Google's Storytelling Ad: Here Are 6 More

Lots of theories circulating about why Google's Super Bowl ad ("Parisian Love") was such a smash hit.

We think its charm and popularity can be summed up in one word.

Storytelling.

Look how cleverly it hooks and rivets you with its suspenseful, fast-paced narrative. A character, a quest, an obstacle, a climax, a satisfying resolution.

All in less than a minute.



Lesson for videojournalists: look for the natural dramatic arc as you shoot and edit your non-fiction narratives. It's what will make them memorable.

Now here's a treat: six more similarly structured short storytelling videos, courtesy of Google's "Search Stories" channel on YouTube. Enjoy!

Out of Office



Mad to Live



High School



Potholes



Cheermobile



Newbie

78 Cameras and Something's On

There are still some things that one-man-band mojo backpack videojournalists can't quite cover the same way as the big guys:

For the Super Bowl this Sunday, NBC says it will use 52 high-definition cameras; 93 microphones; 24 digital replay sources; 20 hand-held cameras; five robotic cameras, including two attached to the goal posts; and one cable camera suspended above the field.

BUT! That doesn't preclude the opportunity for less well-armed videojournalists to cover other, often more interesting, Super Bowl-themed video stories taking place off the field, and even around the nation. Join us at KobreGuide as we keep our eyes open for those online gems, and please let us know what you find, by submitting them here. (And, yeh, we're tuning in for Bruce, too.)

1,474-Megapixel Inaugural Photo - WOW!

How do you fit two million people in one photograph?

David Bergman found the solution, for his picture of President Obama's inauguration, and you've got to see it to believe it:

Before Tuesday, I had photographed five presidents and covered big events including the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and concerts like Live 8 and Live Earth. But this one was the biggest.

It deserved a big photo.

And big it is. It's an interactive panoramic shot, composed of hundreds of smaller images, so you can zoom in, out, over, under, around, through an historic sea of faces -- and get so close to individuals, famous and obscure, that you can see the whites of their eyes. (Hey, there's Yo-Yo Ma, taking a picture with his iPhone!)

Clearly something you won't find in the print edition of your newspaper.

So how did Bergman accomplish this?

I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform . The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Use the controls to zoom and pan around the photo. You can also double click to zoom in and double click again to get even closer.

Compare it to CNN's 3D Photosynth project.

They're both like "Where's Waldo?" with real people -- and no Waldo. (Or at least we haven't found him yet.)