Ninja Turtles Illumination

Couldn't resist talking about this because 1. love Ninja Turtles (especially teenage ones) and 2. It's just tight.

This was an illumination that was done in Brazil. It looks like something you'd see in NY city. I think it's cool cause it almost looks real, but I guess if you see it loop a lot, it might lose its flare. In the video though, you can see how the video really attracted viewers. This type of illumination is called Beamvertising.

Mood Rings and Hypercolor

I woke up this morning and went to grab a shirt off my floor to wear, and then I decided to get a clean shirt from my closet. My choice for the day? My Hypercolor t-shirt a buddy of mine gave me a few years ago.
I got to thinking about Hypercolor shirts and mood rings, whether or not they could be considered interactive clothing and accessories. I think they are. I mean, they are constantly changing colors and that's why people wear them - so their bodies can interact with the objects and change the colors. I don't know exactly what you could do with this kind of stuff to make a cool interactive art piece out of, but I'm definitely going to think about it. The first idea that pops into my head is having a time lapse video of a group of people with Hypercolor shirts on and watching the changing colors in a sort of morphing mosaic video...? Maybe? I don't know, but I think a time lapse thing would be the way to go here to see how the colors change over a long period of time, but in a sped up video.

Choose Your Own Adventure Marketing

Continuing the conversation on choose your own adventure books and video, I found some choose your own adventure marketing videos for the new Jeep Patriot. You get to make decisions to guide the three people in the videos on their way to find some treasure. The videos were well done. They made sure they got a lot of screen shots of the car, and the characters use the special features of the vehicle along their way. Also, if you keep hitting dead ends, they give you the option of "Tell a friend and get a clue." A nice way to disseminate the video. I will give a warning - the acting is terribly cheesy.
Check out the Jeep Patriot interactive videos here - Patriot Adventure.com

Video Dissemination and Stuff

So, now that the gallery is done, our class is turning its focus back to our interactive movie that we are creating and posting on YouTube. Question of the day...How do we get it out there so people can find it? Should we create a wiki for it so when someone googles interactive video or something like that, it pops up as an ad on google? I've read some other blogs and found that people are thinking of the usual - Myspace, facebook, YouTube, and a few others. Maybe we should make ads and post them around campus, or one idea that I saw that might work is to get some PR from the local newspaper. They can get a story to write about, and we get a plug and a link in the paper to our video submission site. I think this would be a great thing for on campus, is there something that could do the same for us online? Maybe posting to del.ic.ious or something might get us a bunch of hits. I think there are a lot of options and I'm wondering if posting on YouTube would be enough.

Gallery Experience Thoughts

So the gallery show our class put on at the Tri-Cities WSU gallery went pretty well. We did the installment, tested it out, and then had a mighty fine time at the Towne Crier. It was interesting to work with the other students from the Tri-Cities campus. We were coming in with an idea of what we wanted the installment to accomplish. It was difficult to ask for thoughts and suggestions from them because we felt like they weren't on the same page as us. Actually, from their suggestions and comments, it seemed like they were ten pages behind us. I think there probably could have been a better way to work together to form the project. The videos they made to go with our sound pieces worked really well as far as we saw, so it wasn't like working with them was a total waste, and I beleive we did change a few small details about the installment based on some of their better suggestions. I think both groups learned from this experience though, and the piece did get finished.

Visual Thesaurus

So, one of my instructors introduced me to this and I was fascinated by it. A visual thesaurus. No, I'm not a dork, go type a word in and I swear you'll be on there for at least 10 minutes. It's really interesting and interactive. You type a word in, it spits out a cluster map of synonyms. You can then click on a synonym and it flips the cluster all around and has new synonyms on the branches for the new word you just chose. I don't explain it in words very well so just go check it out at Visual Thesaurus.com

Monty Python performed by scammers

So, after my post about an interactive scam email, I came across this video on YouTube. They are scammers from West Africa who were scammed themselves into producing this video. They are performing a Monty Python skit called "The Dead Parrot." The reason? They tried to scam some people by pretending to be cancer victims in Africa who needed money for therapy. Their email was received by a scam interceptor who's hobby/job is to try to waste the time of scammers as much as possible as a way of payback/discouragement. So the intercept then pretended to be a CEO of a company who was giving away money to people who sent in video of acted out television and/or movie scenes. The West African scammers sent this video in. I think it's cool because it's interactive, but they don't even know about it. What a great way to get some funny video content. Anyway, you probably could have gotten all that from just watching the video, so just watch the video.