I have a strange inkling that Kroc Camen’s project ‘Video For Everybody!’ will become important. I’m not sure how, or who’s going to instigate this elevation to importance, but I think it’ll happen. The project addresses a requirement that has sorely needed work for some time, and in an elegant fashion that’s just begging for core inclusion in all manner of content management systems as well as hand-crafted websites. It also bridges the gap between HTML5 (the future – when it happens) and HTML4.01/XHTML1.1 (ie, what’s in common use right now) whilst simultaneously addressing the increasing demands of clients/bosses who must have video without knowing what that might involve, or how it’ll be handled by all kinds of browsers and mobile devices.
Briefly, the project’s output is a code snippet that will display video on site. Sounds simple? Try doing that and you’ll very quickly come up against all kinds of problems, issues and hurdles. This snippet handles all of those, pretty much – by bubbling down through a set of possibilities for playing video files based on your browser:
HTML5 ‘video’ elements, or if that’s not supported…
Quicktime, or if that’s not supported…
Flash, or if that’s not supported…
A static image and links to download video files.
It manages all of this without JavaScript and in a relatively compact manner. This means that as long as you’ve got video available in a few different file formats (which shouldn’t be difficult), you can be confident that it’ll play out on your website whether it’s viewed in a fancy modern HTML5-supporting browser, on an iPhone, or even (my word) on IE6. I think that’s pretty cool.
This is an impromptu reflected spectrum cast onto a wall of the cottage in Sligo, Ireland that I recently retreated to for a week. It’s good how nature creates these little treats for us!
An insane amount of work must have gone into this, Mark Webber’s 1.5m x 1.8m linocut map of Paris, hand-rendered in type. Sometimes people’s dedication to a project is just mindbending in its relentlessness!
Making its way into my consciousness via Booooooom!, a remarkable video for Sour’s ‘Hibi No Neiro’ that pushes the boundaries of user involvement to something of an extreme level. Amazing stuff, and an example of the kind of video that I can’t quite comprehend planning out, let alone successfully making.
In today’s Photoshop-drenched world the work of Martin Wilson is doubly, triply outstanding. What he does is take a series of real film photographs, in sequence, with a view to them subsequently forming a final contact sheet arrangement which then, magically, turns into a single image of sorts. According to his blurb, he doesn’t cheat, or slip in replacements if one shot is out of sequence. And if that’s true, it’s an inspiration to anybody picking up a camera. It’s nice these days that you don’t have to make every shot count, but it’s equally nice that sometimes there’s a good reason for doing so.
The sequence pictured above, entitled ‘One Hundred’, also reminds me very much of part of the packaging I once designed for a vinyl record release. Great minds!
This is nice: stop-motion live action animation by Bang-yao Liu, using Post-It notes stuck to the wall. I love how it’s two-dimensional but interacts with the real, three-dimensional world.
This is awesome. YooouuuTuuube: feed it the URL of an existing YouTube video and it’ll show you a crazy Flashed-up sequence of every single frame from the video, in some kind of brain-melting modern take on the zoetrope. Remember the days when the internet was more of a playground, with less commerce and more experiment? This reminds me of those days. I’m especially pleased that they’ve included the means to show a randomly-selected video. Hours of fun trying to work out what the video actually is based on all of its component frames.
This is awesome. YooouuuTuuube: feed it the URL of an existing YouTube video and it’ll show you a crazy Flashed-up sequence of every single frame from the video, in some kind of brain-melting modern take on the zoetrope. Remember the days when the internet was more of a playground, with less commerce and more experiment? This reminds me of those days. I’m especially pleased that they’ve included the means to show a randomly-selected video. Hours of fun trying to work out what the video actually is based on all of its component frames.