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Indecision – an interactive hyper-videoblog story

RAAAAAAAAAA!

I finally did what I’ve been meaning to do for about 2 1/2 years. I made a hyper-videoblog post.

You can only see it on YouTube – here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtQg_LCq_T8&fmt=18

The thing that finally spurred me on was YouTube’s new Annotations feature. All this time, I’ve been waiting and hoping that they would introduce something like this.

But at the moment, they only allow you to use it on their site – no embedded players yet.

There are six different parts to it – what path you take is up to you. Click the options at the end of each clip to choose what I do.

I really was feeling indecisive about what to do with my evening – and it proved the perfect subject. I made it up as I went along, and it took 30 mins to shoot and 90 mins to get the clips onto the Mac, onto YouTube and Annotated with links.

I’ve always thought that for my hypervideo dreams to become reality, hyperlinked video would need to be a) easy to use, b) easy to create and c) within a setting that people are already comfortable with.

I’ve been working on much more complex hypervideo stories, and if this quick slapdash bit of fun seems to work, I’ll start putting some together properly. Let me know what you think.

It’s been a good week for me with my old nemesis YouTube. Tumblr saw my High Quality YouTube Embed Generator (thanks to Wreck and Salvage) and implemented it as standard on all Tumblr YouTube embedded players. So I helped make the world a prettier place.

The future is now! Even if this particular part of the future looks a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book from 1982.

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Pangea Day – Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Awards in LA, Day One

Pangea Day, May 10 2008

Nokia have flown me to LA today for the Pangea Day Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Challenge, in which I’m one of five finalists.

Update: I didn’t win, Eduardo Cachucho did, but the event was extraordinary and they laid on untold luxuries for me, Kate and Amy. We had an amazing trip.

Pangea Day was the largest film festival ever – all around the world, people gathered to watch films chosen by the Pangea Day judges. Both in officially organised events in cities on each continent, and in thousands of small community-organised clusters. The idea of Pangea Day is to bring the world together through film. It was a TED funded project granted to Jehane Noujaim, director of the documentaries Startup.com and Control Room.

The day before Pangea Day, I attended the Pangea Day Filmmakers Retreat, for which they flew dozens of emerging documentary makers to LA from around the world. It was a day of presentations from prestigious documentary makers and collaborative exercises, with group mentors. I had Matthew Modine as my mentor… So it was quite hard to resist doing my best Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Especially as the atmosphere was relatively humourless. 100 documentary makers. It was a bit like a pre-natal class. That kind of setup always presses my Naughty Boy button.

Anyway, it was a great experience. And it was all free.

Next Pangea Day – May 2010? They say they will try to do it every two years. It can only get bigger and better. Viva Pangea Day!

Formats available:Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)
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