We have lots going on this week! Product photography, product videos and spokesperson videos. Tomorrow we go to NYC for a trade show video-shoot which will include testimonial videos, interview videos, and some street scene interviews with the general public. Look for new additions to the DDA Video portfolio soon!

Unless you are working on a film for the big-screen, ( most likely not) video is a complex medium that has many different forms. If the parameters of the video are not defined properly, this can effect how the video is displayed and create issues in trying to resolve the matter. It gets even more complicated when taking into account what type of screen the video will be displayed on. Standard televisions have 0.9 aspect ratio while computer monitors have square pixel aspect ratio. The introduction of HD formats have now added the 1.33 aspect ratio into the mix. The latest versions of Photoshop provide handy presets for various video configurations available. A quick browse through these presets will show you just how many options there are.

To someone who isn’t working with video on a regular basis, video dimensions, aspect resolutions and pixel aspect resolutions can be confusing or unimportant. At DDA, we always define the format of a video project from its inception to meet the client’s delivery method which can range from DVD distribution to tradeshow videos, web videos and CD-ROM videos.

Have you seen the show Survivorman? Well, really it should be called Survivorcameraman. In case you haven’t seen the show, it’s about this guy who goes out into the wilderness around the globe with 3 cameras, the clothes on his back and seven days to fend for himself with no food or water. His shows, which usually run 30 minutes in length, are made of video entirely shot by himself during his expedition. By strategically placing the tripod and camera along with thorough post production, he achieves in creating a well composed and edited documentary which one might think took a whole crew to orchestrate. In one episode, Les Stroud (aka Survivorcameraman) talks about the hardest challenge during his 7 days in the snowy and harsh landscapes of Alaska. It wasn’t the cold or the lack of food. Not the sunlite nights. But it was having to deal with the cameras, setting them up, walking away from them while the camera records his trudging into the distance, and then turning back around and getting the camera only to set it up for another distant shot of his desolation. I wonder how many cameras he’s gone through? It must be hard to have all these lenses… these eyes looking at you, staring, recording, speaking to it and having nothing to add to conversation.

I was thinking how interesting it would be for DDA to have a documentary, solely shot by each individual in the company, Survivorman style, with trips to the water cooler allowed of course. If the various departments documented their script writing, or programming, web design, website optimization and flash animating, and all the wonderful things we do here at DDA. I can only imaging the mess of tripods around the office as we document our hikes from the distant and cavernous video department to the high-altitude levels of the writers department, all the challenges and obstacles that may stand in-between, ever wary of the jingling and panting of the greatly feared hyena-dog, Indie.

Commenting in programming is your best friend. Having become proficient in AS programming with Flash, I have learned that it is crucial to include comments for better navigation around the code. Commenting can be used to define the version information of a file or to group or separate various functions. This especially becomes useful when sharing a file between programmers avoiding confusion and decreasing mental process time with unfamiliar code.

When working with a file, whenever I make a substantial change I always increment the filename and save the file. Including version information within the code is also beneficial in case I need to revert to an older version of the file. An example might be…

//—————————-Version Information
// - new background graphic
// - update to menu navigation
// - added shopping cart functionality

Keeping order and clarity within the code is  important and will save time editing the code and finding the best file to revert to should problems be encountered with later file versions.

My dad travels… a lot. Last weekend, he stopped by Philadelphia on his current trip to visit us. He has been on the road and in the air for over two weeks, visiting Mexico, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and on to North Carolina and then back home to France by the end of this week. He works in the tobacco industry, working with flavors and R&D for all the big name cigarettes and cigar companies. One of the beauties of all this traveling is the incredibly cultured experiences he encounters and the wonderful and varied people he meets all around the world.

From this current trip, my dad told me about “Ashes and Snow”. His descriptions of whimsical photos and videos and real-life images of people and animals all displayed in this fantastical and astounding bamboo building in the middle of Zócalo, Mexico City, was hard to comprehend and visualize. This “Nomadic Museum” sounded ethereal. I could tell he was deeply affected by his experience.

He handed me a brown paper bag which I opened and inside found two notebooks, intricately and meticulously hand-made of natural paper and twine. Opening them revealed beautiful sepia photos of women, men and animals in natural environments, untouched by human technology. The package also included a DVD. The video was amazing…

Although the imagery is unaltered by today’s technology and shows humans and animals in their most natural and serene nature, the images were produced and delivered using high technology. The photos were printed in large format, revealing intricacies in skin pores and animal fur. The videos were played on giant screens, where every ripple of muddy water the baby elephant sloshes
around looks like a mountain. It took the artist almost two decades to accumulate the work in the exhibit but it is the technology of today that delivers his images with the most powerful and inspirational potential.

From the installation to the gift packaging to the website and video, the experience is consistent and amazing. Although we may not always be filming eagles flying down narrow columned ruins, or a man suspended in the ocean with humpback whales, this experience is what we strive for in each of our projects at DDA.

It has been a long time since I have painted. I graduated from MICA in 2001 and have since touched a paintbrush to canvas once. In my college days I took a number of intensive drawing and painting classes. These classes were crucial in developing my sense of composition, color, visual aesthetic, and the overall process of creating a piece of art.

It is with no doubt that all these skills are applied to my work at DDA. One of the most important, and probably most ignored, things to keep in mind when creating artwork is to work the whole canvas. It is very easy to get stuck on a particular section of a drawing or painting. The same goes for video compositing, animation, design, etc. One must pay equal attention to the entire piece in order to make it successful.

Not only does this process apply to a single project, at DDA we apply this theory to our clients. All our clients get the same amount of attention, whether it be creating a marketing video for a person with a simple invention to creating large, 500 hundred page websites for large recognizable companies.

As we are always creating new videos for clients, we are always expanding the DDA video portfolio. The preliminary version of the DDA Video website has 30 screens which display 30 different video categories. An individual project is featured for each of the categories. In a secondary version of the site, we started creating “Double Features” to showcase a couple projects under one category. With our portfolio steadily growing, it was foreseeable that we would need triple features and quadruple features, but that would just be silly.

We are planning a large update to the DDA Video site with some added features. The most important being the addition of secondary “galleries” to the individual 30 categories. Using XML, we are able to create a list of videos that fit within one category and the user can flip through screen shots to decide which video they want to watch. As the website uses a single smart swf file on all of the 500+ pages, we have also programmed it in such a way that we can still reference or link directly to a specific project using the “location.search” code.

Another added feature will be the PicLens browser plugin support. This will allow you to see all of DDA’s videos in one large, full-screen scrolling 3D wall. This feature truly emphasizes DDA’s extreme capabilities in creating exciting, informative and diverse videos.

Apple is always coming out with new and exciting technologies, and along with them, cool and trendy marketing  campaigns and video tutorials.  I can go into a slew of their various computers and gadgets, but I think we are all now pretty familiar with what they offer.  Their website includes elegant videos, packed with guides and tutorials on the various functions of their products. The overall message being that you are purchasing a solid, clean, cool and smart tool (which for the most part they are). A number of clients reference Apple’s videos and tutorials for their projects. The basis of the Apple videos are fairly straight forward; direct, uncluttered, smooth and featuring good music. With all of our projects at DDA, these elements are always part of our formula for creating a great video. But at the same time, we bring a unique approach and experience to each client and their project, making them stand-out from all the other Apple want-a-be’s.

Last week, one of our actors from the DDA Actor’s Network came to our studio to shoot video for an AARP commercial. It was fairly last minute and unfortunately the actor didn’t have the chance to bring a digital file of the script. We setup the script about halfway  between the actor and the camera lens, with the paper being below the view of the camera lens. A quick read through the script revealed that the setup wouldn’t work, with the actor’s eyes clearly breaking contact with the camera and looking downwards to the script. It was obvious that we had to spend the time to transcribe the script and have the actor read from the teleprompter. The script file is projected onto a one-way mirror positioned directly in front of the camera lens, allowing the actor to have direct eye contact with the camera  yet still be able to read the scrolling text. Even though time was limited, it would have been pointless not to take the time to setup the shoot properly. Sometimes it can be a very fine line between what makes video look amateurish or professional.

Whether downloading an application from the internet or launching a CD-ROM, if the authoring source has any sense of design and user experience aesthetic, the application folder will be clean and provide clear direction in what application to open or copy. Unfortunately, since the new X operating systems were implemented, the autolaunch function for CD-ROMs and applications on the Mac platform was omitted. This mostly being due to preventing malicious software from invading a computer.

There is standard process for developing icons and folder backgrounds for Mac applications. For icon creation I use Iconographer and Pic2Icon. Although the software was created a few years ago, I still find it useful. Background images are easily made in Photoshop. Using Terminal, I create an invisible folder in the disk image. The background image is placed in this folder and the display settings of the disk image window are changed to show the background image that now resides in the invisible folder. Spending a bit of extra time when finalizing a project really can make all the difference. Catching the users attention and making their experience pleasant is crucial from the get-go.

Click here to see some background examples from another folder background enthusiast!