A selection of some of the cool projects I’ve worked on.
Inspired by professional video software like After Effects and Nuke, Seriously.js is an open source Javascript library for complex video effects and compositing in a web browser. Unlike traditional desktop tools, Seriously.js renders video in real time, combining the interactivity of the web with the aesthetic power of cinema. Though Seriously.js currently requires authors to write code, it is targeted at artists with beginner-level Javascript skills, so that the main limitation is creative ability and knowledge of video rather than coding ability.
Seriously.js has been featured at #1 on Hacker Hews, GitHub’s trending repos and at JSConf Asia 2013.
Resources:
HapYak is an interactive video platform designed for authoring and hosting of rich interactive experiences (e.g. in-video quizzes, chapters, text, images) on top of existing videos in a web browser. The platform is used by a range of enterprise and educational clients. I joined HapYak early and built the interactive video player from scratch based on a prototype, using Popcorn.js. To meet clients’ needs, I lead the development of “wrapper” APIs to unify about a dozen different video player APIs, including YouTube, Vimeo, Brightcove, Wistia and Dailymotion. Additional relevant technologies included Ember.js, HTML5 media API, RequireJS and QUnit.
Popcorn is a Javascript library for creating interactive media with HTML5 video and audio, part of the Mozilla Webmaker project. Since early in the life of the project, I have contributed bug reports, feature requests and code patches. I participated in the first code/film hackathons and workshops, using Popcorn to rapid-prototype interactive films with established documentary filmmakers as well as high school film students. My work with Mozilla on early versions of Popcorn Maker, the graphical interface for Popcorn.js, helped establish the dominant visual conventions for Popcorn-based interactive video.
Outside of my direct work with Mozilla, I have built multiple open source libraries expanding on the Popcorn feature set, and I helped build HapYak, a commercial interactive video platform driven by Popcorn.js.
Popcorn modules and plugins:
“Four Eyed Monsters” is an independent film that played about twenty film festivals in 2005 and built a dedicated cult audience in the following year. Starting in 2006, I worked full time with the filmmakers to create a pioneering “transmedia” campaign around the film, a website, an episodic video series and social media, and distributed the film to theaters, on DVD and the web. I planned strategies and negotiated contracts with a range of sponsor, distributors and promotional partners. I also developed custom software for data-mining and outreach to fans, including a tool to map global fan demand (which was later used on other films, including Iron Sky.)
The “Four Eyed Monsters” team has been recognized as the first feature film to include a regular web video series, the first on social media, the first on YouTube and the first to premiere in a virtual world. Our work was featured in industry (Indiewire, Variety) and mainstream publications (Wall Street Journal, Wired), in books on self-distribution and at many film festivals and conferences (SXSW, Power to the Pixel, Sundance). “Four Eyed Monsters” remains a landmark case study in self-distribution and Internet-based audience outreach for independent film.
A collection of my recent code projects, including interactive video pieces created at hackathons, is available on my GitHub profile. I am active on Stack Overflow and am currently listed in the top two for questions answered about html5 video.