Barely Concealed Narcissism

Catching Up With ‘09: My way of making up for putting these posts off…for months at a time.

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.

Catching Up With ‘09: My way of making up for putting these posts off…for months at a time.

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.

I can’t stop telling people about this. It’s a brilliant concept, beautifully executed. Be sure to click through to view more like this as well as more by the filmmakers.

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

A quick tip from Mr. Palumbo. If you’re trying to set up a scrubber for a video player in AS3, make sure there are key frames in the video file itself.

Seems pretty obvious. Just don’t tell me or Steve that.

Update: In response to SB’s comment, below…to be honest, we’re not totally sure how this file had no key frames. It came to us already encoded. So maybe (probably) we’re making this up as we go along? I was able to compress an FLV that was 900 frames long with a keyframe every 1000 frames. When I tried to seek, it would just stop. Why you would want to have such seldom keyframes, I’m not sure.