This one was lots of fun to make, and helped celebrate our year anniversary as an event! Yippie!

The first video is a scene from the musical “1776″, where all the founding fathers are bickering about who is to write the Declaration of Independence. During this time, Noisebridge was having drama about who would be the next Executive Director. We ran into the classic problem where nobody who should have been it wanted it, and consensus issues abounded. This also lead some people to follow the red herring of “what about the bylaws”, and suddenly we had a ton of useless bickering over who served what role according to what law. At several points I wanted to bitchslap a few people and point them at the sign “Be Excellent to Each Other”, but instead my frustration worked its way into the intro video.

The next video was of a bunch of Disney Sing-a-longs, opening up with Zipadeedodah! I chose this partly because I wanted to see how well the audience would react to an interactive video, partly because I’d been trying to fit Song of the South in (it’s a very controversial movie now), partly to make fun of Hacker Dojo (after some debacle, we pulled David Weekly into the event as a speaker!), and partly because it’s Disney motherfucker! I really enjoyed watching people singing along to the videos, wondering how many were watching the words of the songs and seeing how deeply politically charged this stuff actually is.

Finally, the circles video. This was created by Philip Glass for Sesame Street in 1979. Watch it. Over and over again. It’s mesmerizing. Discovering gems like this make me want to keep producing intro videos.

-aestetix