) or 3G. However, as I soon discovered tethering my phone, the speeds aren’t great and my 6gb/month cap would quickly expire with only basic browsing.

I knew a third option existed - Gulf Islands Wireless, a company that was recently sold to a man named Sigfried Luft (note - Sig has since relaunched the service as Beacon Wireless). I tracked him down, called him up, and he was sitting on my porch a day later after driving over in a boat from Saltspring. And he brought an antenna.

Attached to that antenna is an awesome little unit called a Bullet from Ubiquity Networks. Believe it or not there is a computer running Linux inside that.

He showed me some photos of the transmitter on Mount Bruce - island style ISP, mon!

Sig took it up to my balcony and pointed it towards Mount Bruce on Saltspring Island, right across Trincomali Channel. Unfortunately, it being foggy, we could not see the mountain.

My cousin Justin stopped by, a fellow geek, and gave Sig some instruction on the finer points of crimping Cat5 cable. Justin does satellite and network installs throughout the Gulf Islands.

Hooked it all up.

Plugged it into Sig’s MacBook - you can access the bullet’s interface through the browser (Sig was unfortunately using Safari - I forgave him).

Getting a decent signal at -72 db (we were shooting for -65, the lower the better).

We did not obey regulatory power.

Holy shit we’re on the Internet. Awaiting the moment of truth….

5mb/s down! 3mb and change up! That’s better than I had in Montreal! Huzzah!

Fog settled later in the day - the signal is coming from that mountain over there.

And the real test. Nice.

Thanks to the efforts of Anna Sobiepanek and Scott Downe, I’m happy to invite you to try out the latest experiment from Web Made Movies. As outlined in an earlier post, we wanted to pay homage to both the Kuleshov Effect and We Feel Fine. This demo is an experiment in merging the traditions of cinema with the emerging ideas of the web.

Of course, we know that this demo by itself has limited emotional and narrative impact - but as with everything in the Web Made Movies project, our idea is to experiment at the fringes, hoping that other filmmakers and developers will both build on our work, but also bring their own projects and ideas into our lab-in-progress. Please do contact us if this sparks an idea that you would like to pursue. We’re open :)

Visit the demo!

From early on in the popcorn.js process, we’ve been imagining BUTTER - an easy way for non-coders to be able to add metadata to their videos. Currently, popcorn.js uses an external XML file (though we’ll be switching to JSON in our next releases). Neither of these formats are reasonable for lay video creators to use, so discussion of a front end has been in the works for months.

However, looking at the amazing work done by the Participatory Culture Foundation on Universal Subtitles, we thought this interface would be great to experiment with, and so they were nice enough to add support for metadata in the language drop down on their staging site. Scott Downe and Adam Duston are responsible for this early work, which you can see a screencast of below.

As the Open Video Conference in New York draws closer (Oct 1-3), we’re excited to announce our hack day on Sunday October 3rd.

The Web Made Movies hack day is a chance for filmmakers, developers and anyone interested in creating Open Video to turn the inspiration of OVC into action.

Are you a videomaker?
Its a great opportunity to meet with people who can help you explore the potential of HTML5 video – for instance, applying the Popcorn.js video library to your videos to pull data from flickr, twitter, wikiPedia and Google Maps into your video experiences.

Are you a software developer?
Meet with the folks who have created the Popcorn.js library and brainstorm how to improve and expand its scope. Meet with like-minded developers who need help or have some to offer. Learn and teach.

Just curious?
We’ll be featuring a series of short talks and presentations that will spark your imagination and have you leaving the OVC weekend with some concrete next steps to apply to your future work. And we will have lots of coffee during, beer afterwards, and some pioneers of internet video hanging around.

If you’re interested in coming, it would be great if you could fill in a small google spreadsheet form – it will help us in designing the day and pairing up video creators with developers.

Find out more about Web Made Movies, Mozilla’s open video lab.

Details of the event: Sunday October 3rd, 10 am - 721 Broadway

View Larger Map

Please fill out this survey if you plan on attending!

Was discussing in the Web Made Movies IRC today with David Humphrey the need to create a new, and vastly different than our last, demo for the upcoming Open Video Conference.

We wanted to create something that presented a dynamically generated video based on who was watching, and that created different meaning from different juxtapositions of shots.

This reminded me of the Kuleshov effect - the famous experiment by Russian film theorist Lev Kuleshov, in which he proved that meaning was created in cinema through montage.

Kuleshov took a shot of a man staring at the camera, which was devoid of emotion. He then made 3 sequences where he spliced a bowl of soup, an attractive woman, and a child in a coffin, followed by a shot of the same man.

When showing the 3 sequences to audiences, he found that despite the expressionless face of the man, they perceived him to be hungry, lustful or sad, depending on which shot was placed in the middle. Thus, he declared, the meaning of individual shots and sequences was changed by whatever preceded or followed them. It was an extremely influential finding.

Seeing as Web Made Movies is about seeing what happens when we mix the traditions of cinema (time) and the traditions of the web (hypertext), Dave and I wanted to experiment with how this experiment would be different in the context of the web.

I though it would be fun to mash this experiment with the ethos of We Feel Fine, a human emotion experiment by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that presents web visitors with visualizations of the worlds’ emotions by gathering data from searches and blogs.

So I mocked up a wireframe that you can see below, and I’m looking for some feedback on how it could more meaningful riff of these two experiments. In the example below, the user is asked for their twitter account, as well as their location.

The demo would then build a unique sequence of 3 shots that would be tailored to the users emotions. The first image would be a shot of a face, staring similarly to Kuleshov’s actor, which would be either sad, happy or angry. Which emotion appeared on the actors face would be determined by how often the twitter user mentioned those emotions in their twitter stream of the last month (or so). The second image would be pulled from flickr - from a search of an emotion (you can see that interesting results, for instance, can be found be a flickr search of “sad”.

The third image would be the same as the first.

The music would be chosen from a sampling of 10 songs (or so) which would be categorized based on emotion. The chosen song would correspond to whatever the “world” was feeling, which would be transmitted from We Feel Fine’s API.

The background of the page playing the video would be influenced by the weather in the users location - if it was rainy, it would be dark, sunny would be bright, and so on. Potentially we could also throw in some weather effects via something like processing.js.

Finally, the user would be asked to categorize the emotion of the video. This would be added to a third page, which would provide a grouping of the emotions similar to the 9 elements demo (only works in FF 3.6, not FF4). Users can then preview the different videos that were generated for others.

So it doesn’t feel quite right yet, but we’re thinking we might start and see where it gets us. But could really use some feedback on how this experiment could feel more true and more, well, meaningful. The wireframe draft is below. Comments here most appreciated.

In creating our first demo for popcorn, we gathered footage from projects like Grassrootsmapping.org and The Village Telco to create the final video. However, we only used small snippets, so I took some time to edit down longer versions of each.

Grass Roots Mapping

The Village Telco

I’m old.

Unlike people born after the first Star Wars movie (the real one), I use desktop apps for things like managing my calendar and checking my email.

My hard drive recently crashed, and as someone who is terrible about backing up their computer, I was terrified - but then found that all my data actually existed in the cloud (since I use google apps for my mail), so I really hadn’t lost much.

But I realize that I still hold on to things like my calendar, address book and mail client much more than a lot of web users. And since more and more of our digital life is moving into the cloud, I’m going to try a week of only using web services to check my mail, look up my friends addresses, and arrange what I’m doing when.

I have to take the train tomorrow, which is when I usually catch up on my email backlog. I also haven’t properly set up my phone to sync with these services, so I’ll give that a go.

I know you are all waiting with baited breath for my findings. I’ll report back in a week.