W3V2

CGI, or Computer Generated Imagery, is both an art and a science. Due to the innovation and artistry of individuals and studios such as 1st Ave Machine, this amazing technique is producing lifelike results. According to their website, this successful company “is an NYC based CGI VFX/Animation studio and Production Company working the advertising, broadcast, music video and feature film industries. 1st Ave Machine creates high end design work by employing 3D in ways that blur the line between what we perceive as real and impossible.” This company was founded by Arvind Palep and Serge Patzak. There is a current AT&T commercial now airing that I remember seeing and thinking “wow, that’s cool.” You can view Quicktime movies of all their projects on their website: 1st-Ave-Machine.com.

Their work is amazing and this video never fails to catch our patrons’ eye.

Sixes Last

Today Google announced the winner of their Doodle4Google contest. This contest invited “K-12 students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo.” Sixth Grader Grace Moon won the contest with this illustration which will be the Google homepage logo for today, May 22:

Google has always (or since I can remember) tweaked their logo to represent the current day’s holiday.  They have recently taken this concept one step further with this contest and by asking famous current artists to create artwork for their iGoogle pages. Using iGoogle, you can personalize the look and content of your iGoogle page. To let users know about these new features, Google created two videos highlighting these services. I added these videos to our flatscreens to pass along these fun options to our patrons. iGoogle is an easy and fun way for our computer users to have their own “home page” on a public computer.

iGoogle: A Mini Product Tour

Introducing Artist Themes for iGoogle

On a related note, I also added a fun little video on Gmail that is a “compilation of clips submitted by Gmail fans as part of our collaborative video project. Selected from over 1,100 clips from fans in more than 65 countries.” - Google. All of these videos were produced by Google and made available through their YouTube Channel.

Gmail: Behind the Scenes (Final Cut)

and I think I’m okay with that.

Can you think of any other company who’s name is a verb? Noun? Sure, that one is easy: Kleenex, Coke, XEROX, Saran Wrap, etc. But no other company (that I can think of) has ever been used as a general verb. In library world, Google and it’s uses is a hotly debated topic. Is its federated search engine as accurate as a catalog search of Library of Congress subject headings? For the scholar doing research, maybe not, but for the average gal looking for a cheesecake recipe or anything else in the world, its fast, accurate and does anyone really use anything else?

Google also happens to be an amazing place to work if you’re one of the brilliant and lucky who were chosen from the 3000 applications they get A DAY! They were also named Fortune magazines #1 “best place to work” in 2007. You get all the free food you want, free massages, haircuts and doctor checkups on site, you can bring your pet to work with you, and they bring in authors, musicians and electoral candidates to speak just for the staff. I just the other day ran across the authors@google page on YouTube (over 300 full length author speeches) and, while these videos wouldn’t work on our flatscreens, they are an amazing resource. To view the NBC Today Show’s tour of Google and catch a serious case of workplace envy, watch this video: Google-The Best Place to Work

Google has a channel on YouTube and periodically they post videos highlighting products such as iGoogle, Google Earth, Gmail. I have chosen several of these videos to show our patrons the many ways that they can use Google. The three videos (of the six Google videos playing) in this post feature Google’s mapping abilities: Google Maps, Google Earth and Sky.

Aliens find businesses with Google Maps

New Features in Google Earth 4.3

Google Sky, Mars and Moon

The internet and sites such as YouTube and aniBOOM are making it very easy for animators to share their animation in all of its forms (stop motion, claymation, computer graphics) with others. There are many websites devoted to animation and these sites serve as a place for community, contests and forums. I ran across an Aniboom video on Youtube and have been broadcasting several from this site on our TVs because they are short, humorous and translate very well without music.

Aniboom is a worldwide animation website and forum where animators can upload their work and participate in contests.In their current contest, animators create videos using songs from Radiohead’s new album, inRainbows. The winner gets $10,000 to create an actual video for Radiohead and marketing support for the video from aniBOOM. Serious business. To view the videos that have been submitted for this contest so far, go to http://www.aniboom.com/radiohead/.

These are the videos that I have chosen to display on our TVs:

Cheese by Peter Harakaly (Vancouver Film School)

Lolly Poo Lee by Sushant Dholakai

Peas by Vincent Prijent

Bananas by Zach Parrish

Space Alone by Ilias Sounas (Aniboom awards finalist)

It amazes me how a little video created by an average person can suddenly, with the phenomenon that is YouTube, go “viral” and be seen by thousands (sometimes even millions) of people. The TV channel VH1 even has a “top 10 viral videos” show. If you have not heard of the “dramatic chipmunk” or “rickrolling” then you are missing out on some funny-wierd internet pop culture (or maybe I need to spend less time on the computer).

When Karl Fisch, the Director of Technology at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, CO created his “Did You Know” Powerpoint presentation for a faculty meeting and then posted it on YouTube, it went viral. This means that it was viewed and reposted by many different people. The original YouTube video was posted on 1/19/07, has had 966,462 views. It was edited by Scott Mcleod to remove references to the high school and reposted on 2/08/2007. This version has had 3,802,451 views and has been reposted about 131 times.

After the original video became so well known, a professional visual communications company named XPLANE offered to create new graphics for the video and, with some different information, new music and a new look, “Did You Know 2.0″ was created. This is the video that was shown at PLCMC’s Staff Day 2007. This version has been on YouTube since June 22, 2007 and has been viewed 1,782,889 times and has been reposted 12 times.

On Karl’s blog The Fischbowl http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com (”a staff development blog for Arapahoe High School teachers exploring constructivism and 21st century learning skills”) you can read all about his sources for this video and download both videos.

I think that this video is successful because it is as surprising as it is thought-provoking. Every time it runs on the TVs in Virtual people stop and watch. Even though it is really just a simple Powerpoint presentation, it’s power is in the information it communicates.

Here is both the original Did You Know and Did You Know 2.0 (they are also sometimes called “Shift Happens”)

Did You Know

Did You Know 2.0

It seems that, as video games become more intricate and technologically advanced, many of the adults who grew up on simple, pixel-based games like Pong, Super Mario Brothers and Space Invaders are waxing nostalgic. These games are making a comeback through the art, craft and design of those who played them as kids. Here are some examples:

The Mario Quilt

The Pong Necklace

The Space Invaders Cutting Board

(All of these images are from posts on Boingboing.net)

I thought it would be fun to add the ultimate “nostalgia mashup” video to our flatscreens: a stop-motion animation short film of Mario Land recreated with LEGOs! Amazingly, a lot of people have thought of this (and apparently also have a lot of time on their hands) because when you search “Lego Mario” in Youtube you get over one thousand results!

Man!ac anyManiac MARIO LEGO
from Man!ac Magazine

In future posts, I will add one video at a time to both the TVs and the blog with a short description. However, to get us caught up with all the videos that have been added so far, I will begin with several on each post. These first seven videos illustrate the possibilities that abound when you merge technology and art.

“1 Week of Artworks” by Rinpa Eshidan
A motion painting project shown on the surface of a wall, this piece documents a week in the life of Rinpa Eshidan. This video combines time lapse videography with graffitti art. It is not only fascinating artistically, but illustrates one of the many ways that you can create an interesting video using low-tech equipment. Cast: Daisuke Yamamoto, Noiz-Davi

Women In Art by Philip Scott Johnson
500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art
Music: Bach’s Sarabande from Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007 performed by Yo-Yo Ma
Nominated as Most Creative Video, 2007 YouTube Awards
For a complete list of artists and paintings visit http://www.maysstuff.com/womenid.htm. I chose this video to show how computer software can be used to produce videos. This also an example of how new technology allows artists to interpret old information in new ways.

Women In Film by Philip Scott Johnson
Music: Bach’s Prelude from Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007 performed by Yo-Yo Ma
This video is by the same artist as the Women in Art video and uses the same technique.

Sand Art by Ilana Yahav
“Ilana Yahav is a sand animation artist. Using only her fingers, Ilana draws with sand on a glass table.” www.sandfantasy.com

3D Street Art
This video, created by Jamie Walton, is a sampling of the amazing works of street artist Julian Beever who uses chalk to create 3-d scenes on the sidewalks of various cities around the world.

How to Paint the Mona Lisa with MS Paint by EclecticAsylumArt
This is a time-lapse video of an artist “painting” the Mona Lisa in MS Paint. The video plays in under 5 minutes but it actually took him 2 hours and 30 minutes to create the final image. This is another example of using new technology to “remix” old images.

Ten Thousand Cents
“‘Ten Thousand Cents’ is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.” - - tenthousandcents website
Music by Yasuhiro Tsuchiya. For more information visit http://www.tenthousandcents.com. Ten Thousand Cents was initiated by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima.

Most of staff here in PLCMC’s Virtual Village are self-proclaimed “tech geeks.” That’s why we love working with computers and teaching our patrons about all the great things they can do with computers on a daily basis. Imagine our delight when two flatscreen TVs, one 46″ and one 50″, were installed at our service desk in November, 2007 to provide active, up-to-date content and digital signage information for our patrons. The question then became: what do we display on these TVs?

Throughout the past seven months, we have developed an ever-changing content program that features a combination of information and entertainment, focusing on technology and computing. So far, the content on these TVs consists of information and schedules for the technology classes we teach in Virtual Village, information about system-wide events and exhibits, patron artwork created in our technology classes, “Patron Spotlights”, and videos featuring technology demos, computer animation, etc. One important thing for us to remember when choosing videos for the TVs is that, since we have music playing in the lab, all videos must make sense or tell a story without sound.

Our goal is to use these flat-screens as not only a “digital signage system” but also a tool that allows us to interact with our patrons and provide them with a place to showcase some of the work that they are creating in our library. The Patron Spotlight program was a simple way to begin this endeavor. Using a short questionnaire available at the service desk, a participating patron provides us with their picture, some information about themselves and some of the websites they enjoy. We then create a slide show of all of our “spotlighted” patrons to display on the TVs. This program was created to let the patron know that they are a valued part of our “community” here in Virtual and for them to share their interests with others. (Plus, it’s just really cool to see your picture on TV!) For privacy purposes, these slides will not be added to this blog, but come and visit us in the Virtual Village if you would like to to see them or create a Patron Spotlight of your own!

With this concept of sharing and community in mind, we created this blog to share with you all the cool new videos that we are presenting on our flatscreen TVs in Virtual Village. These videos are added to and removed from the flatscreens on a regular basis. This blog will serve to not only keep readers up to date on current videos, but archive all previous videos that are no longer displayed. Patrons can access this blog to find out more information about a video that they saw in Virtual Village.