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WebMadeMovies: the evolution of video

Web Made Movies is Mozilla's open video lab. We're bringing together the world's most innovative filmmakers and hackers to showcase the power of new open video technologies. Blowing up the traditional box and unlocking video's full 21st full century potential.

New tools like HTML5 allow us to produce video that behaves like the web: linkable, quotable, searchable, mixable, hackable. Liberating it from closed platforms and creating whole new ways to tell stories online. By mashing up video with the rest of the social web, we're reinventing the medium through open source collaboration, artistic innovation and global community.

The problem: video locked inside black boxes and walled gardens

Video today is *on* the web, but not *of* the web. Despite the innovation that's swept other online media, most video -- from information and entertainment to educational videos and user generated content -- is still trapped inside closed technologies that are difficult or impossible to search, link, quote or contextualize. We can "embed" video in pages, but only through closed-off players that are sealed off from the content around them, and that still behave much like traditional TV.

This traps video inside a virtual "black box," robbing it of audience and potential. And locks an entire branch of knowledge and creativity inside closed systems that don't behave or innovate like the rest of the web.

All that's set to change. Unlocking video's 21st century potential.

New open video tools and standards like HTML5 allow us to open the closed black box. And weave video right into the fabric of the social web. As big industry players move away from closed platforms like Flash, and as the devices people use to watch and produce video continue to rapidly evolve, the stars are aligning to build a more open video future. This represents a unique opportunity to take video in a new direction. What's needed now are the skills and artistic vision to innovate and give the world a taste of what's possible.

Introducting Mozilla's open video lab. Where hackers meet film-makers. Fall in love. And make babies.

• Stress Brett's film background and "king of the mash-up" street cred
  
• We're bringing together the half-dozen most talented open video developers on the planet. The bleeding-edge innovators in the field.
• Plus hands-on hackers like Senneca College students, to dive in on hack-fests and development sprints.
  
• Crowdsourcing design challenges and "the art of the possible." A large part of this is an ~imaginative~ exercise. Dreaming up what's possible, then building it.
  
• Need to stress this "chocolate meet peanut butter" story angle of bringing these two diverse groups together. Hackers and film-makers don't ordinarily collaborate. This is the project's secret sauce.
  

• Open web tools like HTML5 video, svg, canvas, javascript and Firefox make it possible.
• Cutting-edge filmmakers, designers and artists will make it mind-blowing.

Producing video that behaves like the web

Imagine...

• clicking on someone in the documentary you're watching to instantly see their Wikipedia entry
  
• choosing which character the camera should follow next
• 
  
• a teacher able to skip "on the fly" to exactly the right tw-minute clip in a two-hour educational film
• you're watching Johnathan Zittrain talk about "generativity," and as he talks you see a Twitter feed of people who used that term in the last five minutes.
  
• you're watching a video about people mapping the Gulf Oil Spill -- and seeing that map unfold next to them showing the spill RIGHT NOW, in the real-time present.
• viewers can immediately entire documentary film-maker's mind and see their research while watching
• use case around transcription / translation?
• creating bespoke interfaces that marry the medium to the message, instead of a one size fits all boxes. e.g., a doc about the ocean can look and feel like the ocean. A doc about the human body can live and breathe like the body.
  

"Popcorn" and "butter": open video tools that taste great. And change the world.

• building the tools the world will use to take video in directions we can't even imagine
• a toolkit that builds innovation
• JS an engine for other people to build services on top of

• building JS library, other interactive tools that we give away to film-makers to innovate with, widgets
• front ends that allow any film-maker to publish open video without hiring a team of developers
• robust foundation & front end
• "popcorn and butter"

• "Popcorn JS"
  
• This is the tangible concrete deliverable, from the technology side.
  
• Mozilla's permanent gift to the world. This will be a major technological resource free to anyone, anywhere to use.
  
• It's like inventing the 8mm camera -- and then giving it away to every film-maker and hacker on the planet.
  
• the swiss army knife of "open video"