Mitch Kapor on CiviCRM and Open Source Software

Mitchell Kapor Foundation was hosting CiviCon at our San Francisco offices in April of 2010. There were plans for Mitch Kapor to deliver the closing remarks at the end of the conference, but Mitch was going to be out of town for the event and needed another way to address the CRM civilians in his absence. We immediately assumed that we'd shoot a video of him delivering a short speech in his office... and then I figured it would be more interesting if we incorporated a little green screen.

We got Mitch on the green screen, but it turned out that he had very little prepared in terms of script. As a quick and dirty solution, we had him write a few notes on a whiteboard, which was off to the right hand side of the room. Mitch did two takes, almost completely off the cuff, we went with the second one, and didn't even bother to edit his speech; Mitch typically knows what he's talking about.

After the green screen shoot, I realized that I actually had no idea what I wanted to do with the background visuals. So I did what I always do when I'm in doubt... I drew something out. An afternoon of storyboard sketches eventually turned into a series of animated vignettes dispersed across annotated excerpts of Mitch's speech.

One of the most interesting things about this shoot was that Mitch had to look off to the right to read his talking points, and this was clearly caught in the footage. When I first noticed this, I figured I'd have to cut away from him during these parts, but then I realized that I could use the looks to my advantage and simply place make the text of his speech appear to his right in the video. The result makes it seem as if Mitch is actually reading the text as it appears on his left. This is a perfect example of what musicians and artists call the "Glorification of Accident".

This video proved to be incredibly entertaining for the CiviCRM team, and they liked it so much that they made of the illustrations the cover of their book... a multimedia success!