In the non-linearly timed film, above, Leth places his human in a ‘boundless room, radiant with light.’ I interpreted the title not as “the depiction of the perfect human” but rather as “the perfect depiction of the human” – that is, a precise telling. This brings to mind the nature of the World Wide Web – boundless, driven by packets of light, arranged in a non-linear fashion, and accessible at any precise point – especially via today’s powerful search engines.

So to tell the 2010 version of The Perfect Human, I built a tool that brings a user into a precise – albeit random – point along the vast continuum of the Web. Using the voice over and dialogue from the film as body copy, one can highlight any range of text and be presented with a relevant (as deemed by Yahoo!’s search engine) destination on the Web in the results section below it.

If you have a second and can give it a spin, please do. It’s certainly still in beta, with some interface elements to clean up and complete. But check it out. Scroll along the text box, watch as the film at the top (which takes a bit to load – it’s 9MB) follows suit. Alternatively, click play or scrub along the QuickTime video and watch the text move. When you’ve found a piece of text you’d like to search the Web for, highlight it. It can be any portion of text – not necessarily single or even whole words. You can also scroll along to see what past users have searched for and the coinciding results.

If you give it a spin, please leave some feedback in the comments section here.

Click here to access the tool.

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.

Fifty People, One Question: New Orleans from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.