Now, unhappy though I might be to pass on a piece of ‘viral marketing’, I can’t help it with this Vimeo video ‘And Then There Was Salsa‘ – it really impresses me. Anything that takes my expectations and then does nifty things with them gets my thumbs up. However, I’m no more likely to buy chips and/or salsa as a result.
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.
I love this, cutesy music as performed by two crocheted characters with very specific personalities. The animation is subtle but really accomplished, and it matches the music superbly!
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.
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.