A few folks have asked me about what they should do to try to win 30 Under 30 or 40 Under 40, which I think is fantastic. It’s so great to set goals and have something to work for. At FWV, we approach every big project from the beginning of it asking the questions “what is the client going to call us about in 6 months and say, I can’t believe it came true”, “what is the case study going to be?”, “how will the award submission read?”, and I think it just makes it that much easier to succeed.

So here’s what I’m saying to the few people that have asked and hopefully a few others will find this helpful.

1. Don’t work for the award, work for the community.

When I first moved here, I just really needed to meet people and feel connected to this strange new city that was so different from Seattle, New York, Atlanta and LA. I was more or less unemployed and just needed to do something, and I could see that the community needed a few fun things to do, so I just started working to create them.

2. Don’t talk about doing something, just do it.

Pretty self explanatory. If you’re going to do something like host an event or launch a networking group or create a class for people, just do it, promote it, get people there and see how it works. Don’t spend months asking people if they think you should do it.

3. Surround yourself with the right people.

There’s a few people that I got to know immediately when I moved here. I can trace back every single big opportunity or success to just a few people. I’ll list them in detail below. You already know who you are if you’re even reading this.

4. Set big, hairy, audacious goals.

A lot of people will talk you down from doing something amazing with lines like “underpromise, overdeliver”. There’s a time and place for that, like in client service. But when it comes to your life and the impact you make on the people that you care about, I say “overpromise, with the understanding that we’re all human, and if you don’t make it this time you’ll never give up, and with the expectation from everyone that you’ll succeed and reach your goals”. It’s not as elegant, but that’s really how I approach things. People that hear me say stuff like “TIMA will be the interactive marketing capital of the US” or “Triangle Startup Weekend is going to set the standard for every Startup Weekend in the world” know what I’m talking about and we all work together to achieve it even if we know it’s a long uphill road. Don’t be afraid to overpromise if you know you’ll never give up.

5. Never give up.

It’s redundant but I’m just going to say it: Failure is just a learning opportunity. Look at it that way and you’ll always be moving forward. Most of what you’ll try to do will fail, and you learn that it fails really quickly, and then you smash it up with something else to test it a different way, until it’s badass.

That list of people that have made the TBJ 40 Under 40 possible, in random order based on who comes to mind and just thinking about the people that led me to stuff like the Viral Video Festival, Going Viral, Triangle Startup Weekend, FWV, TIMA, or other stuff that was in the application for 40 Under 40.

Janet Kennedy
Mital Patel
Joanna Wolfe
Wendy McCarthy
Amanda Fennell
Rick French
David Gwyn
Natalie Best
Melissa Kennedy
Sean Wilson
Scott Kelly
Joan Siefert Rose
Justin Goeres
Greg Ng
Mike Esser
John Lane
I-Kong Fu
Damond Nollan
Greg De Lima
Victor Marks
Derrick Minor

…there’s so many other folks, I’ll keep adding as they come to mind, but for the people that are listed above, just know that something you did contributed to something that went into a couple pages about my time in the Triangle and thanks to you doing whatever you did, that’s why I was fortunate to receive the award.

Thank you.

XO
A

The Making of The Bollywood Bounce

1. My photographer shot 30 photos of poses at the palace. We tried to vary the photos by being polar opposites. Like if one photo I stretched right, the other one I would stretch left.

2. I imported all of these photos, and then loaded the song Paper Planes into Camtasia for Mac.

3. I took key parts of the song and broke them down into 8-16 beat measures, then sequenced 4 or so photos in Powerpoint, to repeat in a pattern that matched the lyrics.

4. Using 86 BPM for the song (which I found by googling it), I set up each slide in Powerpoint to advance for either 0.35 seconds (for 8th notes) or 0.69 seconds (for longer quarter notes or pauses).

5. After exporting the movie from Powerpoint and syncing it to the song in Camtasia, I then copied and pasted it in other similar song segments.

6. I repeated this process over and over until the song was complete, and for reference, I did delete a whole verse and chorus from this version of the track so that the video would be more concise and easy to watch.

Below is an example of how I used Powerpoint to sequence 8 beats of the song “The Bollywood Bounce”, a stop motion animation video filmed at the Maharaja Palace in Mysore India, just outside of Bangalore, during the Bangalore Boon.

You may want to Bookmark this Page by hitting CTRL+D (PC) or Command+D (Mac) or save the link somewhere so you can access this information when you’re planning your video projects.

This is the the link to the Resources List I mentioned in the session.
Useful tools for ideation, production, distribution and sharing, including links to the online tools and software we didn’t get to discuss in the workshop.

Here is the presentation you saw

The List of Safe-for-Work Memes is Below

Think of these as popular Techniques that you can use to draw inspiration when you’re thinking of how to present your video.

Youtube Interactive Games

Forced Perspective

Lying Down Game

Photo-a-Day

LOLgraphs

Flash Mob

Parisian Love Parodies (Search Stories)

One Take

Recut Movie Trailers / Movie Trailer Remix

Popping Popcorns with Cellphones

EPIC Maneuvers

Will it Blend?

Daft Hands

wdydwyd? aka Why Do You Do What You Do?

Stop Motion Beatbox

5 second Movies

Youtube Cyphers

The Philippine Cebu Dancing Inmates/Prisoners

Apple Store recordings

Xtranormal

Six-Word Memoirs

Post-it Stop Motion

Vince Shlomi (ShamWow, Slap Chop)

Auto-Tune

Paying Bills with Spider Drawings (Seven-Legged Spider)

Diet Coke and Mentos

Extreme Advertising

Essentially, I see the 5,000 year old phenomenon of people looking at the stars for information about what to do with their lives – when to plant crops, which direction to steer their ships, when to pick up camp and move to a new location – as analogous to the modern day phenomenon of infographics, which also distill large amounts of information into easy-to-grasp graphical arrangements telling people what to do with their lives – from what to think about political rhetoric, to when to post content on Facebook, and so on.

Coincidentally, I was listening to the Astronomy Cast podcast today and heard a fascinating explanation of why weather exists – apparently all weather of any kind, on any planet across the universe, is a function of temperature differences. When you have one system that’s hotter than another, the two systems fight it out to attain equilibrium. Temperature differences are the reason we have clouds, jetstreams and tornadoes, so I found out today.

In my mind, I was picturing these two temperature systems as similar to a couple different social and economic paradigms in human behavior. Supply and demand of information, and then differences of opinion. To put it simply, let’s say demand for information is a hot system, and supply for information is a cold system. Then let’s say “loving” something is a hot system, and “hating” something is a cold system.

The idea in question – let’s say it’s a new idea that people are curious about, like the discovery of a 13th Zodiac symbol – is the tornado.

When astrologists came out with the new and provocative idea of “Ophiuchus” – the 13th symbol that shook up all of our signs (I’m a Sagittarius, and was knocked out of orbit when the headlines told me that was no longer the case). There was a huge demand for that information, and subsequently everyone from bloggers, the media, scientific journals, video producers, and new moms on Facebook rushed in to fill the supply gap for information about this idea. On top of that, people had strongly differing opinions about this new idea – whether it mattered, whether it was fair to force that change on people, essentially they could love it or hate it.

For a few weeks, these contrasting systems created a natural word-of-mouth phenomenon, making it virtually impossible to not hear about the 13th Zodiac symbol. Over time, once the demand for the information and the supply of the information leveled out, and the magnitude of all the opinions in either direction – love or hate, agree or disagree – approached neutral, the word-of-mouth tornado fizzled out to nothing, letting us move on to whatever next big weather system would stir things up on Facebook.

Think about this analogy the next time you’re looking to create word-of-mouth around something you’re working on. Can you look at what’s happening naturally in the world as a pairing of information supply-demand or love it-hate it systems? If so, that’s an opportunity for you to jump in, add your voice and maybe gain some word-of-mouth along the way.

Click on the photos to find out more about them.

1. Steve Jobs Day

2. The Apple Tribute Logo

3. “We Are All Steve” by the Pantless Knights

4. 13-Mile Apple Logo in Tokyo

5. Steve Jobs Mosaics with Apple Devices

Step 2: Make your own version of that photo and post it to StockingIsTheNewPlanking.com

Follow that simple two-step process and you’ve joined the latest participatory photo meme: Stocking.

Here’s an example that I thought was particularly funny from the site.

Meme-tracking is one of my favorite past times. I love seeing what the collective global consciousness can produce, and am always amazed when people willingly spend their precious time to submit user-generated content in the spirit of crowdsourced entertainment. Think of the effort marketers put in to trying to get people to do things like upload a photo of themselves with a product, or submit a comment. And then think about how all it takes for the guy above to upload his photo is a simple concept and social proof that other people are doing it.

Some co-workers and I were rattling off all the crazy photo memes that have come and gone recently: planking, owling, horse maning, leisure dives… and thankfully there’s a good post here with pictures and descriptions of all these photo memes and more.

Obsolete HTC Status

Watching the new ads for AT&Ts exclusive HTC Status which features a Facebook button in the body of the phone (!%$?) has me thinking about a few things…

• I’m really lighting up to Google+ – although I won’t go out on a limb and say “no more Facebook or Twitter for me” just yet.
• Should a phone, or any device other than a computer keyboard or musical instrument, have manual keys any more? It seems like a touchscreen that can always be evolving with the OS rather than a hard-wired button system is much more scalable.
• Let’s say speed of a total rise and fall of new innovative communications mediums like Facebook and Google+ continues to increase, how fast will someone need to get out a new piece of hardware like a smartphone to capitalize on that medium?

I’m sure Facebook will be around long enough for the full lifecycle of this phone to come and go before Google+ can make any sizeable impact on FB usage (assuming G+ even gets past the innovator/early adopter phase in their own life cycle). But seriously, who is the audience for this phone?!?

Watch the video, let me know if you have any ideas…

Here’s my contribution, a Google Doodle cover of Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd.

Image is from Rad-Dudes.com

One of the things I teach students in my Going Viral class is how to quickly respond to topical trends in the world by mashing up ideas that create contrast and tension. Using a simple formula like “topic” caused “other unrelated topic”, can often be a recipe for comedic viral success. What Rad-Dudes.com found and shared from the underground meme hotbed 4chan.org in the image below is a perfect example. In a bizarro world where marketers are less conservative and more in tune with how the internet really works, WWE would have been the one immortalizing Randy Savage as a world-saver. Instead it’s a little known blog via a subversive group of internet trolls.