Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Glenn Bulycz on the QuickTime product marketing team. Welcome to this session. Hopefully we can fight the post This session is a little bit new for us, and I hope it works out. If you want to feedback either directly to me by email or in the feedback forum or however you'd like to do that, there have been some online campaigns to support product sales, to support charities, to support all kinds of things, maybe notably something like the QuickTime movie trailer theater and things like that really are promotional assets for driving business. And we're lucky enough today to have a speaker who was very, very involved in the delivery of probably the most important and one of the most entertaining campaigns that we've seen on the web to date. So without further ado, I will introduce Chris Stocksmith with Fallon Minneapolis, and I'll let him tell that story.

Hello, can you hear me? Hi. My name is Chris Stocksmith and I work for Fallon Worldwide. And we are an advertising agency. Our home offices are in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And we have offices in New York, London, Hong Kong, Sao Paulo, and Tokyo. And some of our clients include United Airlines, Time Magazine, Citibank, Virgin Mobile, and two projects I'll be talking to you about today, BMW and the islands of the Bahamas. Thank you.

So this session's called QuickTime Sells. I'm not necessarily gonna be going through how to sell QuickTime to your clients. Rather, I'm going to be doing a couple case studies of two projects that we did that, you know, I like to think were pretty successful. And hopefully they'll, somewhere along the line, it'll help you think about things that you can do for your clients with QuickTime. The two case studies will be on BMW films that we did for BMW North America. I imagine most of you know about that one. And the other called the Island Hop Tour, and it was for the islands of the Bahamas, for the Ministry of Tourism, for the actual nation of the Bahamas. And I'll kind of go through why we did what we did and how we did it.

Okay, so first a little background. BMW at the time in 2000, traditional car advertising had changed quite a bit. It wasn't quite as effective as it had been. The return on investment was down a bit for a lot of reasons, and I'll go through those in a second. And another thing for BMW that year, they had no significant product introductions that year. And their whole ultimate driving machine campaign was kind of being mimicked at the time by their competitors. So, um... We took a look at our prospective buyers and what was unique about them, did some studies. We found that 65% of them were online a lot. 45% of them did research for their buying options online. So that was all good news for us. And they were a younger demographic than in the whole, which is really important because you want to leave a positive impression about your product. product when people are young. Get them to buy early, build up brand loyalty, all of And a good portion of them had broadband access, most at work and some people at home. And this is 2000, so step back in time a bit. And they were really receptive to TiVo and DVRs, which is another important aspect when we're talking about this. And they were watching less TV, and when they were watching TV, they weren't watching network sitcoms. So we had to find a different way to get to our prospective buyers. And they were avoiding ads, and that's, you know, one of the nicest things about TiVo is that you can avoid ads. So we had to find different ways to get to them.

So our goals were with these prospective buyers to increase awareness, increase familiarity, give them a positive opinion, you know, so they have a positive opinion about BMW and kind of get the whole BMW exhilaration thing through to them. I don't know if many of you have driven a BMW. I own a Mini Cooper S which is manufactured by BMW. A little side note, it really is quite a driving experience. When we first got the car, my wife is from, I live in Minneapolis, we live in Minneapolis. My wife is from Littleton, Colorado. And the first year with the car, we wanted to drive it out for Thanksgiving and show it off and all of that. And we're driving across Nebraska, and it's kind of drizzling out that day. And it was 32 degrees, right at freezing. But the road was insulated from the ground, so it wasn't freezing up at all. And when you drive a BMW or a Mini, it's a real tactile feel. You can feel the texture of the road in the car. The way I'd almost describe it is kind of like you're on gravel, it's kind of a-- you're on concrete-- you can feel it. You can actually feel the texture of the road in the steering wheel and in the pedals. And so we're driving across Nebraska, and we hit these overpasses that have no insulation underneath them. The air was blowing under them.

And all of a sudden, it'd be like-- And I knew right away that I was driving on ice. So I think it's the best safety feature of BMWs and Minis that most people don't get is that when you're driving on ice, you can feel the road. So that kind of exhilaration, that kind of driving experience, we wanted to help get across to our prospective buyers.

I believe it was Goldeneye. We had a Z3 prominently placed in the film Goldeneye, James Bond film. And we got really good response from that. You know, there's a lot of good driving scenes with it. And people really responded to that. So that was another thing we were thinking about when we were planning what we were going to do for BMW. And the prospective buyers, they weren't intimidated by the Internet. They were not necessarily techies like you and I, but they weren't intimidated by it. They were willing to download a plug-in. They were willing to get new experiences through the web because they were using it as entertainment.

So the big idea, what we called it, it was no one, we couldn't say BMW's new project. We couldn't even say BMW the big idea. It was just the big idea, and everybody knew, oh, the big idea, you know, gotcha. The idea was to create a series of short films and to make them only available online, or initially only available online. And a really interesting thing about this is that in order to do it, we needed to flip the traditional advertising model.

traditional advertising, you spend 10% of your budget on your production of your ads and your print media and all of that. And then 90% of it is spent on media, paying the networks and the magazines and whoever to push your message out to who you want to sell to. With the big idea, the BMW film thing, we took our budget and we were going to spend 90% on production and only 10% on the media. So our goal was to create something really interesting that people would go and seek out online. And being that we had a big budget, we could go and we could get first class A-list directors. So the hire was created.

And the talent that we were able to recruit. Now, the whole idea about it, let me step back a bit. The whole idea behind this was that the car wouldn't necessarily be a product placement as much as a car would be a character in the film. So a lot of these films have chase scenes. You know, the cars are featured prominently. But the cars didn't necessarily, you know, we didn't have to show the new glove compartment. Or, you know, there was no list from BMW you have to show this thing, this thing, this thing. It's just that the cars needed to be a character in the film. Otherwise, we could be as creative as we wanted to be. You know, kind of carte blanche on that. So the first person we approached was David Fincher. Did Fight Club and Seven and a very technologically gifted man. And we were approaching him to originally be a director of one of the films. But he really grabbed onto it and he ended up being an executive producer on the whole series. Other directors, John Frankenheimer, he did the Manchurian Candidate, the original one. They're making a new one now. And Ronan, which is a Robert De Niro film. It's got a great chase scene in it, and actually we used that chase scene when we were pitching the whole idea to BMW, so he was kind of a no-brainer. And then Ang Lee, just Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was really hot at the time. And then we--to add some authenticity, we had some foreign directors, Wong Kar Wai and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu-- and I always say it wrong, Iñárritu, Iñárritu, sorry-- but a couple foreign directors, you know, young, up-and-coming, and, uh... And then Guy Ritchie. And Guy Ritchie had done a snatch and lock stock and two smoking barrels. And if we can switch to the demo machine, I will show you the one that he did for us. All right.

The first thing you notice physically about this lady is her eyes. Bright blue eyes. It's rare to actually see those eyes, cos they're usually covered up, but when you do, it's worth it. The next thing you notice is her hands. Strong, powerful, yet feminine hands. But the real heart stopper that this woman has in her galaxy of talents is her voice. Her billion dollar voice. She's a legend in her lifetime. She's achieved giddy heights few have he caught. She's unrivaled in her world.

You say you are the bomb. - Idiot, you are such a moron. This is not what I pay you for. Glenn, her manager for seven years. No backbone on the man. - Not a problem, sweetheart. We will work it out, okay? - But he gets paid enough not to have one. - Coffee, I want my coffee! It better not be cold. - Piping, piping hot. - I'm so over black.

This'll do. Take me to the venue. I'm sorry, I'm booked for someone else. Yeah, right. Just take me to the venue. What venue? I am gracing this armpit of a town for one night. If you also think I'm gonna know the name of the venue in El Armpito, you're sadly mistaken. You are the driver. You are supposed to know.

We're going to the palace. We? Listen, my bone-from-the-neck-up driver friend. I suggest you put your foot down. And next time, do your homework. Okay. Fine. What do you think you're doing? I'm coming with you, ma'am. Then get on the roof and hold on tight. Out! Out! Out! Follow behind. Good idea, tough guy. What are you waiting for? Let's get out of here before he gets in the car. I don't want him following me. OK. Don't lose them.

So things we can get away with online as compared to on television. On television, you always see cars race up to like 60, 65 miles an hour, and then all of a sudden the speedometer stops. Here we could push a car any way we wanted to. You can't show cars getting shot up by machine gun fire and things like that in traditional advertising. So we had more liberties that way too. OK, so that was Star.

So the first season was pretty successful. We made a benchmark on what would be a proper return for the investment on all of this. We figured 3 million views would do it. If we did that, we would be happy, and BMW would be happy, and we all agreed upon that. And in the end, we ended up having 13 million views by the end of season one. So it was pretty successful by our standards. And the best part about it was that we got to do a second season. Um... So season-- OK, so season one-- that should be BMW Films' player, not a layer-- we built a player using Macromedia Director. So it was a standalone piece of software, and it would load QuickTime movies into the player. And then you would get added features, DVD-type features, like subtitles. You could look at the car that was featured in that certain film.

And it was good for tracking. We could track if a person who downloaded the player, what films they had watched. Had they watched all the films? Did they watch them all the way through? Did they go to BMW and look at a car? Did they check out the car inside of the player? Things like that.

One of the disadvantages of this was is that people could download the movie and then not necessarily view it in the BMW Films player. They could actually view it in anybody's player, which in the back of our minds was a little weird, but that's where technology was at the time. That's what we could do.

And you know how it is. You download something, then there's a new file on your desktop and you just pop it open. You don't necessarily load it into the player the way you learned how to do it the first time. And these are coming out every couple weeks, just to keep hyping them a little bit more rather than all coming out at once. and the press was ridiculous, especially when, you know, when that Madonna one broke, it was a really big deal. So for the second season, this is where we discovered Live Stage Professional, and we realized that Live Stage was a really, really great tool. It's a quick-time authoring software, those of you not familiar with it. And not only is it great for tracking metrics, you know, how often people look at films, you know, sending information back to us about people's viewing habits of these films. But it was also great because you could put a flash layer into the QuickTime movie for, you know, added interactivity. This was great for us because we're, you know, Fallon Interactive, we have a lot of great flash developers, and it speaks right to us. And me being a flash developer by trade, I was given the task of, you know, learning how to use LiveStage Pro and then incorporating the two together. So the second season, each movie is actually-- the player is built into every single movie. So if you downloaded the movie, you got the skin, you got all the added DVD features, the subtitles, the tracking was built in, and there were added car features so you could take a look at the car. And the added weight was minuscule compared to the actual film, because the films are big. They were like 60, 70, 80 megs. And so, you know, like, 5 to 6 megs added on so we could add all of these other things to help sell the cars, to help brand it, to help keep the BMW idea there. So that was really important to us and to them. Okay. Kind of covered all of that. All right, so I'll show you the player. If we can switch back to the demo machine, I'll show you the player from the second season and how it's kind of different.

So this is a player, obviously. Let me close this other one. Let me hide this. So completely branded. It's got all the added information. It's got the-- well, I can look down here. It's got the credits built right into it. Plays a movie. Make it full screen. You know, volume controls. You can, you know, change the bass, change the treble, all of that. And then you can turn your captions on, and there's director's commentary built in, too. So this is all built into a one QuickTime file, so it's kind of a neat way to be able to put a lot of interactivity into your-- into your--into your movie.

I know what I wanted to show you. So the second season, there was a new product rollout. It was a Z4 Roadster. And all three films-- we did three films the second season. all three films had something about the Z4 Roadster. And this is probably one of my favorite ones. This is a third film. It was filmed in Las Vegas. And so we worked with Mark LeFevre, who's a photographer in Minneapolis, and we put a car mount on a Z4. And on the other films, you know, there's a car mount on the front, and then the second one's got QTBRs built into it. But basically it's a big car mount unit and then we had to photoshop out all of the added stuff so. And this is all controlled in live stage, so it's pretty neat. It's a neat way to see the car. OK, so that's kind of how the second season came about.

So can we go back to the slides, please? OK. BMW Films was pretty successful, as I'm sure you've all probably heard of it. We figure we got 26 million in free advertising. There was a lot of press. 250 broadcast stories that we know of. I'm sure there were probably more, but 250 that we actually tracked. More than 750 stories in print and 350, more than 350 stories in online news sources, I To date, over 63 million views. And people are still downloading this.

So this lives on. It's not like a traditional TV campaign where it runs until they decide they don't want to run it anymore. So it's still helping put the product forward. B&W is really happy about it, and we won a ton of awards, kind of the two big ones being the one show, which is kind of the Oscars of the advertising world. We won Best in Show. And at Cannes, for season one, we entered Cannes, but we didn't win anything. And there was a big controversy, because it was one of the biggest things that happened in the advertising world that year. There was a big controversy. Everybody was like, why didn't it win anything? And the main reason was that it didn't fit into any traditional advertising category. So the next year, they added a new award for something that would be kind of breaking new ground. Groundbreaking, I guess you would say. They added a titanium lion, and we won that for the second season. So it's kind of cool when they, you know, make an award based on something you did. So.

So that's BMW Films. The next thing I'll talk about is the islands of the Bahamas. The Bahamas, fairly new client to us, last year about the time I came to the Worldwide Developers Conference, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. Last year I came to the Worldwide Developers Conference. I was a guest of Glenn's, and I went to a presentation by Michael Schaaf. I don't know if any of you, I'm sure you all know of him. He's a guy who wears a top hat, and I think this year he's got a funky beard and he's got the kind of red mustache. You know, he's brilliant, works for a place called Idle Hands. I think he is Idle Hands, isn't he? What's that? Small Hands, I'm sorry. Sorry about that. I went to his presentation last year, and it was really great. He showed this demo of the Los Angeles subway system, and the way it worked is you had the map of the Los Angeles subway system, and you could kind of scroll through it, and you could click on certain stops, And when you clicked on a stop, a QTVR would pop open, and you would be standing, you know, at the station, you know, underground, like you just got off the train. And you could look around and take it all in. And then he had nodes built into it, and you had, you know, like your exits, and you could click one of two exits, and you click the exit, and you had another QTVR, and you're standing on the street above the subway, above, you know, where you would get out, you know, knowing where you were.

And you could look around, and it was really, really fascinating. and I'm like, wow, that's really a neat use of live stage and QuickTime and Flash. And really what I thought was I could do that, you know. So it was very impressive. So I went back to Minneapolis, and I was in a, one day I get a call from the Bahamas team, and they're like, you know, we need someone to come down and talk about banners with us. Pretty much any ad campaign we do, there's always banners to go along with it. I think that's pretty normal. So I went down to this meeting to talk about Bahamas banners. And they told us the whole idea for the TV spot. So if we can go back to the demo machine, I'll show you the TV spot that they were describing to me, that finally came out.

700 islands of the Bahamas. Okay, so we can go back to the slides. So that was basically the idea. And what the Bahamas was trying to do, they have two main islands that pretty much all the tourists go to, all the cruise ships stop at. But there's actually 600 islands in the Bahamas, and there's 14 main islands that tourists can go to. And the out islands have really unique experiences, and they aren't big tourist traps like the other two islands can be. So I was sitting in this meeting and I had one of those light bulb moments where everything, where you go, why don't we do something like that subway thing I saw? Why don't we have a map of the islands and you can click on an island and you can stand at one of the really beautiful places on the island. And then you can click on another place and it's like a virtual island hopping thing.

And then, what if we had tour guides built into these QTVRs? So if you were at a unique location, someone could tell you specifically about the location you're standing at. And there was no money in the budget for it, obviously. Well, we got a couple hundred thousand for banners or whatever. But we had a really good team on the project, and that's the thing about Fallon. We really try to promote ideas, really try to think of things in different ways. and if it's a really workable solution, we try to get that in front of our client. So my account executive said, can you build a prototype of it? And I said, yeah. So a day later, you know, I had a prototype ready, and we got it in front of the client. So let me show it to you real quick. Here we go.

Can we switch to the demo machine, please? So I went online, and I found some QTVRs that I could borrow to just kind of use as a piece of theater so we could get it in front of the client. So here's kind of a-- the logo of the Bahamas is kind of a map of the Bahamas in theory. So I click on this island, and-- And then there's a location. Bang, you're there. So that's kind of the idea.

You know, golf course, we were talking about vertical markets. I mean, this is obviously not in the Bahamas, but it gets the idea across. And we didn't really have any, you know, we're in Minnesota, so there aren't many Bahamians around. So I just used myself to. This is where the person would pop up and talk about something great about the Bahamas and how I'm a unique person in the Bahamas and how you should come here. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. - So that was basically the idea. So we built this prototype and got it in front of the client. I mean, what a great client. They just got super excited about it. So they went back to Parliament and asked for money for it. So that's cool when the client goes-- when they start throwing money at you to do something. We can switch back to the slides. And at one point, the TV-- the budgets were really tight, and the TV got postponed, and the print got postponed.

The thing that didn't get postponed was this project. So right there, I kind of consider it a big victory when something like that happens. So the Bahamas Island Hop Tour. So we started putting an estimate together. And because this was going to be done with found money, and we didn't know-- they wanted to know how much it was going to cost.

And we didn't want to say $2 million. We wanted to be really careful about it because we really wanted to produce it. We thought it was really something special and kind of groundbreaking. Well, I shouldn't say that, but I like to think it is. I'm sure there's other things out there that are cool too.

So we really wanted to do it. So we started thinking about how we were going to do it. And I'm a filmmaker, so I've got experience in independent film. And you can-- so we use that to our advantage. I was going to direct all of the interviews. And we were just going to have a cameraman with us and a sound guy.

And we talked to Mark LeFevre, who had done the motion QT-- the motion VR, we called it, on that BMW film I just showed you in Las Vegas in the back of the car thing. He had done that for us. And he'd been doing stuff with us in BMW for like 10 years. Tons of QT VRs. He's just a great photographer. And he's the kind of guy who really embraces QTVRs. He's got a really nice relationship with Panascan, who are-- they make a QTVR camera. So we talked to him. And he started putting an estimate together for us. So we started picking locations.

We found that, you know, for the bigger islands, we wanted to do two locations on each island, and for the small islands, we just would do one location. So 22 locations altogether we figured out, and we needed to coordinate all the interviews, so this was kind of a challenge. And then we had to put together a crew, and we had to coordinate travel, and LeFevre Pictures, Mark LeFevre and his team, came in real handy for that because they're used to traveling around the world. But this was kind of unique because we were going to go to really 16 islands. They say 14 islands because Harbor Island and Eleuthera are right next to each other, so they kind of consider them as one entity, but really 16 different islands. And we had to put together a schedule, and we had hit 16 islands, and we figured it would take about 23 days, and that's with no breaks. So we didn't get any days off. And I tell people that we worked every day, we worked so hard, and we were in the Bahamas for 23 days, and nobody seemed sorry for me. Nobody has much sympathy. But really, you would work a really long day. But at the end of the day, when you can go out and hang out on the beach for a little bit, it really recharges your batteries pretty quick. OK.

So it was hard work. And I'll tell you about just one of the days we had. We were on Long Island, and we were scheduled to shoot at two places on Long Island. In the morning, we were going to shoot at a place called Dean's Blue Hole. And a blue hole is basically a big pit in the ocean.

I think it's created by glaciers. I'm sorry, I don't know how it's created. But Dean's Blue Hole is the deepest blue hole known to man, 660 feet. We had to do an interview with a dive master who was gonna be there with us, so we had to set up the location for the QTVR, shoot that, do the interview, shoot a lot of footage so we can splice stuff together. And that day, later on in our shoot, we were doing some underwater shooting. We were doing some underwater QTVRs. They weren't gonna be cubic. They were linear QTVRs that we used in underwater digital SLR in a housing and on a tripod underwater. And we were also shooting video underwater. So we needed to test our cameras. In like two weeks, we were gonna actually shoot that. I mean, the cameras had been tested, but not in the field, so we had to do that. And then later that afternoon, we were going to a place called Max's Conk Shack. I don't know if you know what conk is, but it's that big-ass shell that you put up to your ear and you can hear the ocean. That's conk, and they prepare it in so many different ways in the Bahamas because they're everywhere. And it's really good the first, you know, dozen times. But everywhere we went, everybody is like, Oh, you know, Americans, you know, give them conk, you know. and I'd never need to eat conch again.

I mean, it's great, but I never need to eat it again. I've had quite a bit of it. So we had to go to Max's Conch Shack, and we were gonna shoot a QTVR there, and we were gonna do an interview. So it was a really busy day. So let me just show you some of the stuff we ended up shooting at the Blue Hole. So if we can switch back to the demo machine, please.

So first I'll show you the-- this is the blue hole. And it's really dark because it's 660 feet deep. And a guy actually dove to the bottom of it, believe it or not. He was down there for all of a minute, and then he spent the rest of his time decompressing, coming up. But it's still amazing to me that someone actually went that deep. Then there's like a 60-foot cliff right here that you can jump off of, and I'll show you the video where someone's actually jumping off of it, but we all jumped into it, you know, because how could you not?

So it's kind of neat. You know, you can go right there and bang, you're there. And start looking around, you know, taking it all in. Sorry, making you dizzy. OK, so that is the QTVR we shot. And then here's the interview. My name is Joel Fries. Behind me you see Dean's Blue Hole. It is the deepest measured known blue hole in the world. The ledge, actually you can climb upon the rocks and jump right into the blue hole. Diving in the blue hole is unique as if you were diving in a tunnel going straight down. We have a large variety of dives from the blue hole here to coral reef dives to wall dives and shark feeding dives. So divers, we invite you to come to Long Island and do some diving with us.

So we shot all of that stuff. And then we had to do the-- and he's a dive master, so he took us down to do the camera test underwater. I didn't go personally. But we were kind of running behind. And it was kind of a big deal locally, I guess, because people kept showing up and checking out what we were doing.

And one of the guys who came out, this old guy named Leonard Cartwright, went to my producer, Julie, and said, you know, you guys should really come check out my cave. My cave is really cool. You should check it out. You probably want to shoot there. It's really cool. And he was really nice, and he hung out all day chatting with everyone.

I was kind of like, well, we could maybe swing by there, but we're running out of time, and we really got to get to this Max's conch shack. And we're about two hours behind schedule, and I said to Julie, OK, forget it. We can't go there. And she goes, I already told them we would. Please, can we just go by there? So the QTVR team was tearing down and packing up all the underwater camera housings and things like that. And I said, OK. I was really mad, because if we failed, if we didn't get our next shot done that day, we would only have one shot on Long Island, and the Out Island Promotion Board would be pretty mad if that were the case. So I said to Julie, all right, it's on the way. Let's just take the video team. We'll go there, and we'll check it out. So we went there, and can we switch back to the slides, please? Okay.

Leonard Kerr, right? Oh, well, okay. We can switch back to the demo machine. Sorry. So we went there, and we walked into the place, and it was, you know, we had to walk through the caves for a little bit for like, you know, 10 minutes. And it was like that scene in Indiana Jones with the big ball.

You know, the cave was just beautiful, and there was this light coming in through these holes in the ceiling. And it was simply gorgeous, one of the most beautiful places we had been there yet. And I turned to Julie. I said, you've got to call the QTVR team and get them over here. We've got to try to shoot three things today. So there was a ladder, like a rickety ladder, going up into one of the holes, and she's like, my cell phone won't work. So she had to climb up the ladder, went up there, called them up, gave them directions.

They came by, and Mark walked into it, and he said, yeah, we've got to shoot this. We've got to shoot this. So we did our interview. We interviewed Leonard, and then we left. We went to the conch shack to start our interview there, So then Mark Lefavor could join us later with the QTVR team and shoot the QTVR there. So we shot the interview. I'll play the interview for you quickly.

Yeah, this is it. We have cartridge caves in Hamilton. These caves were found by the Indians. And we found pieces of Indian pottery and markings on the walls. We used the caves as a hurricane shelter. And in the early '30s, you could have got the whole community in here. And you could hardly tell that there's a hurricane going on outside, except for you could look out and see the trees moving. We'd spend days on it sometimes. We had a lot of fun. I was a kid at the time. Play catchers and hide and seek and, you know, we had a lot of fun. My name is Leonard Scott Ray. This is my playground.

So, yeah, you see he's a sweet old guy. He was just wonderful. So we shot that, and then we moved on. And Mark LeFevre and his team, an interesting thing about these caves is that they're filled with bats. Just filled, filled, filled with bats. And so, of course, they're filled with bat guano, bat poop, you know. And back in the 30s, they used to take the guano and shovel it out and send it to the United States because it's a really high power, it's a really good fertilizer. So there's brown soil everywhere, and it's basically bat guano. So Lefebvre and his assistant, when they were shooting it, basically they used a Panascan camera. I'll talk more about it later. But it's basically a glorified scanner with a big Mamiya medium format wide angle lens on it. And they would scan a certain area, and there was this light coursing in. But you couldn't really capture the light unless there was dust in it. So they took their shirts off, wrapped them around their faces, and then went around the place, kicking up bat guano, so there's all this bat guano floating in the air. And then they got really beautiful, they called it god light, you know, these beams of light like shining through. So they had to do that all throughout the cave, so I'll show you that real quick. So this is the QTVR they shot, and there's the god light.

Bad poop. And right up there, when they were down there for the hurricanes, they would see the trees moving and all that. So they shot that and they really had to haul ass over to the, over to the, to the conch shack where we were. And we showed up at the conch shack and you know, it's cool. But you know, the thing about QTVRs is that, you know, it's all the way around so pretty much the, you know, the whole panorama was beautiful and then there was like a car up on blocks and various things like that. And it's not necessarily what you want to-- you know what I'm sure the Ministry of Tourism was looking for in promoting the Bahamas was a car up on blocks.

maybe Kentucky, but not the Bahamas. I'm sorry, I've never been to Kentucky. I didn't mean anything bad about Kentucky for anyone who's from Kentucky. So we're thinking maybe we can Photoshop that out. We're going to shoot inside of the conch shack. And the conch shack's just a big round shack with stools all the way around it. And they chop up the conch. They made conch salad there, which is chopped up conch with lime juice and peppers.

Really good, the first dozen times. And Another thing that was in the shot, you know, the conch shack, you know, they had these, like, windows that open up like that, so then you get, like, shade and... on the inside of these like plywood kind of things hanging over their head there were centerfolds you know like playboy centerfolds all the way around and because we had almost no budget we didn't have the budget to scout this beforehand and and we're standing there and we're like so we did the interview anyway and lefavor showed up and i said we got to go with the cave because you know you can't airbrush out all of these centerfolds and i'm not going to ask him to tear them down and you got the car sitting there so it worked out really really well for us i mean we were very fortunate that we didn't have to scrub any shoots. The weather was beautiful the whole time there even though we were in hurricane season. So we were very fortunate. And that was just a typical day. So then we had a little extra time. So we all sat around and had a click and some conch salad. So we can go back to the slides, please. Okay.

So yeah, this is a Panascan camera, just kind of the head of it. He had a 17-inch PowerBook. But basically, it's got that periscope. So the lens is always right at the pivot point, and it spins around. And it takes about a minute and a half to two minutes to scan all the way around. So if you have someone in the shot, it's like photography of days gone by. They had to be real still. And this kind of ran-- in most cases, this wasn't a problem. But we did run into one situation where it did become a problem. Nassau, one of the biggest tourist places in Nassau is something called the Straw Market. And it burned down about two years before. So they were in a temporary housing while they built the new Straw Market, which should be done 2008 or something like that. And it's basically this big industrial-sized tent. And we tried to find the most picturesque place to shoot there, but it was going to be hard to polish up that turd. It wasn't really that beautiful.

That was the nice thing about having a QTVR and a corresponding video to go with it, because you could kind of-- you know, if one turned out fabulous, then, you know, the two of them together, you know, kind of raise the whole sum of the parts. But I'll show you the QTVR for the straw market. So if we can switch back to the demo machine. Thank you.

And it's funny because we were there all afternoon and we were setting up all afternoon. And this guy right here, he was, everybody was kind of following his lead. You know, everybody had to sign a release to be on this thing. And we even had someone there from the Ministry of Tourism kind of strong-armed people a little bit. This guy didn't want to sign a release. And once he signed a release, everybody signed a release. And I think everybody got like, you know, $50 out of it. But they all wanted to be paid, basically. But here's, you know, one of those situations. And Panascan's working on a new camera, well, updating the firmware, so it shoots much faster. So, you know, people only have to be still for a second rather than for, like, the, you know, 15 seconds while it's going past them. But you can see we kind of get into some areas where people are a little blurry. And, you know, there are the blue tarps I was telling you about. And we made this one more of a linear QTVR. I don't know why I'm showing you the worst of all the QTVRs. It's still good, but, you know, we really had to go through a lot to make it. to make it, you know, what it is. But I'll show you the interview that went along with it. And I think it's the best of all the interviews. It's my favorite by far. So I kind of compensated for it. Good morning, darling. How are you doing? And can I help you?

The market is a delight, a real delight. My favorite thing about being in the market is meeting people. I enjoy talking, I enjoy camaraderie. I just love it. It's fun to be here. A normal day is actually fun. All of the craft baskets are made here and made just by the store vendors. As you can see, I'm working on one right now. My name is Bridget Humes. Come on down and visit all of us at the famous, world famous Our lawyers spent some time trying to figure out if we could have Mickey Mouse on there and I guess it was okay.

Um, now, you probably noticed that most of these videos are only, like... you know, 30 to 60 seconds long. And there's a reason for that, because we are building this as one big quick-time movie with all of these things incorporated into it. So we really had to edit them down to be small and still get the point across. You know, the original cuts were like, you know, two and a half minutes, but... So we really had to work that out. So if we can go back to the slides for a second.

So we were done shooting all of our content. So we came back to Minneapolis and put our team together. And Nate Hintz, he was a designer on BMW Films, the second season, and I worked with him. Then we had Jim Park, a Flash developer. Andy LeMay, another great Flash developer. I'll probably talk a little bit more about them. We hired our director of photography, Ben Kruger, to be the editor, because he was familiar with the footage. Mark LaFavor did the retouching on the QTVRs, and then Russ and myself.

Flash and QuickTime put together in the live stage. One thing, there's... Right now, the Flash plug-in is Flash 6. Inside of QuickTime, the Flash plug-in is Flash 5. So we all had to step back about a year and a half and develop for Flash 5 to incorporate the... You know, we'd have to produce a Flash 5 Swift to incorporate into the QuickTime movie. So it was kind of like jumping into a time machine. And the intro for the Island Hop, Andy LeMay, he's one of our really gifted Flash developers. He's a PC guy.

And he's really, really gifted. So he built this really great intro that's got a map of the Bahamas, and little bouncing arcs, and then clouds kind of moving independently, and there's shadows and shimmering water. Really, really impressive. And I'll show that to you quick, so if we can go back to the demo machine.

Flash plugin is not on here. Let's see if it still works. Well, I can't show it to you. But I'll show it to you in QuickTime. I'll show you the newer version. Trust me, it was really cool. But we... He built it, and once we put it into QuickTime, it worked fine on the PC. Did not work very well on a Mac, which is weird, because then all of a sudden a QuickTime movie kind of clunking along on a Mac. But the reason for that is, is Macromedia doesn't build a really... It's kind of the bane of, as a Flash developer, of our existence, that Macromedia doesn't really have a great plug-in for Flash for Macs. So we had to strip a lot of the really neat stuff out of there. So basically the clouds all move together and there's just one hopping arc. But let me show you the finished piece here. Can we go back to the slides for a second? Thank you. Make sure I'm getting everything. Okay. Okay, yep, sorry. Actually, I'm on the machine. So here's the finished piece.

So that's basically the intro we wound up with. And it was kind of a last-minute decision because we couldn't get it working properly on the old iMacs. You know, we couldn't get it playing. And you've got to develop for everybody. But... So it has kind of a great interface. You've got the whole rollovers here. You can select an island and just go to the island. Okay, the Abacos. And then you can choose another island and jump there. Let's go back to the island menu. Oh, well, let's stay here. And then you've also got the specific location you can go to and just look at things. So here's the Hopetown Lighthouse.

And you noticed we scripted the QTVR, that when you first get there, here I'll do this. See, you're taking off, you're jumping somewhere else, and here you are landing somewhere else. So let's go back to the lighthouse. house. And then we've got the sound built in, so you can hear the wind up there. And it was kind of scary up there. That's my favorite part right there. - Sure. And then here's our interview. And you notice when the QTVR first opened, we have it so it's automatically panning. So people realize that it's not just a still image.

and then the interview to go along with it. My name is Vernon Malone. I live here in Hopetown. I run a grocery store and a bakery. I'm a marriage officer and a lay preacher in the Methodist Church. One favorite thing about my life? I guess living here, being fortunate enough to live in this part of the world. I think that would be one of my favorite things. Thank you.

No matter how much money you have when you live on an island, there are things that you can't buy. I will have it and give it to you. It's not for sale, but people will share it with you. So the true island experience is here. The Hopetown Lighthouse is one of the last three in the world that are fired by kerosene. It's 120 feet above sea level. It has 101 steps.

The keepers have to wind the mechanism every 90 minutes. The light is visible for 19 miles. There are five flashes and then a rest and that would be the only lighthouse in the world that would do that and that's why you can identify it from 19 miles away.

So that was a pretty good day, as you can tell. So this is a QuickTime movie. This is nothing more than a QuickTime movie. I mean, Flash is already built into a QuickTime movie. This is interactivity that you can get into one piece. If they have the QuickTime plug-in, it's all there for you. Using Live Stage, it's just an incredible tool to put all of this stuff together.

Is there anything else I wanted to show you on here? Oh, if you are online, that's what the temperature is right now. So that's all dynamically built into. And we were going to build more dynamic things into it, but we just didn't-- We didn't have the infrastructure in place that we could leverage, and the Bahamas had run a deal with Travelocity. So if you wanted to book, you had to go to Travelocity and do all of that. But we were going to build in a booking engine, and we were going to have things automatically update, like specials at local restaurants and things like that. But the infrastructure just wasn't there, and the budget wasn't there. So that would have been pretty cool. But again, this is just a quick-time movie with some really cool flash in it. some great content.

I don't think this would have happened if I didn't know what we were capable of doing. And I guess that's the biggest thing I want to get across to people today is that there's a lot of stuff here you can do. And it pains me to think of all the Flash developers out there who want a skill that makes them unique.

Because there's a ton of Flash developers out there. They want something that makes them. Look at me. I've got this real great thing in my toolbox that I can do that no one else can do. And Live Stage Professional is that tool. Because it's not that complicated of a program. You know, it's complicated, but it's not that complicated, but it really helps you leverage your-- leverage your Flash experience coupled with QuickTime. You know, I mean, it's so much greater than the sum of the parts, so. If we can go back to the slides, please.

As far as the editing goes, again, we hired Ben Kruger, who had shot the stuff. He's a film student. We were film students together. We hired him to do all of the editing, and we did all the editing in Final Cut Pro. Now, at Fallon, we have Avid Suites, so we had Avid Suites available to us.

But they bill out pretty, you know, they're pretty expensive. So Ben could basically just work on his laptop. And because all of the source footage was already mini-DV, we weren't, you know, losing anything by working in Final Cut Pro. So, um, and it also great support for the camera we used.

We used a Panasonic 24P camera. So, and also great for the budget. Thank you. So in conclusion, we've got all these incredible tools-- Live Stage, QuickTime, Flash, Final Cut Pro. You put them together, you can really do some incredible stuff. And I guess that's what I'd like to leave you with. Guillaume is here from Totally Hip, and he can help answer any questions you may have about live stage. And I guess we'll do Q&A now. Thank you.