Thursday, October 1, 2009

My Night at TEDx Seattle


I recently had the pleasure of attending the first TED.com event in Seattle. It was a fun and engaging night in the Georgetown Ballroom. See all the TEDx Puget Sound 2009 Videos.

Above is a video of climber Ed Viesturs, one of the speakers for the evening. Notice in the video when he talks about marketing himself to pay for his climbing expeditions...there is a brief reference to MountainZone (my old company). We did projects with Ed and his team when we were pulling the zone together.

Check out the Flickr Photoset of pictures...you can see me lurking in the background eating all the orderves.

"TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize."

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Thursday, February 19, 2009

My Deep Zoom Comic and a Busted Narrative Structure


How is Narrative Structure Influenced by Presentation Format?

I just drew a comic about something that happened to me in the dot com days. I've posted it online in three different formats, partially because I wanted to see how different forms of presentation might change the overall feel of the story. I like the Silverlight Deep Zoom version the best by far. It allows the reader to scroll left and right and up and down. Plus it allows the reader to zoom deep into the image, seeing all the detail and even finding images within images. This "resolution independence" has allowed authors and creators to create unique new modes of storytelling.

Does it destroy the integrity of the story line and plot? You tell me. Perhaps our scattered, divergent, web-era minds crave stories where multiple plot paths intersect and overlap. It's often how we read the web, leaping from story to link to picture and back. Are these narrative asides just bad habits of an internet-infected mind? I actually think that, done well, these techniques can free creators to tell a multi-dimensional story like never before.

Above is the Microsoft Silverlight Deep Zoom version. This allowed me to tell the story the way I really wanted to. It allows for the best resolution and easiest user controls. Hover over the image and you'll see the controls to zoom in and out. You should also be able to use your scroll wheel. Go Full Screen!

Don't miss the hidden images. Some are easy to find, but some are much harder. The whole "resolution independence" of Deep Zoom allowed me to overlay images. If the reader zooms into a tiny spec on a photo, that spec may reveal a full-resolution photo that itself can be zoomed into. Theoretically infinite.

Find the following hidden images:
  1. A Thai food menu.
  2. Three pictures of Hawaii.
  3. Another entire comic.
  4. A pixel farmer farming pixels.
  5. A spreadsheet.
  6. Tripod.com home page.
  7. A picture of me during the dot com days yelling at a phone.

You'll need the Silverlight plug-in which is a very quick install.

Sorry, I can't get it to work on the Mac yet. Silverlight is totally cross-browser and cross-platform, but the Deep Zoom composer tool is still a young product and the output is not fully optimized (which means a lot of tweaking of the XAML which I'm not an expert with.)

This is the Flash version. I bet with a little extra work I could simulate the Deep Zoom effect, but I'm just not a Flash guru. I want to spend time making stories and not doing multimedia development. This version works pretty good, but it forces the reader into one linear path.



This is the HTML version. This is so old school! Just some big-ass JPEGs stuck in a table (about 4.5 meg). I like this because it is simple and it works cross-browser, but ultimately it's kind of a pain in the butt to scroll around using the browser controls...too much effort.


All this makes me think about traditional narrative structure and the "The Freytag Pyramid." Gustav Freytag was the German writer who described a system for dramatic structure back in 1863. It's a mighty nice structure and I use it often. But, I also strive to bust that sucker up.



Check out the recent Wired magazine article by Scott Brown called "Why Hollywood Needs a New Model for Storytelling" to learn about Freytag deviants.

If you like this stuff, then check this out:

Video Below: Scott McCloud, graphic novel guru, talks about infinite canvases and digital comics at the TED conference.


This is an ancient interactive story I made back in the mid-90s. I was experimenting with the choose-your-own-ending storybook concept.



Download Microsoft Deep Zoom composer and make your own infinite canvases.

Learn how Deep Zoom works here and here.

View more of my dot com comics.

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Saturday, February 23, 2008

MountainZone.com Early Media Coverage 1997

Here are some more retro flashbacks from the early days of the web. This montage shows how the mainstream media was covering our dot com start-up between 1995 and 1997.



These clips were pulled from the following:

  • MountainZone TV Commercial series

  • "Wild Wild Web" syndicated on CBS

  • CNN Financial

  • Seattle News on KIRO-TV

  • ABC Sunday Night Movie "Into Thin Air"

  • "Up To The Minute" on CBS

  • Live Update on CNN

  • Reebok's "PE-TV"

  • "Playing in Style" on FOX


  • For more stories from the dot com days, see posts about my personal Internet history.

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    Thursday, January 31, 2008

    Digital Handel's Messiah, 1994

    In 1994 my company won a contract to broadcast the the annual Kennedy Center Handel's Messiah performance live on the web with video. We'd barely just started our company, MediaZones, and the only reason we got the gig was because very few companies were doing live internet video. We'd had some cursory initial success with local Seattle events and that made us the default experts. So, we loaded all our digital gear into travel cases and headed to Washington, DC to try and make it work.

    We were hired by a company associated with the Paramount Theatre in Seattle. They'd made all the arrangements to get our crew from Seattle to DC and all we needed to do was make a postage-sized flicker of video appear on their webpage while the live event was going on. We used a now-defunct software-hardware combo called Xing Technologies that required we lug a giant server with us, along with 4 desktops and a laptop. Not to mention our cameras, microphones and cables.

    In those days we felt lean and mean when it came to equipment. When we were at events, the TV crews would gawk at us and be amazed that we could broadcast from just seven suitcases. They couldn't take us seriously because we, in their minds, had barely any equipment. We didn't even have a van. How could we be professionals? How indeed.

    Back in 1995, I sketched this comic rendering of the whole adventure and I have recently posted it online.

    In comming weeks, I'll post some photos of this trip...I just uncovered another box of media from those old early days of the web. Stay tuned!

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    Wednesday, January 9, 2008

    Comic: Making a Cybercast 1997


    Back in 1997 I owned a company called MountainZone.com. We published outdoor sporting information on the web. We didn't know it at the time, but we were building a community.

    We traveled from Seattle to Stratton, VT to broadcast the US Open Snowboard Championships. Since we were posting our audio, text, pictures and videos to the Internet, we called it "cybercasting" which sounded even sillier in the 90s than it sounds now.

    We finagled ourselves into all-access media passes and we bartered a free room in exchange for a banner graphic on the event page. We were doing everything for the first time...breaking ground. Media folk and journalists rarely asked for web connections in the early 90s when we started our cybercasts, but by the late 90s it was becoming more common for press rooms to offer Internet. Although the connections were thru 28.8 modems, definitely not high-bandwidth.

    We were serious about the sport and our team knew the riders, event planners and other professionals. By the end of the weekend there was underwear on the lamps, beer on top of the computers and silly string hanging from the ceiling. How we ever published anything is beyond me.

    But it worked...and the visitors to the website started streaming in. First there were dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. By the time we sold MountainZone in 1999 we had millions of visitors pouring into the site to learn about mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding and climbing.

    Above is a comic I drew on the plane ride home (click it for the full story). The photos are provided as proof (to myself) that it all really happened and it was not a dream. Watch this blog for more of my personal Internet history. I’ll be digging up some great dirt.

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    Tuesday, November 13, 2007

    My Personal Internet History: Mae Phim

    Back in the late 1990s, me and fellow Internet junkies in Seattle would occasionally take time away from the computers to eat. A little Thai place in Pioneer Square was always packed with dozens of high-tech knowledge workers. Mae Phim was the place to go if you wanted to pick up secrets, spot entrepreneur rock stars or spread rumors. It is still there today. Order the garlic chicken. Three star.

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