Drumbeat: A Forcing Function

November 18, 2010

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.

2:19pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZZWBQy1W2XhH
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(Notes: 55)