So where to start… In Nas and my session at Expression around the Clock I showed the vorb video editor
and the “How About It?” (video trailer).
We introduced this work a while back at the Web On The Piste conference in Queenstown.
We were looking for a bit more than a “hello world” for the conference so we hooked up with Intergen and the Wanaka/ Dunedin local Dysto boys to throw out some cool technology in the keynote and the ride on Silverlight session.
Tim and Chris showed with their kick ass camera, film and bike gear and gave us all an insight into how they tirelessly filmed “How About It?” over the last 18 months!
I shot this one of the boys at WOTP before the guys session with Tim’s sic 10.5mm f/2.8G
These boys have skills! and Tim’s other job is photographer/ videographer for NZ Snowboarder!
So what did we do? We mashed up Dysto with the award winning Vorb website and the Intergen team in Wellington to create a prototype of an in browser video editor that was designed as a concept to allow people to make their own “How About It?” trailer.
After sign off from the corp team I provided Intergen an early view of the “Top Banana” starter kit that Scott Guthrie promised during the MIX keynote in May. (Please don’t contact me for a copy of this starter kit, I’ve been assured by the guys working on preparing it that it is not far away but I don’t have the exact dates). The Intergen boys then invested time (maybe 2 man weeks) to pull it apart skin it with their designer and create a prototype version for this conference.
The thing that I found most interesting about this little project is that it is a real mashup of technologies used.
The guys shot video and edited it in Adobe Premier and After Effects, video was encoded for Silverlight using Expression Encoder. Vector elements for the editor were created in Adobe Illustrator and exported into Expression Blend where animation and interaction was added by the designer, code was written in Visual Studio 2008 using C# and deployed into a beta environment running on a PHP web site being served off Apache on Linux for testing. The end result viewable via Silverlight 1.1 to Windows and Mac users running an array of different browsers. NICE…
Minty from Nectarine was very impressed with Tim and Chris due to his history in film production… he couldn’t believe their attention to detail for shooting golden, digging out jumps and framing shots. He commented that the only way they could have composed things better and more slowly would have been by using “stop motion animation” then Chris pulled out his stop motion sequences using blocks outdoors to introduce the riders… classic!
Minty wrote in an email to me after the conference “Congrats on the support of those young guys and their bike movie. I was hugely impressed by their tenacity, smarts and flatout film skills (sure do well slamming down the side of a mountain on two wheels too!)”
Speaking of talent here is one of Minty’s animations that played during the second day keynote of the conference!
My sister (also a Wanaka local and a washed up pro snowboarder) linked me to the dysto guy’s work from the “The Chop Washed Up Cup” (to enter you have to be over 30 and Washed Up in the snowboard scene)… yes that is a Subaru WRX rally car jumping a 60ft’er! CRAZY!