I’ve participated in the 48 Hour Film Project two years in a row now. While 2008’s entry marked my debut not only as a participant, but a writer and actor, the experience was surely hectic. The 2009 experience, however, proved to be much smoother sailing. We had a smaller, more focused team. I was also fortunate enough to avoid being cast as any character and instead got to try directing out for a bit. And would you believe, I enjoyed it.

We weren’t recognized with any awards, but I wouldn’t have changed much if we had to do this again. Hats off to my production team, Barry Frechette and Bob Holt, for seriously knowing what they were doing.

Cold Feet from Gabi Schaffzin on Vimeo.

It’s hard to survive in this cross-platform, cross-media, cross-channel, cross-everything-but-dressing world without, well, mixing up your executions a bit. So building VH1’s The Great Debates campaign was both entertaining and relevant.

VH1’s The Great Debates ran for a week after July 4th, providing its viewers with the answer to such debates as “Star Wars vs. Star Trek” or “Beatles vs. Stones.” LocaModa was tasked with bringing this debate to the general public. Using digital out of home and web executions, we gave users the ability to text or click their votes and then we showed live updates in Times Square, in bars across the country, on VH1.com, and on Facebook. We also used some “social polling” to check in with how popular each topic was on Twitter. And VH1 carried the baton even further, displaying live text-in results during the show. How’s that for a little buzz-word bingo action?

(Note: Video shrunk a bit to fit here. See full size.)

The campaign garnered a large number of interactions, especially considering its short seven day flight. And it’s already been named a finalist for a 2009 MITX award. We’re hoping the accolades continue through 2010.

This one listens to the noise around the computer (as long as you have a built in mic) and displays a quasi-equalizer. Nothing fancy, but definitely progress. You can adjust the sensitivity by clicking “Options…” I also learned about the importance of the nested iterator patch, reducing the number of total patches significantly. Screen shots below. If you give it a try, let me know.

Install by copying to /System/Library/Screen Savers/

Root Patch

Iterator Patch

Volume Bar Patch

Decided to open up Quartz Composer the other day for the first time. Pretty sweet.

After a little playing around I came up with an extremely basic screen saver idea that floats three cubes around your screen, displaying the first 18 images from a given Flickr RSS feed. You can change the feed to whichever you’d like; the default is mine.

Included my patch macros, below. If you have any thoughts, please let me know– I’m extremely eager to get better at this.

Root Macro Patch

Controlling cube position

Timed Sampler Patch

Passing Flickr RSS to parsers which output images to cube sides

Flickr RSS Parser which downloads the thumbnail and passes to output