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.

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?

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.

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

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.