QuickTime Media Skins. My name is Glenn Bullich. I work in the QuickTime product marketing group, and we're very, very, very lucky to have the two presenters here today. Very, very, very fortunate indeed. So many of you obviously know what QuickTime Media Skins are, and we really thought that this particular session we could present to you probably some of the largest media events out on the web in QuickTime wrapped in media skins, and the two people that we have to present today drove the teams that delivered that.

So what I'll do is I'll just give, we're going to do about 30 minutes for each of them, and then we'll do some Q&A afterwards. It's really important if we do. If you do want to ask some questions of these folks and some of the other people in the audience who supported them, that you do walk up to the mic because the questions will be clearly translated, and that way we can have it as a record for everyone to use on the DVD and on the VOD afterwards.

So originally with Fallon, Minneapolis, Mark Sandau drove the team that delivered the BMW Films experience over the last couple of years, and we're really thrilled to have him. And Lori Schwartz with Zentropy Partners has driven. We've done an incredible amount of work with notable companies like Reebok from Los Angeles, and so we're going to have both of them present in reverse order, and we'll start with Lori. So thank you for coming, and I hope you enjoy.

The first case study, Reebok, is what we call the Reebok Experts Network. Basically, Reebok came to us and said, "Look, we have all these master trainers. They're fitness experts, and we'd like an opportunity to show them off. These are the people that invented Step Reebok. We've got all this cool video content. We have interviews with them. We have images. We have text. We want to figure out a way to house all this. So let's build something in Flash," because everybody was familiar with Flash.

They were also looking for something that could compete with Nike and some of their other competitors, because all their other competitors were doing really interactive Flash sites. So because we had done these demos with QuickTime skins, our creative group said, "Well, why not house all of these really great assets in a media skin? It's a perfect place, because QuickTime is, after all, a bucket of content, to put all this cool stuff." So our solution was to build a master trainer skin to house eight... eight pieces of trainer information, basically. So the first thing that we did was we built a pretty intricate and detailed user experience, information architecture flow.

And this was really important, because there were... there are actually eight different skins within this larger skin, and there are actually three pieces of video content, each with three bandwidth choices. So it was a lot of material to house inside of one piece and could get very complicated and at times, very complicated.

So we built a user experience chart here, and you can just see, and I'm sorry the images aren't a little bigger. And the final execution is over here, and you can see there was a global nav established just so everybody would have a place to go and a real detailed spill down into how this thing would work. So let me give you a little demo of it.

Oh, terribly sorry. And some of you may have seen this. This was out about two years ago, I think, maybe a year and a half ago. How many-- have many of you seen this before? A few of you? I know my Live Stage Pro guys did, because this was actually built in Live Stage Pro, which I believe has a sale going on right now at the show, ladies and gentlemen. I'm not a Live Stage employee. OK, so can we go to the iBook, please? Great. Okay, so let me just show you how that guy launched, really simple.

So this actually lived off of Reebok's website in a special section of their Reebok University. It's branded to Reebok, and we have a little flash navigation here with eight trainers on here. There's a link to go back to this main page. There's also a link to go directly to a URL where you could find a trainer in your area by putting in your zip code. So the idea here is to create a really cool marketing experience, but also to create something that does something. So they wanted to drive people to their trainer website. Okay, so let's click on a trainer here.

Okay, so, Gin Miller was famous for inventing Step Reebok, so we created a skin here that highlights Step Reebok, and there's three questions that she answered, so user would click on one of these questions and it would bring up some video content. My favorite aspect of training now, at my age, at 45, is to release stress. If I've had a hard day, or I've been at the computer all day, or I've had a hard home call, just try to get people different things or answers to questions.

I need to get out the door, find my credibility, and go for one. There's also bios here so that people can find out more about the trainer. Now, interestingly enough, there were a couple of interesting things that came out of building this thing, and we can go back to the PowerPoint.

The client wanted a streaming experience because two years ago, streaming was like, "Whoo, streaming!" We were actually pushing for a progressive download experience because we knew that progressive content is better for like one-minute, two-minute pieces of video, but they were, you know, really, we want streaming. So we went ahead and we built a streaming version of the Reebok Skin, but what happened with the programming was that when the video ended, it needed to trigger a snapback to the questions that you saw.

So the streaming version actually had a terrible user interface because you'd have to wait a long time until that buffer signal ended and it would snap back to the questions. So we ended up going back and building another version of it that was progressive and then getting the client to sign off on that.

So it ended up being a lot more fun. It ended up being a lot more production time and a lot of aggravation that didn't need to happen if we could have sold the client originally on the progressive idea. And what this really did was it helped me to formulate some best practices that we present to the client up front.

You know, more officially saying to them, "Look, we've looked at streaming and progressive and how to really build this experience in the best light, and for shorter pieces of content, for things like this, it's better to go with progressive. For other longer, chapterized things, it's better to go with streaming." So this really helped us educate ourselves and in the future educate our clients, and that was a big lesson that we learned here.

We also learned that we had to have more QA in the project because we had milestones set throughout, but we didn't have enough milestones. And so sometimes our programmer would go off and do some things, then we'd take a look at it and we'd see he'd gone too far down the path and we'd have to go back a few steps again. So that was a big lesson for us to schedule in more client reviews, more QA, and to really get best practices out there. Let me go forward from here.

Also the other thing that we kind of really figured out is that whenever we're dealing with media skins and new technology, we still have to talk about the brand, go over the creative brief, provide stats, metrics, context for the client. So just because we're doing something kind of new and groovy, we still have to go back to all the methods that we used for a traditional web page. So we're going to talk about the web page, the web development, and online marketing.

And the more that we saturate this process with our traditional practices, the more that this stuff becomes real to everybody. It becomes safer. It's not something scary to go out and build, and the client feels more secure. So that was another thing that we learned is that we really have to sell this in the same way that we sell in everything and not make it so intimidating to a client. Could I have the real-time? These are some of the questions that after this process we came up with whenever we try and sell something to a client.

What was the original business concept that launched the product or technology concept? What business value was it designed to impart? In this case, it was a marketing experience. What is the return on investment? Well, we're trying to drive clicks to a specific section on the website, so that's what that URL was.

What's the return on investment? Has it proven successful? And when we looked at the numbers, and I think specifically when it was listed on the QuickTime site, we had about a 10% increase to the site when this thing first launched. And then why or why not? And always to do a postpartum on it to see how you really did on this thing.

Okay, so let's jump into the Nautica case study. Nautica specifically is a great example because it shows how we sort of had a turn in how we're looking at media skins and also how we're selling media skins to our clients. They came to us and they asked us to design and build a website that had the following objectives in mind. They wanted something to combine all of their brands. And they also had a great deal of offline video footage, footage from events, from, you know, models and fashion shows.

And they also do a lot of co-branding things with sporting events, with sailing and things like that. So they had all this video content that was just sitting there and wasn't being used. And they were thinking, well, how can we use this? So once again, we pitched the idea of building a media skin that would house all of these assets and put this media skin on the site and we would call it the Nautica magazine. And the ultimate objective for them was to collect emails because they wanted to develop a more robust user database.

So we consolidated all this content onto one section on the website called the Nautica Magazine, and then we built what they were calling the NS83TV, which was a customized QuickTime media player which housed all the assets. And we also included a registration box on the home page, and we actually ended up collecting about 8,000 emails two months after it launched.

Now the interesting thing about this skin that's different from the Reebok skin is the way we sold it. In this case, we sold this as a desktop application that could actually grow, that you could scale out as more content became available, that we could turn into something that lived and breathed and stayed on a desktop so that the user could have this persistent Nautica experience.

And one of the ways that we encouraged the idea of this to the client was to build a flash nav, and so that as more content became available, we could grow it. So we started to grow out this flash nav. So let me launch the skin for you. Is everybody having a good time so far? Good? Okay. It's 3 o'clock. I know it's -- sugar's dropping. Did everyone have some candy to get their energy up? Okay. That's important.

Okay. So -- That's just a reference file that we use. So this is actually our Nautica skin, and it's not the sexiest skin in the world, I admit, but it's still on the Nautica site right now, and I have the client calling me and asking to put more content on it, and I just think that is a tremendous.

So here's the flash nav up there, and what we do is, as more fashion shows and content becomes available, we just expand this global nav, so they don't have to keep paying for a rebuild of something cool and funky. We have something that can grow with the brand and with the client. Let me show you some content.

So that's Daisy Fuentes, so that really makes a lot of people happy to see Daisy Fuentes. And we did sell this as something that also we could add a chatting functionality to it, we could add email collection right inside of this skin. We talked about all the powerful things that you can leverage with QuickTime and with XML and the fact that you could dig into a database. Now we haven't gone there yet with this skin, but that was part of the sell and the client really bought off on that. We also have the traditional small, medium, and large bandwidth choices, and obviously all these buttons work.

Now, the other interesting thing that happened, and this is another best practice lesson, is that the client discovered iMovie and decided to start compressing their own video, which, you know, is all great for getting Apple products out there, but a terrible thing, when you receive a 56K file for 56K compression, that's 320 by 240.

So, I had to actually, in a good way with the account manager, guide the client through the fact that we can't control, you know, quality, we can't give quality assurance unless we're the ones controlling the assets. So, now the client sends us, you know, beta or DV cam or whatever it is that they're working with, and they let us handle all the compression. And, again, that's a best practice thing. That's really educating the client on how this process works and the best way to deliver the best experience. Because they don't want their video looking like... They don't want their video looking like crap on their website.

And this thing can also, and I don't know how many of you are familiar with it, but it's QuickTime, so it can be laid off to CD-ROM. The reference file for this can be emailed out. So, it's a very viral experience as well, and everybody likes to hear viral in this community.

Not in regular life, but in this, everybody likes it. So, can we go back to the PowerPoint? Thank you. So the other thing that I've been finding in building these skins is to really leverage press opportunities because these haven't been done yet the way they should be done, I feel.

And so when we launch one, we get great grassroots marketing, and I turned to Apple, actually, to help me do that. And so every time I launch an interesting media skin, I get help from them, and they put it on What's On, if they think it's interesting, What's On, in their What's On section, and also in their QuickTime.

And so I've been able to get a lot of people to come in and say, hey, I want to know what's on your skin, and I can't tell you how powerful that is for my Nautica client to hear that they're getting free press and getting thousands and thousands of consumers out there reading about their skin and then getting driven to their website.

So it's very powerful. And the fact that it's so powerful actually got the global manager, the global head of Zentropy, to write a quote in a press release, and we sent out a press release about this Nautica skin. And this was huge because this is a guy that two years ago, refused to have anything to do with QuickTime.

And because one of the things that we're doing as an interactive advertising agency is looking at ways to leverage client assets and to really grow a brand in a lot of different ways, he was so excited about this, he now sees the potential of it, and he's talking about QuickTime all the time. And I just remember the first time he said, we could do QuickTime. I dropped whatever I was holding because it had been a two-year journey for me to get him to feel that way. So everybody now is really... behind the development of this stuff.

So where we are right now as a company, as an interactive agency, is looking into solutions for our clients that really highlight branding, that highlight conversion. And what I mean by conversion is if you have a consumer who's never heard of the brand or who's not a fan of the brand, experiences that attract them, that get them hooked on, that get them seduced and become lifelong members of this brand.

And also applications that collect data and information and that stay persistent in a user's mind and perhaps on their desktop. So desktop applications and the use of QuickTime Media Skins for me is just an all-around great solution for these ideas. Also, everything that you build in this can be tracked.

So for a lot of our clients, they want to see numbers on how these things are doing. So you can directly look on a daily basis, see what people are doing, see where in the skin they're interacting, what content. And then you can also look at the content that they're using. So you can look at the content that they're using and see where in the skin they're interacting, what content is exciting them and really leverage all of that information.

And the other thing also to be aware of is right now what's happening in the living room with cable operators, with video on demand and with TiVo and other PVR solutions is pieces of video content is really becoming a much stronger player for advertisers. What used to be video that just, you know, stayed on the cutting room floor is now becoming significant content that people are showing.

And with living rooms becoming wireless and the opportunity for a user to have a dual screen experience where maybe they're watching some kind of television show or a game show or something in the living room and then they have video on their lap or some sort of experience on their lap on their Mac or PC, that becomes very, very powerful. So that's why this, the use of video and media skins are so significant to me.

And lastly, I just wanted to mention, and this is revisiting this GM demo that we did. GM ByPower, which is one of our biggest clients, is actually a website that drives dealer leads. It basically, a user goes on there and has a choice of all the different GM cars, and they actually get drilled down to a dealer. So if we could go over to the iBook again.

So actually, if any of you are in the market for a car, please go to GMPiPower. Let me show you this. So this is something that we built two years ago, but it's come up again as something that now the client wants to pay for. And that's because GMPiPower is really interested in tools that allow the user to interact with different assets that will help sell the car, basically, and get them interested. So this skin was built as a place to look at and say, "Hey, I want to look at all of GM's SUVs." So here is basically a content well of all of the content for GM-branded SUVs.

So a user could basically launch this, either on the GMPiPower site or the GM.com site, choose an SUV that they're interested in, and then we have an application here that houses all the assets so they can find out more about that car, including commercials. . Tiger Woods is a Buick's boy right now, so we put all the Tiger Woods commercials in here. So you think... Where is it? I don't see it. . . .

You know, this is like a million dollar commercial or, you know, gazillion dollar commercial, however much these things cost, and now we're repurposing it and using it in this world, which is a great way to repurpose assets. Also, our friend VR, so the user can really see that car and in the inside of the car.

So if a major corporation like GM is actually really starting to see the importance and the sexiness of this, it's really exciting. So look for something like this to be out in the next six months or so, and maybe it'll be something that will actually launch off of GM.com, which is actually a QuickTime site. And that's it.

Am I on? I'm here to talk to you about the hire. My name is Mark Sandau. I am the interactive creative director for an agency in Minneapolis called Carmichael Lynch. And these two slides were in the example I was set, so I just filled in a little overview for objectives of the project, creating an interface, a little bit about the execution of some of our ideas, and some of the success we found with this project. So I'm just going to lead you through one case study.

Go to here. I never know if people know about this or not, but sometimes I feel stupid asking the question, other times I don't want to assume, but have anybody seen the films? Is that something you guys are kind of familiar with? So, real briefly then, this is a series of short films that happened over two seasons. The first season was pretty successful, so they came back with three more. And they're all about this guy who is the driver.

And what's kind of interesting to note is there was a different director for each film. So, there's kind of a different take placed on all these. And our job was to take whatever they do and get it out to the world. My part being purely interactive stuff. So here's a quick trailer if you guys haven't seen this before. There is audio on this. I probably should have. Just imagine it being the best audio you've ever heard.

and Here's a list of some of the directors that we worked with. Well, this is the list of directors we worked with, so you can get an idea of some of the caliber of some of these people that we're working with, and this is kind of important when I talk about some of the other stuff we've tried to ask them what to do.

The distribution of the films, as I mentioned, was on the internet, but we also had broadcasts. There was actually a television channel on DirecTV dedicated to BMW for a while, even as far as in-flight movies and disc-based media, so it got passed around quite a bit. Goals and Objectives.

This was our, I guess, working brief as to what we were going to try to do with Season 2, and I'm going to talk specifically about the second season. Obviously, A number one is excellent quality presentation of the film. Whatever we did was just to present the films. We could not mess with that. But we also needed to create a really compelling and engaging interface. Just to, you know, not to be outdone by the films, we needed to make our piece just as engaging.

Another side piece was always increasing distribution, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that later. And again, one of the things that was in the original brief, even from Season 1, was unique delivery of a unique piece of content, I think. In Season 1, we kind of did it, but in Season 2, I think we did a much better job. And of course, reliable and stable technology.

One of the quotes then is, sometimes they summarize this for you as you get this brief, it said, "Must perform like a BMW," and I always thought that was pretty interesting. I don't know if that always gets played out, but the interface, not only the content, but the interface is really a brand extension, and if this thing doesn't perform very well, it doesn't shine a very good light on BMW.

DV light controls and special features also made it. Here's two slides about Season 1 and things we had changed. Season 1, we basically made a VCR, and we had all these different tapes. So you download the player, and you plug in these tapes. And we thought, well, that's kind of a neat idea. You can collect these things, and it's a pretty familiar interface.

And it looked a little bit like this, where we had these little, these little chicklets would fill in with these snapshots of the film if you had downloaded that piece. But what we had found out was, that wasn't simple enough. It got confusing, there was multiple downloads. So we took everything from that previous statement about what these films needed to do, and then we took all our learning from Season 1 and we came up with this.

We really needed to simplify the player. We needed to make this easy to use with no instructions at all. I think for as many times as you hear that, that gets lost so often that it's good to reread that over and over again. We need to reduce the physical size. One of the things that we noticed as these things get popular, people download them a lot. And we ended up paying a lot of server fees trying to distribute this stuff.

Last season was in QuickTime 5, Sorenson 3, and we thought if we went to, or the first season was in QuickTime 4, this season was in QuickTime 5, so we did a little math. We also tried to reduce the screen dimensions of the films to bring them down from this funny size of 800 by 340.

I don't know if you guys have ever tried to work on anything bigger than that magical 720, but it's not really worth it. We thought we could do it, but no one noticed when we went to 720. And then viral distribution, it was kind of interesting to hear you say that. So again, try to save a little money by letting other people host our content.

So we came up with this great idea that we thought the film is the player. So each player will be its own film, and each film will be its own player. And if people want to collect them, they can do that, but it won't be this VCR type of system.

So when we end up with this, basically what I'm trying to say is we ended up with a QuickTime solution. The first version was Director, and we had a Flash layer, and we brought all these QuickTime films in, but it just wasn't the system that we needed. This system ended up just being so much less complicated to develop. And this is kind of my little plug for QuickTime and for Apple, because it just worked out fantastically well for us. We had one environment instead of two because we had a binary file. We had such less technical support.

It was just something that you could really measurably... That's information I can't release, but I wish I could, because you could just see it drop so much, the number of emails, and even from the client, like, "How did this work?" or "What happened to this film?" or "Where do these films go after I download them?" This was such an easy, simple solution that you just had one file, and you could keep track of that.

And then a less complex interface, and I'll talk a little bit about how we came to the interface that you'll see it in. Another thing, I don't know if you guys have run into this, but we had a lot of trouble with people trying to download these at work. Just because, you know, they have their broadband connection at work and it's lunchtime.

But it would not make it through these firewalls, our little director solution. Here, basing it on QuickTime, it's all part of the browser. However they get this information, it's not us. It's not our fault anymore. We don't have to handle that ever again. That was a lot of time spent just on that.

Viral distribution, we made a real conscious effort this time to make smaller files because they're easier to send. Again, binary files so people didn't have to post if it was a Mac or a PC, and then any viral distribution is free distribution in our mind. So we really encouraged it.

Nobody could put up a branded site that tried to take control of the content, but certainly if it was passed around, that was fine with us. And then I'll talk a little bit about how we tracked our viral film views later. So here's the demo. If we go to the demo machine, I will play for you what our skin ended up looking like.

So here's our piece with our music. Right down here is where the slider will develop. These are our play controls and then a little bit of navigation. That's about all we had. Everything will happen in the same interface. You're not really moving to different pages or anything like that. We hope that the play button was pretty obvious. Clicking on play takes you right to the film.

Over here is our volume control. We had this neat little system that we just had one slider, but it had multiple functions. We can change it to base, and now I'm controlling the base. Change of treble, and now we're changing the treble. Again, really trying to simplify this interface. Over here, you can see we had a scan backwards, and we had scan forward. But if I hit pause, now they turned to step.

So again, trying to really simplify this interface and not have a lot of controls. We found this just to be much more easy for people to use than season one, that we had to download the piece. Here, we were going straight to it. We were one click away from watching the film at any time.

Little section about the Roadster. I'll show you some of this cool stuff later. And then we have a little section in here for credits where you can click on people's names. So we had accomplished everything that we had done in Season 1, but this was all done through a skinned player. Back to the slides for me, please.

And those are still out to download at bmwfilms.com. All the films are out there now for season one and for season two. So here's a brief rundown of what we had. We had to do everything in that great cinema format, 2-3-5-1. We had a full-screen video option, so clicking on the full-screen option in the corner would black out the entire screen and play the video in the center, which was a great accomplishment thanks to... A few people working very hard, like Chris Stock and Guy.

We had director's commentary in there. We had biographies and filmographies. We had our sound control. We had a whole gallery section. We had closed captioning in there, which is really amazing. And we had web links that all exist in that little piece, which I just think is a lot of content for that.

Executing the idea. Here's a little process that we go through, and it sounded pretty similar to what Lori had talked about. We start with a schematic. If it's not appropriate in this situation, we go to a wireframe. We do things that are called mood boards, and I'll show you what those look like.

And of course, we have to take into consideration now that we have those done, what our fonts and our colors and what our graphic standards might be. And finally, at that point, we go to creating a layout. I think that's really important that you do all these steps before and before you start working against the layout. And of course, some user testing. We'll get to the final piece.

Here's our version of a wireframe. This is something that we present to the client to give them an idea of what the content is on the page. Sometimes I present this idea and people have never ever seen it before and other people have different names for it. I can't remember the name that you would use, but... Oh, yeah. Do people use these? I was just curious.

Do you guys do this very often or once in a while? I find it really helpful, especially if some clients are just not able to absorb those three different pieces of information. If you can just say, okay, this is purely the buttons and the switches and controls that will be on your interface. That's all you have to worry about. Don't think about fonts, colors, content, anything.

Just look at this for me. It's really helpful. Second step is these mood boards that we call them. This is us collecting pieces of information to give the client an idea of what this thing is going to look like. I had a picture of the room, and I should have brought it, that just has hundreds of these things clipped to the wall.

This is just a few of the stuff. These are kind of these MP3 skins that we had found that we liked. There might be just little hints and pieces of things that you see. It could be clips from movies. It could be magazines, books, whatever you find in the newspaper. We just keep collecting stuff.

You get it on a napkin. Hey, that was kind of cool the way that thing moved. Just keep collecting stuff. In the end, you kind of color it down to a few different pieces. This is a great way of quickly showing your client kind of some ideas of what this thing might look like without you spending a real lot of time on actually making layouts yet.

Here's just a couple quotes that I like. Simplify, simplify, make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler, is a quote that we use quite often. Again, that's kind of my credo when looking at work that's presented to me by my designers. I think hierarchy of information is pretty important.

I think we did a really good job in the situation that we didn't have to have our step forward and our scan buttons visible all the time. We thought if you're playing the movie, then you probably don't want a quick pause and step forward. You probably want to scan and vice versa. And I think it's important, a fundamental of design is to only present the information that's really important at that moment.

Know what to leave out. I don't know if Steve Jobs actually said that first, but I've heard it mentioned in this Time interview that he had about OS X, and I always thought that was a great way of putting it. Use conventions found in the interactive language. We found it really helpful just to make that play button a triangle, even though other people have tried a lot of different things. I think I've got a lot to worry about, and I think I might just go with some of those so I can move on.

And then we also had to make a template that was appropriate for all films, and I thought that was kind of an interesting challenge that not only did we have this piece for one film, but we had to make it work for eight different films, being these different directors of different types of movies.

So we started with those two things. We had shown them a mood board. We had got sign-off on some of these things. We knew some of our standards. We kind of knew what the posters looked like. So we moved to the Flame Surface QuickTime skin, which was based on the shapes of the BMW Z4, the car that was featured in those three films. We tended to call this the movie theater. That's part of the reason why it goes black when you get to the movie and you're actually watching the film.

The kind of interesting note, the original concept was done in 3D, but we were never able to achieve exactly what we wanted to do. So we ended up creating the whole thing in Photoshop. This photographer, I'll have these URLs up later if you ever want to work with some of these guys. They're just amazing, had created this whole thing with photography.

So here's what the Z4 looks like. Notice the rondelle, the side marker light where the BMW logo is and how that's shaped. And kind of notice the taillights, the way they're sculpted around the taillights. So we had taken some of those ideas along with-- that's pretty dark-- where the backlight of the cowling sits and where the gauges are. And here's our player. And you can kind of see some of those same tones and ideas making their way into our piece. Music, I think that's really important.

I thought I'd just play this little clip of music that we had. I think sometimes you run into these skins and these other pieces and they just have this little four-second loop, you know, they just keep going over again, hoping you don't notice. And this is such a great little piece of music that I think sometimes it doesn't get appreciated. Again, based on the... No.

I was kind of above the standard, and I think sometimes those things don't show to the surface, but those attention to details eventually, when you get them all right, really makes for a really nice piece. Motion VR is this great idea we came up with, where we took a 50-second movie clip of the Z4, and we made basically a traditional VR, but in this case, the vehicle's in motion.

There were two VRs created. There was a front angle during the daytime and a rear angle at night. And we were able to take this content, kind of talking about what Lori had mentioned about, because it was QuickTime, we were able to use this piece on a DVD. And we had a self-contained QuickTime movie for this, and then it was also embedded in the EFE. And I'm going to go to the demo right now and show you what that looked like.

Switch me over to the demo machine, please. Here is the standalone version. I'm going to turn that down. But here we are, moving through Las Vegas at about 4 o'clock in the morning. And it's still about 108 degrees. So we're shooting this, and the user can watch the Z4 motion.

We just thought there was something really beautiful about watching this car move and watching the lights dance across the hood. So you can move through all these different angles on demand, and even on a sequence. Just like a VR, but in this case, it's in motion. Is that actually separate video practice on VR? Exactly, yep.

Yeah, it's very much a workaround in the background, but very much the live stage and a lot of work, again, from Guy and those guys helping us find a system that we can stream all these, run all these things at the same time and be able to switch in between them.

Back to the slideshow, please. That's also on the DVD. You can get a DVD of all these films, and that piece is on there. Of course, it's full screen, and it's big and beautiful. You can use your angle button, which you never get to use on your DVD. I love that piece.

So our Z4 MotionVR was eight still cameras. Those are all still cameras that we shot. We didn't drive very fast, and we rattled off a ton of still frames. They were mounted to this custom rig, and I have a picture of that, and I'll show you what it looks like. And we had a chase car falling behind. In the end, we shot 64,000 frames of this stuff. It ended up for just these two 50-second clips.

We stitched, we call it stitched, into these QuickTime movies, and we used Apple QuickTime VR Studio, which I believe is still in 9. I don't know if there's any chance. Anyway, moving that to 10, that would be nice. And they were retouched with Photoshop to try to take the bottom of the rig out, and we used LiveStage and QScript to control the layer switching.

And here's what that rig looked like, about as long as the car. It's kind of a close-up. about all the other things. Big, huge CF cards on those cameras so we could try to snap as many frames as possible before we could switch them out. We had rented every D1 camera they had in Los Angeles for this.

That's a great question. We shot a test in video, and it ended up looking a lot like video. And I don't know exactly how, but the still just looks so much more beautiful, and we knew we could use a still frame to layer. We also found out that hanging as many cameras as we wanted to need off the back of that rig was really a pain with their batteries and everything. But the still cameras were so much more lighter and flexible that we ended up going there.

Shelley Ward is the name of the company that built that rig, if you ever need a rig for that type of stuff. Again, I think that's at the end of my presentation. Those guys are amazing. They'll build you anything you want. I think so, but I think it would have been a lot of work.

I'm getting pretty close now. Interior VR, I don't know how many people have worked with interior VR. I'm sure you're all familiar with it, but I thought I'd just show this real quick. The photography was done on a soundstage, and the lighting is fixed as the camera rotates, which is kind of interesting. Here we are shooting that on our soundstage.

I think that's kind of a fun photo. People probably don't realize how much lighting is done on these cars. You think you have just one light, but that wasn't even our complete setup. I'm going to just show that real quick, just because I think it's big and beautiful and I want to... Mark, with favor of photography, shot this. And I just think it's some of the nicest VR work I've seen.

And then he had went out and shot this bridge in one of the films. We shot at, and so we did a lot of work to try to marry up the films with its environment. Again, like that Las Vegas shot was, I don't think I mentioned this, was used in one of the films too, so we tried to do as many things as we could so this whole thing felt like a unified piece. And back to the slides.

So, this goes without saying, but so much of this stuff was done in live stage, but just to reiterate, we used a Flash layer really for all our graphics and animation. We used it to control the user interaction. We used it to pass the user request to QScript, and we really used QScript really to control everything that was QuickTime level. And I think that worked out really good, making that decision, which we didn't quite make right away, but when we did, I think it really worked out well. We said, hey, everything graphics, everything that's user interaction will handle with Flash.

Everything that goes to the workings of this whole thing, we need to do in QScript. And just by notes, it's all a new technology. It requires a lot of experimentation. I think a couple times we had given up on that motion VR, thinking we can't get this thing to work.

And we had tried turning off layers or enabling layers or bringing them to the front, and there's 20 different ways to skin that. And we finally ended up with something that works. So, I guess my advice to you is try a few. Try a few different things, because sometimes these combinations of this newer technology don't always work out.

Um, and compression, I think you all know this too, is that compression's really a craft, and good results come from a lot of experiment and experimentation, and, uh, and also the original source material really helps if you can have them try to shoot something that, uh, that's able to compress, and that's why I kind of showed that director list before, because we had had a few conversations with some of these directors trying to tell them, like, you know, you need to shoot this way so it compresses well.

It was kind of an interesting conversation to have when you have, you know, People like Ang Lee on the end of the phone, you know, he won an Academy Award. And I'm like, "Wow, if you could cut it just a little less, that would be helpful." That whip pan was really bad.

And then we had Yu Sorenson III, MP3 Audio, and Cleaner 6. Here's our success. I think this is kind of our great little telltale. We have 40 million views as the official number so far, and you know the media that we got. Here's my favorite slide. There's season one, our director test, and I love director.

I grew up on director. That's all I did. It was on VideoWorks or whatever when it first came out, and that was my idea. But we had 29% of the people actually downloading the piece and 71% streaming. Season two, we went to the QuickTime solution, and now we had 75% people downloading these pieces and 25% streaming them. And I think that's an amazing testament to some pretty unique technology that's very stable and makes your work look very good.

Then my last little notes about the dynamic player. We didn't get a chance to get into this at this piece, but I wish we would have. We did a little metrics collection, so if these things even got passed around, they would call home just to let them know that the film had been viewed, and that's how we got an idea of how many films were viewed.

We didn't do any serial data collection, so we don't really know who anybody was. Just kept track of the film views and how long they had the player on, which is some really interesting information for you and your client. But you could have gone a lot farther. We could have gotten an idea of who's watching it, what time of day, and what type of CPU they have. That's all the information you can gather, and I think it doesn't have to be malicious. It just helps you build a better piece next time, knowing what these people are using to view your stuff.

The one piece that we did do is we did do the help online, which is kind of nice, that we didn't have to worry about updating our player, although we could have, but that was just a help page on a website that we could update immediately. And we never got to streaming trailers, but that would have been another great use of this, is to have the trailer stream in, and each time a new trailer would come online, you could still have Season 1 or Season 2 skins and see a trailer coming up for Season 3. I wish we had gotten that far. And then here's some URLs.

EC Media, you can talk to Guy, which is tremendously helpful. Lefevre Photography, we had used to shoot all that photography element music. and Chris Sheehan is the, he's not really the, he is a photographer, but he was the piece, he was the guy who helped build our skin.