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

By popular request, we have started uploading all the intro videos we’ve been doing since they started. In addition, because some of them reflect internal politics or other personal reflections, I have added elaboration on the meaning of each video.

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

Videos for the June 5MoF.
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Videos from the May 5MoF.
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