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

Ahh, Berlin. What an amazing city. And an inspiration for some personal development which wound up making its way into this video.

The first video is the opening scene from the movie adaptation of Kafka’s “The Trial”, directed by Orson Welles. Excellent movie if you haven’t seen it. I was inspired to put this in, partly by my friend Stella, who claims to only watch movies made before 1965, and partly in response to some stupid drama that happened at the December 5MoF. All in all, it’s probably one of the best shorts on philosophy I’ve ever seen, that doesn’t get too preachy.

The next video is really fucked up German porn. Nobody complained about the dancing penis, so Ani and I decided to go as overboard as possible. I think that left a few people’s jaws totally dropped going “what the fuck?”.

The final video is a 1962 short film called “The Existentialist.” Probably one of the best gems I have found in years. I think we actually blew the audience away with that one. When the intro video ended, they really just had no idea how to handle it. To me, that is a sign of success.

Last note: our event had received a Cease and Desist notice from a group that has the phrase “Five Minutes of Fame” trademarked. Once we got this, I went to the EFF and they handled it for us. I’m very grateful to Corynne McSherry for her time and work on this. So we figured we’d homage this by making fun of lawsuits, Prince style. After the event, I was very amused to learn that Corynne was involved in a lawsuit defending a youtube video that got a takedown notice from… Prince.

-aestetix

And here we take a plunge into the avante-garde “stuff nobody but me gets” world. After November, some people asked what the theme of the video was. And given that it was really just some stuff I liked and threw together, I had no good answer. So I thought, why not try to make a video with a theme?

This one combines “A Christmas Carol” with “The Shining”. Notice the music in the beginning: Wendy Carlos’ “Bolero”, the theme song from Kubrick’s “The Shining”. I think there had also been some discussion about using proprietary software at Noisebridge, so we stuck in one of the BoingBoing parody “You are a pirate!” seals. Next, there are three videos, each representing one of the ghosts from Christmas Carol, and each a dark color overtone representing the seasons in The Shining. We tried to pull in the drum boom, but didn’t really have enough time.

Next, each video has specific importance. The Christmas Past video features Robert Anton Wilson (and others) on Bill Maher, talking about Tim Leary. It’s low quality, but it’s the highest I could find (and man I looked…). The idea here is that Noisebridge has roots both in the hacking scene, as well as the “counter culture” political scene. Bob Wilson and Tim Leary represent (to me, at least) an important part of the history which drives people today. It was sort of a suggestion that we should study our roots if we’re at all concerned that we should adhere to any sort of rule of law. Why is Noisebridge an anarchy, a do-ocracy? Look to these people, and those they knew.

The Christmas Presents video is important for two reasons. First, there was a lot of stupid drama going on at Noisebridge, mostly caused by people kind of jerking off to themselves in the mirror. It was pissing me off, so Ani and I came up with this as a subtle attack/parody of it. Second, it’s porn! Sort of. 5MoF was starting to get really big, and I had been trying to feel out whether I could do stuff as edgy as we did in the beginning. One of those rise and fall of societies things (look up the temporary autonomous zone). It’s still an important question: the more people there are, the higher the chance is that you will piss someone off. Moreover, if you keep doing edgy things, people will get used to it, and will start expecting it, thus it will no longer have the same appeal. But the video went over well, nobody complained, and that opened a few floodgates we’ll get to later.

The final video, Christmas Future, holds a special place for me. First, it was saying “Hey Noisebridge, if you get over this stupid drama, we can do cool shit like this!” Second, it was a video of Blinkenlights Stereoscope, a project that several friends of mine (including Milosch and Brita Meriac) were heavily involved in. I met Mitch Altman doing the RFID badge for The Last HOPE conference in NYC, where I also wound up meeting Milosch and Brita. This project took me over the Berlin for CCC, where I met Tim Pritlove and several other people involved in Blinkenlights. I actually almost helped deploy Stereoscope myself, but I had a date conflict and couldn’t make it. Finally, it was an homage and shoutout to the CCC for 26c3, which a bunch of people from Noisebridge wound up going to a few weeks later.

Also, I need to give Ani mad props. With this video, you can tell she’s starting to get really good with animation stuff.

-aestetix

This is when we started pulling stuff out of our arsenal. Incidentally, I chose this specific Aeon Flux short because of the emotional passion it portrayed. God I love that show. The middle short was on a DVD Jonathan Foote loaned us, a collection of short films. It had a note suggesting to use the first video, which we did. Turned out that the first video was actually what was playing on the DVD opening credits, and the one we chose was the second. But hey, it worked out. The final short is “Elephants on Parade” from Dumbo, because it was trippy and cool.

This was also the first video (I think) where Ani started playing around with logo animation stuff.

-aestetix

This was still in the honeymoon phase of “wow, we just pulled off something really cool, let’s do it again!”

The first two videos are seasonal halloween things. The third one, Ani put together in celebration of the release of Windows 7. To the tune of the Radetsky March…

-aestetix

This was the first “serious” intro video we did.

Some background here: in 83c, we had a few projectors sitting on the stairwell, and often we’d overlay one projector the other. In fact, for the very first 5MoF (February 2009) Steen created a timer that would show on one projector, kind of overlaying the “presentation” projector. I was looking at this, and it reminded me of a rave flyer I’d created back when I was still in St. Louis. For a few months I was obsessed with anaglyphs, and was playing around with a bunch of ideas. At first, we wanted to use the dual projectors with different filters to produce an effect, and I went and bought 100 pairs of 3D glasses for the cause. I spent a few months seeding several local artists and some of the regular speakers, trying to pull together interest in making talks that went with 3D. It proved really tricky, so I abandoned the cause for a while, but held onto the glasses.

I want to say that started in May 2009. Around July or August, some people approached me. Emperor Norton I is very important to San Francisco culture, and especially Noisebridge, and they were planning on having a party to celebrate the fact that September 17th, 2009 was the 150 year anniversary of Norton’s ascension to the throne, to the day. Then they realized that 5MoF fell on that day, and we decided we needed to celebrate. To further compound this, the event happened right after Burning Man, and right after Noisebridge moved into the new space. Which meant that I had the honor of hosting the first event in what we now call “2169″.

In any case, we needed to do something special. We spent some time spreading rumors that something really big was going to happen, and we started working really hard on crazy preparations. I’m really happy Ani had learned to tolerate me by then, because I have a habit of throwing lots of nonsensical ideas at her, and then making changes before she’s even read the original. Alex Handy (vonguard), who’d been in the know about the 3D stuff, suggested the amazing video that you see at the end, and we spent a while with different filters before we finally found one that sort of 3D-ified it. epsas, who’d apparently done a bunch of 3D work, took the Noisebridge logo and turned it into an amazing rotating 3D image.

The opening video, “Fifty Percent Gray”, was a short film I’d seen in my freshman year of college, and thought it’d be suitable. I’d actually forgotten the title and spent a good week or so tracking it down, and I think it worked well.

Finally, the templates and jingles. I think I was on an airplane thinking about how silent movies still managed to speak, and realized that it would be a great segway between the videos. And only thing better than the silent movie messages, are silent movie messages that insult you. We’re so used to seeing old movies and some very short (or very Victorian) dialogue, actually seeing one that said “Hey you fuckhead” or something to that effect seemed really funny, especially if lined up with a classic jingle. Went through a few iterations of messages before we found ones that worked, and the rest is history.

This video was pretty important. It kind of began a trend, and in the space where I used to attempt to give a pathetically sour comedy routing, and where we would initially play videos to distract from the fact we weren’t ready yet, we discovered we could put some effort into it and create an art form that, in my opinion, separates 5MoF from the other “lightning talk” events.

This was also the first month where we introduced the “commercial” segment, which began as a parody of commercial. I played a video from the Church of the Subgenius, partly to com plement the Discordian references from Norton, and partly to poke fun at some discussions about sponsorship of Noisebridge (and 5MoF) that had been happening.

-aestetix

We’re starting with the video from July 2009, created by J. Fox Circe. There were a few earlier videos, but they were mostly just random clips from Youtube and have been forgotten. We created this because we wanted to have something distracting the audience from the fact we couldn’t ever start exactly at 8pm, and I think it turned out really well.

In any case, enjoy!
-aestetix

From the article:

SAN FRANCISCO–About 30 people listened intently on a recent Thursday night to short presentations on linear algebra and beer brewing, watched a demo of an iPhone cyberspace shooter game, and learned how to make a light staff (acrylic rod, LED, resistor, tape, no soldering required).

For the last talk, a speaker billed as “Dr. Baron Mikheil von Burstein, esq.” explained how to pull off his interactive public art specialty–swings that hang in the aisles on the underground trains in the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system.

“I installed it publicly, illegally and got away with it,” he boasted. He had materials with him to hang four swings, he said, adding “Let’s install a swing right now on BART!” (5MoF: more info about that here: http://www.audreypenven.net/2009/11/bart-swings/)

At least half the crowd followed him, officially ending Five Minutes of Fame, an event held the third Thursday of every month at the Noisebridge Hacker Space.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10405255-245.html