Attack of the Clips Viral Video

Here is one of my latest projects--a viral video. Much of it is shot with a Canon EOS 30D using stop-motion animation, mixed with live action. It's always fascinating to see how a video performs virally...check it out below.

{video temporarily disabled until we lock down details with our distributor}

Dreams of interactive television

How can we watch "interactive television," and what does this mean for the viewer? I was reading Steve Kilisky's post on his Dynamic Media Blog and it got me reflecting about the increasingly blurring lines between television the Internet. It's funny how the last few classes I'm taking at UCSC all discuss ways in which electronic media merge, overlap, or displace one another; all this questioning leads to a (mostly) unpredictable future for Television 2.0--similar to a recent grad's?

Henry Jenkins analyzes this newer convergence culture, Lisa Parks talks about "microcasting" to niche audiences, and William Boddy adds to and interprets the results of the growing list of failed WebTV-like ventures. Where are we now? We have:

-user created content piped through a cable television station (Current TV)
-television distributed through the Internet & brought to your computer (Joost)
-content distributed through the Internet & brought to your TV (Apple TV)

We have all these different technologies grasping for similar goals. As Kilisky comments, much of interactive TV's poor adoption has stemmed by a poor user experience. Perhaps progress has been made, but it's difficult to tell. Newer technologies might encourage more "lean forward" viewing practices, but is that what the average television viewer wants? Is it even possible to successfully mix newer, Internet based technologies with the same old original television format?

Fresh stats from Pirates of the Caribbean

These IMDb viewer's statistics are taken at 9:30pm on opening day (Fri., 5/25/07). What disappoints me about about IMDb is the (perhaps unavoidable) user bias. Look at this graph up close, at 100% scale, and you can see the majority of users simply voted Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End a "10," which is really unrealistic for an average.

These have to be just the fans, who saw the movie on opening day. Look at the popularity by age group, too.

IMDb also has the statistics as males rated the film a median of 8.7, and females a median of 9.4. So does Pirates have more of a love theme than the previous two incarnations or what?