After the success of last year’s “The Volunteer Experience” video featuring Volunteer Center staff we decided to make a similar video featuring Bay Area volunteers. The participants all tell a great story about how volunteering can change lives (including their own!) and benefits the community. For the full effect be sure to watch the HD version at youtube.

I served as creative director, editor and as the lead of the motion graphics team. The video was shot on a Sony F23 and thanks to the hard work of  Thomas Tucker and Jim Rolin of VideoFax, it looks pretty sweet. Almost all of the screens are live – only a couple were composited and only because of licensing issues.

While I agree that Flash will soon be replaced as the dominant media player for video on the internet, I think it’s shortsighted of Apple to completely ignore it on the iPhone OS. Flash was the technology that stretched the boundaries of what was possible for the internet in the past and I think it’s the leading contender for that role in the future as well. As an example – how else would someone create something like Chat Roulette?

Personally I would like to have the choice – a well tended, walled garden or the unknown wilderness. There is beauty and wonder to be found in each.

* Or anything else really interesting/compelling/odd/fascinating etc. etc.

More photo from the most excellent “East Bay Hills Rally Cat” race this past Saturday are here.

While we are still some years away from the screens of tomorrow that I imagine (low powered lasers in your glasses that would paint virtual screens directly on to your retina), I think this is a big step forward in the input problem. The soft-key interface of the iPhone proves that people can get by just fine without physical buttons. Personally it took a long while to get used to, but in time I’ve discovered that I can type far more rapidly and accurately than I ever did on my Palm Treo with its Blackberry style keyboard.

So to take this concept a step furthere, why waste valuable screen real estate with keyboards, buttons and other interface elements? If you can turn the body itself into an interface device, perhaps by making our fingertips into sensors, than any surface could be used for soft-keys.

Not only is this an incredible boon to the hearing impaired (or anyone that wants to watch videos with the sound turned off), this is one way to start automatically adding searchable metadata to video content.

We had the standard turkey for Christmas dinner at my in-laws house this year and even though it was great, it was when I made the leftovers into San Francisco style* holiday-burritos that it really shone. 

* All of the ingredients jammed inside the tortilla.