Web 2.0 Summit 2008 in Two Minutes
The 2008 edition of Web 2.0 Summit just wrapped up last Friday, and what an event it was. We had a bevy of great speakers, including seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, the ever lucid Larry Lessig, and the Honorable Al Gore. Here’s a quick two minute video of photographs from the event:
This video was one of those unplanned things that happens when you get all sorts of interesting people in the same room. During one of the breaks, Brad Jefferson of Animoto came up to the photo work area in the back of the main ballroom. He showed off a quick sample video he’d created by slurping in my Flickr photos into his company’s product. I was floored. Stunned. One thing led to another and we ended up producing and showing a video showing photographs from the first two days of the show before the last block of speakers took the stage. It was an instant hit. The folks at O’Reilly Media and at TechWeb all were impressed and happy with it. I was thrilled.
Once the event wrapped, I took things one step further, logged into Animoto, and produced the above video. I hope you like it as much as I do.
7 Comments
That is pretty amazing. I played around with their free 30-second jobs and was similarly impressed.
Gotta love those open APIs, man!
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I can't shake this "get off my yard" feeling: what's wrong with photos for the sake of photos, without the chimp attract? Are normal slideshows hopelessly passé now, since beat-synchronized dancing and bubbling and chopping and dropping is this easily attainable by anyone with half a keyboard?
Yet... that is cool! Maybe someday I will lament the loss of an era of simpler slideshow pleasures, or maybe Animoto will get old fast like automatic Ken Burns and the blink tag. But this demo was something I could and did enjoy today.
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I've been using the unlimited access for a year now and have always obtained those "ooohhh" and "aaaahhh" results. I see with interest how they are expanding their model by diversifying to different business niches.... Brad & co. are doing a great job!
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Nate, I know where you're coming from. After all, you don’t get the quiet pleasure of really spending quality time with a single photo or even a small group of photos in a video piece like this. On the other hand, where there’s a larger story involved, like this conference, it makes for an awesome promo piece. As I move forward with playing with tools like this, I also want to spend some time with simpler linear slideshows and see how they both can be used to best effect when appropriate.
Tho, funny enough, I still like the ol' Ken Burns effect. :)
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Hello James,
your Video is great and amazing!
Is it possible to allow fullscreen in your player, because i want to show it here some people in a Meeting.
At the moment it is not allowed to switch tofullscreen on your site.
Thank you in advance for Feedback,
/rene
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Rene, Fullscreen access seems not to be working for me either. I'm not sure what's going on there. The embed code from Animoto is a simple quick JavaScript include without much in the way of adjustable knobs.
Try using the following URL to see the video on Animoto's site where the full screen function works: http://animoto.com/play/1LB1nHwBHBQEwIlGq2O2jg
Hope that helps!
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"Simpler" offline alternatives to Animoto
http://www.soundslides.com
http://www.boinx.com/fotomagico
Combined stills/video for powerful storytelling (examples)
http://mediastorm.org/
http://tinyurl.com/5ayjc3
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